Point of View July 9, 2024 – Hour 2 : Editing Jesus

[00:00:00] We are created in God's image, but sometimes we Christians create God in our image. And that is certainly true not only about our view about God, but our view about Jesus. And that's why we're going to be talking about this book, Editing Jesus, Confronting the

[00:00:35] Distorted Faith of the American Church. It is published by Moody Press and it is about 200 pages, came out last month. It is written by Rick Lawrence, who has been on the program with us before.

[00:00:46] He is the Executive Director of Vibrant Faith, which is an organization focused on ministry resources, training and coaching. He's an author, a journalist, a cultural researcher, for many years actually led the group publishing youth ministry resourcing team, launched the Jesus-centered line of adult resources, leads

[00:01:04] a home church, but also is the host of the podcast, Paying Ridiculous Attention to Jesus, and joins us now by phone. Rick, welcome back to Point of View. Thank you, Kirby. It's great to be back with you. Let's, if we can, maybe tell your story.

[00:01:19] I've watched some of the interviews where you talk about being in a kind of a group, I guess it was more like a Zoom or a call, but anyway, at the end somebody wanted to get some perspective and said, well, I think we've been editing Jesus.

[00:01:32] And everybody goes, okay, well, what do you mean by that? And that resonated. And then I guess basically three years later, we got the book on Editing Jesus. Tell us the rest of the story. Yeah, that was that.

[00:01:45] So, basically a gathering of Youth for Christ leaders in the United States. Jake Bland, who's the youngest leader in Youth for Christ history, invited me for an hour-long Q&A with their leaders.

[00:01:59] And at the end of that hour, he asked me a question that I didn't see coming. He asked me what I thought the greatest challenge facing the American church was today. And I said, editing Jesus. And he said, tell us more.

[00:02:13] So, I spent about 10 minutes describing what I meant by that. And after I got off the call, about 15 minutes later, Jake texted me and said, oh my gosh, my phone's blowing up now. Everybody wants to know more about what you're talking about here.

[00:02:29] And that was kind of the seed that started the exploration that ended up in a book three years later. Well, again, we've done certain surveys. We've interviewed George Barna and others on this. And even more recently, we've had Nancy French.

[00:02:45] And a lot of times, we end up talking about the what, which we will be doing. But also, I've been really kind of interested in the why. Because just think about this for a minute, Rick.

[00:02:55] We probably have more access to the Bible, and thus you would think would have a more accurate picture of Jesus and what it means to be a Christian than ever before. I mean, you go back to the first century, nobody had a Bible because they didn't exist.

[00:03:10] And then for almost 1500 years, most people did not have access to a Bible. Then you have the Protestant Reformation. Maybe some people might have a Bible in their homes. But now, in the modern world, everybody has a Bible in their home.

[00:03:24] And most of us have a Bible on our phones. We have access to more Bibles than ever before. And yet we see more unorthodox and unbiblical views than perhaps we've ever experienced. And I'm sure you probably have some thoughts about that, because your book is full of all

[00:03:44] the misunderstandings and the misstatements that people make. But as some people have said, we should be the most biblically literate. And we don't seem to be biblically literate. We seem to be biblically illiterate. Yeah, that's a fascinating angle that you're throwing in there, Kirby, about how much access

[00:04:05] we have to God's Word. And it makes this all the more interesting. It's human nature, I'd have to say, throughout history to make God in our own image. It's just part of our human gravitational pull.

[00:04:23] In the book, what I try to do is take an approach that I call theological reverse engineering, where we start with Jesus and then we work our way back into our life. So if we make the introductory assumption that everything Jesus says and does is good,

[00:04:42] and not only good, he's the source of all goodness. If you accept that wholeheartedly at the start, then work your way back from what he says and does, and particularly how he frames what life with him is going to be like, then it

[00:04:57] starts to disrupt your life when you do that. And what we typically do as human beings is we start with our own story and try to infuse that into the story of Jesus. And where the story doesn't seem to match, we edit him. We shave off his edges.

[00:05:16] We jump over things that he clearly said or did, because they don't fit our narrative. One of my favorite examples of that—it's actually my favorite story in all of the Bible—is Jesus' encounter with a Canaanite woman, a pagan woman, as he's traveling with his disciples.

[00:05:37] She has a daughter who's suffering from demonic possession or at least oppression, and asks him, pleads with him over and over again to rescue her daughter. And the disciples are getting irritated.

[00:05:52] They finally tell Jesus to do something about her, and he turns to talk to her, and she asks for healing, and he says, I've come for the people—for the children of Israel, not for—essentially for a dog like you.

[00:06:04] And she responds, well, even the dogs get the scraps off the master's table, Jesus. And he just explodes with delight and points out to everyone there, kind of in a shocking way, look at the face of this woman. It's incredible.

[00:06:21] But that story, I would hazard a guess that most people listening right now have never heard that as the focal point of a sermon church. It's not one that you normally use. Because he's just doing things that don't seem—Jesus doesn't seem Jesus-y in that story.

[00:06:37] Well, and again, the point you're making is there, of course, later on we'll get to that chapter where you talk about where we try to soften Jesus and all the rest, the softening of the hard.

[00:06:47] But if you just think about it for just a minute, the survey we did a while back here, do you agree, Muhammad, Buddha, and Jesus are all valid ways to God? Nearly two-thirds of young born-again Christians agreed with that statement.

[00:07:01] Well, again, if you can't get the gospel right, as you like to say in the book, the unedited Jesus is going to say, I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father but through me.

[00:07:13] Or the unedited, if you will, Peter is going to say there is salvation in no one else for there's no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.

[00:07:23] If you can't get the gospel right, boy, you're going to have trouble with all the other issues you talk about in terms of kingdom and materialism and a variety of others. So starting just with something as basic as that, we've got a problem, don't we?

[00:07:36] Yeah, talking about getting the gospel right, if you back up one more step, I think what's important to understand, and you're referencing it here, is you won't get the gospel right if you don't get Jesus right.

[00:07:51] And the reason why we get survey responses that are like what you just said is because of the way the church has shaved off the edges of Jesus or jumped over things that don't fit their preconceived values and priorities. What it believes is a non-person in its wake.

[00:08:11] So when you edit Jesus, you edit him into someone he's not and therefore not a person that you can relate to in his fullness. There's a quote early on in the book I just love from Eugene Peterson shortly before he

[00:08:26] died. He was basically endorsing another book, but in his endorsement, I was just profoundly moved by what he said. He said, we need the whole Jesus, all of him, every little bit of him or else we're sunk. And I wholeheartedly agree with that.

[00:08:45] We're going to continue our conversation on the book Editing Jesus with Rick Lawrence right after this. This is Viewpoints with Kirby Anderson. Perhaps the most disappointing Supreme Court ruling this last session dealt with a real concern about social media censorship.

[00:09:11] The justices chose not to decide the case supposedly because the plaintiffs lacked standing. Just as Amy Coney Barrett wrote, we begin and end with standing. We therefore lack jurisdiction to reach the merits of this dispute. The other argument dealt with the issue of traceability.

[00:09:27] Although numerous federal agencies did attempt to censor social media posts and people, Big Tech didn't always take their advice. Justice Barrett argues that the platforms had independent incentives to moderate content. This is a poor argument. As one commentator put it, the government couldn't be held responsible because the

[00:09:46] platforms only followed through with government flags and requests at a roughly 50 percent clip. In his dissent, Justice Samuel Alito did acknowledge that what the officials did in this case was more subtle than the ham-handed censorship found in another case.

[00:10:01] The high court decided, in fact, he argued because of the perpetrators high positions is even more dangerous. It was blatantly unconstitutional and the country may come to regret the court's failure to say so. This is a disappointing ruling, especially since we have the revelations from the

[00:10:17] Twitter files that show emails and subsequent decisions by Twitter and Facebook to censor content. Also, the House Weaponization Subcommittee has released reports showing federal agencies working with nonprofits to coerce Big Tech into curtailing certain forms of speech.

[00:10:34] There will be other Supreme Court cases concerning social media censorship, but this was a missed opportunity. I'm Kirby Anderson and that's my point of view. Go deeper on topics like you just heard by visiting point of view dot net. That's point of view dot net.

[00:10:58] You're listening to Point of View, your listener supported source for truth. And once again, we're talking with Rick Lawrence about his book, Editing Jesus, came out last month, published by Moody, and you can find it in your local bookstore.

[00:11:10] But we have a link there as well, including to his own ministry. And you talk early on about the idea that sometimes when we teach about Jesus, it's more like a TED talk.

[00:11:20] And you were just talking about this, and I think it gets us into the section that you talk about in terms of the Christian-ish Jesus, because most Americans, 92 percent believe Jesus was a real human being, but about half believe he sinned during his life on Earth.

[00:11:36] And I have seen enough surveys and even done one where we have actually identified that the younger you are, the more likely you are to believe that Jesus sinned. And so as a result, you're thinking, well, it's just kind of like us.

[00:11:50] But if we don't, then we tend to deify it. And then we don't know what to do when Jesus refers to a woman as a dog or when he says, look, I didn't come just to bring peace, but a sword that showed up recently in the Chosen.

[00:12:06] Don't know what you think about that. And boy, next year when they have this series of Jesus pulling out a whip and overturning the tables in the temple, that's not the Jesus most people have in mind. Is it, Rick?

[00:12:20] Yeah, it's interesting you mentioned Chosen because, I mean, all depictions are flawed, but the Chosen is probably the best depiction of Jesus I've ever seen that somebody has tried because it has tried to present him in all of his disruptive impact.

[00:12:40] And one of the things they've done on that show, too, is show how often he went off to be alone. Yes, that's something people skip over a lot. But he was he went off to be alone a lot.

[00:12:50] So anyway, the idea that as you go down the generation, there's more of these sort of unorthodox views of who Jesus is and what orthodox belief is. That's very true. And so you could say, well, what difference does it make if six out of ten people

[00:13:12] believe that Satan is just a symbol of evil, not a real person? Well, the domino starts to fall then because if that's your belief, then you also believe that Jesus didn't really have an encounter with an actual presence in the desert, in his temptation.

[00:13:30] As soon as you start to cut out the things that just seem kind of weird, crazy, doesn't really make sense in my worldview. You're unconsciously making Jesus into a person he's not.

[00:13:43] And like I said in the book, there's a great quote that I put early on in the book from Russell Moore that I think kind of captures the whole sort of engine room of all this.

[00:13:56] He said, if people reject the church because they reject Jesus and the gospel, we should be saddened but not surprised. But what happens when people reject the church because they think we reject Jesus and the gospel?

[00:14:08] What if people don't leave the church because they disapprove of Jesus, but because they've read the Bible and have come to the conclusion that the church itself would disapprove of Jesus? Well, that's a crisis. I just think that's so well said.

[00:14:20] And that's really what this book is about. Let's explore what the impact of editing Jesus has been. And then what does the unedited Jesus look like? And by implication, what are his ways? How can we walk in his ways and stop editing out his real presence from our

[00:14:41] everyday life? And again, each one of the chapters talks about the edited Jesus and then the unedited Jesus. And since we were talking about the gospel, you have a whole section there on the exclusionary Jesus because Jesus says you enter God's kingdom only through the narrow gate.

[00:14:58] Many of us say the gate into heaven is wide. And also anyone who hears my teaching and does not obey is foolish like a person who builds his house on sand. And instead, the idea I can construct my foundation on any kind of belief.

[00:15:14] I'll hold up the booklet we produced a while back called Heresy. And a lot of it is simply based upon Elisa Childers focus on another gospel and the idea of progressive Christianity. So some of this is certainly happening in progressive Christianity.

[00:15:32] But the sad reality is what you're trying to talk about here is it's also happening inside the evangelical churches, isn't it? Yeah, it's cross it's across the continuum that the first chapter in the book kind

[00:15:45] of targets or narrows into some of the most prevalent kinds of editing that are happening in the you could say on the conservative evangelical end of the continuum. The second chapter targets more some of the editing that's happened on the progressive end of the continuum of the church.

[00:16:06] And that really that second chapter called Softening of Hearts is you just mentioned one thing that's very prominent, like Jesus says very many exclusionary things. He's also radically inclusive in both ways. He deeply offended people on either side of that.

[00:16:27] You can make the easy case that he offended religious leaders as much for his inclusion as his exclusion. Right. But they're both there. And no matter what, from what perspective we're coming from, we have to decide if

[00:16:44] we're going to be reverse engineered followers of Jesus, meaning are we going to start with him and work backward into our life? Are we going to start with our life and change him to fit into our life?

[00:16:56] One of the topics that I thought was so powerful was what you called the problem with principles. And when I got into that, I'm like, OK, where are we going with this? And eventually, because, you know, it was a little more abstract until I got

[00:17:10] into it. And I realize exactly what you're talking about, because you're talking about Mary and Martha. I go, OK, where are we going with this? But what you were talking about is that in the church today, here's another aspect we prioritize.

[00:17:23] We focus on maybe even camp out on personal transformation. Jesus is here to give you an abundant life. He is. Jesus is here to heal your relationships. He does. But it's all kind of an attempt to go back to something we've talked about

[00:17:41] for many years, really ever since we had Christian Smith on this program. And he began to talk about MTD, moralistic therapeutic deism. That is a God who exists and is created and watches over human beings. God wants people to be good, nice and fair.

[00:18:01] The central goal of my life is to be happy and feel good about it. God isn't necessarily involved in my life. That's the deism part. And good people go to heaven when they die. And that's when I finally realized where you're going.

[00:18:13] The gospel that we present in many churches today is Jesus is here to make your life good. And that's not exactly what the gospel is, is it? Yeah. And I've been working with Christian Smith for the last 20 years.

[00:18:28] I was asked to be on his public advisory team for his huge groundbreaking study called the National Study of Youth and Religion back in the day. And so Christian Smith has a lot to say about what's happening kind of on the ground in

[00:18:43] the American church. But the thing that you just described, moralistic therapeutic deism in the book I talk about how four out of three out of four self-identifying Christians in the U.S. embrace moralistic therapeutic deism as basically their spiritual worldview.

[00:19:00] They wouldn't use that phrase to describe what they believe in. But Christian Smith will say this is the prominent religion in the United States right now. So the basic idea underneath that, and this will resonate and also feel uncomfortable when I

[00:19:16] say this, on most Sundays what we're hearing a pastor tell us is that the way to transformation is to understand the biblical principle and then apply it to our lives. It's usually three biblical principles or three expressions of that principle that we're supposed to apply to our life.

[00:19:35] If you step back from this and again reverse engineer, did Jesus bring transformation into people's lives in this way? Was he trying to help them understand the principle and apply it to their life or was something else going on? So in that chapter, I quote Dallas Willard.

[00:19:52] I heard him speak to a small gathering of people right before a few years before he passed on. And he was targeting this very thing. And he was basically saying Jesus has made it clear how transformation happens. It's through abiding and remaining.

[00:20:08] In the vine, Jesus said this over and over again in one way or another that the path forward is a relational dependence on me. That's what brings transformation. When we're deeply attached, we get his life coming up through our dead branch, transforming us and it naturally produces fruit.

[00:20:25] Instead, what we've done in the church is urge people to try harder to be better. And in a way, I use the metaphor of what we would prefer, what we prefer to do in the conventional church is duct tape fruit onto the branches.

[00:20:41] But if you stand back far enough, it looks like you've got a fruit tree. But what Jesus says is that really it's all about the root. It's how are you attached to me relationally? Because if you are, you remain and abide in me.

[00:20:55] My life comes up into you and it produces fruit naturally. That's why he could say my yoke is easy and my burden is light. That doesn't make sense in most of our lives because it doesn't feel like this is all

[00:21:07] easy. But I think what he was really trying to get at is if you're attached to me, if you're yoked to me, then the fruit that comes out of that is easy. It just naturally produced. I'm the vine and you are the branches.

[00:21:22] Again, let's take a break. We will continue with Rick Lawrence right after this. In 19th century London, two towering historical figures did battle not with guns and bombs, but words and ideas. London was home to Karl Marx, the father of communism and legendary Baptist preacher Charles Spurgeon.

[00:21:48] London was in many ways the center of the world economically, militarily and intellectually. Marx sought to destroy religion, the family and everything the Bible supports. Spurgeon stood against him, warning of socialism's dangers. Spurgeon understood Christianity is not just religious truth. It is truth for all of life.

[00:22:11] Where do you find men with that kind of wisdom to stand against darkness today? Get the light you need on today's most pressing issues delivered to your inbox when you sign up for the Viewpoints commentary at PointofView.net slash sign up every weekday in less than two minutes.

[00:22:30] You'll learn how to be a person of light to stand against darkness in our time. It's free. So visit PointofView.net slash sign up right now. PointofView.net slash sign up. Point of View will continue after you are listening to Point of View.

[00:23:02] The opinions expressed on Point of View do not necessarily reflect the views of the management or staff of this station. And now here again is Kirby Anderson. Continue our conversation today with Rick Lawrence. If you would like to join the conversation, 1-800-351-1212, 1-800-351-1212

[00:23:22] if you have a comment or question. And certainly, Rick, one of the things you were talking about is, of course, the comments by Dallas Willard. Later on, you also have some comments from Ray Ortlin and others.

[00:23:33] And it's kind of, as you said, an understand and apply formula, which is not surprising that then we've ended up with the what we call MTD or that idea. But it isn't just that this moralistic therapeutic deism is the dominant view.

[00:23:49] George Barna now even goes on to say that the most dominant view is syncretism, that it's just a mix and match of theological ideas. And that brings me to one of your other recommendations to maybe reevaluate how

[00:24:04] much time you're on a computer, how much time you're on a cell phone, smartphone, social media and the rest, because we do have almost a hodgepodge of theological ideas, oftentimes contradictory ideas, not just about Jesus, but even about what it means to be a Christian.

[00:24:25] Yeah, it's interesting, right after our last break, I heard you talking about Spurgeon and Spurgeon played a huge role in a massive shift over the last 20 years of my in both my personal life and my professional life as a ministry leader and author and so

[00:24:42] forth. Spurgeon lived his life by a very simple motto in all things make a beeline to Jesus. And every one of his there's thousands of published sermons of Spurgeon, every one of them, no matter where it starts or what the text is, always finds its way

[00:25:02] to Jesus. You can see this lived out in what he actually did with people. And the reason he was doing that was a he was captured by the beauty and wonder of Jesus.

[00:25:13] But if you think about it in the New Testament, we hear the audible voice of God twice, both times the audible voice of God is saying the same thing. This is my beloved son. Right. I well pleased with him. Listen to him. That's not a passing statement.

[00:25:31] He's the audible voice of God is trying to say that the Trinity's strategy is for you to pay ridiculous attention to Jesus. Listen to what he's saying. Pay close attention to everything he says and does, because by doing so, you'll understand the

[00:25:47] God you can't see and you'll understand what it looks like to live in the kingdom of God. So I lead a what I call a home church for young people. Mostly now college students, post-college career now, but it's a couple of dozen of them.

[00:26:03] And I've been doing it for 10 years. And last Tuesday we were talking about something I call the great deception, which references what you were just talking about, Kirby, that these conduits that we're attached to have the impact, it says the research of turning ourselves onto ourselves.

[00:26:23] They have the kind of this subtle gravitational pull that says all of the answer and strength and solution to my life is contained within me, not contained outside of me. And as we were involved in this vigorous conversation about all this with these young

[00:26:41] people, one of them said, well, the problem, though, is we can understand that what the conduits are bringing into our lives. But you can't just take that away without providing an intentional space instead of that. And I thought that was a remarkably fresh comment.

[00:26:58] But what he's really saying is that the spaces that we really need are spaces that encourage, invite us and give us ways to attach ourselves to remain and abide in Jesus instead of filling up our head with more principles.

[00:27:13] Instead, what would it look like if the reason church existed was to help people become more intimately attached to Jesus? What would you do differently if that was your driving force? That's such a good question.

[00:27:27] I think, again, pastors listening to this right now need to be asking themselves that question. Of course, we've talked about George Barney even saying that even just a bare majority of evangelical pastors have a biblical worldview and even smaller percentage, very small percentage of youth pastors do.

[00:27:43] So it's if we want to move beyond the what to the why, why is that the case? We need to change what we do if our outcome is to have more intimacy with Jesus. I think you've made a really good point there.

[00:27:58] And I just thought just since we did talk social media, there are two chapters that really kind of spring from that one, your chapter on golden caffeine of materialism and then also the siren song of platforming.

[00:28:13] Again, first of all, let's just mention that the subtitle of this is confronting the distorted faith of the American church there up until I get to chapter five. I could say as a person like yourself, it's traveled to other parts of the world.

[00:28:28] Many of these problems, many of these distorted views exist elsewhere. But there is something that maybe is a little more unique to North American Christianity, and that is materialism. Can you speak to that? Yeah, that that chapter opens with a little quote from John Steinbeck that's riveting to

[00:28:49] me. It was in a letter actually that he had sent to Adlai Stevenson, who was a presidential candidate at the time. And the letter was later reprinted in The Washington Post. But what Steinbeck said to Adlai Stevenson is if I wanted to destroy a nation, I would

[00:29:05] give it too much and I would have it on its knees, miserable, greedy and sick. And he I think he's describing well this sort of cancerous influence of materialism and too muchness, I guess is what I would say.

[00:29:21] I did a research project a while back with young people to try to find out what life feels like to them. And one of the ways they describe what life is like is too muchness.

[00:29:34] There's just too much that is available to them, too much coming at them, too much for a human being. Yes. Over choice, over choice. Yeah. Yeah. And this golden caffeine of materialism really is referencing our preference for God's

[00:29:55] what what what seems to us is God's slow moving process of coming through for us. So just as the ancient Israelites got tired of waiting for Moses, so they constructed their own God out of their jewelry and started worshipping their own God because they

[00:30:13] could have a material God that they could actually see, feel, taste, touch. And they didn't want to wait around for this God that they could not see. And in a strange sense, we have many, many habits in the American church that are just

[00:30:29] like that. We construct our own material gods because they seem more concrete to us and more worthy of our trust. Of course, we know from experience that there's so many examples like lottery winners and others who get suddenly rich that it ends up destroying their lives.

[00:30:48] We have all these kinds of anecdotal stories, but it doesn't mean that much to us because we still think that if I just had a little more, that's what it would do. That's what would do it for me.

[00:30:58] So this this idea is deeply embedded in our American consciousness as well. Again, you quote from Jonathan Haidt, who's been on the program with us back and when we first talked with him about the coddling of the American mind.

[00:31:11] Now, of course, you have the book Anxious Generation and we are we are really now dealing. And again, he's not a Christian, doesn't even claim to come to these ideas from a Christian point of view.

[00:31:21] But isn't it interesting, Rick, that the secular world is oftentimes telling us what the problem is and the church needs to pay attention to some of those individuals who almost have a prophetic voice, even though they're not believers?

[00:31:35] Yeah, it's interesting that I I've been involved in my two daughters have been involved for years and years with a camp for special needs adults and young people called Camp Barnabas in Missouri. Oh, sure. And and when it's interesting because we take I've taken the people in our

[00:31:56] in our home church, we've taken a band load of 12 or 15 of them to that camp several years in a row. And what happens when you get there is the same as what happens a lot of camps. You get your phone taken away for the whole week.

[00:32:10] And at first it's hard. But universally what these young people say is they experience the kind of freedom when they knew that they could not access their phone. And it's because of the torrent of stuff coming at them, including the the idea that

[00:32:28] materialism has embedded itself even deeper in us is very much tied to our technologies because it used to be that our human nature was to keep up with the Joneses, the people in our cul-de-sac, for instance, the people that we had actual physical contact with.

[00:32:45] There's always been that that truth of envying what someone else has. But the scope of the envy was necessarily narrowed because of who we were in contact with now because of our technologies. We're not keeping up with the Joneses. We're keeping up with the world.

[00:33:03] And this is just suffocating for young people who see the rich, wonderful lives of people all over the earth and compare it to their everyday life. It's just it's overwhelming for them. Hard to have contentment when that is the case.

[00:33:19] Let me just mention Camp Barnabas is something you might want to check into as well. Going to take a break and we come back, maybe at least pick up one other chapter because again, it gets back to this idea of platforming.

[00:33:31] And of course, we already talked a little bit about that, but a very important issue. And again, there are eight chapters. We've covered some of them, but you can get a copy of the book and we'll talk more about that right after these messages.

[00:33:55] You're listening to Point of View, your listener supported source for truth. Continue our conversation with Rick Lawrence for just a few more minutes. We do have a link to Rick Lawrence dot com. You can find out about this book and other books, his speaking opportunities, his

[00:34:10] podcast and much more. So it's available at the website point of view dot net or you can simply go to Rick Lawrence dot com to find that. And Rick, I thought for just a minute we might talk about the siren or siren song of platforming.

[00:34:24] I love that you start out with Matthew 23. Those who exalt themselves will be humbled and those who humble themselves will be exalted. And you and I are old enough to remember when Marshall McLuhan said the medium is the

[00:34:35] message. But there are so many times you say where Jesus does deliberately and purposefully dismantles his platform and calls people to something other than to just a nice, comfortable platform, which unfortunately is what we sometimes provide today, even inside the churches.

[00:34:57] Yeah, it's funny if we if we had to translate that that statement of Jesus from Matthew 23 to match the spirit of the age, including the spirit of age in the church, we would change it to those who exalt themselves get upwardly mobile.

[00:35:15] Those who exalt themselves build a bigger platform and therefore have better influence and greater reach. But those who humble themselves will just be forgotten. They'll be in the backwater of history. No one will ever remember what you said.

[00:35:28] It's a it's a way of thinking that as an author, I'm very familiar with because for authors to get books published nowadays, you have to prove that you have your platform is big enough to sort of guarantee some out of the gate sales of your books.

[00:35:45] And it's a difficult path that authors walk because they're not just writing books. They're now in charge of their marketing as well in some ways. And but that that particular example of the profession I'm in, it also extends to

[00:36:01] everybody because we live in a culture because of social media and primarily and Jonathan Haidt talks about this a lot because of social media. We have been formed by the expectations of that medium that Jonathan Haidt talks about with the introduction of the like button on Facebook.

[00:36:19] That was a game changer in our culture because all of a sudden you we became performance oriented because of that like button. And the performance is really about trying to build up as big a set of followers or

[00:36:36] bigger, as big a platform as we can, even as individual people. And it creates a kind of a self-centered mentality that sees humility and what I call in that chapter sitting at the wrong end of the table. Yes, it sees that as a bad thing.

[00:36:54] And that little metaphor references Jesus talking to this kind of comical activity of all these religious leaders trying to get the best seats at a dinner gathering. And he stops them and says, you know, what you're doing is really stupid because if

[00:37:11] you angle for that top seat and the host comes in and demotes you, you're really going to be embarrassed. Right. So what is sitting at the wrong end of the table? It means just to me, it means sitting where Jesus sits with others who aren't

[00:37:24] clamoring for the head seats at the table. Let me just before I let you go talk about the fact that this is certainly something an individual can read. But the way you put it together at the end of each chapter, you have nine questions for reflection discussion.

[00:37:39] And the way this is put together could be a real useful discussion. And as an individual that leads a home church for young people, I figure you've already tested some of this out on some of the individuals that you've been discipling.

[00:37:52] Yeah, so that group of people that they're always in my acknowledgments over the last decade because this is a highly experiential conversational, what I call a co-discovery environment. And our motto there in that group is pursuing the heart of Jesus, not his recipes,

[00:38:12] which means that we're really after the beauty of Jesus. We're trying to get as close to him as we can, the real unedited Jesus. And we're not that concerned about life application at all because of that idea that

[00:38:26] Jesus planted that really this is all about your attachment to the vine. So the way we become attached to that vine is by being exposed to the beauty of his heart. And we either are drawn to it or repelled by it.

[00:38:38] So so those the questions at the end of each chapter are designed to really provoke rich conversation. They're not telegraphed questions, meaning there's a telegraphed right answer to them that it's designed to provoke conversation comes right out of the environment that that I'm in while I'm writing books.

[00:39:00] So these young people have really helped me over the last decade. They've infused everything I've written over the last decade. Again, the book is published by Moody. You can certainly find out about it in your local bookstore.

[00:39:11] Probably find it there as well since it came out last month. But we do have a link to Rick Lawrence dot com. And you have, of course, an opportunity for people to have you come and speak to get

[00:39:22] some of the other books. There's a place where you can work as a collaborator, a coach, a contact point. So what will people find when they land on your website? I'll get a look at some of the books that I've published besides this.

[00:39:36] They're all over the last 20 years about Jesus and other way to contact me. You can also contact me very easily at Rick at Rick Lawrence dot com. Just Rick at Rick Lawrence dot com.

[00:39:45] You can just reach out through email if you if you have questions, you want to pursue something further. But on that site, you'll also get a little link to that podcast you mentioned before. It's called Paying Ridiculous Attention to Jesus. It's in its eighth season now.

[00:39:59] I was just about to record a new episode tomorrow. So that comes out every other week and it is an exploration of exactly what the title is. All we do for an hour is pay ridiculous attention to Jesus in the million different ways we can do that.

[00:40:14] Again, all that information available on the website point of view dot net. Of course, you go to Rick Lawrence dot com and Rick, thank you for joining us and look forward to the next opportunity. Kirby, thank you so much for inviting me into your space.

[00:40:27] I really appreciate it. Just before we go, let me just mention we do have an action item for you today and about an hour ago, almost an hour and a half ago, we had an email that went out. It would have actually in the byline there Warren Kelly.

[00:40:42] But he's just reminding you that I did send out one earlier about this issue of protect minors online. And so you can go to the website point of view dot net and find the information.

[00:40:55] It is very disturbing, but at the same time, it's why we need to take action. And I certainly want to give credit to Senator Ted Cruz, who actually has this take it down act tools to address known exploitation by immobilizing technological deep fakes on websites and networks act.

[00:41:16] That's a long set of words for basically saying that you have had individuals that have been victimized by what we might call pornographic deep fake images, oftentimes known as revenge porn. And this is really a piece of legislation that would require big tech to do what

[00:41:35] they should have really been doing in the first place. And you can read a little bit more about it to find out that this is not just a hypothetical issue. It involved real people that I think were actually abused as much by the big tech

[00:41:50] resistance as they were by the people that perpetrated it in the first place. But you can come to your own conclusion in that regard. But just before we run out of time, let me mention that tomorrow I'm going to talk a little bit about Bible translation.

[00:42:03] Edward Arnold, Edward Andrews, I should say, is an individual that I've worked with before and just wanted to talk about what he's done in terms of putting together another translation based upon, you know, just a real dedicated work to try to get

[00:42:18] the most precise meanings possible in his Bible translation. So I thought you might like to know some of the work that he's done over the years in that regard. Ingrid Scott will be with us.

[00:42:27] We'll be talking about the abortion pill and the case that went to in front of the Supreme Court, where once again, the Supreme Court decided not to decide. So we have those issues and we'll be following a number of other things today.

[00:42:40] Of course, we talked about the Republican platform really softening its stance. We'll give you some more perspective on that since next week will be the Republican National Convention. And then five weeks from Monday, yesterday, you have, of course, the

[00:42:55] Democratic National Convention and Democrats are trying to figure some things out in that regard as well. We'll have a lot to talk about as we always do. I want to thank Megan for help engineering the program. Steve, thank you producing the program.

[00:43:07] We'll see you back here tomorrow, right here on Point of View. The Bible tells us not to worry. And yet there is a lot of worrying stuff in our world today. Thankfully, the Bible doesn't stop at telling us not to worry. God gives us a next step.

[00:43:26] He says we need to pray. But sometimes even knowing what to pray can be difficult. And that is why Point of View has relaunched our Pray for America movement, a series of weekly emails to guide you in prayer for our nation.

[00:43:44] Each week, you'll receive a brief update about a current issue affecting Americans, along with a written prayer that you can easily share with others. We'll also include a short free resource for you in each email so you can learn more about the issue at hand.

[00:44:02] Will you commit to pray for America? Go to pointofview.net. Click on the Pray for America banner at the top of the page to subscribe. Again, that's pointofview.net. Click on the Pray for America banner. Let's pray together for God to make a difference in America.

[00:44:28] Point of View is produced by Point of View Ministries.