Covenant Theology with Emilio Ramos

Why Revived Thoughts Exists and How It Recreates Old Sermons

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Welcome to The Rap Report with your host, Andrew Rappaport, where we provide biblical interpretation and application. This is a ministry of Striving for Eternity and the Christian Podcast Community. For more content or to request a speaker for your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.

All right, well, welcome to another edition of The Rap Report. I am your host, Andrew Rappaport. We've got a great show lined up for you today, only because I happen to know who the guests are and you don't yet.

But before we get to them, we do have a review we just want to read. This is by Cardinal One and gave five stars and said, quick information. Andrew gives a lot of information in two minutes. Great if you need a quick lesson on a number of biblical topics.

He's referring to the Andrew Rappaport's daily podcast, which right now, as of the recording of this one, has kind of been on hold. I haven't announced why it's been on hold yet. Some of you have been wondering.

I know because I've gotten the contacts. I cannot say why yet. It's still on hold longer than I had planned because of some things going on in life. But that's the way life is. Actually, life, if you're listening to this right now, live, when this drops, life has been kind of crazy for all of us.

And we've been forced to be at home. Some of people are going crazy. You're not used to being with your family that much. I happen to love the fact that I'm just at home with my bride and nowhere to go, no one to come over and visit us.

I just get to be with her, just she and I, I love it. She might not love it as much as I do. But that aside, this is an unprecedented time for many of us. And I realize that for many, this is just, it's going on and on and people are going stir crazy.

And we want to provide some encouragement, at least in this episode especially, with some places you can go to take good advantage of the time you have where you're not traveling around, going out for dinner or whatever else you might want to do, that you're sitting home and you could turn to good podcasts.

And so we're going to talk about that today. And I just want to, before I bring our guests on, I want to mention that this podcast that we're going to talk about, this is something where many years ago I had this brilliant idea and it was to create a podcast.

And I talked to a couple of friends of mine and I had this brilliant idea, so I thought, of creating a podcast where we would just put it out there and people could sign up and they would be able to preach their favorite sermons from years ago.

And the idea was that we would just get people to randomly just go and preach a sermon, but maybe give some history about the sermon beforehand. And the idea was really not for me to do any of the work, but get everyone else to do it.

See, that's the brilliance of it. And I had this idea, I talked to a couple of friends, I talked to one friend who actually was like, this is ingenious, I love it. And he actually preached four sermons, gave a history before it, and he was anxious for this.

And then I got a text message, I believe, from Colleen Sharp from Theology Gals, who's the co-host with me on So You Want to Be a Podcaster. And she's like, have you heard of these guys? I'm like, no.

She goes, they're doing your idea. And they are. They just did it better. So I want to welcome the hosts of Revived Thoughts, Troll, Troll, I just mixed both your names together, Troy and Joel.

That was really bad. So you guys. This is not the first time that has happened to us, I'm going to be honest. Yeah, it happens more often than you think, actually.

It's kind of like, you know, I travel with Anthony Silvestro, and I've gotten in the habit of calling him doctor, or Dr. Silvestro, or I just call him the dentist, so that people would call him that because he just did a debate on Apologetics Live last night.

And the guy he debated was commenting to Anthony and I this morning. And he's referring to Anthony, he did this during the debate too, he kept saying, Andrew was doing this, Andrew was saying this. And I'm like, dude, like, you don't even know who you're debating here.

Well, he was doing the same thing when he was writing it was. So I understand it. So forgive me for calling you a troll. You know, maybe what you should do is reverse the name and put it as Joel and Troy.

It's harder to combine. Yeah. Well, and if they do it, then it becomes joy, which isn't so bad. I guess so.

There you go. Hey, that's better than a troll. Yeah. So, you guys, let's start. Your podcast is Revived Thoughts. And before we get into this, we should announce that you guys are award-winning podcasters.

You guys have gotten the award from the Christian podcast community, a podcast community that you and I, both our shows are a part of, and you got the award for 2019 for Best Christian Podcast of the Year.

So congratulations on that first off. Thank you so much.

We were really excited. We were also really surprised. Even when you sent an email and like you guys were nominated, I was like, that's so cool. I can't wait to see the list and tell everyone, look at the other podcasts we got to be with.

When you told us we won, I literally just was like, I don't believe this. Yeah. Very surprised. It was really, it was really exciting. And it was an awesome surprise. Yeah. And we did, we won a little bit of a cash bonus from you guys, a little gift card.

And that went straight into our fund to buy new microphones, which we are using now. So thank you very much for that. It was a massive improvement over what we had before.

Yes. Being that my view of, you know, dynamic mics, the snowball versus an ATR 2100, love the choice. Good. Thank you. So, now you guys are right now together. Let's just establish the fact that you are six feet apart from one another, correct?

Yes. Absolutely. Maybe even further. All right. We want to just make sure that you keep your distance from one another. Social distancing, of course. Yeah. I mean, now that you don't have to share a mic, you're not coughing all over the same mic.

All right.

Good. And this was filmed or recorded way before the COVID -19 stuff. So obviously. We didn't even know about it at the time. Exactly.

That's why that's fine. So let's talk about your podcast. And it was something that as soon as Colleen sent me the first episode of your podcast, I was like, I mean, what you guys did, and it's the irony that you guys thought of it completely independent of me, and yet you did it much better than what I had planned.

Because the format of your show is the two of you talking about the history of the sermon, not someone else. You guys talk about it, and you guys provide that, and then you guys get someone else to preach the sermon.

And so there's probably people going like, well, I could listen to a sermon, you know, on Sermon Audio or at my church. What makes these sermons different?

Church History as the Setting for Sermons

Yeah. And so we kind of went through a lot of renditions as far as what we wanted the show to look like because Troy and I, neither one of us are voice actors. You know, we love to host a podcast, but we also thought it'd be neat to have a different voice kind of each doing each sermon each week.

And these are from men all throughout history. So I mean, from 100 years ago to some, you know, 1200 years ago, they range through all of church history. And so there's a lot of different opportunities for different voices to come through.

But we still wanted to kind of have a show to host and to talk about. And so we came up with this format of doing this introductory history backstory kind of portion of the podcast where we spend the first five, 10 minutes kind of setting up the setting of what was the era?

What were the audience that this sermon is being preached to? What's going on in the world at that time? You know, where's this speaker coming from? What's his past? What's his upbringing? And it kind of gives better context and kind of makes, you know, our hope is that it makes that sermon seem a bit more real and kind of more grounded with it.

And I mean, you were talking about coming up with this idea and us kind of simultaneously coming up with it. That was that was one thing that we were terrified about in production of this show, because we we were we loved the idea and it took us a long time to get going.

There's probably about seven months of no, it's a year and a half. Was it a year and a half? The first time we discussed it was November of 2017. I was still living in China for a long time and we did not publish our first episode till May of 2019.

So there was a year and a half between the two. Yeah. Between that. Here's an idea. And we said, right. And that whole time where we're researching old sermons, we're kind of modernizing the language so that it's not in the old King's English.

That whole time we're kind of, you know, trying out different recording techniques. There's a lot of test episodes that we kind of put put shelved and that whole time we were we were thinking it's got to be any day where someone else is going to come out with the same idea.

But thankfully, I think we beat most of the competition to the airtime. So it's it's it was just a matter of time before someone came out with it, though. So I don't want to be selfish, but I'm glad I'm glad we got to it before you do anything to you.

You mentioned why these sermons there is there is truth that can be understood from the historical perspective that we today just don't see it. We every sermon. If you're like me, you have a few people pastors you like to listen to.

Obviously, Joel Osteen, Creflo Dollar. No, I'm kidding. But you have some people you probably enjoy listening. Oh boy, those weren't sermons. And and when you listen to them, they're all great, but they're almost all from the West and they're all from, you know, their recent sermons from this week, this month, this year.

That's good because they can really relate to you. They're talking to you and your culture, but it's cool to go back and hear people from Germany in the 1500s to hear people from Rome and the 400s or 300s to hear these voices and it's really cool because you can see what we have in common is still the story of Jesus Christ, but some of the differences really helps me understand my walk with God better.

They have thoughts and they have ideas and they see things differently. They're living through persecution and famines and wars that we don't live through. So there's a perspective that we can kind of lack and they can help supplement that.

So this is really cool thing where I'm strengthened because I see my faith is not is so consistent, but I'm also encouraged. I'm also challenged because I'm seeing things from a new perspective that I would have never gotten access to.

So let me start with your backgrounds because other than the fact that you stole my idea made it better and took off with it and then made it an award-winning podcast. I'm not I'm not jealous or envious or upset in any way, but let's start with your backgrounds.

You know, I mean you mentioned you were from China. You didn't. Were you the one that brought COVID -19 over just for the record?

No, I'm sure I brought over other things from there. I got sick all the time in China. So yeah, but I did not bring that over. But yeah, I was teaching for two years in China and I'm not from China. You were you went over there to teach.

Just taught actually Joel and I we met at a Bible College in Kansas City. And then I went over to China for a couple years also taught Miami for a little while. I was a teacher now. I'm a children's pastor and during that time I was in China.

It was lonely. I was on the other side of the world. So my time difference was very different. And so when I was messaging people was either late at night early in the morning. So I gave me the midday where I had nothing to do, but you know my job so I was pretty boring and when I wasn't doing my job, I was just reading books and stuff and somewhere in that time.

I just kept thinking like it'd be cool because I was reading a lot of the old big books of history. I'm talking like good ones like Martin Luther's bondage of the will but also bad ones like Karl Marx's Communist Manifest.

I just wanted to read the books that changed the world and somewhere in there my brain started to think about like, well, what if we read the sermons that changed the world and that kind of was one of the things that kind of helped push us in the direction of coming up with this idea.

Church History, Great Preachers, and Lesser-Known Sermons

Yeah. Yeah. And Troy and I became really good friends in Bible. It was back 2011. We met freshman year of Bible College and we remained really good friends even when he moved away to teach at China. And so he called me up one night.

I forget what it was. We were just chatting about stuff and we were shooting a bunch of different entrepreneurial ideas. Entrepreneurial. Yeah. And most of them were forgettable. This was just one that I threw in there.

Yeah. How about this idea? How about we do a podcast that is where we just listen to old sermons that have been recreated and for some reason it's stuck and we're like, let's workshop that. Let's perfect that and kind of make that a thing.

And so that's where it kind of started and it took, as Troy said, about a year and a half to fully develop, but we had a lot of fun making it. And yeah, now we're here today.

So what got you into church history? Because this is not something that a lot of people like to study, but and let me preface also with this. I've just kind of realized that there's people who love history usually had one professor and that they'll remember who it is that taught history in a way that it came to life and it's like they all remember who that is.

And that's usually I find that there's usually one professor that everyone had that's like, this is why I love history. I had two, one in seminary, one in high school. But so what brought about your love for history?

Was it a professor or teacher in school? And if so, do you remember who they were?

I do remember my world history teacher and also my European history teacher in high school. Mr. Derryberry was a great teacher for the most part. And he had a lot of excitement and or the very least, I like the class.

But if I'm going to be honest, I didn't think much. I loved history. I read a lot of books when I was such a nerd when I was in high school. I probably read like a hundred political nonfiction books because I just thought it was super interesting.

And a lot of those have to do with, you know, the Constitution and founding. So that was always like history was always a part of that kind of thing. I was reading, but I will be honest. I didn't think about church history.

It was the podcast Dan Carlin's hardcore history that probably made me like reawaken the history in a way that I hadn't because he was really intensely focused on telling the story. And I really liked that because everything I learned about history in school, I felt like was just the facts.

You know, there was a population of 700 ,000 that lived in the city and they would all, you know, they were textile makers. So they wore purple clothing and blah, blah, blah. And I was like, that's fine.

But it wasn't very interesting to me. And listening to his show brought the stories back to life where it was like this person did this and it affected everything. And I was like, that's what I want to do.

It was not really. I mean, we didn't really set out to start a church history podcast. If you had asked us along the way, we wouldn't have even realized that was what we were doing. But as we looked into the stories of each of these men, they have just incredible stories and lives and they just kind of, the more we read about them, the more we were like, I got to know more about Hudson Taylor or John Calvin or whoever these guys are.

They live lives that did just seem larger than life most of the time. It's like, how did one person do all of this?

So that's actually where I think that what you guys did is such a huge improvement on the idea that I had. My idea was just that people would talk about the sermon, just the sermon, and then preach it.

And it'd be a way of people being able to just go and promote, hey, I'm, you know, so-and-so preaching this sermon, but, you know, they could introduce themselves. That was my thought. But the history you guys provide, I love church history.

And that's why I love, especially when you guys do, you do some of the sermons from guys that no one knows. And there it's different. I mean, like Calvin, okay, a lot of us know who Calvin is, but then you get into some, I don't remember the name of the missionary.

You had a missionary I never heard of before. And it was just neat to see the background. And that's where I think it really is. So, you know, I'm glad that you're not doing like Dan Carlin with a six-hour episode, but, which he breaks, he breaks like all the rules for podcasts.

I love it when people say, well, how long should my podcast be? Everyone looks at Dan Carlin like, well, he does like, you know, four to six hour episodes, like one episode. He comes out with them every six months.

So they talk about consistency. Well, he's not exactly consistent with it either. So he breaks all the rules, but he's got like this excellent podcast and.

It does, it makes history. When you're as good as Dan Carlin, you can break the rules because you're as good as Dan Carlin. And if you're at that level, don't break the rules. Yeah, there you go.

So, I mean, you got to, so I guess Dan Carlin would really be your, the guy that got you into history and stuff. But why did you choose to take sermons from people that nobody knows? I mean, you do some of the guys, you mentioned Hudson Taylor a lot of us know who he is.

Not everyone knows some of the background Mortimer, Whitley, guys like this, the Golden Tongue for folks who know what their church history, right? In the, in the, I think he was what second century, third century, John Christoffel.

Third century Christoffel. Yeah. And so little note, you'll find that 90 of our pastors start with the name John. So if you're named John or your kid is named John, you set him up for a life of pastoring as far as I can tell.

Yeah, but I mean, you take a look, you know, John Cathostrum was known as Golden Tongue because in his day, his preaching was just something to be heard. And you guys had him, well, you didn't actually have him on, you had someone pretending to be him, but you guys went into his history providing a sermon that literally has been read, but no one really heard it preached for, you know, maybe 2000 years.

Why Old Sermons Still Matter for Christians Today

Yeah, that's that. I mean, that's the kind of the motivation of the show is this idea that we live in a modern world. We live in a, in a, in a world where so much content is so readily available in so many different ways.

You know, we constantly are connected. We're have smartphones. We're constantly seeing videos run. We're listening to podcasts all the time and the, the reality of these old because I mean, as we said, kind of implied before that the word of God is timeless.

It is so applicable from errors past, you know, just as applicable back then as it is today. And these old sermons are kind of, you know, in some ways being forgotten. They're kind of like being left behind because they're not in formats that our modern generation really takes advantage of and really utilizes a whole lot.

So our motivation was, hey, let's get these old sermons and put them into an audio form. Make it, make it easy and accessible for people to listen to and people can hear these kind of different takes, different perspectives on, on the same things that we interact with every day or, you know, relationships with God, you know, problems with our culture, government, like things that they're not new problems.

They're not new concepts in the Christian, in the world of Christianity. People have dealt with these concepts for centuries. And so to hear these people from, you know, 500 years ago, talk about kind of the same concepts, of course, it's different in their culture, but same concepts as they, as we're dealing with today is, is a really neat thing.

And, you know, you're kind of mentioning earlier having some lesser known names in there too. That was also something that we thought was important too, because, you know, we could, we can make a big show about all the, the most famous names and that'd be fine, but we wanted to kind of maybe introduce some people that haven't aren't as well known that maybe don't have a whole lot of recognition with them as well to kind of shine some light on them because we, you know, there's 2000 years of church history.

There's 2000 years of people that have been seeking after the Lord and walking with the Lord and having great things to say about their views on the Bible. And really, I mean, it's only the past 90 years or so that we've been able to kind of document it in a digital format, a media format.

And so we got roughly 1900 years of history that is just waiting to be unpacked and made available in a digital way. Yeah. And our slogan for the show is world's greatest or history's greatest sermons.

And we're looking for the best sermons. Some of the best preachers are not the best theologians are not the ones you remember. We could do a show where we just put Spurgeon, Edwards, Bonhoeffer, Luther and Calvin and those five on rotation and our downloads probably be even better because those all five of those do really great.

But some of the best sermons are preached by people I had never heard of when we do the research and we find some of these sermons. I can't tell you how many times I think Joel and I both will be like, wow, I don't know who this guy was, but that was a good sermon.

That was a really just something about it was just perfect. And we had never heard of the guy before and we know, you know, and no one else. We literally have sermons. I don't think anybody has ever heard before.

We paid for one out of a library in Britain. So we know that we're the only ones with that one. Yeah. Yeah, that's actually a really neat story. There was this this sermon that my wife who is a musician was coming across that one of the things we see a lot about these people in history is that a lot of these old pastors also were were artists, especially with music like they would write the hymns and stuff for their congregations.

And that's something that you really don't see in today's society. Your head pastor of your church isn't writing worship music per se that kind of rules been branched off. But throughout the majority of history, like the leader of the church was also writing music.

And so a lot of these great names in old church music were also great leaders in the church. And there was this sermon that was referenced several times that George. What's his name? Troy George Matheson, George Matheson said, of course, I'm blanking on as soon as I start talking about it.

George Matheson who is probably better known for his hymns now, but he there's this document of him preaching the sermon about Joe before the queen and the queen loved it so much that she ordered it to be copied and documented in her personal writings.

And we thought that'd be a cool episode to kind of look into and we did research and research trying to find this sermon and we see all of these instances of historical accounts talking about that event talking about that sermon and how impressed the Queen was Australia.

I found like reviews from them being like great sermon preached before the Queen. So like the sermon was really famous, but but the sermon itself we could not find and eventually we found the hometown that George Matheson lived in the library there had an old copy of it in their archives and we were able to coordinate with them and get scans of that and then have it emailed over to us and we were able to kind of translate it into a modern reading and get that done.

So as far as we know like that is the only publicly like digitally accessible version of that sermon in the entire world that we checked on which is it was a cool adventure. It was a cool process to get that on our show.

It was a pain because they sent us scan-laded pages. I had to run it through processors. I had to take out all the mistakes which they made a lot. It was in the 1800s English. So I mean the whole process to get that from we found this sermon to then ready to then spoken.

It's a lot of work, but we really enjoy it. And that's one of the other things too. Like we speak about people every sermon from a guy you probably haven't heard of. It's not just sitting there on like a website usually where it's like sermons.

You've never heard of usually they're in like we live in the perfect time Google took like all these library books and put them up as PDFs for you to find but you have to go and copy and paste doesn't do a lot of work to get those right, but it is a lot of fun and I can also see why no one else was doing it before, you know,.

It's interesting because I remember Justin Peters called me up one day and he because I do I plan a lot of conferences and I have you know, I've he knows I've done that and he's like I got an idea for a conference.

I want to do and I want to run it by you. He goes. I want to do a conference where we get a bunch of pastors that like these good preaching pastors that have no name. They have no platform. No one knows who they are and let's put a conference together.

I said, that's a great idea. I love the idea. The problem is who's going to show up if it's a bunch of people no one knows right? That's actually the problem. We have I think with this whole mindset of platform that you see in the world today were even though the book industry has changed when I went to write my first book.

I remember talking with Phil Johnson and said listen should I go self-published I go published and any basically told me says unless you have a huge platform going publish is useless. It's just the whole market change.

They only care about whether you're have a large platform. And when I did go with one of my books that was published that the thing that they wanted to know how many Twitter followers do you have? How many Facebook followers do you have?

How many I was just that was all they were really interested in. I was like, what about the quality of the book that I think that moved down and this is a thing that I love what you guys are doing with it because we often think of the greats who've made their mark in history and there are a whole lot of guys who we don't know of and yet they made a mark maybe on a small congregation, but there's a mark.

I think that could be made in a generation today by what you guys are doing on the podcast repreaching these sermons and giving the background the history of these different people. That's where I see that you guys are not just a sermon podcast when I first started listening.

I put you in the category of like sermons that this is this is a sermon. But then I started to realize no you guys are really in the church history category and the sermon is really the example of the history because you guys what I notice a lot of times and for folks who are listening you need to listen to revive thoughts to see this and pick this up.

But what you guys do is you provide that history that background to the sermon, but so often what I find is you're in giving that setup for it. Not only are you giving the history but you're putting the historical setting for a lot of these sermons so that all of a sudden it's like, oh, that's why that's being preached.

It's not like this is being preached in a vacuum. There are times where look if you're if they didn't always do expositional preaching back then, you know verse by verse, right? But that's actually why so much of their sermons are topical.

So much of their sermons are dealing with things in that time period and a lot of times you guys give that background and then you hear the sermon and it's like wow if I just listen to the sermon I've been like, oh, that's really good.

That's cool. But when I listen to the the information you give before the sermon all of a sudden I understand the historical setting now when I end up listening to that I actually listen to that differently because I now am putting myself in the position sometimes of going, okay, that's what was going on.

This is what's being addressed and it really helps to not have it as just an old sermon that might have some good theological discussion. But now I'm seeing that as I'm listening and this is just me as a listener to your podcast.

I find myself putting myself in the position of someone in that congregation because I now have a better understanding of the culture and why it was being preached. I don't know if that's something you guys had planned.

That was exactly the goal though. We I mean we say it on this show a lot to like imagine putting yourself in the shoes of a person back then but we what got to me was there was a sermon by Bonhoeffer called overcoming fear and I read it and I was really impressed with it.

But when I went back to read the date and the information on it, I found out that the week he preached that the Friday before so Sunday to Friday the Friday before communists and Nazis in the street had gotten in this big brawl and when I looked it up basically the Nazis had marched through the streets of Germany Berlin where he was and they said we want to make Hitler the chancellor of Germany and the communists the brown shirts came out were like no, you're not they get in this huge fight.

There's torches. It's a crazy mess. And then two days later these people show up to church terrified. I'm sure and Bonhoeffer gets up and goes do not be afraid you have nothing to worry about Jesus is in the boat with us.

Like what on earth do you have to be afraid of when you're afraid run to him and fear and they just it made so much more sense when I understood the context of it and honestly, it was so much more brave of him to preach that sermon because that's not a sermon.

I think I could have given in that moment and when I try to think of myself as somebody in that church in that moment, I thought wow, that's amazing. And when I thought about that, I was like we need to do that with all of these sermons like these sermons have to feel like you're in the you're in the pew with them.

And if you feel that moment where you're almost like losing yourself in it, I think that it is a much more powerful sermon that way and you really come to appreciate it. If we just gave you the sermon and said here it is an old English do your best with it.

I think we would have people who enjoy it, but I don't think it would be I don't think the show would be nearly as impactful and would have would have the same just I don't think it would be doing justice to what what we have before us if we did it that way.

Choosing Sermons, Handling Disagreements, and Letting History Speak

Yeah, and you know, I want to take a break after this break. What I would like to do is I want to talk about why you choose the sermons that you do. I know that you are selective and also you choose them based on being not only older but not having in digital form anymore, but also the people you that you choose as speakers.

So I want to go into all that after this message. Hey, I'm Joel.

Hey, this is Troy. Have you ever thought about how many sermons have never been listened to because they were never recorded because they came out before recordings on our podcast revive thoughts. We take the roughly 1900 years of sermons and try to bring them back to life.

We talk about the history we talk about the setting and every week we have a different speaker deliver these sermons for us to listen to once again. So this is your chance to listen to sermons by people like Calvin by people like Spurgeon by people like Knox and maybe some people you've never heard of like Johan Tauler or Alexander white.