What Is the Mission of the Church? | Greg Gilbert

We're back with yet another episode. Does anybody want it? It doesn't matter because we're doing it.

Another episode of the Room for Nuance podcast. I'm Sean with my guest Greg Gilbert.

Greg, will you open us in prayer, brother? Sure. Lord, we thank you for this opportunity that you give to me and Sean to sit for a little while and talk and have conversation about who knows what.

But Lord, we pray that it would be edifying for us and for anybody who's listening in on it and we ask that in all of it,

Jesus would be glorified in his name. Amen. Well, let's start with this.

Tell us how you came to know the Lord, brother. Yeah, it's not that great a story. It's not as good as your story.

It's probably better. Well, it's a faithful family. It's shorter. Yeah, it's faithful Christian family,

Southern Baptist Church, all growing up. Was converted at nine at a very typical fall revival meeting.

So our church did those you know, Sunday through Thursday, come to church every night. And so I don't remember what the guy was preaching on, but I do remember,

I remember where we were sitting in the sanctuary. I remember listening to the sermon. I remember the invitation.

And I just kind of leaned over to my mom at nine years old and said, I need to go down there. And she knew what that meant.

So she put me in a conversation with my dad at home and then the next night of the revival meeting,

I guess, I did the whole thing, walked down the aisle, professed faith in Christ.

I remember my father, you know, really tall on this side of my pastor, really tall on that side. Your dad was tall? Taller than me at nine years old.

Yeah. And maybe even still taller than you today. No, I outstripped him eventually. But then did a baptism class for six weeks and got baptized after that.

So yeah, that's how I became a Christian. So you were going to tell me that after you walked out, they baptized you that night? Oh, no, no, no, no.

It wasn't one of those. All right. So the Southern Baptist Church of your upbringing, where was it on the spectrum of health?

That's a good question. So the guy who was my childhood pastor was at the, he was at the church for, it must've been 25, 20, 27 years, something like that.

And then he retired and ultimately passed away. But he was an expositional preacher.

He preached the gospel. He was not reformed. He became reformed actually right about the time

I did. So when I was a sophomore in college, that's when I became reformed.

And he did too, just kind of through independent means. But he had already been a pastor at my church for,

I don't know, 15 years by that point, something like that. So yeah, I mean, it was a good church. We did the things the church does.

People came to Christ, God preached the gospel. And eventually for the last 10 years of his ministry, he was, he was a five point

Calvinist. So you get saved at nine and then do you have like teenage rebellion years?

No, I was a good kid. Okay. Yeah. I made the grades. I was on a couple of sports teams.

Okay. I was never an athlete. Okay. Never played. Did you want to be, was it aspirational?

Not really. Okay. Way more academics. Yeah. Oh yeah. Okay. But I was on the basketball team all four years.

Okay. Never played. Okay. I literally didn't play ever. Would you like,

I mean, just, you enjoyed going to practice or what? No, not that either. It's, it's funny. I've told this story before, so some, some of these people will, will hear it, but so my, the, the, before the basketball season started my senior year, the coach called me into his office cause

I had talked to him. He was my Sunday school teacher actually, as well as basketball coach. Where was this? Texas, East Texas.

And so he said, he said, I know you've been thinking about, about quitting or not playing your, your senior year.

He said that the, in a normal world, that's probably a good idea because you're not going to get any playing time. You and I both know that you're really bad at this.

But he said, he said, listen, I need you to stay on the team.

And I said, why coach? And he said, because if we don't average your GPA and we're going to go on academic probation with the district.

And so I said, okay, well, I need something from you then. And he said, what? And I said, well,

I want to be the captain of the team. And he said, he said, you got to be kidding me. You can't be the captain and never play.

And I said, well, those are my terms. And so he made me. Were you, were you playing it serious though? Oh, absolutely.

Cause I was building a resume for college. Like I needed to put, I needed to put captain of the basketball team on my, my resume.

So he finally gave in. So every game I would strut out to center court and shake the ref's hands and the other team.

And I was the captain. And then I never, never set foot on the court. Wow. Pretty much the entire season.

I don't know if I got you beat, but I think I have, I think I have an, a similar story for various reasons.

I was for various reasons. I was late to register for school my freshman year in high school and all of the what are the classes that you don't have to electives, all the electives were taken.

And so they put me in band. I don't know how to play instrument. I don't know how to read music, but you learned.

No, I didn't learn. They, they tried to teach me like one scale on a trumpet. And within like an hour, they were like, this is not going to work, not going to work.

So what they did was they had me go out on the field in March and pretend to play the trumpet.

And whenever, like in the bleachers, the band would get up and do the thing. I would get up and do the thing. Yeah. Pretend to, but you weren't allowed to actually blow through the trumpet.

It would have been bad. I remember at one point I was like, I'm going to take it home and I'm going to, I'm going to show them.

I'm going to like, try to learn to play the trumpet, but smoking weed just got in the way of that. So I thought you were going to say they gave you like a

Snapple bottle and a stick and just beat it. Yeah, no, I wish that had been awesome.

Okay. So a high school, you go off to college at Yale university,

Yale university. So East Texas to New Haven, Connecticut, a little bit of a culture shock. Huge.

Yeah. But I loved it. I was, I was ready to get out of small town, East Texas. So, um, that old truck had a, uh, yeah,

I was ready to go. So loaded it all up. Went to New Haven, Connecticut, a huge culture shock.

New Haven pizza overrated or underrated? Neither. It's highly rated and it's delicious.

Okay. I mean, it depends on the place, but that's true, but a lot of people don't even know New Haven pizza exists.

Uh, I'm not sure any other pizza actually exists. I think it's all knockoffs except, except, do you know who

Dave Portnoy is? He does the pizza bite. He's putting it back on the map. Like, is this his favorite kind of pizza?

I mean, it's delicious. Yeah. Pepe's pizza. That's his number one rated spot in the whole country. Okay. So you were right around that area.

Yeah. You were living it up. Yeah. It was within walking distance. Okay. So you go to Yale as a Christian. Yep. What's it like?

Yep. Yep. Uh, very, very different from East Texas. Very different. Um, because in, in the little town where I grew up, it was like 2 ,500 people, something like that.

Pretty much everybody believed in Jesus. Like no one, you didn't find an atheist.

You didn't find even an agnostic. Everyone believes they just, you know, the struggle was whether you're going to live out your belief or not.

Cultural Christianity at Yale. Yeah. Everything was on the chopping block. Everything was challenged.

Did you know that going into it? Not as deeply as I probably should have.

I mean, I knew it was going to be, I knew it was going to be different and, and difficult in that way. Yeah. Uh, but I, I didn't know that I was going to wind up being challenged at literally every point of my faith.

Did you have like your first day of English lit class where your professor gets up and tries to destroy the faith of every freshman?

No, I didn't have that. I had my roommates, freshman year roommates, um, who every single one of them was a character.

Um, you know, I liked them. We had a good time together, but man, there were no Christians among my, I had four roommates, uh, no

Christians. So there was a, uh, a sort of almost atheist reformed

Jewish guy. That was one of them. Uh, and he and I probably had the most spiritual conversation. He was, he was very interested in, you know, very smart.

So he would challenge me on everything. There was a self -proclaimed philosophical hedonist who basically told us day one, uh, my goal is to do as many drugs, uh, and sleep with as many women and maybe some men also as I possibly can.

So just fair warning. So he told us that upfront. Then there was an honest to God Rastafarian like in all the whole religion.

Was he white or black? He was a white guy. So not, not quite honest to God. Irish even, you know,

I mean, he was, you know, redheaded. I mean, like an Irish looking sort of guy. He was an honest to God Rastafarian by which

I mean, like he adopted the whole religion. Um, it wasn't just for the marijuana. Like he, he was, he was into it.

And then there was this, uh, agnostic or just apathetic economist guy who eventually converted to Rastafarianism because he liked the weed.

So those were my roommates. And, and it was just a very different thing that I'd ever seen in East Texas.

Now, were you like, I mean, had you been well -discipled Christian worldview? Did you know your

Bible apologetics or were you kind of just like, you know, uh, um, a mixture, you know,

I mean, I'd been well -discipled in terms of the Christian life in terms of defending the faith, not so much.

So a lot of my college career with those four guys and then, uh, the roommate that I wound up with, uh, in the last three years, a lot of my college kind of career was figuring out how to defend the faith.

So I'd get into, you know, 2am arguments with roommates and get stuck on something and not know how to answer the question or feel like I was losing.

And so the next day I would go meet up with a guy who was discipling me and say, how do you answer this question?

You know, what, what's the answer to that? And he would tell me, and over time, over those four years, I just kind of built up really from, from the, from the ground up a defense of the

Christian faith, um, as, as I understand it. So it was really good for me in that sense.

Yeah, I can imagine. I mean, I also could imagine it going the other way, but God's grace is amazing.

Were you a member of a church there? Uh, not for the first two years. Okay. Yeah. I mean, healthy churches around that were hard to find,

I imagine? Not really. Uh, I mean, there were, there were probably three churches that I was sort of bouncing around to at the time there was a charismatic church, and then there was a more liberal

Baptist church, and then a very conservative, great, uh, Presbyterian church. Yeah. And I kind of bounced around to those tried.

There was a time when I tried really, really hard to be a Presbyterian. I desperately wanted to be a Presbyterian and just couldn't make baptism work, couldn't make pedo -baptism work in my head.

Um, but I finally joined a church 20 miles north of New Haven. Uh, uh, but that was kind of in the wake of, uh, me understanding that I was going to go into ministry.

So I joined that church in order to become a youth minister. Were you a part of like campus ministries and stuff?

Oh yeah. We were, we had a, we had a crew. Uh, we just called it Campus Crusade for Christ back in those days.

Um, that was a big organization. So Thursday night, large group would have 150, 200 kids at it.

So that, that was big. Um, and then we had a BSU, Baptist Student Union.

They go BCM now, I think Baptist Campus Ministries. My first sermon I ever preached was at a Baptist Student Union.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Mine was in a tiny little church in East Texas. Yeah. Oh, as a teenager?

No, as a 20 year old. Okay. Yeah. So you came back to town? Came back to town at Christmas and preached.

Did it go well? It did not. What happened? It did not go well. Well, so I, I, it was about the time

I was becoming reformed too. So I had gotten ahold of, uh, the, the book that reformed me basically was

John Piper's, The Pleasures of God. And I read that thing about 15 times and finally took the book to, uh, this, this crew guy.

15 times. How much of an exaggeration is that? Slight. But like, even if it's five, that's a lot.

I probably read the whole book three times, but you remember chapter five? Chapter five was God's pleasure in election.

That I'm, that I read 15 times. Um, and I finally took it to this guy who was discipling me, um, a crew guy.

And I kinda, I kinda threw the book down on his desk and I said, there it is. I said, this guy has figured it out.

Like all questions of theology are answered. This John Piper guy. This John Piper guy right here has figured it all out.

So he read a little bit of it and he said, Oh, this is Calvinism. And I, you know, what's that?

And then he showed me, you know, whole library. So he was reformed. Oh yeah. He was reformed. Yeah. Here's my

John Piper story. I was coming out of the prosperity gospel, trying to figure everything out.

I was, I didn't have a church. I was newly in the army stationed in Seattle, very secular, hostile culture.

Spent a lot of time on, on MySpace. You remember MySpace? Okay. Uh, and somebody was posted a

Paul Washer video. Obviously got me right. That was a shocking youth message, you know, and YouTube just had that thing where you could go down the rabbit hole.

So like Paul Washer video led to a John Piper video. And I said, who is this guy?

And then he had this prosperity gospel sermon jam. Do you remember sermon jams? I do. Somebody would.

Yeah. And I saw it and I was just coming. I was on the verge of coming out of the prosperity gospel and I was livid.

I was like, ah, I thought this guy was solid, but this guy sucks. Who is this idiot? John Piper. And I couldn't shake him.

Like I remember I would go back and try to read some of my prosperity gospel guys. And I was just like, John Piper's voice would be in my head.

And I was just like, nobody handles the word like that. And so I made a rule for myself.

I would go back and I would like read his books or watch his sermons. But if he said anything about the prosperity gospel,

I would just fast forward that part, you know? And so like so many other people, John Piper was my introduction to a, a healthier, happier version of Christianity.

Yeah. The Lord's used that man in extraordinary ways. I want to go back to your college stuff, but just since we're talking about Piper, unfair to say he's the

Spurgeon of our day. Oh my goodness. Unfair.

I don't know. I can't think of any other man that has affected our generation of Christians and pastors like John Piper.

So maybe, I mean, I don't know how to think in terms of centuries and all the rest of it, but for our generation, he, he reformed our reformed generation.

Yeah. I agree. Yeah. The Lord did through him. And it's interesting that you brought up the pleasures of God because Desiring God is kind of the main book that we think of, but so many people,

Mark included, they just say, yeah, Desiring God, great. Couldn't read it all, but the pleasures of God, you know, and future grace.

Yep. I've heard people say that the pleasures of God is the white hot center of John Piper's way of thinking.

And I think that's got to be right. Every time I think another Piper book, I don't really need to read this.

You know, I kind of got it. Christian hedonism. My, my, my world was exploded, been there, done that. And then

I'll just go back and I'd be like, oh, it's just as good as I remember. Yeah. So good. I am praying unto the

Lord daily and I'm, and I'm using like Joel Beakey did, I'm using thys and these and thous.

I'm trying to use the King's English in my prayers, hoping it'll help that. We'll get him for room for nuance. They're protecting him, dude.

They're like, listen, he's 78. He's got a lot of writing to do. He only has so much energy. Just, just do like you did to me.

Send him a text message that says I'm coming to get you at three o 'clock. Just act like it's on the schedule for the record.

It was on the schedule, but Hey, I will kidnap him. I mean, if that's what you're getting at, I will kidnap.

I mean, he's downstairs. He looked a little bored, so he would probably welcome distraction.

He's sitting there just kind of, you know, anyways, he's, he's, he's watching this guy preaching.

He's like, Hey, he's no John Piper. He's writing his next book in his head is what he's doing, man. Okay. Back to you,

Yale. What was your undergrad degree in? It ended up being in history, but I bounced around quite a bit from economics to political science, to philosophy, to, you know, history, religious studies, but wound up in history.

Okay. And then after you finished that, what did you do? You were a youth pastor. Yeah. After, well, during and after that degree,

I was a youth pastor, which is kind of hard to imagine a little bit. Yeah. I was younger then.

Yeah. Okay. No, I mean, I used to be fun. I did used to be fun.

Yeah. All right. Yeah. Icebreakers and everything was all about it. Did you play chubby bunny? Uh, we did.

Yeah. What you can't do now. I know it's dangerous. Dangerous choking. Cause you can, you can aspirate the marsh.

It's not good. Nice. You have a medical background. My wife's a nurse. Oh, there you go.

Yeah. Okay. So you were a youth pastor. So yeah. Youth youth pastor in a little town in Connecticut for three years.

So junior year, um, senior year, and then one year after that. And then, uh, pretty immediately went to, uh,

Capitol Hill Baptist to be an intern with our mutual friend, Mark with Mark.

Uh, sure. But also, yeah. Was Mark your connection to the internship? Yeah. So Mark was, uh, uh, he came to be a speaker at a grad student retreat for some

Yale grad students. And the guy that I was telling you about, you know, that I threw the Piper book in front of, he, he was running that.

And so, uh, he said, look, you're, you're two months from graduating. Why don't you, why don't you come with us on this grad student retreat?

So Mark was speaking at it. We pretty quickly, he and I figured out we were the only two Southern Baptists in the room.

And so we ended up talking a lot and he said, well, Hey, why don't you, before you go to seminary, why don't you come to Capitol Hill for a year, uh, do an internship?

A year. It was supposed to be a year. Oh, cause now they're five months. Yeah. This was not, this was not the

Capitol Hill internship. It didn't exist yet. So, so like there were two of us.

So, uh, well, Jonathan Lehman was, was one of the guys.

Uh, is this after Sean Lucas? I don't know. Okay. I think Sean Lucas was the first one, which

I thought, I thought a guy named, uh, Slezacek was the first one. Mark told me

Sean Lucas was the first one. Well, Mark's getting old and forgetful. Okay. Okay.

So you and Lehman are doing the internship. Yeah, we did the internship. Uh, and it was, it was just very different.

So now here you are sitting together downstairs at the quorum. I know. It's amazing. Wow. Yeah. He's, he's one of my oldest and best friends.

I love that guy. Um, yeah, it's just very different. So now if you do the CHPC internship, uh, you're watching and listening and that's it.

Like you don't, you don't teach, they don't build any ministry on you. Yeah. Nothing. Yeah. Uh, that was not the case when we were there.

So Jonathan and I were writing Sunday school classes and preaching on Sunday mornings and doing discipleship.

And it was more like a, more like a pastoral assistant or assistant pastor role.

Yeah. Um, so it wasn't anything like the current, I think we read two books. What?

During the semester. I read 66. I know. And I wondered if that number was on purpose. He said it wasn't. Yeah. I know that the interns read a ton.

Now we read two books, I think. I mean, surely you're doing reading of your own and all that. Yeah. Yeah.

Mark's making recommendations. Yeah. And Mark would give us, so, so the, when I was there, one of the first things

Mark did was he would feed me popular books that were on the market and have me read them and write reviews, which they would put on the website.

Um, and so a couple of those got me in trouble. Yeah. One of them got taken down. What got taken down?

Yeah. One you wrote positive that now everyone shakes their head. No, I'm not sure what that, well,

I'll figure it out. I'll figure that out. Yeah. I don't know. But it was really bad. Yeah.

There were, there were two of them that kind of two or three of them that got me in trouble. Yeah. I can't believe they were having you do that.

That's so great. Uh, yeah. I don't know exactly what Mark was thinking. I think he was just kind of honing my ability to read and, you know, incisively look at a book and review it.

So he still has you in the internship. You have to read one bad book on ecclesiology. Okay.

Mine was on urban monasticism. Interesting. Man, it was bad.

And not only was it bad, it was like 700 pages bad. Oh, so I thought, oh, you, you think you can do this to me?

So I wrote a review that I tried to make as painful for Mark for him, for the intern discussion as I possibly could.

Uh, yeah. Anyways, 700 pages worth of stuff to say about urban monasticism.

You know, I would expect you to say that Greg, but this man who's changing the world, he says there is, he's got more than 700 pages.

Okay. Yeah. That was, that was the, the edited version. All right. Well, that was the spark notes.

Uh, no, it was really bad. It was terrible. Okay. So you do that and then you had disseminated no temptation to hang around CHPC.

Well, I ended up saying for two years. Oh, okay. So did, did the one year got married, hung out for another year.

Met your bride there. Yep. She was a, she's a little older than me. She's two and a half years older than me. So she was already in DC, uh, producing radio shows actually.

Um, but she joined Capitol Hill, literally the same members meeting that I did.

So, uh, we met, you know, the church was a lot smaller than two. It was probably only 250 people at that point.

So it was a much smaller thing. And so anyway, she and I met and hung out, you know, through just the normal social avenues and got, got engaged, got married.

And then, uh, yeah, moved to move to Louisville in 2002 to start seminary.

Sorry, hold on. What was Mark like 20 years ago? Exactly like Mark is now. Yeah. I mean, you know him.

Yeah. He, he was who he is. He is who he was. I wonder if he's getting a little more curmudgeonly. I mean, that just happens with age.

I think. Yeah. I don't know. I mean, I've heard he's gotten softer. I don't know about that either.

Okay. All right. So you went to Southern? Yep. Yeah. Uh, so yeah.

Southern seminary. Yeah. Um, did school anything, anything interesting here?

Uh, interesting about, about that. Uh, I worked for Al Mueller for,

I think four and a half years, something like that. Started part -time wound up working for him full -time.

He had a daily radio show at that time. So different than the briefing. Yeah. It was a, it was an hour long call in live radio show.

So no recording, no second takes. Um, but part of my job was helping to produce that show.

So I would, you know, scour the webpages and newspapers and all the rest and have a stack of material highlighted and noted and all the rest to hand him as he was walking in and the opening, the opening, which the briefing kind of grew out of those openings.

Um, you know, so he would pick out five stories that he wanted to talk about and, but my job was to give him 50 stories every day so that he could choose five.

Um, and, and that's what I did. And it took hours and hours and hours every day. Yeah. And so you were doing that as you were a student?

Yeah. Yeah. It was great. Cause it was super flexible and, you know, I just knew I needed to be at the office at a certain time to hand that stack to him.

I've heard conflicting accounts about Al doing the briefing. I've heard that he uses notes, but more often than not,

I've heard he doesn't know notes. He just goes in there and riffs. I've never actually seen him do the briefing.

He never used, he never used written notes when he was doing the radio show.

Yeah. I mean, literally he just would look at a newspaper article and sort of just talk about it.

I mean, yeah. So my guess is he does not use notes. Anything fun, interesting, or surprising you have to share with us about Al Mueller?

Does he sleep? About Al Mueller? Uh, he does not sleep during the week. He does, he does catch up on the weekends.

He's not super human. Yeah. I guess we'll come back to him later. Cause he's an elder at your church.

Correct? Uh, he's a member. I thought he was an elder. No. No. Okay. So you finished up seminary then?

Yeah. So finished up seminary, uh, through that whole six years, uh, the degree didn't take that long.

I was in, in Louisville for six years, uh, was a member of the church that I now pastor third

Avenue. We were going through a really bloody reform, uh, at the time.

Just the church was dead by the 19 mid 1970s. And it's sort of zombified and stayed dead.

Um, until some seminary students in the late nineties started showing up and going, uh, going to that church.

I got there in 2002, the sort of reform was getting really hot right about that time.

Uh, so I was there through, you know, the hottest part of that reform and, and ultimately the end of the reform too.

And so far as there ever is one. Um, but we got all the, you know, got a new constitution, new statement of faith, uh, you know, elders, which was huge.

So I was right there for all of that. And that was, that is, that whole experience was huge for me.

I mean, I learned how to, I learned in, in, in certain ways, how to pastor, I learned how to lead,

I learned how to, you know, get things done. Uh, it was huge for me going through that reform.

What's the name of your church? Third Avenue Baptist. Third Avenue Baptist. And where is it located? Louisville, Kentucky.

On which Avenue? Well, third street. Ah, that might be a little confusing.

Yeah. Third Avenue on third street. Hmm. Uh, let's pause for a little interesting nature factoid.

Uh, I found out the other day that all ants are the bugs. I found out that they're all female. Did you know that?

How'd you find this out? Well, let me just prove it to you first. Here's how you know it's true. If they were males, they'd be called uncles.

Oh, you're so bad. Okay. So let's get there. There's your viral clip right there. Send that one out.

What if you just threw? Nah, I don't think so. Okay. So, uh, how do you feel about third

Avenue being called the CHBC of the South? Well, we, we called him third

Avenue East. All right. Uh, I mean, since you've been there, since you were there, since you got there in the nineties, has what, what's your impression of how

Louisville has changed as far as the local church scene? Uh, for the most part,

I think the church scene has gotten stronger over the last, I mean, I've been there for 22 years, except for that, that little thing in the middle.

Yeah. Um, but yeah, over 22 years, it's gotten a lot stronger. There've been some church plants, there've been some church reforms.

Um, but I'd say there are half a dozen or more churches in town that like, if third

Avenue ceased to exist, you know, in a moment I'd be overjoyed to go to any of those churches in town, which is pretty amazing.

Yeah, that is. Um, okay. Let's talk about books. You've written many of them.

Yeah. Uh, depending on how you count nine, 11. I use Roman numerals.

Well, but, but there, there are books that I've coauthored and then there's, there's a

Bible study. Does that count as a book on James? It's well, let's start here.

Let's start with your little pink book, the church questions and answers book. Can women be pastors?

Yes. Yes. I'm willing to start there. That little booklet, and I'm not trying to be diminutive to like be dismissive.

It is little. It is little. It's fantastic. I was trying to, I'm trying to imagine somebody more succinctly and biblically and thoroughly and persuasively and illustratively putting the matter.

And I just don't think it's possible. Uh, I, I didn't read it when I first got it. We have had, uh, the little set up on our book thing.

Like you could come, anybody, any member with that little rainbow of fruit flavors. Yes. And you know, grab this booklet, grab that booklet.

And I didn't read it cause I thought, I know the answer to that. This book could be one page, just one scripture reference.

No. Uh, and, but then we had an issue come up where there was a member who was thinking through some of these things and I was throwing them, you know, the biblical manhood and womanhood and the

Andreas Kastenberger and all this stuff. And it wasn't getting read.

And then I picked up yours and I said, I just read this real quick. And I was like, Oh, this took you about 10 minutes.

Yeah. Yeah. And, and I, but what's significant is I said, I don't need all those, at least for this conversation.

This little booklet is more than enough. Uh, so tell us how you came to write that book and any fruit that you've seen from it.

And maybe let's talk about the content of it as well. Yeah, sure. I mean, the, the, the book was written cause they asked me to write it.

I mean, that's, that's just the long and short of it. Did they ask you to write it because they thought you would be particularly good?

I really have no idea. Okay. Uh, it just came in an email. I don't have a particular passion about that question.

I've never really spoken about it. Like I did the prosperity gospel question because people kind of know that you talk about that.

Lehman did the politics and like, I, I haven't been involved in the Southern Baptist conversations. I haven't tweeted.

So I don't know, but they asked me to write that book. Um, and so I, I did,

I had just, well, maybe they heard a sermon series cause I had just done a on first Timothy.

And so the, the argument of that little book, I made it in the sermon. So maybe somebody heard that and said,

Hey, that's a pretty good answer to that question. And they, maybe that's what it was. If somebody is wrestling with this question, you've got 60 seconds, kind of like the gospel presentation in the elevator, but you've got 60 seconds.

What would be your. Yeah, well the, the linchpin, the linchpin text is first Timothy two 12, right?

Like you, you don't even have to talk about anything else. It's just first Timothy two 12. I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man.

Is that a hen dietist or not teach? Yes, it is. I was, I was trying to remember what a hen dietist was other than a female chicken, but I finally got it.

Two things that are put together in one thing, right? Yeah. Because several different times, like four or five, half a dozen times in the pastoral epistles, teaching and having authority is the job description of an elder.

It is how you pastor. Yeah. That's just what it is. Right? And so it's that verse that, that nails the whole thing down.

The, the question is, is Paul just being either culture bound or arbitrary in saying that is that aimed at just one particular situation or is it more universal?

And the argument that I make in that book is that actually not just in verse 12, but through the whole of chapter two of first Timothy, Paul is thinking about the story of Genesis and the fall.

And he actually is pulling out of that. What, what I ended up calling, they come out of the curses in Genesis three, paradigmatic sins of men and women, by which

I mean in a fallen world, men are going to tend to sin in a particular way.

Women are going to tend to sin in a particular way. And both those things are talked about in those curses. Your, your relationships are getting messed up in these ways because of the fall.

And it looks to me very much like Paul is taking those curses and applying them in chapter two of first Timothy first to talk to all

Christians without regard to male or female in the first few verses, then to talk to men about their paradigmatic sin struggle, and then to talk to women.

So it's not arbitrary. It's not aimed at women in particular. Paul's, Paul's, you know, he's spraying the machine gun all over the place, just nailing everybody for the fact that they're acting like Genesis said they were going to act like.

And, and that's just one of them that falls there. So I think what you end up with in the end is not an arbitrary command.

You actually end up with Paul saying, look, authority structures are good. And God put those in, in creation right from the very beginning.

And they were beautiful. And he intended them to be there even before the fall. Satan's work was to upend all of those authority structures, like, like dominoes falling, falling upward and culminating in Adam declaring war against God, basically.

And he's saying to those people in, in Timothy's church, all of you are actually doing the work of the snake as you also try to usurp and overturn the authority structures that God has put into the church.

So it really becomes this not arbitrary, but very high stakes thing of, are you going to be on the side of God?

Or are you going to be on the side of the serpent? That was not 30 seconds, but I'm glad we -

Well, you gave me a minute. That wasn't a minute. Room for nuance, this is called?

Room. Tons of room. Explore the space. There's plenty of room for activities. I like to pair that book whenever I give it with, with Cary Fulmer's little,

How Can Women Thrive in the Local Church booklet. It's kind of like Piper when he goes, you know, women say, well, what can we do?

And he's like, well, here's literally a million things you can do. So. Yep. Absolutely. Are you a broad or narrow complementarian?

Do you need me to define terms? Yeah. Yeah. That would help. So I'm a broad complementarian. That is, I think,

I think when I think of complementarianism, the way that men and women relate to one another, particularly into expressions of authority,

I don't think that that's limited merely to the home and to the church. I think there are more pointed applications of that in scripture.

But I think men and women in general should relate to one another, even in society, in complementarian ways.

A practical outworking of that is I don't think women should be in the military. I don't think they should even be police officers.

I don't think they should be using force in order to protect people. So on and so forth. Yeah, I agree.

And the reason I, I mostly agree. So room for nuance. I, I, yeah,

I believe that there are ontological differences between men and women, right? So, so the, the very essence of, yeah, the things that God says about the roles of men and women are not just, he's not just pulling them out of his hat, right?

They're, they're based on the way he created men and women to be different paradigmatically all the way down.

Have you used that word one more time? Doesn't mean, well, it's, it's a great word. It doesn't mean without exception that, that, you know, all men are this way and all women are that way.

It just means by pattern, right? The only other thing I would say is that I don't think you get the same kind of commands about that broadest sphere that you do about the family and the church.

You get patterns, but you don't get the same sort of, you know, I do not permit a woman to be a CEO of a company.

You just don't get that. That's right. Well, nevermind. I'll stop there. Although there is plenty of room for nuance, and I'm glad that you said that.

Somebody came on our show and said, nuance is a, a tautology.

Am I using the wrong word? What does that mean? Wait, am I, no, that, no, a tautology is a, is a true, is a true.

It's like the same thing. A equals A. Yeah, no, no, no. What, okay. Well, what did they say? Oh, oh, neologism.

Aha. See, that's why. It's a neologism. I shouldn't try to use words I don't understand. Invented by, uh, the postmoderns, you see.

And, uh, really we should change the name of the show to room for teleology. What do you think about that?

Should we do that? What a weird question. Teleology.

Like the end of things? Yeah. Like the goal of things? Uh huh. Like, you know, ontology.

It just seems like an utterly different concept. Nuance and teleos, they're, it's just not even the same thing.

So, so that's a no. You need a synonym. Okay. All right.

And it's funny cause it wasn't even tongue in cheek. The recommendation, it was an earnest room for teleology.

Okay. Moving on, uh, transition.

Uh, you wrote the big three, although they're little, who is Jesus? Well, why should we trust the

Bible? And what is the gospel? Not in that order, but yep. Okay. Well, what was the order? What is the gospel?

The writing order was, was what is the gospel? Who's Jesus? Why trust the Bible? Okay. Let's take them one at a time.

The reading order ought to be opposite though. Okay. Who is Jesus first? No. Why trust the Bible? Why trust the Bible?

Yeah. Okay. So if you read, if you read those three books in, in order of a

Bible, Jesus gospel, you're basically seeing, uh, in, in human intellectual terms, why

I'm a Christian, right? That, that, that's it from the ground up. Um, a lot of people though, just go straight for either gospel or, or Jesus because the

Bible one is a lot more technical. A lot of people just don't have that question. Although you'd, I think you did a pretty good job making it accessible.

I mean, it's more technical. Yeah. Yeah. I actually found more difficulty reading the who is Jesus book. I wanted to get it out evangelistically and the, like the prophet priest

King thing. I just found like, like I would take copies of like, what is the gospel into the jail and that would go over better.

Who is Jesus would be more difficult. Yeah. Interesting. I think who is Jesus is actually more useful, at least from what

I've seen in my experience with people who have a little bit of Christian substance already.

Yeah. Yeah. I can see a little bit of Christian formation. Yeah. We give away copies of why, uh, why can

I trust the Bible? Am I saying that right? I keep messing up. Why trust? Why trust the Bible? That's right. But, uh, I think far and away, the bestseller of the three is what is the gospel?

Oh, without a doubt. I think they told me that's the number one bestselling nine marks book. Yeah. I've heard that too. And it's published by Crossway.

Published by Crossway. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. That's the one. I mean, that one gets used for evangelistic purposes all the time.

I think it's in 30 something languages now and people use it for evangelism. It's not, I didn't even write it for evangelism.

Wasn't even, wasn't even intending it to be evangelistic. I mean, it's the purpose to talk to Christians. Interesting.

I mean, you read, you read between the lines just a little bit and it's trying to, it's trying to get Christians to be clearer about the gospel so that they can go talk to other people about it.

But it's not written to a non -Christian at all. But people use it like that all the time.

All the time. I think it's just because it's obviously so gospel rich. I mean, you, I feel like if I give this book to someone and they read it,

I know that they have now come into contact with the claims of Christ for their lives. Well, praise

God. I hear stories still all the time about, you know, people reading it or being converted through it or whatever.

And it's just, it's incredible. Sorry, go ahead. It's just incredible the way the Lord has used that thing.

I used the Spanish translation when I was teaching a Bible study in the jungle.

And I was walking there. Not many people could read. I led two or three guys who could read through it.

And right in chapter one, we had a context issue. Can you guess what it was? And it's funny because it might be,

I think it's a context issue now, but it wasn't 20 years ago. Use the illustration of like a

Garmin, like a GPS. Oh, the GPSs. Yeah. But like the old school. The kids don't even know what those are.

They have no idea. They have no idea. So anyways, yes, I used it evangelistically. It was great.

Thank you for doing that. Use it in a different language, even in the jungles of Peru. Praise God. Are you going to update it?

I don't know. Justin Taylor's downstairs too. You should ask him. I'm interviewing him tomorrow. Yeah, I don't know.

So there was some talk a little bit ago between Nine Marks Crossway and me about a second edition of it, or even a paperback edition.

Because I can't take those into the jail. I have to strip the hardcovers off. Do you really? Interesting. You're not allowed to have a hardcover in the jail.

Yeah, I understand. But Crossway just said, yeah, we use paperbacks and second editions to gig a book again once it's kind of dropped off in sales.

Right, but yours hasn't. And it just didn't. And I think the reason is because just it got, you know, for whatever reason, it just got into the church budgets of a lot of churches.

And so they're buying cases of them kind of automatically to give to people. I know a lot of churches that give them away when they have first time visitors or they use it for the new members class.

Yep, I hear about that a lot, which is amazing. So yeah, I don't know. I mean, there's some things I would want to change.

Nothing in the like deep, deep substance, but like the GPS illustration, it's just silly now, right?

You need to fix that somehow. My mother found a typo. Yeah, those kinds of things.

Rick Warren, The Purpose Driven Life. Greg Gilbert, What is the Gospel? Who's made more money?

Rick Warren, he's also trained six million pastors. Six million pastors. I said, wow, that's a lot of pastors.

That is a lot of pastors. That is a lot of pastors. There's a great meme after that. There are only 40 ,000

Southern Baptist churches. So this is huge. You have no idea what this guy's doing. That's 150 pastors per church or something.

It's almost as bad as the tweet from, I won't tell you who, from which missions organization that in the year of COVID said that in South Asia, they planted 20 ,000 churches.

I saw that, yeah. Yeah, that's pretty wild. I mean, the audacity though, right? Ministerial math right there.

Oh man, okay. Let's talk about what is the mission of the church.

That is far and away my personal favorite of the books that you've written.

We had to read that for the internship. Mark still assigns it, I think rightly so. But I read that even before the internship just because I thought it was useful.

You and Kevin DeYoung wrote that together. I think one of the things that people most often say about that book is that it was like you guys had your finger to the wind.

Like you were maybe a decade ahead of American evangelicalism in some sense.

Maybe where you were, you were already getting some of those wins. But I mean, it felt like when things really ramped up, like Kevin and Greg have been talking about this for a decade in this book.

Yeah. See, that's interesting because I wouldn't have said that at all. I wouldn't have said it was ahead of its time.

I would have said that there was an ongoing conversation in evangelicalism about the mission of the church.

Not everybody was calling it that, the mission of the church. But there were all of these conversations about making our neighborhoods better places to live.

People were moving into hard hit areas of cities and trying to gentrify them.

They didn't then understand the consequences of that in terms of tax policy and all the rest.

We were gung -ho. We were going to transform our cities to the glory of God, wrap them up in shalom.

And so all of that was going on. And right about that time, there was a whole series of books that came out.

So there was mine and Kevin's. There was one by Michael Horton.

And maybe Van Drunen. There were three or four books that came out. But if Van Drunen writes a book and no one reads it, doesn't that make a sound in the woods?

I read it. It was good. All those books came out. And I think what they did, honestly, is they complexified that conversation.

Because everyone, all the blog posts, all the books that were being written were making it sound like it was the most obvious thing in the world that the church's mission is to make our neighborhoods and cities better places to live.

And so Kevin and I and Michael, and whoever else wrote those books, walked in and went, is it really that simple?

And I feel like a lot of evangelicals, they didn't engage that conversation fully, but at least it stopped that locomotive in its tracks.

It was like, ah, this is more complicated than we thought. I think Christopher Wright's book was pretty influential, right?

It was huge. Yeah, The Mission of God. Oh, yeah. You and Ed Stetzer, or you and Kevin and Ed Stetzer, had a little bit of a back and forth after that book came out.

Mark doesn't assign that. I begged him to actually assign. Oh, the back and forth. Yeah, the back and forth.

Because I think it really fills everything out. From Ed, you have a thoughtful evangelical critique and response that I think ultimately falls flat.

But then you guys respond to him and very charitably, but thoroughly demonstrate that it falls flat.

He responds one more time, which to me seems like, you know, a car kind of running out of gas and pulling into the driveway and getting into park.

But any reflections on that back and forth exchange? Gosh, it's been so long ago.

I mean, that's been 13 years ago or something. Yeah, I don't know.

I mean, I remember kind of having the same impression that you're describing there. Here's a critique.

We disagree with it. As I remember, there was some credentialism in it that we didn't really appreciate very much.

These guys are not missiologists or professors. And we're just like, we're pastors. What are you talking about?

Of course, we're going to talk about the mission of the church. I would have just been like, I went to Yale. Where did you go? Yeah, no.

But yeah, I had the same impression. I just, you know, one of the big critiques, and I honestly don't remember if Ed was the one making it or not, was that the way

Kevin and I were talking made good works unnecessary or unimportant.

And so... Even though you specifically say the opposite in the book. Well, yeah, yeah, yeah. But we had to come back and sort of fill that in a little more slowly, right?

We thought that was going to be an obvious thing. And it turns out that was a sticking point for a good number of people.

So we had to kind of go back logically more slowly. When you say go back, do you mean like a second edition? No, I just mean in blog posts.

We just kind of had to revisit the topic and go through it more slowly. Like, let's think about the purpose of good works.

They're good. They're important. But what is their purpose? They adorn the gospel. They adorn the gospel. Yeah, that's right.

And how did you and Kevin come to do that book together? We... So Kevin, Justin, and I, and a couple other guys,

Josh Harrison and Tully and Chavijan, had been meeting together a couple of times a year just for conversation and eat pizza and hang out.

And we got into these conversations. And Justin Taylor finally said,

Greg, you and Kevin seem to be on the same team here. You guys should think about writing a book together.

So we thought about it and ended up doing it. How did that work? Did you guys work on the same chapters together?

Do individual chapters? We developed a table of contents. Then we divided it up and each of us wrote half.

Then we traded them, edited them, kept trading them until we could agree with every sentence.

Was that an easy process or was it fairly hard? Pretty easy. Yeah, I mean, he's Presbyterian. I'm Baptist. And so we, and we're trying to answer the question, what is the mission of the church?

And there's some pretty fundamental differences even in how you define church. So we were actually pleasantly surprised how far we got without, you know, running into each other.

Now that it's 13 years on, what's your view on how that book has been used by the Lord? It's been, it's been down in the, it's been down in the minds, right?

So it's not like a super popular book, but it's down in the minds. Like interns read it.

It's on some syllabi for various seminary classes and college classes. So I think it's getting away.

At Sixth Avenue Community Church, put it in our bookstall. Yeah, I think it's getting to the people who it's, who it can most help.

And it does seem like it kind of contributed to stopping that locomotive of, let's go make our cities better places.

You're like, oh, well, that's fine. That's good. But it may not be the mission that the Lord has given us.

I just think, I mean, let's just say that nobody else, but the interns at CHBC read it and then they go on and they pastor and then they replicate that vision.

I mean, that's huge. Yeah, but it's certainly far, it's being used far beyond that. Yeah, yeah, the funny thing about that book is that I think if there ever were another edition of it, what would change in that book is the illustrations of what we're arguing against, right?

Because the positive argument is going to be exactly the same. It hasn't changed. Like the mission of the church is proclaim the gospel, make disciples.

The things that are competing with that in people's minds are completely different than what they were 13 years ago.

Can you elaborate? Well, yeah, because 13 years ago, it was about transforming cities. It was about poverty.

It was about transforming nations by the introduction of aid of various kinds and digging wells and putting up power lines.

And it was about transformationalism. Now the things that are, there's still some of that.

But the things that are on people's minds now are things more like, for example, racial reconciliation.

And now, things have even started to pop up more on the right -hand side of the spectrum. The transformationalism argument has really kind of moved to the other side.

And it doesn't have the same flavor to it, but it is kind of the same thing. We're going to transform, the mission of the church is to transform the nation.

And make it a better place to live. Yeah. At the Quorum Deo conference, you're going to give a talk called,

What is still the mission of the church? Are you going to basically do what you just told me?

Yeah, pretty much that. I mean, that title gives the game away, right? Because it's like, I'm not going to say anything all that different.

Basically, yeah. I'm going to just try to set the stage kind of in that way. Say the challenges are different.

But the answer is the same. Like, let's dust off the old ancient stones and put them back in place and just remember what the mission of the church is.

Regardless of what the challenges, challengers are out there. I actually really think that you guys should do a number two.

Yeah, we talked about it. We decided we were too busy. Really? Too busy to write books to serve the church?

Yeah, man. Man, both of us are like, you know, year 13,

I'm 13. He's what, year 20 of being a pastor? Something like that. It feels like it may be more important this go around than the first go around.

Hard to say. And I would also say that this is the most important election ever. Wouldn't you agree?

Every four years. I mean, our nation has never been more divided than it is right now. Wouldn't you agree with that? Are you giving the response to the

State of the Union? Who are you voting for, Trump or Biden? Not Biden.

I can tell you that much. I'm going to write in Dukakis. Write in Jesus.

That's right. You're a history buff. What did you study at Yale? What was your focus?

Focus ended up being Jonathan Edwards. So I did my thesis on Edwards.

That was fun. What about? Oh, it was this tiny little thing in Edwards.

So a guy written a book. It was not published yet, but he let me see a pre -pub copy of it, which

I thought was incredibly cool. And he was making the argument that at the end of his life,

Jonathan Edwards changed his mind and believed that people who never heard of Jesus Christ could nevertheless go to heaven, could be saved.

And so my thesis was looking at all of his arguments for that and knocking them all down.

At least in my opinion. And were you able to? In my opinion, yes. Okay. Yeah, that would be incredible.

The coolest thing, honestly, about that thesis was that one little point in it actually came down to the color of ink that Jonathan Edwards wrote a thing in.

And so my professor suggested it. There were like these two sentences side by side in the publications and they didn't make sense because they were utterly different from each other.

Like, why would you write that and then not that? And my prof said, you need to go look at his actual written manuscript.

So I did, went down into the bowels of the library and they pulled it out. I looked for it.

And lo and behold, he had come back some years later with a different color ink and written the other sentence.

And so it just all made sense because it was a little marginal note. Did you have a hard time reading his writing?

I've heard it's very, very difficult. Yeah. And he uses code. He uses simple codes. So you have to, you have to kind of have a key next to you.

You need like the Rosetta Stone. Yeah. Okay. So settle a Jonathan Edwards dispute for me, if you will.

Let me give you the backstory. I was at ETS last year, which, wow, nobody warned me.

I've never been to an ETS. Don't, don't go. Never done it. There were one or two good talks, but nobody told me that you actually have to read your paper.

Like you have to read it. And like Kevin actually is one of the few people who actually did a good job like bringing it to life.

His was all like John Witherspoon and sarcasm. But anyways, this guy in the most boring fashion possible gave a talk on Jonathan Edwards and the way he changed the manuscripting of his sermon towards the end of his ministry.

And talking about the, you know, his journal used smaller paper, so on and so forth. And then we,

I asked him a question about reusing paper because Marsden and his biography says that one of the reasons why things got so tense for him at the end of his pastorate there was that he just wasn't making enough money.

And he was asking for more money because like he was having to recycle paper because he was like,

I can't write what I need to write. I don't make enough money for even for paper. And I raised my hand.

I asked the guy a question about that. And he goes, no, no, no, that's not true. Jonathan Edwards was very wealthy. Now I know you're not, you haven't looked into any of that, but thoughts?

I don't know. I mean, I know he did. There must've been a paper shortage for some reason because he would turn it on its side and write across his other stuff.

I don't know if that's because he couldn't afford paper or just couldn't get it. But there was certainly a paper shortage for some reason.

All right. I didn't figure you'd have the answer, but I just wanted on public record to state my side one more time.

Trying to get the last word. Oh, history.

There we go. You have not written about church history. Have you thought about it?

Have you thought, ah, you know, I like to write. No. Well, so no, I've just shifted in my interests, right?

Because I actually started out working on a PhD in church history. It was while we were doing this reform at Third Avenue back in 2004, 5, 6, 7, that kind of thing.

And so I was doing seminar papers and writing about Jonathan Edwards and, you know, whoever. And I don't know,

I just kind of realized that I wasn't all that interested anymore in doing research to say what somebody else thought about a topic.

I just wasn't that interested in that anymore. I wanted to say what I thought about a topic. Which I think is probably just the fruit of being an elder and a pastor.

You know, I don't really want to hear about it. I don't want to hear what Calvin's view of piety is. I kind of want to hear, like, if you're going to be up there and give the talk on piety,

I want to hear what you think about it. Yeah, well, I mean, I don't mind hearing that. I think it's useful. I just, you know, when

I'm standing in the pulpit, my role is to say what I have learned from the Bible. And I can use supporting casting characters, but I just kind of decided

I didn't want to spend an academic career learning and saying what other people thought.

I wanted to say what I thought. Did you do your PhD? Oh, that's a loaded question. Most of it.

Yeah, it's not. I'm pretty much all but dissertation right now. Do you need to do it?

Are you going to finish it? Yeah, I want to finish it. Why? Well, because I want to be able to teach, like, at Southern.

You can't teach without a PhD? You can't teach regularly. Okay. At Southern. Do you want to teach regularly?

Yeah, I'd love to. Like if... Like you want to be their ecclesiology guy? Like if my church member and friend

Al would say, you know, every MDiv student that comes through here has to take

Ecclesiology 101 with Greg Gilbert. Yeah, I'd love to do that. Yeah, that'd be awesome.

But you can't do that without a terminal degree, so. And terminal means dying? Means, no, like the end, like the highest degree.

All right, okay. Teleology. Yeah, room for the terminal.

Uh, okay. So how are you going to do that? You're a busy man. I don't know.

Every semester I tell myself this is it. I'm going to do the... I'm going to do the prospectus this semester. I'm going to have lunch with the supervisor and every semester it doesn't happen.

I mean, a dissertation, from what I gather, I don't know. I don't have a high school diploma. It's not, it's a lot of work, right?

It's a ton of work. Yeah. Yeah, it's a, it's like a full -on academic book. It's, it's tough. Well, you probably just have to wait till you retire.

To do it? Yeah. I sure hope not. Maybe take a good long sabbatical with the church. A writing sabbatical?

Would they give you a writing sabbatical? I'm actually going on sabbatical here pretty soon. For how long? But it's four months. That's not long enough.

But it's not going to be to write. Right. I'm not going to do that. Yeah. Just going to have fun, rest, hang with family.

How long have you been pastoring? Uh, 13 and a half years at Third Avenue.

Maybe could you, could you say like, hey, for my 15th year anniversary, you can say 16, it just feels weird.

Give me a year long sabbatical to, uh. A year? Wow. I can hear my elders voting you down right now.

Oh, but the church hasn't built around you, brother. No, no, certainly not. But they do pay me. Okay. Yeah.

Um, we'll raise the funds. How about that? Okay. We'll raise the funds. Room for nuance. Room for funds.

Now, just so you know, we're still raising funds for ourselves. But while we're at it. So maybe it will be when

I retire. Maybe. Yeah. I mean, cause the idea of you teaching ecclesiology at Southern gets me going.

I mean, I would love it. I would absolutely love to do that. I have been very disappointed. Just to be clear, Al has not promised me anything like that.

No, that's not what I understand. That's my dream. No, no, no. You've told us, I think quite clearly that there's some nepotism going on because you're his pastor and he's promised you.

Maybe he's listening to this. Maybe he is. Probably not though. Although I was, I was happy when I said hi to Kevin at ETS, which was maybe the brightest spot of ETS.

I just got to say hi to Kevin. He said, oh, I enjoyed the Matt Schmucker interview. I was like, yes. You're listening.

Epic story of the Bible. This is your sort of popular, accessible biblical theology book.

Yeah, it is. And it was meant actually to be a kind of companion to the story of redemption

Bible. Which is your study Bible that you put out. Yeah. The study Bible that Crossway did.

Yeah. It's beautiful. That thing is absolutely gorgeous. It's so well designed. But basically what that does is it leads you on a read of the entire

Bible more in narrative order than canonical order. Oh, I love that. So you don't read all 12 minor prophets at the end of the

Old Testament all together. Right. They get scattered throughout like first and second Kings when they were actually preaching.

Okay. And so you make your way through the Bible, all 66 books. And I'm kind of your

Sherpa guide, right? Like I'm taking you up the mountain and telling you, hey, look at that, you know,

Vista or remember that rock. That's going to get really important. Three, you know, three books from now.

So don't forget that. Or, you know, even giving people permission at a couple of times to say, okay, the next three chapters of Leviticus, you can read them really fast.

Yeah. But notice such and such a verse as you're going. But I'm doing stuff like that throughout the

Bible. And then epic story. Let's hang out on that. How long did you work on that? Probably a year.

Is that just the fruit of you? Have you preached through the whole Bible? No, no, no. So I had to study all 66 books though, as if I was going to preach them.

Wow. In writing that. So what made you want to do that? It actually started out as Crossway came to me and said, hey, we want you to do what we're going to call a new believers

Bible. So a Bible study Bible that you would give to somebody who's brand new Christian. And that run through the entire

Bible with me, Sherpa guiding you was one of the things that was going to go in that new believers

Bible. And then there were going to be other things. But then they just decided to pull that out and make it its own thing.

They just thought that was useful on its own. What's it called again? The story of redemption.

The story of redemption. I've seen it and I've not ordered it. So now I'm definitely going to order it and I'm probably going to use it.

So thank you, brother. Yeah, it's, I mean, it's beautiful. They designed it super well.

What was your favorite book to do the notes on? Well, the histories. I mean, the histories are amazing.

And, you know, there's so many little Easter eggs and biblical theological bombs that are planted that don't go off until, you know, much later.

So the Old Testament histories are so fun. I feel guilty sometimes as a pastor that the, the history sections are the parts that I struggle with most.

Just keeping all the kings straight and who was here and where it was, you know. You gotta make a chart, man. That's what

I did. You gotta be a chart guy. Excel spreadsheet with all the kings. Yeah, that sounds like not fun.

I'll email it to you. You don't have to make it yourself. I'm guessing it's in the book, right? Yeah, that's not in the book.

Okay. Yeah, they probably didn't want to bore us. I think there's a list in the book, but not in the spreadsheet. So, so you have the companion to that, the epic story of the

Bible. I told you earlier, but I'm going to say it again for the sake of our audience. I was so excited to talk that I reached out specifically to talk about this book because we assigned it to our women's discipleship cohort and far and away, it was the favorite book for the women in our church.

Tell us a little bit about it. About the, about the book. Um, yeah, so what it's doing is giving you a kind of briefing on what to look out for before you set off on the journey of reading the whole

Bible. So it's trying to teach you how to think in the categories that the story of the Bible is, is, is told in.

But you do that through a pretty massive illustration of you traveling. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, I mean, the whole like, you know, illustration that runs through it is a, a trek through the

Himalayas that I did a few years ago. And what mountain did you climb? I didn't climb any real mountains.

Oh yeah, I thought you did. I went to Everest base camp. Oh, well, hey, that's, that's good enough. I, I, I went to Everest, but not up Everest.

Do you want to climb Everest? No, I do not. Why? Because everything I see right now, it looks like a nightmare.

It just looks like a line of people. Tourism. Yeah, it just looks awful. Okay, so yeah, it's, you're on a trek.

Yeah, so reading 66 books of the Bible is a trek. It's up and down and it's difficult.

And there are places you can fall off the trail and, you know, like Leviticus Pass, for instance, is where most Bible reading plans die in about mid, like it's right about now that you're hitting

Leviticus in your yearly reading. And a lot of people are dying. I would even say the second half of Exodus is really tough for people.

It is tough. Yeah, and then you get the whole stretch of Leviticus. And so it's trying to just get you ready to, to make your way through that and realize, you know, this thing is a story.

It's not, it's not a bunch of fortune cookies that are thrown in a jar that work. Just pick out a verse and read it.

It doesn't work like that. It's as much an epic as the Lord of the Rings or the Odyssey or the

Iliad. It's just, it's a huge story. And so I want to train your mind, you know, to be able to think in those ways and be ready to engage that trek better.

So theologians would call what you're doing their biblical theology, tracing the story of the Bible from the beginning to the end.

But we know there's sort of cords of biblical theology as well. You can trace a theme and sort of pluck the cord all the way through from the beginning of the

Bible to the end. You do three biblical theologies for us in that book. Is that right?

Three? Well, I think, so I think I trace out four of them. Four, four themes. Okay, so what are they?

What are they? The presence of God, kingship, covenant, and sacrifice. For the sake of this interview, pick one of those and give us a good biblical theology.

Oh, biblical theology of the presence of God, kingship. Yeah, so I mean, the presence of God is probably the easiest one, right?

It's a theme that runs through the entire Bible. It starts with God being very present with the humans, walking with them in the cool of the day, all the rest of it.

The Garden of Eden is literally a temple. It's the holy of holies. Adam's job is to keep it and guard it, which is exactly the same job descriptions that the priest in the temple have.

They're to keep and guard the temple. So the presence of God is in place with humans in the

Garden of Eden. That gets broken, of course, at the fall. The flaming sword is put at the entrance of this garden temple so that the humans can't get into it.

Which is a mercy. Yeah, the temple then has this, the whole story of the nation of Israel and the development of the tabernacle in the temple is that you don't get near God.

You can't. You come up this mountain, we shoot you with arrows. You go in the holy of holies, there's a good chance you're going to die.

You touch the Ark of the Covenant, even with good intentions, you're going to die. It's just you cannot approach

God because the relationship is broken. And then there's God approaching his people through covenant, right?

So the first approach is Abraham and then Moses and he teaches them about sacrifice.

So that's another theme that kind of makes its way into that one because they're all woven together, right? So he teaches them that through sacrifice, you can actually come back into my presence, at least for a time.

And then finally, he even departs the temple. So there's more distance.

He's not even in the holy of holies anymore. The presence of God goes away over the mountain.

There's the promise of God returning at some point to his temple, which then happens when

Jesus comes into the temple. And God has come back to his temple.

God and man are reconciled at the cross. You know, all of the enmity is taken away. The curtain is ripped from bottom to or from top to top to bottom.

And the holy of holies is wide open again. And then finally, in Revelation, I mean, before that, the

Holy Spirit comes. Yeah, I'm skipping, skipping all kinds of stuff. There's so much. But at the end, you know, there is no temple because the whole thing is the temple and God is with his people and we see him face to face.

And the separation is ended. So see, I mean, and that's just one thread.

I mean, you could even see we kind of intersected sacrifice there. Covenant. Oh, yeah, you intersected covenant.

But you've got covenant, kingship, temple, sacrifice, and they all weave together in this ridiculously beautiful story.

It's just richer than anything else you're ever going to look at in the universe. I know some people are more tilted towards systematic theology or biblical theology.

You really need both. You need people who are tight categorical thinkers. But man, to be able to just look at all of those threads throughout the

Bible and to see the way that God is weaving them all together, it's amazing.

It's beautiful. Yeah, yeah. And it's stirring to the heart also, which I think is really important.

I mean, it would be the way we typically as evangelicals read our Bibles and interact with our

Bibles is absurd if you understand it to be this epic story.

I don't know how much of a Lord of the Rings fan you are, but it would be absolutely ridiculous to go to the

Lord of the Rings and say, oh, well, today my Lord of the Rings reading plan calls for me to read a little bit about the

Shire, then a little bit about Mordor, then to go backwards to Tom Bombadil and then read a little bit about Colladriel.

And you know what I'm talking about. It's silly. It's silly. And yet that's the way Bible reading plans tell you to read or the way we want to interact with our

Bibles is like to jump into Lord of the Rings, grab one sentence out of it and say, what does this mean today?

What am I supposed to get out of that sentence right there? When really what the book is doing, whether you're talking about Lord of the

Rings or the Bible, is telling this story that's supposed to stir your heart to greater things than yourself.

But we don't treat the Bible like that. And we are all the poorer because of it. Ethan, clip that.

Luke, your greatest, greatest illustration you've ever heard. You're going to use that all the time from here on out.

Nice. Which book is better,

Lord of the Rings or the Bible? The Bible. Oh, okay. And I don't, I don't just have to say that, right?

I mean, it really is. It's richer. It's got more themes, all the rest. Let's talk a little bit about ACMI. ACMI is a new church association of churches for missions and evangelism.

That's what it stands for. You and I were in the same room when the idea was conceived, but you have been at the helm, leading, guiding.

No, that's not true. That is. I'm on the board. That is what I mean when I say at the helm.

Okay. But the guy at the helm is Aaron. Is who? Aaron Minnikoff. Okay. No, that's fair.

Okay. He's really at the helm. You're like behind the helm, like helm adjacent. I'm helm adjacent.

There would even be guys closer to the helm than me. Okay. I haven't talked about it much on Room for Nuance.

I haven't had opportunity to. I want to have Aaron on to talk about it. But while you're here, tell us a little bit about ACMI. Yeah, it's a new fellowship of churches that's meant to bring together churches into cooperative endeavors.

Churches that are super like -minded on ecclesiological issues. So, you know, my church is involved in cooperating with several different things, right?

We're a pillar church. We're an SPC church. Now we're an ACMI church. ACMI is the one that is most like -minded.

Like that's our closest, closest. Concentric circles, SPC, pillar, ACMI. ACMI is the tightest one.

Absolutely. So what that does is that it ensures that any dollar we give to ACMI, we're going to be 98 % happy with how that dollar gets used.

Whereas in a larger cooperative group like the SPC, we're not going to be 98 % happy with how they use those dollars.

We're going to be happy enough that we give them, but we're not going to be happy with 98%. This allows us to be extremely happy about how those monies are getting used.

When I've tried to talk to people about it, my little spiel usually goes like this. If I'm going to give money to see churches planted, either domestically or internationally,

I want to plant churches that would be like churches that we would plant. Exactly.

If I had more money and more resources and I could plant these churches myself, I would not plant a church without a plurality of elders.

I would not plant a church that didn't believe in the regulative principle or that accepted two services or any of the other things.

Yeah. So when we give, when we, I mean, our church gives a significant amount of money to the SPC. How much?

60 ,000. Whoa. I didn't think you were actually going to tell me. Kudos to you. Yeah, 60 ,000. And when we do, it gets used for a lot of stuff, including to plant churches or whatever that I would walk into and go, wow, there's a lot wrong with this, right?

Money that we give to ACME, you know, I think I would walk into those churches just because of the shared commitments and be like, this is home, right?

This is what I believe. Interesting, brother. Well, I'm praying for the Lord to use it. It may not ever be a behemoth, but that I think will actually probably be better.

I mean, a tighter organization with a tighter shot group. It's not going to be huge because it's very idiosyncratic, right?

It's very, very... Like you have to be convictionally convinced of one and only one service in order to be a member church of ACME.

There aren't many churches that are convictionally... It's been the main hang -up when I talked to other pastors about it. Yeah, right. But that's what

ACME is. And so it's... But it's doing amazing stuff. The board gathered in late

January to dole out a whole bunch of grants. I think I can say...

Okay, say it. And we can edit it if you don't think you can. No, I think I can tell you the amount. We ended up giving out $300 ,000 in grants, which was way more than we expected to be able to give less than a year after the public launch.

Yeah. And I know where some of that money went and I'm rejoicing. Yeah, now that I know I can't say, but the amount

I think is safe. But we can... We'll talk about it afterwards. Was the government involved in 9 -11?

What are you talking about? All right, let's do some of these rapid fire questions.

Tolkien or Lewis? Do you have ferns that you're going to put me between? Tolkien or Lewis?

I love them both. Tolkien. Okay, but let me rephrase it so that you won't say what you just said.

Okay, not just... Okay, Lord of the Rings versus Narnia. You're taking Lord of the Rings. Okay, all of Tolkien's writings or all of Lewis's writings?

So what are you including in Tolkien there? All of Tolkien's writings. Anything he ever penned versus anything and everything that Lewis ever penned.

Oh my gosh, that's tough. Probably still Tolkien. Yeah, how come?

Because I think that's unique. And I think I can get the stuff that Lewis wrote from somewhere else.

So if you're taking it away. Really? Yeah, I really kind of do. Okay, all right. You're crazy, man.

You think we really went to the moon? Yes, I do. Do you think we'll get to Mars? Yeah, eventually.

Next 30 years. You found your soul mate, Luke. Elon's taking us to the moon.

You think he's going to get us there? I don't think that... Well, at least his legacy. I don't know that he'll live long enough.

I don't think the economic incentive is there or any other incentive structure. Elon is his own incentive.

Yeah, I think he'll die before the technology and the money is there. But this isn't my interview.

It's your interview for now. Tea or coffee? Coffee. Favorite sitcom?

Are you an office guy? Yeah, right? My family watches one or two offices a lot of nights of the week.

Yeah. Parks and Rec, do you go for it? Nope. Dang, you're one of those.

I never even watched it. I think I could. No, I tried. It just didn't click. Everyone says, if I wanted the office,

I'll just watch the office. Well, it took the office a long time to click with me too. Like, I had to watch several episodes.

So maybe Parks and Rec would work if I watched it more. Yeah, okay. Okay. If you could only...

Trapped on a desert island. You could only read the books of one of these men. Who would you choose?

DeYoung, Dever, Piper, Keller, Sproul, or Johnny Mac? Which is short for John MacArthur.

Uh, Piper. Piper, yeah. Yeah. If you could only listen to one of their preaching on a desert island for the rest of your life.

Uh, probably Mark Dever. Yeah. But because of the breadth,

I think. I agree, yeah. I was at a pastor's thing with you once where there was a panel discussion on race and you were asked to be a part of it.

You chose not to be. Is that just like a calculated decision? Like, I'm just not going to get involved in this stuff?

Uh, it's a little bit of that. Um, I know exactly what you're talking about. Um, the setup of that particular panel just wasn't...

I didn't think it was going to... Are you using the word setup on purpose? Like, it was a bit of a setup? I don't think it was a deliberate setup.

But the setup of that thing, I didn't think was going to be conducive to honest conversation.

I noticed that in a lot of panels like that panel, there's just a lot of a -manning, not a lot of disagreement or pushback.

If you take DeYoung's 1, 2, 3, 4, it usually is just all twos. Very rarely threes.

Definitely never a four. Well, I mean, the thing on that one was you were going to have, I think it was like 11 people up there and 30 to 45 minutes anyway.

So there's not a lot of conversation that's going to be able to be had there. Did you cry when Kobe died?

No, I didn't. But I was sad. It was very sad. Okay. Favorite fiction author?

Tolkien. Unless you're saying that's not fiction. Right, right. Okay, shoot.

Favorite American fiction author? American fiction.

So I have a lot of fun reading like young adult dystopian stuff.

I just, I think it's so fun. Hungry Games, Red Rising. Dude, you found your soulmate in this, man.

I just love those mindless books. Dude, I tried Red Rising. I could not get into it.

It's so good. I even did the audio version thinking like, man, it'll be, nah, I couldn't do it. Well, okay, you guys can talk later.

Pierce, what's his name? Yeah, Pierce Brown. He's one. Okay, do you like Cormac McCarthy or?

I've read some stuff by him. He's so dark. It's just depressing. No, it is definitely an issue with me. I'm like Grapes of Wrath, Cormac McCarthy.

Yeah, it's just so dark. The Road. I think he just came up with six million synonyms for gray to write that book.

Yeah, it's bad. Favorite movie? Like a vault, maybe

Gladiator. Okay. Russell Crowe. Yeah, I'm familiar. Yeah, I love that movie.

Favorite candy? Not much of a candy guy. Sour Patch Kids. Least favorite candy?

Why are you looking at me like that? I'm mocking you. Obviously, I'm judging you. I'm mocking you. Oh, yeah.

Least favorite. I don't count. I wasn't counting chocolate as a candy. Oh, you can count chocolate. I do like a good chocolate.

Cadbury chocolate is probably my favorite. Okay, that's even worse than the Sour Patch Kids. What are you, from England?

No, I'm not, but I like it. Yeah. Least favorite candy? Licorice. Red or black?

We had a conversation in the car with the guys on the way up here, and they say that I feed answers to people when

I ask that question. You just make them say licorice. I'm like, no, I don't. Black licorice is terrible.

Yeah, people just don't like it. But like a red vine? You don't like a red vine? It just tastes like wax. It's just wax. It has no flavor at all.

No, no, no. You're crazy. You bite the ends off. You drink your soda with it, you know? Okay. Mountains or beach?

Beach for a day, mountains for a week.

Okay. Favorite theologian? Favorite theologian?

I mean, I've just got to say Edwards. I've studied him the most, right?

I don't necessarily find him the most helpful all the time, but I find him the most stimulating.

He is endlessly fascinating. I tried to work my way up to him. I worked my way through the collected, you know, the blue Yale edition books when

I was in the jungle. That's big. It was... Well, I tried. I got... I did Religious Affections, Revival and Revivalism.

No, that was Ian Murray. Charity and its Fruits. Anyways, I found that Edwards was at his best when he was just doing good

Bible work. You know, they say he's the greatest American philosophical mind. Yeah, whether that's true or not, he's up there.

But I mean, some of his philosophical stuff, when he would be getting down to the finest granular distinctions,

I was just like, I can't keep up. But when he would reinforce that with Scripture, I mean, he was fantastic.

Yeah. Yeah, his gritty philosophical stuff will either... Like that, those are the moments when genius happened.

It's also the moment where it all kind of fell apart. So it happens in both directions with him. It's kind of incredible that he can do both as well as he does.

I try to once every few years on our Wednesday nights, not do an inductive study and just read

Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God out loud. And it wrecks me every time, you know.

Yeah, it's tough. It's a tough sermon. You are trapped on a desert island.

Again, somehow you just keep getting trapped. It keeps happening. You only have one systematic theology.

It can be several books. One book doesn't matter that you can take with you. What do you take?

What did Ligon say earlier, Von Schleimick or something? He said something.

I mean, do the institutes count, Calvin? Yeah. I'd probably take the institutes. Really? I think so.

Okay. It's not a bad choice. Not Turretin? It could.

Yeah, it's great. I mean, modern guys, I love the reformed systematic that Joel Beeky did.

Oh, so you've read it? Not the whole thing, no. But I've used it. I love the way he hears it. Yeah, it's excellent.

Yeah, it's excellent. I mean, Wayne Grudem. Oh, Boving's great. Wayne Grudem's systematic was the one that a ton of us came of age on.

He's the guy that shaped our theological minds. But now he's EFS. Wayne Grudem's bad now.

That's probably, yeah, I think EFS is a real problem. Yeah, okay. John Frame coming under fire as well.

He is. I haven't kept up with that much. Yeah, okay. Champagne or wine?

Neither. Beer or whiskey? If you're gonna force it, whiskey. I wouldn't force it.

Yeah, you're gonna force me to answer that. Android or iPhone? Android 100%.

Really? Why so emphatic? Because I hate the parental controls on the iPhone.

They don't let you control it the way I want to control it. Okay, that's actually a great answer. Macaroni salad or potato salad?

Potato salad. Nice. You said he was gonna say macaroni, Luke. Night in or night out?

Goodness. Three out of four times night in. Okay, all right.

We'll take that. Concert or ball game? Ball game. Yeah, you a big college football fan? Yeah, love college football.

Hedgehogs? You root for the Hedgehogs? No, Cardinals. Louisville Cardinals. Ah, okay. I thought that was baseball.

Baseball team. Well, it's a whole university. Okay. Morning person or night owl?

Night owl, big time. Night owl, okay. Burger King or McDonald's? McDonald's.

Mexican or Italian? I just got back from Rome and now you're asking. Normally, I would say Mexican. Yeah.

But if you're talking Italian -Italian in Italy, Italian. Okay. I don't think there's any food in the world like Italian -Italian.

Really? What's so good about it? I don't know, but it's just blow your mind good. You were just taken in by the experience.

Nah, it's delicious. Okay. There's something about that pasta that you just can't get anywhere else. That's true. What about this?

Like crappy, regular American Mexican restaurant? Then I'm going Mexican. Or crappy

Italian. Or like, yeah, Olive Garden. Yeah, give me Chewy's any day. Dude, I'm a

Mexican food snob. Chewy's is the worst. Garrett can't keep it in. I really am too. I'm from, I'm a Texan, right?

Yeah. I know Tex -Mex and real Mexican. But in Louisville, the best you're getting is Chewy's. I go to Radius to teach ecclesiology.

And I've told Brooks, like, I'm just here for the tacos. Like training missionaries. Yeah, I understand.

Whatever, dude, I'm here for the tacos. It's secondary to the tacos. Very much so. Burgers or barbecue? Burgers, I think.

Yeah, definitely burgers. I mean, a good burger, man. Onion rings or french fries? French fries. Biblical theology or systematic theology?

I gotta choose? You gotta choose. I don't even know how to choose. What are you talking about? They like, they, they, they, they work together.

I don't know how to choose. How do you choose? You're on a desert island. And you can only have one theology.

You can only have one book. Are you taking a systematic or a biblical? Biblical. Okay. Cold or hot?

Like food or a swimming pool? What are you talking about? Heart? What? Outside, weather.

Outside? I'll take the cold. Okay. Chinese takeout.

And I'm talking like, like not good. Okay, bad. Crappy Chinese takeout. Typical Chinese takeout. Or sushi?

Sushi. Okay. That seems like a weird question, but a lot of people's like heart language is like bad

Chinese food. But they love it. No. Okay. My wife and I get sushi every once in a while. It's good. Okay. Rock or rap?

Neither. Did you ever get into any of the like lyrical theology Christian rap stuff? No, not at all.

Classical or jazz? That's probably more your speed. Or you're just not a music guy? I'm just really not a music guy.

My kids make fun of me. I'm like, turn on the top 40 radio station and go with it. You're like, now that's music volume 23.

Kids, bop. The hymn you want to be sung at your funeral? Jerusalem, my happy home.

Come to Jesus. Crown him with many crowns. Oh, yeah.

There's a few. Yeah, that's pretty good. All right, brother. Anything else you want to say to the dozens of people tuning into this interview?

Just thanks for making it this far. Yeah. No. Well, thank you for doing the show, brother.

This was great. I think people are going to be enjoying it. Thank you. One of the main goals of Room for Nuance is to get people on who can promote resources that we think are deserving of more of people's money and time and attention.

And I think you have consistently produced those kinds of resources. And I hope that the next time you come out with another useful resource, we can just do round two and talk to you about that as well.

I would love to. Nice. Let me pray. Lord, we come before you humbled that you in any way allow us to participate in this gospel labor.

We are truly stunned that we get to be ambassadors for you. Not only that, but we get to be pastors and we get to do cool and fun things like write books and do podcasts.

Lord, we pray that you will bless this labor to the glory of our name, not to us,

Lord, but to you, to the glory of your name and for the joy of your saints. Draw in many sons and daughters for the glory of your name so that we might dwell with you forever.

pray this in the beautiful, lovely, mighty name of Jesus, our Lord. Amen. Amen.