Revived Thoughts – Listening to Sermons of Old

Andrew Rappaport's Rapp Report

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It's how we take health care personally. Who in the world wants to listen to a bunch of sermons from old dead guys?

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1, 2, 3. Welcome to The Rap Report with your host, Andrew Rapoport, where we provide biblical interpretation and application.

00:45

This is a ministry of striving for eternity in the Christian podcast community. For more content or to request a speaker for your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.

00:55

All right. Well, welcome to another edition of The Rap Report. I am your host, Andrew Rapoport.

01:01

We got a great show lined up for you today, only because I happen to know who the guests are, and you don't yet.

01:07

But before we get to them, we do have a review. We'll just want to read. This is by Cardinal One and gave five stars and said, quick information.

01:19

Andrew gives a lot of information in two minutes. Great if you need a quick lesson on a number of biblical topics.

01:28

He's referring to the Andrew Rapoport's daily podcast, which right now, as of the recording of this one, has kind of been on hold.

01:34

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.

01:40

I cannot say why yet. It's still on hold, longer than I had planned because of some things going on in life.

01:48

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.

01:57

And we've been forced to be at home. Some of people are going crazy.

02:03

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.

02:14

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.

02:28

And I realize that for many, this is just, it's going on and on and people are going stir crazy.

02:34

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.

02:53

And so we're going to talk about that today. And I just want to, before I bring our guests on,

03:01

I want to mention that this podcast that we're going to talk about, this is something where many years ago,

03:09

I had this brilliant idea and it was to create a podcast.

03:14

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.

03:30

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.

03:40

And the idea was really not for me to do any of the work but get everyone else to do it.

03:45

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,

03:52

I love it. And he actually preached four sermons, gave a history before it, and he was anxious for this.

04:02

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

04:10

Podcaster. And she's like, have you heard of these guys? Like, no, she goes, they're doing your idea.

04:18

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.

04:30

Troy and Joel. That was really bad. So you guys -

04:35

This is not the first time that has happened to us, I'm gonna be honest. Yeah, it happens more often than you think, actually. It's kind of like,

04:42

I travel with Anthony Silvestro, and I've gotten in the habit of calling him Doctor, or Dr.

04:49

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,

05:05

Andrew was doing this, Andrew was saying this, and I'm like, dude, you don't even know who you're debating here.

05:12

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.

05:20

You know, maybe what you should do is reverse the name and put it as Joel and Troy. Joel and Troy. It's harder to combine, yeah.

05:27

Well, and if they do it, then it becomes Joy, which isn't so bad. I guess so, yeah. There you go, hey, that's better than a troll.

05:35

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.

05:47

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

06:01

Year, so congratulations on that first off. Thank you so much, we were really excited.

06:06

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 podcast we got to be with.

06:15

When you told us we won, I literally just was like, I don't believe this, this is very surprising. It was really exciting and it was an awesome surprise.

06:23

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.

06:33

We have, it was a massive improvement over what we had before. Yes, I, being that my view of, you know, dynamic mics, the

06:43

Snowball versus an ATR2100, love the choice. Good, thank you.

06:50

So, now you guys are right now together. Let's just establish the fact that you are six feet apart from one another, correct?

06:57

Yes. Absolutely. Good. Maybe even further. All right, we want to just make sure that you keep your distance from one another.

07:02

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, and all right, good.

07:10

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

07:16

Exactly, that's why, that's fine. So, let's talk about your podcast, and it was on there, as soon as Colleen sent me the first episode of your podcast,

07:30

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

07:40

I had planned, because the format of your show is the two of you talking about the history of the sermon, not someone else.

07:48

You guys talk about it, and you guys provide that, and then you guys get someone else to preach the sermon.

07:56

And so, there's probably people going like, well, I could listen to a sermon on sermon audio, or at my church, what makes these sermons different?

08:07

Yeah, and 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.

08:16

We love to host a podcast, but we also thought it would 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 1 ,200 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, 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, 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.

09:15

That was one thing that we were terrified about in production of this show, because we loved the idea, and it took us a long time to get going.

09:24

There's probably about seven months of prep work. No, it's a year and a half. Was it a year and a half? The first time we discussed it was

09:29

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, between here's an idea and we have an episode ready to publish.

09:42

And that whole time we're researching old sermons, we're kind of modernizing the language so that it's not in the old

09:47

King's English. That whole time we're kind of trying out different recording techniques. There's a lot of test episodes that we kind of put shelved.

09:56

And that whole time we were thinking it's gotta be any day where someone else is gonna come out with the same idea.

10:02

But thankfully, I think we beat most of the competition to the airtime, so it was just a matter of time before someone came out with it, though.

10:11

So I don't wanna be selfish, but I'm glad we got to it before you did. And the other thing too, you mentioned why these sermons.

10:18

There is truth that can be understood from the historical perspective that we today just don't see it.

10:24

Every sermon, if you're like me, you have a few people, pastors you like to listen to. Obviously, Joel Osteen, Creflo Dollar.

10:30

No, I'm kidding. But you have some people you probably enjoy listening to. Oh boy. Those weren't sermons. And when you listen to them, they're all great, but they're almost all from the

10:39

West and they're all from, they're recent sermons from this week, this month, this year. That's good because they can really relate to you.

10:45

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 in the 400s or 300s, to hear these voices.

10:56

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.

11:05

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.

11:12

So there's a perspective that we can kind of lack and they can help supplement that. So it's this really cool thing where I'm strengthened because I see my faith is so consistent, but I'm also challenged because I'm seeing things from a new perspective that I would have never gotten access to.

11:26

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.

11:35

I'm not jealous or envious or upset in any way. But let's start with your backgrounds.

11:44

I mean, you mentioned you were from China. Were you the one that brought COVID -19 over just for the record?

11:52

No, I'm sure I brought over other things from China. I got sick all the time in China, so there's that.

11:58

But I did not bring that over. But yeah, I was teaching for two years in China. And I was very - You're not from China.

12:03

You went over there to teach. Just taught. Actually, Joel and I, we met at a Bible college in Kansas City.

12:09

And then I went over to China for a couple of years, also taught in Miami for a little while. I was a teacher.

12:15

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.

12:23

And so when I was messaging people, it was either late at night, early in the morning. So it gave me the midday where I had nothing to do but my job.

12:30

So that 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 it'd be cool because I was reading a lot of the old, big books of history.

12:39

I'm talking good ones, like Martin Luther's Bondage of the Will, but also bad ones, like Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto.

12:45

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?

12:52

And that kind of was one of the things that kind of helped push us in the direction of coming up with this idea. Yeah, yeah.

12:58

And Troy and I became really good friends in Bible. It was back 2011 we met freshman year of Bible college.

13:05

And we remained really good friends even when he moved away to teach at China. And so he called me up one night.

13:12

I forget what it was. We were just chatting about stuff. We were shooting a bunch of different entrepreneurial ideas.

13:19

Entrepreneurial, yeah. And most of them were forgettable. This was just one that I threw in there.

13:24

Yeah, it's like, okay, how about this idea? How about we do a podcast where we just listen to old sermons that have been recreated.

13:32

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.

13:39

And so that's where it kind of started. And it took, as Troy said, about a year and a half to fully develop.

13:45

But we had a lot of fun making it. And yeah, now we're here today. So what got you into church history?

13:55

Because this is not something that a lot of people like to study.

14:01

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 that they'll remember who it is that taught history in a way that it came to life.

14:21

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

14:28

I love history. I had two, one in seminary, one in high school. But so what brought about your love for history?

14:36

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

14:43

I do remember my world history teacher and also my European history teacher in high school.

14:49

Mr. Derryberry was a great teacher for the most part. And he had a lot of excitement and or the very least I liked the class.

14:54

But if I'm gonna be honest, I didn't think much. I loved history. I read a lot of books when I was such a nerd.

15:00

When I was in high school, I probably read like 100 political nonfiction books because I just thought it was super interesting.

15:05

And a lot of those have to do with, the constitution and founding. So that was always like a history was always a part of that kind of thing

15:13

I was reading. But I will be honest, I didn't think about church history. It was the podcast

15:18

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.

15:29

And I really liked that because everything I learned about history in school, I felt like it was just the facts. There was a population of 700 ,000 that lived in the city and they would all, they were textile makers.

15:39

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 I was like, this person did this and it affected everything.

15:50

And I was like, that's what I wanna do. It was not really, I mean, we didn't really set out to start a church history podcast.

15:56

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 kinda, the more we read about them, the more we were like,

16:09

I gotta 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 times.

16:17

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.

16:24

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,

16:33

I'm pastor of so -and -so preaching this sermon, but they could introduce themselves. That was my thought.

16:38

But the history you guys provide, I love church history. And that's why

16:44

I love, especially when you guys do, you do some of the sermons from guys that no one knows.

16:51

And there it's different. I mean, like Calvin, okay, a lot of us know who Calvin is. But then you get into some,

16:57

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.

17:05

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.

17:17

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.

17:26

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.

17:36

And he 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 so you're at that level, don't break the rules.

17:43

Yeah, there you go. So, I mean, you got to, so I guess

17:48

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?

17:58

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.

18:05

Mortimer, Whitley, guys like this. The golden tongue for folks who know their church history, right?

18:13

In the, I think he was what, second century, third century, John Chrysostom. Third century

18:19

Chrysostom, yeah. And also, little note, you'll find that 90 % of our pastors start with the name John.

18:24

So if your name is John or your kid is named John, you set him up for a life of pastoring as far as I can tell.

18:31

Yeah, but I mean, you take a look, John Chrysostom was known as golden tongue because in his day, his preaching was just something to be heard.

18:41

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 maybe 2000 years.

19:00

Yeah, I mean, that's the kind of the motivation of the show is this idea that we live in a modern world.

19:06

We live in a world where so much content is so readily available in so many different ways.

19:13

We constantly are connected. We have smartphones. We're constantly seeing videos run. We're listening to podcasts all the time.

19:20

And the reality of these old, because I mean, as we said, kind of implied before that the word of God is timeless.

19:28

It is so applicable from eras past, just as applicable back then as it is today.

19:34

And these old sermons are kind of, in some ways being forgotten.

19:39

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.

19:48

So our motivation was, hey, let's get these old sermons and put them into an audio form, make it easy and accessible for people to listen to.

19:57

And people can hear these kind of different takes, different perspectives on the same things that we interact with every day, or relationships with God, problems with our culture, government, like things that they're not new problems.

20:10

They're not new concepts in the world of Christianity. People have dealt with these concepts for centuries.

20:17

And so to hear these people from 500 years ago talk about kind of the same concepts, of course it's different in their culture, but the same concepts as we're dealing with today is a really neat thing.

20:29

And you were kind of mentioning earlier having some lesser known names in there too. That was also something that we thought was important too, because we can make a big show about all the most famous names and that'd be fine, but we wanted to kind of maybe introduce some people that 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 there's 2000 years of church history.

20:55

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

21:04

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.

21:18

And so we got roughly 1900 years of history that is just waiting to be unpacked and made available in a digital way.

21:26

Yeah, and our slogan for the show is world's greatest or history's greatest sermons. And we're looking for the best sermons.

21:32

Some of the best preachers are not the best theologians are not the ones who remember. We could do a show where we just put

21:37

Spurgeon, Edwards, Bonhoeffer, Luther and Calvin, and those five on rotation and our downloads probably be even better because all five of those do really great.

21:47

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,

21:53

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.

22:01

And we had never heard of the guy before. And we know, you know, and no one else, we literally have sermons

22:06

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.

22:11

Yeah, yeah, that's actually a really neat story. There was 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 artists, especially with music, like they would write the hymns and stuff for their congregations.

22:32

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.

22:40

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.

22:52

And there was this sermon that was referenced several times that George, what's his name,

23:02

Troy? George Matheson. George Matheson, 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 there's this document of him preaching this sermon about Joe before the queen.

23:16

And the queen loved it so much that she ordered it to be copied and documented in her personal writings.

23:23

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.

23:29

And we see all of these instances of historical accounts talking about that event, talking about that sermon and how impressed the queen was.

23:38

I found like reviews from them being like, great sermon preached before the queen. So like the sermon was really famous. But the sermon itself, we could not find.

23:46

And eventually we found the hometown that George Matheson lived in.

23:52

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.

24:03

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 was, it was a cool adventure.

24:19

It was a cool process to get that on our show. It was also a pain because based on the scan -related pages, so I had to run it through processors.

24:26

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.

24:34

It's a lot of work, but we really enjoy it. And that's one of the other things too. 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.

24:45

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 those and do a lot of work to get those right.

24:54

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

25:01

Justin Peters called me up one day and he, cause I do, I plan a lot of conferences and I have, you know, he knows

25:08

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,

25:13

I want to do a conference where we get a bunch of pastors that like these good preaching pastors that have no name.

25:22

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.

25:27

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,

25:34

I think with this whole mindset of platform that you see in the world today where even the book industry has changed.

25:44

When I went to write my first book, I remember talking with Phil Johnson and said, listen, should I go self -published?

25:50

Should I go published? And he basically told me, he says, unless you have a huge platform, going published is useless.

25:56

It's just the whole market changed. They only care about whether you have a large platform. And when

26:01

I did go with one of my books that was published, the thing that they wanted to know, how many Twitter followers do you have?

26:07

How many Facebook followers do you have? It was just, that was all they were really interested in. I was like, what about the quality of the book?

26:14

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.

26:26

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.

26:35

But there's a mark I think that could be made in a generation today by what you guys are doing on the podcast, re -preaching these sermons and giving the background, the history of these different people.

26:48

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 a sermon.

26:58

But then I started to realize, no, you guys are really in the church history category.

27:03

And the sermon is really the example of the history. Because you guys, what

27:10

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.

27:17

But what you guys do is you provide that history, that background to the sermon.

27:23

But so often what I find is you're 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.

27:38

It's not like this is being preached in a vacuum. There are times where, look, they didn't always do expositional preaching back then verse by verse, right?

27:46

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.

27:55

And a lot of times you guys give that background and then you hear the sermon and it's like, wow, if I just listened to the sermon,

28:04

I've been like, oh, that's really good, that's cool. But when I listen to the information you give before the sermon, all of a sudden

28:10

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.

28:21

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.

28:31

But now I'm seeing that as I'm listening, and this is just me as a listener to your podcast,

28:36

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.

28:45

I don't know if that's something you guys had planned. That was exactly the goal though. We say it on this show a lot too, imagine putting yourself in the shoes of a person back then.

28:54

But 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.

29:02

But when I went back to read the date and the information on it, I found out that the week he preached that, the

29:07

Friday before, so Sunday to Friday, the Friday before communists and Nazis in the street had gotten in this big brawl.

29:13

And when I looked it up, basically the Nazis had marched through the streets of Germany, Berlin, where he was. And they said, we wanna make

29:18

Hitler the chancellor of Germany. And the communists, the brown shirts came out and were like, no, you're not. They get in this huge fight, there's torches.

29:24

It's a crazy mess. And then two days later, these people show up to church terrified, I'm sure.

29:30

And Bonhoeffer gets up and goes, do not be afraid. You have nothing to worry about. Jesus is in the boat with us.

29:36

Like what on earth do you have to be afraid of? When you're afraid, run to him in fear. And it just, it made so much more sense when

29:41

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

29:47

I think I could have given in that moment. And when I tried to think of myself as somebody in that church in that moment, I thought, wow, that's amazing.

29:54

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 pew with them.

30:00

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.

30:06

And you really come to appreciate it. If we just gave you the sermon and said, here it is in old

30:11

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 the same,

30:21

I don't think it would be doing justice to what we have before us if we did it that way. Yeah, and I want to take a break.

30:28

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 that you choose as speakers.

30:46

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?

30:59

On our podcast, Revive Thoughts, we take the roughly 1900 years of sermons and try to bring them back to life.

31:06

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.

31:12

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.

31:24

Let us live and move and have our being and deal with men as if a dying, risen, interceding.

31:30

See poor Lazarus in his full frightening misery and behind him Christ. The hand cannot alone deliver man.

31:38

The body must call. You can find Revive Thoughts on any podcast app or player that you have and at ReviveThoughts .com.

31:45

We hope you learn something new and grow closer to God. Hey, I'm Daryl and I'm here with my wife,

31:51

Karen. What's up? And we're the hosts of the What Are We Even Doing Here? podcast. The podcast that seeks to answer the question that we all ask, what are we even doing here?

32:01

We cover topics such as marriage, family, life, and living a Christian life in this crazy world. We don't have all the answers, but we know where to look.

32:09

Subscribe to us on iTunes and follow us on SoundCloud as we seek the kingdom of God and find out what we are even doing here.

32:17

Grace and peace. So Troy and Joel, what are we doing here? Oh, that's right, we're talking about Revive Thoughts.

32:24

So let's revive some thoughts. Walk us through why you choose the sermons you do.

32:32

Even in that promo we just played, you give a little bit of the history, not wanting guys who are, we could just go and listen on Sermon Audio.

32:42

Wait, I guess that means you're not gonna be re -preaching any of mine, huh? Man. No, probably not.

32:47

Oh. All right, well, they weren't. Unfortunately, not on this show. I thought maybe you can improve on them because when

32:53

I preached them, they weren't that good the first time. That's some really good speech. Well, it's funny too because we actually get asked a lot, like it'll be a very regular question.

33:02

Can you do a sermon by Martin Lloyd -Jones or Leonard Ravenhill? And we're kind of like, well, one of the rules that we kind of have for the show is we don't do sermons that you can already listen to because you can already listen to them.

33:13

And you mean listen to them by the person who actually preached them. Right, exactly. Because I mean, Sinners in the Hands of an

33:19

Angry God I think has been preached by more people, more times, everywhere. Like when I had my idea, one of the things that I talked over with Colleen is

33:26

I said, you know, we're probably gonna have like a dozen copies, a dozen editions of Sinners in the

33:32

Hands of an Angry God. Some will be monotone, some won't be. Exactly. But you're targeting people who they themselves in their own voice is not recorded.

33:43

Exactly. Because there's no point, if we can have the original speaker, I think the original speaker probably did it best.

33:50

So go listen to his passion and go listen to him. So we're not gonna touch anybody for the most part. That's because you haven't heard my sermons, right?

33:58

From the 1940s on, we don't touch them. But after that, once they're out of audio, we go after them. We try to,

34:04

I don't know, we get asked this question on the interviews and I always wanna like, I wish I had some magical key.

34:10

I'm like, well, if you think of it this way, but we really don't, there's not an exact science. There's to a degree, there's some practical things, like how long is the sermon?

34:19

Some of those guys from the 1500s, 80 page sermons, all run on sentences. I try not to do as many of those because I just don't have the headspace and the time to devote to them.

34:29

I mean, there are some of these sermons have taken over five hours to get right. So I don't wanna do that to myself. Other times we just go, okay, we've done a bunch from the 1800s, let's switch it out and do something from the 1600s for a while.

34:40

Try to get the whole, the goal for me would be to try to have a sermon from every continent and as many countries as possible.

34:48

And a goal for me for the show is to have at least one or two sermons from every century. We're gonna always have more from the 1800s and 1700s because that's closer to us.

34:57

But if I can have sermons from the 400s, 500s, 600s and they're good and they're high quality, that's, that would be something

35:03

I'd like to see. But there's - So I've got it. So all I have to do is go to Antarctica and preach without it recorded, but someone writes it down.

35:11

Your sermon will get in there. Because you won't have any from Antarctica. Oh, I figured it out. I can't wait to do the background.

35:18

So there was this crazy person. What in the world was he doing in Antarctica?

35:27

And sometimes too, we get recommended sermons from our listeners. We get, Joel has found sermons for us.

35:32

He's got one that we're cooking up right now that I'm excited for when it comes out. There is, again, there is, sometimes I look at a speaker and I go, this is a great speaker.

35:39

Let me see what sermons they have that are matching. I go, oh, cool. Sometimes it's the opposite. I go, these are some great sermons. Who spoke this sermon?

35:45

Sometimes I get sermons, I'm like, this is a great sermon. And then I look at the person and I go, well, yeah, maybe they're not the world's greatest person, but the sermon is great.

35:53

And so we're gonna move forward with it and we're just gonna flesh that out in the background. Well, let's talk about that because you did an episode where you put a caveat before the episode.

36:06

And it's something that I, in So You Wanna Be a Podcaster, we talk about how to deal with when you have a guest that you may not agree with.

36:14

And we talk about how to handle things like that. Well, you guys did that very well, even though it wasn't a guest.

36:21

You explained, hey, look, we don't agree with his theology. Here's where we would disagree. This is where he may not. But the sermon was good.

36:27

The sermon had an impact on the community. And this is what was good about it. Here's what the historical setting to it.

36:33

Because the reality is, I think as we go back in history, we're gonna find less and less people we would say we agree with today because our theology has been developed more and more over time.

36:45

And guys from the first centuries especially, they didn't have their theology so well -defined as we do today.

36:53

So there's like a mix of things. For a great example was I had to in seminary write a paper on Augustine and his view of the end times.

37:04

Now, many people look at Augustine as someone who is amillennial. And a lot of what he said is used for amillennials and for the position, but guess what?

37:13

I ended up discovering in the research that he was actually premillennial in this sense.

37:19

He actually believed that that 1 ,000 year period was a literal 1 ,000 years.

37:24

He just thought he was in it. And so you go, well, who gets to use him then, right?

37:30

So much of the Catholics use him. Because he didn't have everything worked out so cleanly that we could go, oh yeah, he's in our camp or he's not in our camp.

37:40

They were a mess until they worked it out throughout history. And I think you did an excellent job of going, okay, here's what we didn't like about him, here's what we did.

37:48

So you gave the caution to your audience to go, hey, don't believe everything this guy says. Right, yeah.

37:54

And that's something we've had to do on a few different speakers. There's a lot of different, because like you said exactly, once you get far back there, the theology is just so different than what we think of.

38:05

And even just the personal cultures and circumstances that are around these people that lived 400 years ago are not things that we would find acceptable in today's day and age.

38:15

And so we don't condone a lot of the lifestyles around certain cultures.

38:22

During that time, but the thing that I always usually will fall back onto is saying is just God can use imperfect people to do incredible things.

38:33

And so just because the people aren't perfect doesn't mean that God can't use them to speak to a lot of people to make a big difference for them.

38:42

We had a sermon by Johann Taller. I remember posting it and telling people about it. And we got a response, a comment came in, it was like, well, he's not a reformer.

38:49

And I was like, I know he lived 200 years before the Reformation. So obviously it would be hard from the 1300s to be agreeing with Martin Luther.

38:58

He came up before, but little known fact, Martin Luther read a lot of this guy's sermons, was really inspired by him.

39:03

The point though is I don't, I just, in my mind, I go, look, my audience is intelligent.

39:09

If you listen to the backstory and you think, you know what, that guy's not for me, or you listen to the sermon and go, I don't agree with that. Okay, we don't think you will agree with every single sermon.

39:16

I don't think every single aspect of church history I agree with. You know, there's lots of things in church history that we go,

39:22

I don't know if I would've done that. But I like to put myself in their shoes. And I think if they looked at us and they could see into the future and see us, they would go, wow, there's a lot of stuff they're doing

39:30

I don't think I agree with either. So I just, I really think we should be careful not to think that we're better than people behind us just because we have technology and stuff like that.

39:39

We think, oh, we are very smart. We would never make those decisions. I go, I think that we make a lot of decisions they would look down on too.

39:44

And we never want to, one of the facets of our show is we never want to sugarcoat history or water it down.

39:52

Like we wanna be honest with our listeners and let them kind of decide for themselves what they think of a person.

39:57

So we'll say like, here's all the incredible things that this guy did, but he also executed people by burning them at the stake or they own slaves or something like that.

40:07

So they can see kind of the pros and cons or where that person is coming from. And again, the cultural stigmas around what was going on around that era.

40:16

And for theology, we tend to take just a very neutral take on it. We try to just let the audience decide for things like themselves.

40:22

We don't wanna subscribe to one camp over another because I think that there's things we can learn about God and see it from different perspectives, especially historically,

40:30

I think helps to sharpen my faith in a way like I may not agree with that. And after listening to a sermon by that, I go, yeah, this is why

40:36

I don't agree with it. Or I go, oh, interesting. I wouldn't have considered it that way. Interesting to hear that. There's a sermon we're working on that will come out soon from a complete nobody, a complete unknown.

40:45

I didn't even mean to find this sermon. I was looking for somebody else's sermon when I found it, but he basically makes this really interesting point where he goes, look, like we stand on the shoulders of all these great men that came before us and their words can live in us like the

40:58

Christian faith, the things they said basically can live in us today if we understand them and know them. And yet at the same time, they're not gonna all agree with each other.

41:06

In fact, some of them are going to disagree with each other and would have thought they were in the same room, but it's still good to know it and it helps us and it helps us be prepared to answer the questions of today, which literally this sermon sounds like an advertisement for our show, but it wasn't.

41:19

It was just a sermon that this guy was preaching at the time. And I was like, that's really the heart of what we're doing. We're not trying to put up a bunch of people that agree with us that say everything the way we say it.

41:27

We're trying to just teach you the history and let you hear these things and decide them for themselves. And that's one of the things too, we'll find that like our listeners, when

41:35

I ask them who their favorite speakers are, they're completely all across the board because certain speakers and preachers just meant more to some people than they did to others.

41:43

Yeah, you know, when I was in seminary, my seminary professor, he was the

41:48

Dean of the Theology Department, and yet he was the guy that could teach history. I mean, when he, you took a church history class with him, it came to life.

41:58

But one of the things, because of those two disciplines in areas he taught, I started to notice that he was doing something.

42:06

He would not just talk history, but he would talk theology and history.

42:12

So he was giving you the history to see how the theology was formed because when, you know, our theology wasn't formed in a vacuum.

42:21

And I was doing a conference and I ended up inviting him out. And what

42:26

I wanted him to do, I said, I would like you to do a history of theology.

42:32

So in other words, go through the history and explain how history affected the theology because it was one of the things

42:40

I found he did so well and put things in the perspective so you understand that's why they thought this, because they were in a time and a culture that's different than ours.

42:50

And when you understand that, you understand what was going on because much of our history, sorry, much of our theology comes out of heresy.

42:57

I mean, that's where our history, the history comes in because when we understand why was, you know, what was going on with Luther and Erasmus and the bondage of the will and the freedom of the will, and you start to dig into those books and you start to know the battle that those guys had with it.

43:13

Well, that helps to understand why they wrote and how it clarified things in Luther's mind.

43:21

And he ended up taking that seminar that I asked him to do. He ended up developing a full semester class and he told me when

43:30

I took the class, he said, this was because of you. He's like, he said, this was out of your inspiration. He took, he created a class that we didn't have at the seminary,

43:37

History of Theology. And we would spend an entire semester going through the history, looking at what was the heresy that popped up and then the response to it.

43:48

That's how we got the Trinity. It was a response to heresy. And I think that's where what you guys are doing is so good because it puts the sermons in that perspective.

44:01

And so you guys have this unique niche of being able to look at church history, sermons, theology.

44:09

You bring this together into your podcast in a very, very unique way. And so I wanna talk to you about how you're hearing.

44:20

I know you guys talk that you get a lot of feedback from your audience, which is always good.

44:25

And I wanna hear some of the feedback you get, how that motivates you guys as podcasters.

44:33

I wanna do that just after this break right here. The Five Solas Podcast, a weekly podcast hosted by James Watkins that is dedicated to the

44:44

Reformed theological distinctives and their continued relevance for the church and world today. Grace alone, faith alone,

44:52

Christ alone, scripture alone, to the glory of God alone. Join us each episode to discuss the truths of these foundational rallying cries of the

45:02

Protestant reformers, the prophetic challenge they present and the sound wisdom they provide. As we delve into their biblical meaning and theological significance and reflect upon and appropriate their truths, we will be engaging issues in the church and world.

45:17

Each week from the rich insight of Reformation Christianity, we will be showing all the manifold ways in which this material helps challenge and direct the current church in its life of worship and witness and confront the idols of our age with biblical discernment and a sound apologetic in a manner that is as open and transparent as possible while challenging you to seek the glory of God in all that you do.

45:43

Sotio Deo Gloria. Hello everyone,

45:50

Daniel Minnick here. I host a podcast called Truth Spresso and I am inviting you to join in.

45:58

So what can you expect at Truth Spresso? Well, at Truth Spresso, we wake up our minds every

46:05

Monday with a robust shot of truth. Let's dig deep in the word of God as we get to know our

46:12

God better together. Let's challenge our view of the world as we take apart conventional politics with a fine toothed comb.

46:22

See all that Truth Spresso has to offer by going to www .truthspresso .com.

46:30

And by the way, Truth Spresso is now a member podcast of the growing family of the

46:36

Christian Podcast Community. Check out other faith building shows at www .christianpodcastcommunity

46:43

.com hosted by Striving for Eternity Ministries. All right, so a couple more podcasts that are members of the

46:57

Christian Podcast Community. We are glad to be part of that and it is an enjoyable community and you guys are part of it too.

47:04

That's really the thing that I really enjoy the fellowship and some of the camaraderie and discipleship that goes on within our community.

47:15

So let me ask you guys, you get a lot of feedback from your audience. How does that help motivate you?

47:22

What's some of the feedback that you end up hearing? I think the thing that we hear the most, which was what we hoped secretly we would hear, and maybe

47:31

I should preface it with this. When we first told people the idea for this show, we heard a lot of people say,

47:36

I think that'll have a niche audience. I think a lot of people said, oh, that's a good idea. I don't think

47:42

I would listen to that, but you know, somebody should do it to go for it. And we felt we understood where they were coming from, but there was just this kind of secret hope that people would listen to these sermons, listen to the show and go, wow,

47:52

I don't know, I don't understand exactly how, but that sermon from the 1600s is extremely relevant to me today.

47:59

I don't fully get it, but it is. And that is actually, I would say, the number one thing we hear is that people are like, this is really like, this is, you guys did a good job on the production and this is so relevant.

48:08

God used this in my life. Yeah, I'm always, I'm constantly blown away. We get so much feedback where it's not just a historical, you know, a church history show.

48:22

It's not just educational. Like the people are really writing in about how it's helping their spiritual walk, how they're growing closer to God, how these things are really inspiring them and encouraging them as a believer in today's society.

48:37

And that is just an incredible encouragement and a huge reward. Yeah, I actually, for myself,

48:43

I had to kind of do like a heart check recently because I was thinking so much of the show, like the show as a podcast and you get into all these like tips and tricks online, do this to grow the show, do that to grow the show.

48:52

And I was just thinking of it as a show, as a show, as a show. And I feel like in the same week we had like three, I mean like multiple emails and messages and Facebook comments and stuff come in that were just like, thank you for doing this.

49:04

I would have not been able to see these sermons without you and they've been helping me a lot. And it kind of made me reflect on the fact like, this is, you know,

49:10

I started this with the intention of it being more than a show, kind of got into the mindset of just making it a show. And God was kind of like, this is a ministry too, like this is, these words are reaching and impacting people today, you know, deal with it more like a ministry, put it before me more than just running it as a show with numbers and stuff.

49:26

And it was a good heart check, but it happens because people are contacting us. And not to mention, we've had many of our sermons read by our listener, people who shoot us an email and say, hey,

49:35

I hear you're looking for volunteers. And we're like, yeah, we are. They'll come in. So they care enough about the show to put their own voice and time and effort into it and to help it grow.

49:44

We originally started with 10, about nine episodes. And we thought we'll go with nine. And if people are enjoying this, if this is reacting well with people, we'll see how far that first season can take us.

49:55

And we had 20 episodes. So we had a lot of people come in and volunteer and join up with us during that time.

50:00

And then the second season we said, okay, we'll try to shoot for another 20 episodes and see how things go. And we've gone past that.

50:07

We're on, I think, episode 25 with all of April and into May. In season two, yeah, we're more than 40 episodes on the series.

50:14

45 episodes all together. And we're just kind of cruising along and people are just jumping in where they can to help out.

50:20

They, I don't know, man, it was just something that I feel like we hit a lot of people, a need that was right there in front of us all that people just didn't realize we all had.

50:29

Yeah, and that's the thing. I mean, I think that it's not just that it's a niched thing.

50:34

Like I've been saying, because this is, the way you guys did it, I'm so glad that I didn't do what

50:42

I wanted to do. I really am, because what you did is so much better because it's not just about the sermons.

50:50

That's the whole thing with it. It's a history lesson. It's a theology. It's the sermon itself.

50:57

And it really is, like I said, when you guys won the award, it's very novel.

51:05

There's no one else I know really doing that the way you're doing it, especially. And I think that's why so many people love it.

51:14

And you're getting the feedback from folks. You're getting people that are like, hey, I want to see this continue.

51:20

Now, do the people who are listening, are they giving you sermons?

51:26

Like, hey, check this one out, check, does that happen a lot? Sometimes, yeah, definitely. We do get the email sometimes, or they'll recommend a speaker, and they'll say, hey, have you thought about this guy?

51:37

And I mean, I'll be honest with you. I am currently in seminary, but I don't know.

51:42

I did not know most of the speakers. I'm done. We get name recommendations all the time. We're learning just as much as everyone else, you know, making the show.

51:51

Maybe that's part of it, is like every episode, we're excited to tell everyone, because we didn't know any of this stuff either.

51:56

I mean, we have an episode we're about to work on on John Calvin, and I feel like the story of John Calvin sounds like it's pretty known.

52:02

When I was writing the script, and I sent it to Joel, we were both like, I didn't know any of this had happened to him. This is super interesting.

52:09

Well, you know, it'd be really neat, I think, for you guys to do. I mean, one thing that I would say to do as a change, if you in your show notes were able to put the sermons in there, because I know you guys kind of edit them and redo them a bit, then people could read along with the sermon in the show notes as they go.

52:28

We, every episode, we do have the sermon up on our website, so if they do want to read along, they can.

52:35

It's up there for them to take a look at. What I was actually thinking of this week, though, is I might start putting up some of the original manuscripts, so people can just see what a stark contrast it is between what they end up listening to in their ears and what they, not the wording, like we keep the intent and the meaning very clear.

52:49

We keep a lot of the phrasing, but just how different something from the 1500s looks, and they don't even use the same letters as we do.

52:57

A lot of them put this F where an S is, and so you have to go through as you're writing it and constantly replace all these extra

53:02

S's. There's things like that that are so difficult. Yeah, that's the older English. That's why I had a guy who was, we had this guy who was a 1611 -only -ist.

53:14

He believed the 1611 was inspired, and I'm like, but you don't use the 1611. Yeah. And he's like, yes,

53:21

I do. So he came back for evening service, and I brought my 1611 replica, and I said, well, here, this is the 1611.

53:29

This is what you should be using. You're using the authorized, and so I took his

53:34

Bible, and I gave him my 1611. At the end of service, this guy could not get his Bible fast enough. He's like, this isn't even

53:40

English. I'm like, that's the 1611. Yeah, yep. So you have it, it's in the link, is where you have the notes?

53:49

On the website, yeah. So there'll be, in the show notes, a link to the website where you can see that episode, and then there's an expansion that'll show the transcript of the sermon.

53:58

Yeah, we also put our show notes, so you can see everything. If you wanted to read along or read our part and skip over our voices, we understand.

54:05

We have that up there, too. So you can just, the whole, everything we do for the episode, because we do so much scripting beforehand, it's all up there.

54:12

So the entire episode, in a way, is up there. Yeah, sometimes people want to recall a fact from the history, and so they can kind of scrub through the transcript of our history section and find that fact, or just look through that expansion of the sermon itself.

54:25

Now, granted, we don't put the references or sources, so you gotta do that yourself, because, to be honest, I just don't have the time.

54:30

So take our word for it or don't, but we're not gonna, you gotta figure that one out on your own. All right, hey, listen, since I know you guys have, don't listen to this podcast, because I know you guys, you just are not regular listeners.

54:43

You don't know what's gonna come right now, but I think it's time for a game. Okay. It's time now to start the

54:51

Spiritual Transition Game. So now we get to find out if you really do listen to the rap report or not.

55:00

Well, that's gonna fail. Yeah. So let me explain the game for folks who may be listening for the first time.

55:08

The way we play this game is very simple. Most people, they find it very easy to share the gospel.

55:15

Once the conversation is in the spiritual realm, once you're talking spiritual things. But the hardest thing

55:22

I have found in 30 plus years of evangelism and training in evangelism is the fact that people can't figure out how to get from the natural world to the spiritual world in that discussion, to take whatever being discussed and bring that into a spiritual discussion.

55:39

And so what we have done is created a game out of it, the Spiritual Transition Game. And we're gonna play this now where what you're gonna hear is either

55:47

Troy or Joel are going to give me something and I'm gonna have to transition from whatever they give me to the gospel.

55:55

Now, the way you could play this on your own is in youth group or just as a small group Bible study is just throw an idea out there and just turn to a person and say, okay, take this topic, go to the, just make it a spiritual conversation or go to the gospel with this conversation and just train yourself.

56:12

It's really not hard to get into evangelism when you're looking at every conversation and saying, how can

56:19

I transition this? And the more you practice this game, the easier it is to not pray, God, give me an opportunity to share the gospel, but to know that you can turn that conversation one way or another into a gospel conversation.

56:32

So if they give me something really easy, I'm gonna call them joy. And if not, I'm gonna call them trolls.

56:38

So, you know, we'll just. Sorry. So it's a win -win really. I'm ready.

56:47

I think I got a good one. I got one too, so bring it on. All right, whichever one of you goes first. I'll go first.

56:53

Well, you guys wanna sit and discuss and figure out who, you know. No, no, no, I'm ready, I'm ready. So am I just setting you up with like a sentence?

57:01

Yep, just either a sentence or an object or a thought. Andrew, Andrew, I wanna tell you about this new brand of hot dogs

57:09

I just purchased. I've been eating brand A hot dog, but I recently tried brand

57:15

B hot dog and they're superior by far. You need to try brand B hot dog. Well, they're superior because they're

57:22

Hebrew national hot dogs and they're there for kosher. And so they, they, they just, they're obviously because they were blessed by a rabbi that makes them better.

57:34

But, you know, there, there is a thing where when I grew up,

57:39

I believed that the, the only hot dog you're allowed to eat is Hebrew national.

57:45

Really? Well, because it was kosher, because I was raised in a Jewish home, you didn't eat any other hot dog.

57:52

And I, I remember a time when I was at one, you know,

57:58

I was at a friend's house and they had hot dogs and their hot dogs didn't taste the same. And I came home and I asked my mother if we could have, you know, this other hot dog brand, which now

58:08

I don't even remember. And she was like, no, we don't eat that. And I'm like, okay. And I, so I had this thing where it was like, the only hot dog you eat is

58:16

Hebrew national. Like that is the only hot dog for Jewish people to ever eat. And it was the idea that you couldn't have anything else.

58:24

And I had this thought that, like there's something better out there that I'm just,

58:29

I'm just, I have to have it. So like when, when I could, anytime I could try any other hot dog, it was like,

58:35

I feel like I'm missing something in life if I don't have these other hot dogs, because everything was like restricted to me other than Hebrew national.

58:44

And I ended up discovering that, you know what, Hebrew national actually tasted better than all the other hot dogs.

58:50

But I didn't realize that because the thought of having something that I thought I couldn't have, it made it seem like it was going to taste better.

58:59

And the reality was it didn't. I mean, I just ended up in my taste, I prefer the

59:05

Hebrew national. But what that really was, was this thing within me where it's this idea that if it's something that I can't have,

59:13

I feel like it's just going to be better. And really that is what sin does in our life.

59:19

It tells us that the things we can't have, it's gonna be so much better than it actually is. And what ends up happening a lot of times when we do things that we know are wrong, it ends up taking us where we don't wanna go.

59:30

And it holds us longer than we wanna stay. And it always has a picture that everything's gonna be great.

59:37

And yet the realization hits us over and over again that that guilty feeling we have knowing we did something wrong.

59:45

And it's just like that temptation, oh, well, there's gotta be something better with a hot dog. Well, that's exactly what sin tells us.

59:51

Our flesh says there's gotta be something better, which if you just believe in God, like you're gonna be missing out on so much.

59:58

And yet the reality is what I had to learn in my life was I wasn't missing out by going out and doing sin.

01:00:05

What I was missing out on was eternal life. That's really what I was missing out on. And the sin, after I got eternal life, after I turned and stopped trusting myself and my good works and trusted

01:00:17

Jesus Christ, all of a sudden those things that I thought were gonna give such pleasure, they fell by the wayside and paled in comparison to the glory of knowing

01:00:26

I'll be glorified one day. And the knowledge that my sins are forgiven. And so I go back to Hebrew National and go, that's the better thing.

01:00:36

Well, the reality is that's what sin does to us. It tells us there's something better out there. And we think that's true and we give up that thought and go for what's true, we have something far better.

01:00:47

That's it. That is far better than I would have come up with on my own for sure.

01:00:53

And that's the first time I ever did one on a hot dog too. I, yeah, I had no idea I was tapping into such a sensitive topic from your childhood as bringing it to life again, huh?

01:01:03

Well, this is the whole thing with this game is you want to tap into something you're knowledgeable on.

01:01:09

Some of the personal, yeah. Because people do end up listening to something that intrigues them.

01:01:17

And that's where you just, there's something they're interested in, that's how this whole game gets played.

01:01:23

And I have found this is why people think I'm so good at sharing the gospel and getting into conversations.

01:01:31

And it's really that I'm not that good. I just know how to play this game really well. So let's wrap up.

01:01:39

You guys have seen your podcast, Revive Thoughts, go beyond your expectation in some ways.

01:01:47

But any podcaster has expectations and has dreams and has things they want to see with their podcast.

01:01:55

What is it you want to see for the future of Revive Thoughts? I mean, now, I mean, you've already hit the pinnacle of winning the

01:02:01

Christian Podcast Awards. So I don't know what there's left for you, but what is, what do you have on the horizons?

01:02:09

Yeah, I mean, there are different kind of, I don't know if you'd call them spinoff shows, but we'd love to create some type of a daily devotional show that we could do with, because there are people from history, like Spurgeon has several collections of daily devotionals that are just sitting there waiting to, and there's books that people read that include those devotionals, but it would be neat to have just a little five minute thing that people could listen to as part of their morning routine or something like that.

01:02:36

So I mean, I guess I'm letting our insider knowledge out. So if someone listening wants to create that podcast, you guys do that as well.

01:02:45

But there's a few things that we'd love to kind of branch out and kind of play around with different aspects of church history.

01:02:53

For our Patreon subscribers, we do what we call a history deep dive, where we kind of spend just a huge chunk of time, like an hour and a half, just examining and getting to know a specific portion of church history.

01:03:06

There's no sermons, but it's just kind of a way to get a better understanding of what's going on.

01:03:12

We just had an episode on the Salem witch trials, which was a lot of fun. Oh my gosh, we did so much research and we had a blast kind of summarizing that in a way that hopefully made sense to our listeners.

01:03:24

So things like that as well. But yeah, I mean, the majority of the core show, we just wanna keep making it.

01:03:33

And thankfully, they're, like I said, it's 1900 years of history. So there's no shortage of content.

01:03:39

It's just a matter of the work that goes into updating these old manuscripts and finding volunteers to read them.

01:03:48

And if one of your listeners is listening to my voice right now and says, hey, that sounds like an awesome project.

01:03:54

I'd love to volunteer to read a sermon. By all means, we'd love to have you on the show as a narrator.

01:04:03

We have kind of a process that we put volunteers through to have a little test recording. But feel free to email us at ReviveThoughts at gmail .com.

01:04:11

And we'd love to get back to you as soon as possible. Yeah, I mean, your episode on the

01:04:17

Salem witch trials, well, the ReviveThoughts edition of it where you talked about it, you got me where I was like, man,

01:04:25

I want to be a patron. I'm just in a position where I've actually pulled back all of my personal support that I've given to many ministries because we're planting a church.

01:04:35

And so church plant takes a lot. And so I'm trying to, that's where the priority is.

01:04:41

And I've pulled back even from the donations I give to my own ministry that I work for.

01:04:46

So, but that becomes the important. So I'm like, oh, I want to listen to this. So, but maybe

01:04:54

I can know some of the guys that are doing it and they can maybe send me an MP through. Well, we'll talk, we'll talk at the show.

01:05:01

We might be able to work sometime. Well, I appreciate you guys coming on. I love your podcast.

01:05:06

I love the way you're doing it. I think it's great. I think it is well -deserved in winning the award at one because I do think that last year out of all the podcasts that were reviewed, it was amazing how that one was just top of the list with everybody that does the voting.

01:05:26

And we pull in from a lot of different people, just asking people throughout the year what podcasts are listening to, which ones they think are better than others, which ones they think are really, ones that others should listen to.

01:05:38

And we were getting a consistent message that it really was you and you guys and Just Thinking and people love those two.

01:05:48

And those two are very, very different type of podcasts. And so those are some that everyone should be listening to.

01:05:55

So I thank you guys for coming on. Keep up the good work. I'm looking forward to listening to what you guys have coming.

01:06:02

You just kept dropping, no new revelations here.

01:06:08

Well, you dropped a little bit of some ideas, but you just said we're really working on a great episode.

01:06:14

Nothing, we got no exclusives here. So sad. You're gonna have to tune in to find out, yeah.

01:06:21

Well, thanks for coming on. And folks, go to whatever podcast app you have, look up Revived Thoughts and start listening.

01:06:30

In fact, what you really should do is binge because you're home, you're not allowed out of the house anyway, just download all 40 episodes and start listening, listen to all of them.

01:06:43

And so I encourage you to do that. Now, I could, if I could recommend, sorry, if I could recommend some ones to start off with,

01:06:49

I really love our episodes on Bonhoeffer, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and our

01:06:54

Hudson Taylor ones are great. Those, and we have, I think, two episodes out with each of those, but those are probably my favorite episodes.

01:07:02

So if you're looking for a place to start, find the Dietrich Bonhoeffers or the Hudson Taylors. Those are both really good ones.

01:07:08

All right. And until next time, remember to strive to make today an eternal day for the glory of God.

01:07:14

And that's a wrap. This podcast is part of the Striving for Eternity ministry. For more content or to request a speaker or seminar to your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.

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