| Time | Text |
|---|---|
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People Are Ready for Content
00:03:45
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| The real problem is not that the culture, again, is moving that way. | |
| It's that people in the church have been desensitized and dumbed down so that they can't hear certain things and then immediately think, okay, this is how scripture addresses this. | |
| This is a theological principle that I can use to talk about this other thing. | |
| And it's because of exactly what you just said. | |
| This whole, you know, again, we can sit here and joke about sermonettes for Christianeds, but that is serious. | |
| People don't get content. | |
| I want to lapse here in a little bit of a personal testimony. | |
| Yeah, I got lots of degrees. | |
| Yes, I have a PhD. | |
| Yeah, I do translation in all sorts of languages. | |
| Okay, I had, my first contact with the gospel was through someone, a divorced mother of four, a single mom of four, living next to my grandmother. | |
| And I went to my grandmother's house a lot because my parents had been divorced. | |
| So my first exposure is being invited to this kid's living room and hearing them do family Bible time. | |
| I knew, and you're going to think I'm lying, but this is not an exaggeration. | |
| I'm living in America and I'm nine or ten years old. | |
| I knew who Adam and Eve were. | |
| I had heard of Jesus, and I had heard of Noah. | |
| That was it. | |
| I was tapped with three names. | |
| So I'm telling you that to encourage you. | |
| Look, I think people are regularly underestimated by the academic community and frankly by your ministers, your churches. | |
| I am the result, not of some, you know, I'm not like, oh, Mike's brilliant. | |
| He's like a genius in genetic. | |
| No, I'm not. | |
| Okay, I'm not. | |
| I am the cumulative result of five minutes a day. | |
| Wow. | |
| That is what I am. | |
| It's like it is never too late to start studying scripture. | |
| Take five minutes a day. | |
| Just learn. | |
| Just learn something new every day. | |
| Just do the math. | |
| At the end of a year, I got 365 new things. | |
| I mean, you just do the math. | |
| And so we want you to get content. | |
| I mean, this is my passion. | |
| I think you can tell. | |
| Again, this is my one-string banjo. | |
| That people are ready for content. | |
| And if the church starts learning to think biblically and theologically, we may not be able to reverse the course of the entire culture, even though that's not out of the question. | |
| That has happened before. | |
| The church does have a track record there. | |
| But at the very least, we can be a voice of opposition that is clear. | |
| We can speak with clarity on things. | |
| Because frankly, we like to talk about how millennials, how they just are bouncing around and there is no such thing as truth anymore. | |
| If you actually talk to young people, they get sick of that. | |
| They actually want someone to stand for something. | |
| Even if they don't like it, at least they stand for something. | |
| And it's not just this wishy-washy nonsense. | |
| So this is a place to start. | |
| Derek's book is a place to start. | |
| In my earlier books, Unseen Realm is much wider in scope than this. | |
| And there's kind of a light version of Unseen Realm called Supernatural. | |
| Again, this is the thing that I care about. | |
| And so I'm really grateful to be here. | |
| I'm no longer, as a scholar, going to protect people from their Bible. | |
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Uncomfortable Questions About Belief
00:01:46
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| I love it. | |
| I'm not going to do that anymore. | |
| That's a brilliant question. | |
| People can get it little by little, just like I did. | |
| There's no magic here. | |
| It's just tenacity. | |
| It's just doing the task and being patient, keeping at it. | |
| Most Christians you'll run into are what I refer to as selectively supernatural. | |
| And my context isn't Pentecostalism and the groups that would be associated with the gifts and all that. | |
| I'm more boring than that. | |
| So that isn't my context. | |
| I'm not speaking from that platform. | |
| I'm just telling you that, again, as a scholar, Unseen Realm asked a really uncomfortable question. | |
| It's the same question that reversing Hermann is asking. | |
| And I ask it of the reader, and it's also a question asked of believing Christian, scholars who are truly Christians. | |
| They're not just Christian in name only. | |
| But the question is this. | |
| Do you really believe what a biblical writer believed about the unseen supernatural realm or not? | |
| Because what we have is we have Christians who, well, I believe in God. | |
| I believe in Jesus and the Spirit. | |
| I've got to have the Trinity or I've got to do that. | |
| Got angels, demons, and Satan, end of list, end of story. | |
| The supernatural, unseen realm of an Israelite, a first century Jew, is a whole lot wider than that. | |
| And it's a whole lot more interactive than that. | |
| Okay, do you believe what the guys who wrote this thing believed about the spiritual world or not? | |
| And that's actually a really uncomfortable question. | |