Spiritual Transformation and the Work of Warren W. Wiersbe

The world is becoming increasingly proficient at telling stories that deny God. As such, we need thinking Christian to become as natural as breathing. Welcome to the Thinking Christian podcast. I'm Dr. James Spencer. Through calm, thoughtful theological discussions, Thinking Christian highlights the ways God is working in the world and questions the underlying social, cultural and political assumptions that hinder Christians from becoming more like Christ. Now onto today's episode of Thinking Christian. Hey, everybody. Welcome to this episode of Thinking Christian. I'm joined today by Dan Jacobson. And Dan is one of the lead pastors at Heartland Community Church just outside of Kansas City. He's also written, edited a book called Becoming New, 100 Days of Transformation and through God's Word, 100 Days of Transformation through God's Word. And so we're going to be talking a little bit about the book, a little bit about Dan's history, a little bit about Dan's relatives. And it's going to be a good conversation. So, Dan, welcome to the podcast, man. Tell us a little bit about yourself. Yeah, James, thanks so much for the invitation to be with you today. I just am truly delighted. I am a fifth-generation pastor. Warren Wiersbe, the Bible teacher extraordinaire, is my grandfather. He was a third-generation pastor, and so I come from a deep lineage of people who have just been called by God to love his people, to love his word, and to make his gospel known. I serve here in Kansas City as a lead pastor. I spend most of my time teaching the Bible, preaching, and helping people understand what's God's word have to say to them today in our current climate, our current context, that this ancient book has something relevant to our lives today. So I went to Moody Bible Institute as a college kid. I did my master's work at Wheaton. And, yeah, I just find studying God's word really is a treasure and a joy that lights me up. And so when it came to do this work with my grandfather's work, it just was a natural next step for me in terms of just taking my knowledge of God's word and what my grandfather had done and kind of combining those two things together. And so Becoming New is really, really an incredible opportunity for me to do that. Well, I took some time, obviously, to look through Becoming New, but I also went back and read. You have the book. Yeah, I have the book. I love it. It's not even out, man. They sent me a really nice copy of it, so it's great. Isn't that great? I got to actually read through it before we had this interview, but I also went back and read some additional Warren Wiersbe stuff. Yeah, there you go. And so I was like, oh, I've re-familiarized myself with that. But I guess I'm curious, before we kind of dive into the book, you know, you're a pastor, you're a fifth-generation pastor, you're in Kansas City. I guess I'm wondering, how do you see the ministry a little differently? You've gone through your grandfather's work here. You've seen some of his unfinished work. You've gone ahead and sort of adapted that, finished it, pulled it all together, compiled it. How is pastoral ministry different today than when your grandpa was doing it? Can you even think about answering that question? Yeah, I think about that question all the time, and I just am grateful that you asked it. Yeah, it is a different world. You know, my grandfather pastored through 1968, 1969, which was a time of cultural upheaval in America. He wasn't a stranger to some of the social revolutions that were going on in America. And in 2020, I just heard a lot of pastors saying, we've never faced anything like this before with just some of the challenges that we face as a society. And in the back of my mind, I was like, well, no, my grandfather pastored through this era decades ago. At the same time, despite maybe having some overlap in terms of what the revolutions were about or the way society was changing, I do have to say, I think being a pastor today is so incredibly difficult compared to maybe the, I would call them the glory days of the 50s, 60s, or 70s that my grandfather got to pastor in. There was a respect for the office of a pastor. There was a, you know, he'd walk down the street and people would kind of tip their hat to him, and they call him to the hospital and kind of be glad to see him walk into the hospital room. And it just seems like our profession nowadays is kind of a take it or leave it type of a thing. We herald the greatest truth in the world that God's here, he's near, he loves us, he's come to us, he's renewing all things in his son. And yet, sometimes pastors can have, at least the office of pastor, can have just such negative connotations. And the advance of social media, all the things that would proliferate to make information and communication so much quicker today, I think really challenges pastoring because people are getting information from everywhere. You know this, people are getting information from everywhere and it's hard to have a single source of truth. A pastor used to be able to stand in his pulpit and know kind of where his people were that week and what they listened to and who they listened to and what news stories they read and what they saw on the news. And yet today, I look out at my people and I just don't know who's getting their news from TikTok. I don't know who's getting anything from anywhere. And so it just creates this baseline societal standard where I can actually like bring the gospel to bear to one, maybe like Zeitgeist. It's really hard these days because people are so splintered and culture is so splintered. At the same time, I think the gospel is perennial. We will always be needing the gospel. We'll always be needing more of Jesus. And so I don't think it's less important or maybe, you know, it's not shunned today. But I do think it might be a little harder. Yeah, it's interesting. I've done a fair amount of work on social media and now AI. And one of the things I've kind of said is, you know, to the extent that we're exhibiting bad habits in the digital age, it's because we had those bad habits in the analog age. The same bad habits we had in the analog age. The difference was the intensity. So now, you know, in an analog age, it's like, yeah, you might get the paper once a day and you're distracting yourselves with, you know, gossip or, you know, half-baked news or whatever. I mean, I'm sure that was around whenever there were paper newspapers. I mean, I can remember walking through, they're still there, but they're not as popular, I don't think, like the Inquirer or the, you know, the sort of goofy aliens landed in Roswell sort of papers, right? You see at the grocery line. And so that was social media sort of back in the day, but it's far less intense. It's far less intrusive. It did vie for your attention, but in a much more passive way. And now that intensity is just ramped up, ramped up, ramped up, ramped up. And so what what tends to what I think tends to happen is that we're more prone to distraction than we used to be. We have more opportunities to distract ourselves from actually getting into God's word, listening to people who actually hold these timeless truths and the wisdom that come from them. And we're just sort of barraged with ridiculousness most of the day. And so it's a very interesting space. Let me let me speak to that because you asked me, you know, kind of the contrast between my grandpa's world that he pastored in and my world that I pastor in now or our current moment. And I would say the thing about Warren Wiersbe that I think is really impressive and a generational lesson that I aspire to, although I think I do this poorly, his ability to focus truly was one of his superpowers. He would wake up with the same routine every day, 5:30 in the morning, wake up, go downstairs to his library. He had this beautiful, massive library in his basement. And in the library was a little room. I called it the Holy of Holies. That's where he did his like study. And he would go down there and he would just open up his Bible and just like just read. And he'd read out loud every morning. He liked to audibly hear and read God's word. And then that would lead him into some time of like disciplined, quiet, uninterrupted study. He wouldn't surface, we called it, from the basement until around 10 a.m. where he'd have tea and toast with my grandma. His capacity to actually do, I think Cal Newport calls it deep work. That's kind of like a lost art that we're reclaiming these days, trying to learn better practices. His ability to do that really gave him this mind that God was able to then use in tremendous, tremendous ways. I call my grandpa, I call him AI. Let me ask you a serious question. If something triggered a major market drop in the coming months, would your retirement be ready or exposed? With inflation, market volatility and ongoing global uncertainty, more families are taking a closer look at whether their retirement plan is truly built to hold up. And many are finding that adding a layer of protection makes a lot of sense. Sanctuary Metals is a Christian owned company that helps families strengthen their retirement savings with physical gold and silver through a gold IRA. 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To bridge together these references and these stories and these... to just really synthesize everything in a way that was really, really incredible. You never had to wonder, like, if a quote he was giving you was accurate or not. It was pretty much word for word, spot on. Yeah. Yeah, it has been a really interesting shift, and I talk about this sometimes, especially with my kids, I'm a Gen Xer, and so, you know, my first experience with the internet was toward the end of high school. It was AOL, dial-up, you know, you put the CD-ROM in and it gives you, you know, codes and you can get a certain number of, you know, hours on the internet for free or whatever, and my kids are looking at me like, what's a CD? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so they've grown up completely digital with Wi-Fi and with cellular data and all that kind of good stuff. We never have to hear a modem screech again, you know. Right, we never had that, and I think even when I was in seminary and was, you know, going through there, I learned on paper concordance. I learned on, you know, much more physical materials. We wanted to use, yeah, we had the thesaurus lingua Greek guy, which is, you know, sort of a geek compendium of all the Greek manuscripts that are available, but we would still have to go to the library and pull the Loeb classics library out and figure out what everything was saying. And so, you know, there's a real physical aspect to everything I did all the way through my doctoral program, really. And so I think that there's a sense in which, you know, what your grandpa did, going down to his holy of holies in the library and reading and studying and having these physical books available to him, it isn't that technology couldn't have helped, maybe, but it forces a different sort of discipline, and I think that different sort of discipline and effort cultivates a different sort of mindset, a different sort of embodiment of that wisdom, a different sort of knowledge than just, you know, having our outboard brain or AI pull up a passage for us. He didn't have that, even that opportunity. He had to know it. Yeah, he didn't have that opportunity. And I'll say this too, we uncovered a letter just about a month ago. He had written one of his friends in 1993, just about some items of business, and he opened it by talking about a recent trip he had been in New York for, and he brought his Compaq computer. If you remember the brand. I remember the Compaq. And it was just like, it was kind of crazy. He was like, I can bring my computer with me, like one of those giant clamshell. And his review was, it doesn't work for me. I can't. And his thing was, I need to be in my library to do my work. And he had spent a lifetime assembling books that were his tools to help him do his work. And not just that, there was something about the environment and the ethos of a library that I think puts you down to business. It kind of gets your mind going down the right track. And so for him, I think he was so prolific and so disciplined because that space was really important to him and that dedicated time was really important to him as well. Yeah, I mean, I think your grandpa's process is really interesting. And I will say, just for me, I still prefer the paper books. I've sort of accommodated some of the AI stuff. I've sort of accommodated some of the, and I've written about how I've incorporated it. But I do worry a bit about this new generation coming up, that what they're going to miss out on. I'm a big weight trainer, so I do a lot of weights and that kind of stuff. And I used to be a personal trainer, so I'd bring people in and do their fitness programs for them. And I usually tell my kids, I'm like, I've never had a client come in, told them to sit in the corner while I worked out and just to watch me. If you want to get in shape, you've got to put in the effort. That's right. You have to do it. And I think there's an aspect of that that we're in danger of losing, given all the technological tools that we have at our disposal. There is still some of this work that just needs human effort, not because it can't be done technologically, but because we actually need that effort to shape and form us into people who are capable of doing, capable of thought. And I think that's part of probably what your grandpa was gesturing toward, if I'm thinking through it. It's like, sitting in my library with my books creates the context for me to put deep effort into this. And when I put deep effort into this, I get great results out of it, results that I can't get off of this Compaq computer, which is totally understandable for those of us who have used them. Well, James, I mean, yeah, exactly. I mean, the thing was a beast. But also, I think, like, you know, these are some of my grandpa's books. These are some of the books that he left me, my background here. But, like, his favorite book was, it was like a New King James. It wasn't that, but it was, I forget the name of it. I have it. This is how bad, to your point, this is how bad it is. I know where the button is on my Logos to open up this resource, but I don't know the name of the resource. My grandpa would be so angry. I think it's the New Treasury of Biblical Keywords. Yeah, Biblical knowledge. Yeah, it's not that. I'll remember it later on in our conversation. But he was like, Dan, if there's one, I'm just gonna pull it up right now because he said this to me. He said, if there's one, like, the Treasury of Scripture Knowledge, yeah. Is that what I said? He said, if there's one secret to my Bible study, it's this work. Everything that I do, I'm gonna, like, do the scripture references based upon what this work has put together. And if you read through Becoming New and you look at how he's made links between the Old Testament and the New Testament or the New Testament back to the Old Testament or vice versa, you can see the cross-referencing of the scriptural integrity at play in my grandpa's Bible study methods. It's what made him such a reliable Bible teacher and what really became a trusted voice in America for teaching scripture is because he let the Bible interpret the Bible, but that was a method that he developed based upon his practical study in his library with the book that he preferred that he knew was going to get him down the road the right way from the jump. You know, he just knew, if it's me, God, the Holy Spirit, and this other work, I'm good. And that was his process. Yeah. Well, I think it's really interesting. You know, you've got the new book, Becoming New, 100 Days of Transformation Through God's Word. Just talk a little bit about how this came about. I think it's a really interesting story. Yeah, yeah. So my grandfather published, there's maybe 150, 180 Warren Wiersbe books out there. If you go to Amazon, you'll see all of them. It's really amazing how prolific he was. But when he died, he died in May of 2019. My uncle had the unenviable task of sort of sorting through all of his files in the library. And so he stumbled across, in a stack of papers, this one folder, and it was called something else, but there was a manuscript inside of it. And it was clear that there was, like, a substantial manuscript. And it was, what my grandpa was trying to do was a hundred days of devotions for how God changes a person. We all know the gospel is about transformation. It's about a God bringing us, ultimately, from death to life, you know, from enemies to sonship. We are transformed by faith. And God does this work of transformation within us. Romans 12:2, be transformed by the renewal of your mind. So what we found out was there was some correspondence in this Manila file folder too. And what we found out is that my grandpa was trying to take 60, 70 years of his Bible study knowledge, all of his accumulated insights to God's Word, and he was trying to distill it down into one volume. He was trying to give, like, your first hundred days as a follower of Jesus, maybe, to like a college kid. And it ended up being a little bit more heady than that. It's maybe not perfect for like a new believer, but it's really good. Let me ask you a serious question. If something triggered a major market drop in the coming months, would your retirement be ready or exposed? With inflation, market volatility, and ongoing global uncertainty, more families are taking a closer look at whether their retirement plan is truly built to hold up. And many are finding that adding a layer of protection makes a lot of sense. Sanctuary Metals is a Christian-owned company that helps families strengthen their retirement savings with physical gold and silver through a gold IRA. During uncertain times, many people look to precious metals as a way to add stability when other assets may be under pressure. 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The Diary of a Madman. It was incomplete. It was totally a mess. It had lack structure. And I was a little embarrassed, honestly. I was like, ah, gosh, I'm not supposed to look at, like, the drafts. Grandpa's books are really good. And my grandpa always prided himself. You know, he turned in a manuscript. There was no edit needed. Like, he, he had done it perfectly the way he wanted. This is it. Print it. And so, you know, I received this thing. I was like, man, this is not the Wiersbe standard that I, that I, that I imagined. And so my, my uncle said, Dan, you know, nobody has any expectations for this project ever seeing the light of day. But why don't you see if you can edit this to something that we can publish? Which was a real honor for me. I had for years talked with my grandfather about doing a project together. And we could never really, like, land on what we would write about. There's, there's stories about my grandfather that maybe he was a bit more controlling in the writing process with co-authors that other co-authors would enjoy. And so I was like, I don't care. I've never written anything. I just love to write. I love to learn the process of writing with my grandfather. So we never got to do it. To receive this manuscript was like this opportunity. It was this really like, oh, well, I mean, this is great. I was so, James, I was so nervous. I was so like, it's getting high. I've never published anything. Like, I'm not a bad writer, but I was just like, what am I going to bring to this? It sat on my desk for about, I don't know, six, nine months. It was a long time before I even like picked it up. And then once I got my head around it, it took me like a very long time to even, like, use the backspace button on my keyboard on anything that he, because I was like, man, I don't, I don't know that I want to mess with this. And I finally got, got some courage to, to get into the process of writing. And, and I, I got my, my head around what he was doing. And that was a really exciting moment to see, like, okay, I actually see there's, this is genius, what he's put together. And I see the arc of it. And so I gave it a, he had given it like a two-part structure. I gave it like a nine-part structure just to, like, kind of break it down a little bit more. Make it like more manageable seasons as you're going through a hundred days. Each and every one of these days is really only like five to 600 words. So they're very short readings. That was a mercy to me. I didn't have to edit, you know, long, long chapters. And I think it's a mercy to the reader because they just have to, on a daily basis, it's a short blog post, maybe, you know, it's a shorter than a blog post. And so kind of halfway through the project, I was kind of stuck. I remember I was stuck trying to, to figure out what, what he was trying to say about Moses. There was this one specific thing about Moses. And I just knew it was, it was lacking like the flare, the Wiersbe flare. And I remember sitting back in my chair, in this chair, and I kind of put my hands over my head. And I was like, gosh, how would grandpa say this? He needs, he's missing his phrase. He's missing, like, his keyword phrase here. And I, the, the phrase came out that, that for Moses, a faith that can't be tested, can't be trusted. Doesn't that sound like a Wiersbe phrase? Faith that can't be tested, can't be trusted. And I, I did some quick Googling, found that, like, it was attributed to some business book guy from, like, 2004. And, like, you scroll down a little farther, down, got to page two of Google, which I don't even know if that exists anymore. But Warren Wiersbe's name came up. I kid you not. It was something my grandpa said back in the 1970s. And it was this moment where I was like, I think I'm up for this. I think, like, this is an editing task that I'd really love to sink my teeth into. And I got this, like, joy really digging into it. And here's what happened to me, James, is I, I really, you know, I've got two degrees in the Bible. I know the story of the Bible. But going through this work, going through this project, this 55,000 words, it made me, it was like a master's degree in the Bible all again. And I learned God's word so much better. I learned the heart of my grandfather better because I got to see, like, what really, how he perceived life, how he perceived the gospel, how he perceived human frailty and the enemy and all the stuff that goes on in life that maybe we don't always put words to throughout the course of conversations with grandparents and grandkids. But I had, like, this beautiful conversation with him as, as I was given the privilege to edit this work. But what it ultimately led to was me having this deeper love for Jesus just to see the transforming nature of God's son and what Jesus does in my life. I, this has been the privilege of a lifetime to be able to work, work this project out and to actually see it in print is pretty amazing. I had no idea it was going to be this thick. I was like, when I was doing it, I was like, man, this is a hundred days. This is great. It's like a substantial book. And so I'm really proud of it all. Really grateful for the opportunity. I will say, like, as you're talking there, and obviously I didn't get to have conversations with him, but when, when I started working with the D.L. Moody Center, one of the things we were doing was a digital archive. And so we had all D.L. Moody's letters and papers and all this kind of stuff. And I decided instead of just reading a biography of him, I would go in and read these letters and papers and try to understand him from a slightly different angle. And it was one of the most spiritually enriching things I think I've ever done. It was just so interesting to hear him talk in his, to his, in his everyday correspondences. And so, I mean, I'm sure you had that with your grandpa. You obviously knew him on a personal level. Right. And so you had these sort of, you saw him every day interacting. But, but I think that there is something to, like, going through someone else's work, trying to understand them, not necessarily even just trying to understand the work, but also trying to see their heart behind it that not very many people get the opportunity to do. And so I'm sure it was just a fascinating sort of spiritually formative project for you. It just, again, given my sort of glimmer of experience with it, with D.L. Moody, it's just, it was such an interesting project to go through that. And I can only imagine, like, your grandpa leaving these sort of notes undone and you getting to go back in and revisit them. I mean, I can, I can appreciate not wanting to use the backspace button. How much editing did you really do? I mean, these are raw, right? They were, they were not, you said they're, they're in that raw form. So how much of this is your grandpa and how much of it is you? Yeah, that's a great question. And I think you're exactly right about the, you get to, you get to know a person through their correspondence really, really well. I mean, I've got letters. There's a stack of letters from my grandpa to his friends right here. And it's just more of those things that, like, help me understand his life, which, which were really helpful. I, I think there's only one day in the final product that I didn't touch. So, so everything else needed something here and needed something there and needed to be checked. Or, you know, some, sometimes his thoughts were right, but a quote didn't work anymore. Yeah. Times have changed, right? And so my grandpa was a product of his time. He kind of came about in the fifties. You know, 1950s America doesn't really connect exactly to 2020s America. And so I tried to be honest to his voice. I didn't use illustrations that he wouldn't have used. I made sure that they were authentic to him, but there's at, there's at least one that I added in through his voice just by my own grandson relationship with him. He had in his library, the corner of his library that I loved was the Calvin and Hobbes. He had like this whole collection of comics. You know, here's this like really serious Bible scholar, his thousands of volumes, the anti-Nicene, all this, all the, all the church fathers, all this stuff. And then Calvin and Hobbes. And so I would always go down there and, and my grandpa, he, he just loved how, how Calvin's dad would always make him do this grunt work and call it character building. Let me ask you a serious question. 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Let's edit this out, but this is a bust of Spurgeon from my grandpa's basement. It was on the trash heap after he passed away, and I was like, you guys, no one's taking Spurgeon. They all thought it was creepy, but yeah, I've got it. I love it. Anyway, my grandpa loved Spurgeon. That's the point. My grandpa loved Spurgeon, and so that really brought him into the world of Victorian England. And so some of that shows up in his illustrations as well. The people that he picks as like these quotable sources are not the people you would think about because they come from a world that is foreign to ours, but yet so much like ours. And so I think like just the ability to read broadly and then synthesize together is something my grandpa did really, really well. And so I had a little bit of an education as I was editing some of these illustrations and stuff to think about, like, I don't know who this person is or why you would quote this person. And so sometimes I just had to learn myself or I just said, if I don't get it, no one's going to get it. Sorry, Grandpa, that one's out. And so I just would cut it and just keep moving on. Yeah, it's fascinating to think. I mean, I think the appreciation for the past and for history is something we don't want to give up. But at the same time, I've used books in classes. I teach a course on developing a Christian mind. And we use Harry Blomaiers' book, A Christian Mind. And students would read through that and they'd have no idea. He's dealing with so many other contextualized challenges from his era. And he was in England. So like the illustrations he often uses, they're just lost on students. Like students just don't understand them. And so you have kind of two choices. You either explain the entire context and help them understand it so you can read the book or you sort of rewrite the book, figure out what's more relevant. You know, how does this message that he's trying to convey, how does it plow into our context now? How do I contextualize this so the message doesn't change, but the illustrations do? The context does. And it's more relevant and more quickly understandable for somebody who's just looking and reading this book now. So I'm sure that was a challenge because, yeah, I mean, he's writing from Victorian England. I mean, I'm not even sure what period that is, right? Yeah, it's the 1870s. Although he would include, I think there's a quote from a British prime minister, Disraeli, who was the prime minister of England in 1840. The fact that I know that is insane, but this book made me have to dig in and understand that stuff. Yeah, that's pretty awesome. It is pretty awesome. So how are you, are you doing anything with this? Like, how is this, how's going back through this? You said you got sort of another master's degree education doing this, but how has it changed the way you think about doing ministry today? You know, I think it's kind of what you just said, which is, I want the gospel to be accessible to people. That was my grandpa's heart too. Like he wanted biblical literacy for the entire world is what he wanted. And I just think like the good news of Jesus is so important that we need to make it plain for people to understand it. We need to make it so that anyone can pick up one of these books or pick up something to help them understand like God's not far away. God's not hiding. He wants to be found. And so I've just found in my preaching and in my own teaching, it's just made me a better communicator, picking up some of the ways that my grandfather would go about things. You know, it really was like learning from the hand of the master while you're trying to also finish out this project. I was also at the same time, like getting schooled by him for how he phrased sentences and structured things to make really clear points, really accessible for everybody. So really for me, it's just become a game in accessibility and clarity. Like how do I preach in such a way where nobody misses the main point? How do I teach the Bible in such a way where nobody misses the main point of what God is saying about this whole thing and what I'm hoping that they hear. You know, toward the, because you, you said your grandpa, when did he stop pastoring? Do you recall? You know, yeah, there was a bit of, so he was done at Moody church in 1979. Okay, 79. But he went back to the Bible, which is out in Lincoln, Nebraska. Yep. And he was a general director of that from 80 into the 90s. And then he kind of traveled and did a lot of like conference speaking. He was done speaking places pretty much by 2004. Okay. So it's just interesting because, you know, he would have been sort of on the front end, I think of some of the internet and digital aspects that we talked about earlier. You know, he would have definitely been beyond the postmodern curve, right. And started to speaking into a much more pluralistic context and sort of more of a context that we're speaking into. Now, do you recall any insights that he had on, you know, the difference between preaching to a 1960s, 1970s audience all the way over into 2004? I mean, was he seeing those shifts? Do you, do you recall anything about that? Yeah, I do. I remember a couple of things and I don't want to name names because he was, he shared some stuff with me in private about some current pastors who were saying things in Christianity Today or in different media publications about how ministry needs to get updated. Ministry needs to, like churches got to get with the times. And I remember him, him looking at me saying, 99% of the people in my church have never seen a sheep. That doesn't mean they don't know the shepherd. I was like, huh. He goes, plus, no one's ever seen a crucifixion, but that doesn't mean that I get to stop talking about it. And I, his point was, there are some things that are, that are going to be the hard work of transcending contexts, of getting us from one cultural context to the next cultural context. It's bridge building work. My grandpa was a master at it, helping us understand what something was in this day and age to today's day and age. And I think his perspective was, as long as you start where the Bible starts and bring it to today, you're on safe ground. He worked at Youth for Christ back in the 1940s. That's kind of where he started a lot of his ministry work. And the, the Youth for Christ slogan was geared to the times anchored to the rock. I think that's what it was. Geared to the times anchored to the rock. That's great. And this idea that like, we're going to be founded upon the truth, the unchanging truth of scripture, but we're going to do so in a way that's actually going to meet people, meet young people today. He did a lot of work with like teenagers back in the 40s. So I think, you know, for, for him, there was this like holiness and I don't use that in like personal holiness, but it's like unchangeable part of our faith that we cannot give up on some strangeness. A crucifixion is incredibly strange, but that doesn't mean that we forfeit it because we want to adapt the model to say, you know, Jesus was executed. Well, no, he was crucified. And that, that language was really important to him. It was really sacred and he didn't want to forfeit any of those, any of those, those things for the sake of relevance. Yeah. It's, it's, that's really interesting. I'm going to love that, that perspective, right? That there are some things that are going to have to transcend culture. 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I was asked to do a piece on the Gen Z Bible. I don't know if you've ever seen this. Yeah, I have. Well, I've got Gen Z kids, right? So I got to try and figure out what they're saying. And so, you know, I read portions of the Gen Z Bible and it got me thinking about, you know, Luther's first translation of the Bible into German. And Luther would have to change certain words because I may be misremembering this, but I think he changed the lizard into something like a ferret or a weasel because he's like, the Germans aren't going to know what a lizard is. And it was like that. You can understand why that's a necessity, right? If people are just going to read

So his translation was in part linguistic, in part cultural. But when I'm reading through the Gen Z Bible, I'm like, it feels like we're just changing this to change it because my kids can still read, like normal English. Like they may speak Gen Z, but it's not lost on them what the Bible means if they just read it. And so some of it seems so superfluous. And I think it's an interesting sort of illustration of, I think what I hear you saying your grandpa said. It's like, Why are we changing if it doesn't need to be changed? Right. Are we ultimately just sort of suiting our own fancies? Or is this a necessity? Are we trying to make this more fun for ourselves or are we really approaching the Bible as a sacred text that needs to be transforming us? Or are we just sort of making it interesting? And there's a real privilege play to say, I don't need to, from my context, do any work to understand the original context. I just want to understand today's context. That's like the height of arrogance and maybe overly privileged. I think what my grandfather really embedded into me was do as much work as you absolutely can to understand the original. And that's work. It takes work. It takes a library of thousands of books. It takes time. It takes investment. It takes all of that. But we can't do the work today of knowing what does that have anything to do with now if we haven't done that work. And so for a lot of us, I think, you know, we... My grandfather used to say the church is always one generation away from extinction. And so the point for him was like, let's always be mindful that we have to make sure the next generation knows the gospel and loves Jesus and sees how good God has been. And I think there's got to be that white hot sort of edge to our lives that pushes our faith into the future. But we also have to be dragging a whole lot of stuff with us that help us understand the gospel, that help us understand the context of this Jewish rabbi in the first century who is an enemy of Rome and upended the world with 12 fishermen and a couple barbarians. Like, you know what I mean? Like this whole thing, there's this whole thing to it. And yeah, can you understand, like, Jesus is God's son and he loves you and he died on a cross for your sins? Yeah, you can understand that. But it's way richer than that. And I think the ways that my grandfather pulls out in the book in Becoming New is just all of these threads between the ways that God created the world and then brought real people through real faith journeys on the road to the Messiah coming, on the road to Jesus coming, the ultimate transformer, the ultimate new bringer. And so he does the work to give you the backdrop in the book. He's trying to, like, build biblical literacy from the first page of the Old Testament all the way through. And he stopped at Acts, which is okay. He had left a couple of... He left First and Second Corinthians outlined in 100 Days for me. So he's sketched out the next 100 days. I don't know that I'm gonna do them. It's like a daunting task. But he had thoughts that this would be, like, the way of the future. And this was like... He was like, no one's doing 365-day devotions anymore. They're doing 100. They're going to do it 100 at a time. They're gonna swap books. And so, yeah. He was probably on to something, honestly. I mean... I think he was on to it. The publishers didn't see it back when he was writing it. But I think what we have to do... You can imagine three or four of these and just sort of cycling through, almost like electionary. That's exactly what I was gonna say. It's like almost a new modern lectionary. Yeah. Very cool. Well, I think some of your comments sort of lean me into what I usually ask my guests is sort of the final question on the episode. So we'll wrap it up. But what do you think? You've done this project. You're a pastor. You know, you're working with people. What do you think the church needs to be thinking about today in order to be and make more faithful disciples? What are we missing? Like what's that crucial element that we're neglecting that we need to recapture? Yeah. I love the name of your podcast. You know, The Thinking Christian. Thinking Christian. Because so much of what this book is about is being transformed by the renewal of your mind. Yeah. Right? For me, a lot of the ways that I watch people... As a pastor, I've got a real serious concern about the ways that people don't think about their lives. They just kind of carelessly or just like thoughtlessly go about life. And maybe they have goals. Maybe they have ambitions. But they don't have, like, a real sense of purpose or a real sense of, like, divine placement in a larger narrative to help give meaning and sense to their life. And honestly, if they're faith... If they were taken out of the context that they are currently living in and following Jesus in, which these are people that I pastor, and they were put halfway around the world with other followers of Jesus that lived in a totally different political system, different world, I think their faith wouldn't work. Like, our faith has become so conditioned upon, like, this democratic, capitalistic sort of church enterprise as opposed to this, like, following the way of my rabbi, following the ways of Jesus in this whole heart, whole life, surrender anything at any cost to him type of way. And I think that takes thought. That just takes, like, a deep amount of thought. Like, Bonhoeffer, we praise Bonhoeffer for what he did, but he was a thinking Christian. He was someone who really just didn't thoughtlessly go about his life. He made choices, then thought differently about them and undid those choices and did different things. But he was thinking through, what does it mean for me today, right now, to faithfully follow Jesus? And I think that just string of questions... That one question, what does it mean for me right now to faithfully be following Jesus, is a really great question that would, I think, allow many of the people that I pastor just that next level of their faith to say, maybe I'm just leaning too far into consumerism or too far into this, like, moralistic therapeutic deism that's just making me feel good about the God that I have. When what I really have is access to all power and all authority in heaven and on earth. And sometimes we just, when we fail to think about it, our God becomes so small and then we become guilty of what Paul says happened in Romans 1, Romans 2. Yeah, I think for us to be able to really be a faithful witness, a present witness in the world today means that we've got a little bit of thinking to do. Yeah, it's interesting. I love that answer. I usually, I mean, number one, it's sort of a nice endorsement of the podcast, so I appreciate it. I'm not trying to placate the podcast, but I really do. I think, like, you know, be transformed by the renewal of your mind is what he says. I talk about it in terms of, like, you know, if you're a football watcher, you know, you can imagine a running back and they get a hole in the O-line and they're running through that hole and they need, you know, two yards to get the first down, right? But the whole field breaks open and they could go score a touchdown, but instead they slide after two yards. And you're like, you just shorted it. Like, you could have gotten so much more. All you had to do was keep going. Right. And it feels like, to me, that picture of a running back sliding after two yards when they could have gotten 10, 15, 20, or a touchdown, is sort of what we're doing by not thinking about our faith, making it primary. We're sliding and shorting what we could have gotten. We're contenting ourselves with something that really, God wanted to give us more, right? Yeah, yeah. There's more there. There's more meat on the bone and we're just sort of tossing it. Yeah, we want to take it to the house, man. Yeah, exactly. The whole field in Jesus is an end zone. So, like, let's bring heaven to earth. So just keep going. Yeah. Yeah. Come on. Very cool, man. Well, I, like I said, I got to read through a portion of the book, Becoming New. Obviously, I recommend it to our listeners. We'll put a link in the show notes so you know where you can get it. But fantastic book. Really enjoyed it. And I appreciate your labor of love here, Dan. Like, this is a... It's a great book. I'm going to share it with my kids, share it with my family. And I, like, I do think your grandpa was on to something with 100 Days. I love it. So, yeah. Really good. And very much appreciate your work. Appreciate you being here. I know you've been sick, just for everybody, you know, full disclosure on the episode, Dan's doing this after recovering from some flu and still suffering from some flu. So appreciate you being here, brother. Hey, thanks for the time. It's been a delight. Absolutely. Cool. Well, we will catch everybody on the next episode of Thinking Christians. So thanks for being here. And check out, make sure you check out the show notes to get Dan's book. Take care, everybody. I just want to take a second to thank

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