Living with the True God II: Extraordinary Importance of Ordinary Lives

The Difficulty and Significance of Judges

Welcome to the WHOLE Council Podcast. I'm Jon Snyder and with me again is Teddy James. And we're looking at lessons from the book of Judges. We did a study on Judges over a year ago. And it's a book that is difficult.

It can be a bit frightening if you approach it. You think it seems that these stories are strange. We have accounts of some very bad decisions, even by those that are in spiritual leadership, that normally we would think are admirable.

And we don't always find moral commentary. It's not always, and so and so did this, and then God sent a prophet and said, why have you done that? Sometimes there's no remark given from God about the behavior.

And so it can be a book that can be alarming or confusing. So we want to look at just a couple of the lessons because if you can get past some of those tricky places and understand where do I walk in those places, then I think Judges is one of the most significant books, particularly for the Western evangelical church.

So, Teddy, what are we going to look at today?

Ordinary Life After the Conquest

In a nutshell, today's episode is going to focus on why it is that it is so particularly helpful for the Western church, for Western civilization, when we live in an era when things are pretty easy. I mean, honestly, if you listen to the 24 -7 hour news cycle, then the sky is falling and everything's falling apart, and it's the worst time to ever have lived in human history.

When you step away from that and you talk with people, yeah, there's bad things happening, but we do live in a good time, in a good era of human history, and it is so easy to live life today. Now, understanding that we have challenges, but in the time that we're focusing, especially, so this is kind of coming from one of the earlier sessions from Judges where you're talking about, you open up session one is a geography lesson, and that's how Judges begins.

It's the end of the life of Joshua, and there's kind of a parallel. When Moses dies, he delivers, was it five sermons in the book of Deuteronomy? Three. Three, okay. What translation you got? It's the... ESV?

Yeah, that's it. Added sermons? Yeah, that's it, the lost sermons of Moses. Okay. So, he preaches his three sermons, and then he dies, and then Joshua comes in, and there's the conquest of Canaan. Every day, something significant happens, something big.

There's a massive victory at the walls of Jericho. There's a terrible defeat at Ai. Every day, something new is happening, but in the beginning of Joshua, things are quite different. It's been 25 years that they've lived in the promised land, 25 years of living life, and this is a whole new generation.

People have gone home. They've had babies. They've, you know, established their farms, and now they're living in a time of normal, everyday life, and it is so easy, as it was easier for Israel, and it's easy for us to look at these things and to think back and think, that was the important time, and now we can just coast.

Yeah, like you mentioned, they've been... So at the end of Joshua, Joshua gives two farewell speeches. Not five. Not five, not even three, and at the beginning of Judges, you know, so it's the transition, and like you mentioned, it's such a contrast.

When Joshua, the book of Joshua starts, basically they leave that church service with Moses, and they go home to say, the men go home to say goodbye to their families because they're going to grab whatever instruments they have that could be used as weapons, and they are going to form an army, and then they're going to go into a promised land, and it's obviously significant, you know, because it's a great crisis.

Who would dare not walk with the Lord? You know, the Jews would not dare to kind of be careless with God when they so desperately, obviously, need Him for that crisis, and it's significant spiritually because they're about to inherit something that God promised to Abraham over four centuries earlier.

God is keeping His word. But that's all past, and like you mentioned, in the beginning of Judges, after Joshua's farewell speeches, they just go home to normal life, so normal marriage problems, normal kid problems, normal work problems, farm problems, you know, and then there's all the happy things, but it's just common.

It's so ordinary, and it is hard to see the significance of the ordinary moment, but spiritually our lives are made up mostly of ordinary moments, not great big spiritual events and not great crisis moments.

I mean, if you were to think of it like this, so when my wife and I first got married, somebody gifted us a Dave Ramsey study, and I wish that I had learned all of the lessons that I should have. You know, we would have made some decisions differently, but I do remember those first couple of years when we were getting completely out of debt, getting rid of student loans and all of those different things.

Every financial decision had weight, and then we got debt-free, and it was so easy to just coast at that point and to think, okay, we've arrived, we've finished, you know, and really that's the time when focus is more required, not less.

Guarding Against Spiritual Drift

Yeah, I think that because of the... there's that natural tendency that we have to be kind of lulled to sleep spiritually, and we see that in the Jews. You're going home after the death and the final farewell speeches of Joshua.

Now, you know, there's certainly... there is some sense of significance in that moment. Joshua has led us. He's no longer going to be with us, but do we need him as much as we did before? You know, are we in a crisis?

We already have pushed the enemies to the corner of the land. Maybe there's a few pockets of resistance, but they're very weak at this point. And, you know, so it's time to just settle back down and get on with normal life, and you can do that in a way that spiritually is unaware of opportunities that you're missing because you don't see the significance of the moment and of the enemies around you.

So think about Israel. Israel wins the battle for the land. They win the wars that give them a promised land, but then they go home, and the book of Judges sadly demonstrates over and over that they forget that there is still a war.

The battleground is not for, you know, acres of land. It's for a place in the heart. So while they won the war for the land, they are losing the war for their hearts, and they are embracing the idolatry of the people that they just conquered.

So they conquer the people, but they foolishly become careless. They're not aware that it's still a dangerous time, so spiritually they lay the armor aside, and they are seduced by the friendliness or the promises of the idol worshipers around them or in their midst still because there's many of them.

They took a shortcut and didn't remove everyone. And so bewitched by that, they give their hearts to God plus, God plus, whatever else promises, whatever other idol promises me happiness. And then what we find is they're no longer in a conflict with the nations around them as much as they are now finding themselves at war with their own God.

So we find God handing them over to the enemies. It's not the Philistines or the Midianites that are the real problem. It is that Israel has turned her back on God, and God in gracious fatherly discipline has responded.

And, you know, it looks a lot like they're in a battle with God, as Isaiah describes many years later, that God has become their enemy, or God seems to oppose them. Now, it's for good, but it's still a sad thing that they have to go through so many bitter generations, you know, over and over and over again, being enslaved to powers that once were pressed back simply because they were not careful to guard their hearts in the ordinary moments.

And it's so easy. We look at, at least I tend to, I look at the people of Judges, and I think you have so many direct promises from God, so many direct promises from Abraham, and then you see that fulfilled, and you see promises made to Moses, and you see that fulfilled, and you see the promises made to Joshua, and you see that fulfilled.

How could you lose your way so easily, and yet we see that again in the New Testament. Paul, when he's writing to the Galatians, who has bewitched you? You know, I just came and preached the gospel to you, and now you're falling away after a false gospel.

But we're not different from them. We're not higher than them. It is so easy for us, and I think that we all know this to be true. When we're in a spiritual crisis of our lives, our prayer life, it's like it goes on steroids.

We seek the Lord. We seek counsel. We spend time on our knees before an open Bible, crying out to the Lord, and then the crisis moves past, or we move past the crisis, and that sweet time of prayer begins to fade, and it dissipates, and then the time that we spend in the Word, well, I don't have to read quite as much as I did.

You know, it's so easy for us to just simply drift away, and what we have to remember is when we're reading the book of Judges, these were drifts that happened over years, even though for us, we read it in a couple of chapters.

So it's not as though the people in the era of the Judges, they just woke up one morning and said, okay, I'm done now. You know, it was a slow drift for them, and we have to keep that in mind.

The Big Picture of God’s Covenant Purposes

Yeah, I think one of the clear messages that we can draw from this is that Israel has a very egocentric, a very me-centered view of their day-to-day events and, you know, of the common things of life, and they forget the bigger picture of what God is doing, and so they have goals and aims and expectations that are warped.

They're inappropriate for God's people. They're very much like everybody else on the planet, and that would not have happened, and they would not have become, therefore, they would not have become careless, missing opportunities, not guarding against dangers.

That wouldn't have happened if they would have kept the perspective that God had and that God explained to them that they should have throughout, you know, from Abraham forward. They should have recognized that coming into the land and living in the promised land with the living God in a covenant relationship with God, that that was something that was much bigger than just their personal happiness.

And one of the things that you said,.

And I know that we do want to get into this, they drew a line between, you know, God's sovereign acts and man's typical action. And what I mean by that is, they said that, you know, it's almost as though in their minds, they had this idea that, well, in my everyday acts of life, so whether that's picking up toys or whether that's working for my job, filling out a spreadsheet or whatever the case may be, that's not something to be done as unto the Lord.

Yeah, and we'll talk about that in a minute, the separation between sacred and secular in a Christian's life and the danger of that. So Israel is in the land. They should remember that being in the land, that the present comforts that they enjoy, that it is part of a greater picture.

God is keeping his word to Abraham, but those promises to Abraham, the Abrahamic covenant covered more than just getting a people into the land. You know, there'll be a great people that come from you that you can't number, even though at this moment you don't have a son.

That occurred. These people will be brought out of Egypt and given a land. That occurred. But what else? If you think about it, the Abrahamic promises carry all the way through to the new covenant, and Paul explains that, particularly in Galatians, that God had always explained to Israel that the kindnesses that they were enjoying in that covenant, it was about something bigger than just them.

They were to be a people that walked with God. They were to be the one nation on earth that knew the truth about the only God that existed. Their lives should have been this bright, attractive, clear explanation of the character and the ways of the one living God.

Every nation in darkness around them, worshiping rocks and chunks of, you know, wood that had been covered with silver or gold, in their emptiness, they should have been able to see, well, there is one group of people who walk in a happy relationship with a God that really acts, a God that is clean.

Look at their lives. We see this. But, of course, they failed to do that. And also, there's the whole issue that I mentioned from Galatians where Paul says God promised that the seed of Abraham would come, singular, the seed, the primary offspring of Abraham, the Messiah.

The Messiah would come through the line of Abraham, and he would bring blessing to the entire world. He would bring, by his gospel labors, hope to every tongue, tribe, and nation. And so, Israel was a vehicle of that.

But it's like they forget that their present happiness, their present safety, their present enjoyment of God's faithfulness to His promises, they forget that it's about something bigger than them. They think, well, it's just about us.

And right now, we're happy. And we feel pretty safe. And things are good. The farm is good. The enemies have been pushed to the edge. And they become comfortable and then, you know, complacent. So, understanding, seeing their lives from the perspective of what God is doing in the big picture is pretty important.

But that's not just for the Old Testament. I mean, even in the New Testament, right?

Conversion, Sanctification, and the Ordinary Christian Life

In conversion, we see, as Lloyd-Jones would say, the Spirit comes into the isle of a man, and there's so much warfare. There's destruction of sin on the left and on the right. And so, even in the New Testament, we see this.

We see, you know, the opportunity that we've been given in salvation, in conversion. And then, there's still that tendency that we have to be comfortable and coast. Yeah, so, conversion,.

You know, the conviction, the stripping away of the false hopes and being emptied until you look to Christ. And like Luther said, you know, it's like you're exposed. You're naked, and all your shame is there.

And then, you see Christ on the cross by faith, and you understand why He's there. And you run to Him. Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, such a picture. With the burden on your back, you run. People that don't have that burden, they're fine to stay home.

Pilgrim cannot go back. So, he goes to the cross. He goes to the empty tomb. The burden rolls off. But then, Bunyan wisely points, you know, as he takes his character through the life of a Christian and through that metaphor of a pilgrimage, you know, every page is full of dangers.

There's still an enemy. We're not saying you'll lose your salvation, but, you know, conversion's like entering the promised land. But now, we have to live with the living God. We get to live with the living God.

There will be enemies, and there are so many wonderful opportunities. And if we, like you said, if we think that, wow, now that I'm safe, my conscience is quieted by the peace that God has given me through Christ, I am right with God, and I have so many provisions in Christ, it's a good time to just kind of coast.

And then the dangers, of course, are not noticed, and the opportunities are missed.

So, we've mentioned that a few times. So, when we're talking about opportunities that are missed, what I don't want is for the audience to think like, you know, well, there's all these big things out there that if only I was a little bit more obedient, if only I was a little bit more spiritual, you know, God would give me...

It's that we miss opportunities. I actually had a conversation with a kid the other day, and we were talking about rewards. You know, this was, you know, it's a different issue, but it is related. But I told him, you know, there's a lot of things that your parents want to do with and for you, but they can only do these things if you're obeying in these other areas.

In the same way, there's opportunities that await us. There's a fellowship with God. There's spiritual conversations, and we've talked about this in a previous episode, you know, with the weight of our words and with who can God trust with His words.

God gives words to those whose lives are weighty and who are trustworthy. So we miss out on those opportunities. We never see the opportunities because we're not living carefully. Is that...?

Yeah, I think, I can think in my own life, a couple of months ago, going to get my hair cut and sitting with a guy who cuts my hair, and he has recently been baptized, and he's really open to talk about good things.

But I was kind of, you know, down in the dumps and distracted, and, you know, and so spiritually looking for something to think about other than the serious things of life. And so I was sitting in the chair, and he was cutting.

Instead of talking about what he'd been learning about Christ, where he's been reading, you know, any questions he has, you know, we just talked about cars or chess or whatever it was we liked at the moment.

And then I went home, and I felt really convicted. You know, you had a chance to speak to him. And I don't mean that every conversation has to be religious, but I had a chance that I knew it was there, that I could speak about things that are eternally valuable in a way that was natural and would be welcomed.

But instead, I kept the conversation in these shallows because I didn't want to have to deal with real things at the moment. So, you know, it's those kind of opportunities, things, what God might have done through you had you been walking with him, things you might have noticed, words that could have been said, you know, at the right time in the right way that would have been used by God to do good, witnessing.

But it isn't just evangelism, you know. It can be so many other things.

It's even spiritual counsel. I mean, if someone is coming to you, you see a person in stress, you see a person who may be, you know, down in the dumps like you were just talking about. One, it is the one who is walking with the Lord who I think does have better eyes to see those things.

I think the Lord shows that. But it's also the difference between being able to give counsel to someone in a way that the world does and giving counsel in a way that the Lord does. Yeah.

So we don't want, as Christians, we don't want to be guilty of the same sin. And that is not being gripped by the significance of the common events or of the here and now just because they're not particularly religious events or just because they're not big crisis moments.

And so if we're going to do that, I think there's some applications we can mention. One is, it is true, especially in the early days of a thing that choices made in the early days because they affect all the choices that follow, they have a greater impact, far greater than perhaps we expect.

They're not the only choices that matter. Thankfully, we can be far along in our Christian life. We can be toward, you know, in our silver years, you know. And we can still, at that moment, by the grace of God, choose to walk with Christ, choose to repent in areas where we've been careless and God can use it.

But much better from the very first to set a course that's careful and not a course that's careless. So, for example, marriages, you know, we get married. Look, we generally think it's all about us. I'm going to be happy because this person is the right kind of person.

And maybe we go a little further and we think, I want that person to be happy. It's not just me. I want them to be happy. But perhaps we forget. I know we officially say it, but perhaps we forget that the way we treat each other every morning when we wake up has to do with more than our happiness.

We have opportunities and to take advantage of, dangers to guard against in a marriage. We want to walk with the Lord together in such a way that God uses our little marriage as a part of the unfolding of His kingdom, you know, and the display of His glory.

Like Ephesians 3 talks about, where the whole church, that is every individual believer, is a part of this tapestry or this panoramic picture of God's glory and it's unfolding. He's pulling back the curtain and the angelic beings are seeing realities about God.

The universe is seeing things about God it's never quite seen before through His activity in His own people. Year after year, century after century, little homes, palaces, it doesn't matter. So, getting our feet on the right course, making decisions carefully at the beginning of a marriage, when we have children.

A church plant, you know, a new job. You walk in, nobody knows you at the new school. Well, who do you want them to think you are? You know, what identity are you going to present? You're the cool person, you're the hardworking person, you're the easy to get along person, you know, get along with.

You're the funny person, you're the moral person. What if you walk into a room where nobody knows you and you're going to have to work with them maybe for many, many years and the only thing that's impressive about you is that you're a person that Christ has loved and that by His grace, you do love Him back.

So, early choices affect everything that follows. But that's not it. I mean, think about the issue of sacred and secular. We mentioned that before. So when you think of that, when you read what Tozer says in his book, The Pursuit of God, and one chapter is devoted to this,.

No Sacred-Secular Divide in Christian Vocation

How would you apply that to your life, Teddy? How would you apply that to a normal life, the danger of a sacred, secular divide? What's he talking about? Yeah, I mean, I think that in the heart of it, it's just, okay, so for me, I think more in the realm of just what I'm doing right now, what I'm working on.

And so, I mean, I love my job, and so a lot of what I spend my time thinking about is my job and what I get to do here. And even though it is a, we'll call it a Christian ministry, but the reality is it's so easy for me to be sitting in front of a computer, editing a video, and thinking, okay, this is work time.

And I am just doing work things because it's work time, and I have to accomplish work tasks. But the reality is that is work for the Lord, to the Lord, to the glory of the Lord. Now, my wife, to use her as an illustration, when she is picking up the same toy or looking for the lost sippy cup for the 10th time today, and those really good ones that you find that had milk in them two weeks ago, and you find them under the couch, all of those things are to be done to the glory of the Lord because there's not a wasted opportunity from the Lord.

He redeems all things. He uses all things. And He is using all of those for the glory of His Son, for the sanctification of His people, in Romans 8, for our good, to conform us to the image of Christ.

All of Life as Holy to the Lord

Yeah, so, in the Old Testament,.

The popular passage, Zechariah 14, verse 20 and 21, you know, the Messiah's coming, the king will rule, and part of that great rule, we find, is that even the ordinary things of life, and in verse 20 and 21, it talks about the bells on the horse harnesses and the pots in your kitchen.

So the bells on the horse, on the harnesses of the horse, etched into those bells would be the phrase holy to the Lord. And the pots and pans in your kitchen will be as holy in God's eyes as the bowls on the altar in the holy place of the temple.

And it's a wonderful, simple picture. And it's not that nothing is holy now. You know, it's all not holy. There's no special building. There's no special holy of holies on earth. There's no special priesthood in that way.

So everything is just kind of leveled. That's not it at all. It's the opposite. It is that since the believer has been bought by the blood of Christ and we have been separated unto Him, placed into Him by faith, by the Spirit, working through faith, now everything can be devoted to Him and all can be holy.

And that gives great significance to every moment. You mentioned picking up the toys. I remember reading the little account by the monk, Brother Lawrence. And of course, we don't endorse everything that Brother Lawrence might have preached, but he's been dead for 400 years.

And his little book does give an encouraging picture of living unto God. And he talks about bending down and picking up a piece of straw off of the sidewalk of the monastery. And he said, I learned to do even something like that for the love of God or I wouldn't pick up the straw except for love to God.

I wanted to do that. And he eventually felt that working in the kitchen or working as a cobbler, making shoes for the monastery, he felt that that was, that could be as much an act of worship as their special monk routine of prayers or singing.

So it's not that worship is brought down or praying is brought down and gathering of believers is brought down to the normal. It's that every legitimate action in the Christian life can be an expression of love to God.

It can be an act of worship.

Ordinary Tasks, Extraordinary Significance

Well, I mean, in my mind, I think of it as the same way as if you were to be, you know, doing something simple like cooking a meal, right? I am not a great cook. You would not want to come to my house if I was tasked with cooking dinner.

But I do know that there have been multiple times, a perfect example, Jeremy Walker, a couple years ago, came to visit the church. He came and he taught our men. He spoke at the church a few times, but he came over for dinner.

Now, Jeremy is a dear friend of ours at Media Grate, and over the years, he's become a very dear friend of mine. So when he was here, we had him over for dinner, and my wife made a dish that she calls red beans and rice.

Now, it's not typical because it's not soupy. It's real dry. It's really good. It's one of our favorite things to make. It was a normal, ordinary dish in our home, but it was made extraordinary because of who was coming to have it with us.

And I think in the same way, it's the little things that we do that are the ordinary things that we do, but they're made extraordinary because of who does them with us or who we're doing them for. Yeah.

My wife, Misty, for a longest time, in the bathroom,.

She had a sticky note that was on the mirror, and so I would see it, and it would say something like, live in His presence. Do all right now for the Lord. So whatever we're doing right now, do it as unto the Lord, whether you're brushing your teeth, combing your hair, getting dressed, or whether you're preaching.

And I remember reading a book many years ago, and I can't quote it exactly. I'm not sure the title of the book, but the author said that the humble man can see God in the little things of the Christian life, but the arrogant man only sees God in the big crisis things, the big super spiritual things.

The humble man sees that all the common events of my day, these are like a thin veil, and behind that veil, I recognize, in a sense, a shadowy, but I recognize the hand of God working. That is my Savior ruling in and through and over all things, and I'm allowed to be a part of that, to live with Him, by Him, for Him, in Him.

And so the present moment matters. And I think also we can kind of pull this all together. Like for the Jew, the Christian can be delivered from the carelessness of misunderstanding the present moment's significance.

We can be delivered from that if we can step back and realize that what God is doing in our lives and what He has done and what today, this present moment is for, has, okay, it is happening to us, but it is about something so much bigger than us.

So think about personal sanctification. If you think of growth as a Christian, personally, if your view of the purpose of that is to reach a certain place where you feel satisfied with yourself, you know, you look in the spiritual mirror and you think, well, look, I've quit doing those things and I've started to add some of these things and the people in the church have recognized that and, you know, my wife's mentioned it or my kids notice it and, you know, that's a very satisfying thing and I feel like this is a good place to go ahead and coast because you forget that even your personal sanctification, becoming more like Christ in your behavior and thoughts, that is part of something much bigger than your personal satisfaction.

I mean, it's a part, for example, of God's promise to His Son that Christ would be given a company, a great company, a kingdom of sinners that He saves who would all be conformed to His image. They would all look like Him at the end of time or that Christ would present you to the Father complete.

So your personal sanctification is about more than you being happy with your growth and feeling like you're doing well. It's more about the Father's faithfulness to the Son and the Son's faithfulness to the Father and how your growth in Christlikeness is a part of something much bigger.

Think of our involvement with other church members, other Christians around us, maybe not just in your local gathering but other believers. You helping them is more than just about them thinking, you know, that person, they're a really great Christian, you know, they'd give you the shirt off their back.

So no, it's about something bigger. The whole body of Christ coming to completion, growing into the measure of the stature of Christ, Paul says in Ephesians. All of that is a part of the glory of Christ across this world.

It becomes a billboard to the world like Israel should have been. The church ought to be a place where people can see the purity of God and the goodness of God in our happy, obedient lives. And so, helping other believers walk with the Lord is much bigger than just us being good people or witnessing.

You know, wherever you look, if you're stopping short of where the Scripture says you should stop, you know, if you're stopping before the finish line, a good question for us to ask ourselves is this, why?

Have I forgotten the big picture of what my life is a part of? Have I looked at the big kingdom of God and said, wow, I understand that in light of my salvation. Like, my salvation is the big thing and the kingdom of God is this thing that fits into my life.

Like, Jesus fits here and peace with God is here and, you know, and wisdom to know how to help my kids as they grow up. Well, that's a little peace right here. So God fits in my life and I'm grateful for Him.

But that's the completely wrong view. It's like getting the telescope flipped the wrong way and God looks tiny and He fits in your big life and you're thankful. But if you put it correctly, then your life is significant.

But not because you're so big, but because your tiny life is part of something everlastingly big, immeasurably big and important. Your life is connected to the glory of the triune God forever. And so, if you're stopping in any area that you shouldn't stop, is it because, like Israel, you know, you're viewing your Christian life and all your goals and aims are all orbiting you, your comforts, your sense of security, your plans.

Or, are you pressing on imperfectly, but all the way to the end because you see that your little life is part of something so much greater and you don't want to become careless. You don't want to be open to enemies and you don't want to miss the opportunities to live unto God in the common moments today because it's a part of that big thing.

Unless you be discouraged because you hear this and you think, that sounds wonderful,.

The New Testament Letters and the One Thing We Do

But I don't know that that's for me. That's the promise for every believer. That is what God says His desire. If you want to know God's will for your life, that's it. And He answers that for those who bring the question to Him.

God, how do I live like that? God gives you everything you need. And the New Testament,.

Especially the New Testament letters, I mean, they're not more important than any other place in the Bible, but the New Testament letters are particularly written to baby Christians, people who grew up in pagan homes.

I don't know what a Christian marriage might look like. I don't know what a Christian dad or mom should look like. I don't know what being a Christian brother or sister or daughter or son should look like.

I'm not sure what a church should look like. I'm not sure what a Christian's work ethic looks like. All of those things are explained in those New Testament letters where Paul takes you back to what the Old Testament was telling you, back to Christ's life and teachings, and he makes it, he brings it all the way down into those very practical areas.

Well, maybe we can close with a quote by Sinclair Ferguson a few months ago. You and I were headed to Canada, and we were looking at the theme. I was teaching and you were filming a part of that up there.

We were with some missionaries in Canada, and we were looking at the theme of union with Christ, and I listened to a series of sermons by Sinclair Ferguson as I wanted to hear what he said about it, and they were very clear.

So, you know, I'm always amazed at how clear and simple and direct he can be, but not shallow. But in one of those talks he said this. He said, Becoming a Christian, I wish I had a Scottish accent. You know, I won't even pretend it.

We'll have to do a lot of cuts if I try. It always comes out like Hindi or something. All right, so in his Scottish accent, he said that when we become believers, we go from doing a thousand things to one thing, but we do that one thing a thousand ways.

So it's not like we don't do all the ordinary things anymore. You know, I still have to get up and go to work. I still have to pay bills. I still have to mow my lawn. I still have to fix things in the house when they break.