The Way to Enjoy God

Apologia Studios

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00:14

What's up? So, uh. What are we talking about? Yeah, no, I got some,

00:19

I got an idea. Got some stuff? So, this maybe will get into a broader discussion. Where I first learned about you,

00:25

I read Notes from the Tales of World. Okay. Yeah, and, okay, very few books have

00:31

I ever stopped and like put down after like a page just to sit and digest for like an hour.

00:38

Because it was so beautifully written and it was just such a powerful, it was a powerful like demonstration of sort of the types of things your dad says all the time.

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The things I try to say a lot about Christ and the biblical worldview and God. Christ and his

00:55

Lordship, like impacting every way that you think and you view the world. So, what I was talking to people about, especially today, especially homeschool conventions.

01:03

It's worldview, worldview, worldview. But it can start to seem kind of dry and like tasteless because it's just, you need to learn the biblical worldview and this is the way things operate.

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But you had this way of describing it that I was like, that's legs on everything that I'm saying.

01:19

So, I got the movie, I bought the film. And so, good marketing, like, you know, book, convince people to get the film.

01:26

Supposed to go the other way, but it's okay. Yeah, yeah. So, then we did it in church. Actually, in our small groups, we actually had people go through Notes from the

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Tales of World, the movie, and sit and talk about it. And it was really transforming for a lot of people because we're like, wow, like all of life.

01:42

Yeah, everything. Everything connects to God and should impact the way that I think about the world. So, I just want you to talk about that just for a second.

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I want you to talk about how, okay, here's why I wanted to ask you. And I didn't even know this was happening right now. So, this is pretty great.

01:54

Like, I just learned that we're gonna talk. So, this is what I've wanted to ask you for a while. Your dad has preached on this stuff for a long time.

02:03

He's impacted a lot of people, a lot of pastors. Like, your dad has had a lot of influence in really helping us to see things clearly and then communicate that to others.

02:10

But you're his son. And so, here's what I want to tell you. This is one thing I said to my wife. I'm like, if you want to see the fruit of what

02:17

Doug is saying, look at this kiss. Right? Wisdom, Jesus says, is vindicated by our children.

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And with you, it's like, that's it. Like, there it is. So, how has all of that been able to take root in your life so you can actually write about it, talk about it, and live it?

02:37

That's a pretty tough question. I mean, it's a big question because I didn't know how strange my upbringing was for a really long time.

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And it wasn't until adulthood that I was actually coming to really experience other people's, and I had friends.

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I could see how my friends were being raised. My friends were going through the same school I was and the same training I was, so there wasn't nearly as much difference.

03:02

But out there, I started to run into a couple different things. Basic failure to actually mean what you say with every aspect of your life.

03:15

So, my dad has always been joyful. And so when you're preaching a gospel of joy and release and freedom, and you're not joyful, you're an angry man, there's a basic contradiction.

03:28

So, I managed to grow up without ever seeing my father get angry. Really? And by that,

03:34

I mean, like, lose his temper. Okay. So, I've never seen my father lose any kind of self -control, ever.

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Like, in my lifetime. Wow. So, I've seen him hit hard. I've seen him make decisions. I've seen him choose to be angry at something because it's the biblical response.

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But I've never seen any kind of loss of self -control. I've never seen him worry. You know,

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I've only ever seen him be joyful and be at peace that he's moving in faith. And as he does, that God will bless it and do what

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God wants to do with it. So, when he told me God's in control, when he told me this is

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God's world, it was never a question of whether or not he meant it. And I think there's a lot of times people,

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Christians especially, it's easy. Now that I'm a parent, I can see how easy it is to tell your kids things when you're trying to talk yourself into it.

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You know, instead of you explaining to your children why it is that you live the way that you live, you're catechizing yourself more than them.

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And so my dad was very clinical in showing me how to assess worldviews and break them apart, but he also was very, very incarnational in showing me how to live them and how those worldviews are lived.

04:47

So what was more important to him than, but basically I think a lot of people who do worldview analysis, what you were just talking about with homeschool and worldview analysis, it's kind of like an insect collection.

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It's like pin it to a board, like hedonism. And you pin it to the board and you put it in the box and then you get an

05:06

A from your mom. But what is the incarnational manifestation of hedonism?

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That was far more important. And for my father, being able to look at the incarnational manifestation of a worldview and then back it out to the architecture, to the skeleton of it and attack that, attack the architecture.

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But also be able to attack the incarnation because a lot of good educators and good worldview

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Christians think that everybody's motivated by logic when no one is. So when you encounter incarnate hedonism and you think,

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I'm going to go to their logical route, it's not why they are a hedonist. Like the logic of it has nothing to do with it.

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The logic of it is just rationalization after the fact. So I think I was eight or 10 years old when I first watched

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MTV with my dad. We'd sit there and he'd curate it. But I remember watching

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Peter Gabriel music videos as a very young kid with my father saying, what is this saying? Like, what is this?

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Like, this is the artistic incarnation of a belief, of a perspective of the world.

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And so in talking through it, talking through this little stop motion music video and what Peter Gabriel was trying to say.

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But the same thing applied to watching my father. Watching him, what does it say about what he believes?

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How does it work its way out? So the Tilt -A -Whirl, man, when I sent that off, it was 3 .30

06:34

in the morning or four in the morning or something, and I was writing. I had destroyed some part of my house and so I had moved my desk into our bedroom and I clicked send and my wife kind of woke up and looked at me.

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And I was just sitting there at the computer and she asked me what I'd done. I told her I'd sent it off and I told her

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I feel like I just streaked through a megachurch. That was the sensation. I clicked send to Thomas Nelson.

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Here it goes. This raucous romp through lots of different mean what you say exercises.

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God made everything. God spoke ex nihilo. What does that mean? What does it mean right now, right this second? And taking all those little mantras and truths that Christians have, which can be great, but trying to bring them all the way into the incarnate present for people consciously so they can see and receive the world the way they say they do and the way they say they want to.

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So with Tilt -A -Whirl, I didn't think I was bringing anything to the table that was new in any way.

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That was not the goal. The goal was simply to try to gather a bunch of friends that I had in mind, very specifically, from grad school and college, and make them see what it is they actually say and receive the world as if it is in fact the kind of thing they say it is.

07:50

And because they can live as materialists, but then pay lip service to Christianity. And to try to break down those contradictions and make people be consistent.

08:00

Yeah. I don't know if that's really an answer. No, it absolutely is. No, no, good. Okay, so here's, what was exciting to me about it was, again, what

08:07

I said. It was like taking all these things we talk about in terms of like worldview and God as the center and him being the treasure to pursue.

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And, you know, like there's real meaning to that. Jesus is God and he loves us and he's forgiven us and he matters more than anything.

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And he made all this stuff. And there was a man that was, my favorite part from the film was where you do the gas station part.

08:32

It's my favorite part. You start touching the car and like, what's this made of? Because you take what are pretty specific and necessary philosophical truths and you turn it and flip it.

08:45

Because most Christians want to hang there and go, that's great. That really destroys - It's a shiny abstraction. Yeah, it really destroys like a materialist position and you start to really think about the implications and it becomes an apologetic endeavor.

08:56

And like, you know, you're really pursuing it down that line and it kind of hangs there and that's boring, right?

09:02

Yeah. And so what I really liked about Notice from the Tilted World is you're really taking the biblical worldview and you're really making it, okay, is this right to say this without sounding like overly childish and sneaky?

09:14

Like, make fun. Yeah. Like, God is a happy God and He's a

09:20

God who delights in His creation and His people and we're supposed to delight in Him. And so here's,

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I remember watching the film and it wasn't that you were being a motivational speaker. It's that you were putting legs on the biblical worldview saying, now go have fun.

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Like, go enjoy God and His creation. So I really appreciated about it, like a lot. And I've read your book about the 100

09:44

Cupboards. Okay, yeah. To my kids and everything else. And I just like what you do.

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And so, okay, so I guess what I want to ask you since I have you in front of me now is how do we do that?

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How do we do that with our kids? How do we, because you lived it with dad speaking into your life and now you have kids and now you're doing it and you're making things very beautiful and fun.

10:09

Now, how do we do that? Yeah. You know, I think it's,

10:14

I'll jump a generation back. Like hop my father and land on my grandfather. And I think one of the most important, one of the things

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I took for granted about my childhood, about my upbringing, one of the big ones was what my grandfather calls practical

10:30

Christianity. Okay. Which is things like confession of sin. So it's like getting things right on how to be in fellowship, how to keep very, very short accounts with your own sin.

10:43

Because the reason why we're not consistent creatures, consistent images of God is because we're fallen.

10:49

Like we're broken. So the reason why I could have one man say the gospel is beautiful, the gospel is ultimate beauty, and then live a very ugly life.

11:01

The reason why that's possible is because of sin. And then that picture passes on to the next generation where they see him saying something that's true, but failing to live it.

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And a failure to live what you say ultimately comes down to just weeds in the garden. It ends up being very simple work.

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Get on your knees and pull the weeds. And you know, just a lot of people have a standard for like where they make things right or where they apologize, where they confess.

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And it's way, it's just so much further down the line than it needs to be. So very short accounts, confession of sin, never fighting with my sisters.

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It just wasn't tolerated. Like the instant things got bent out of shape or the tone of voice starts to turn into a different direction, then it was immediately confronted and dealt with there before it could begin to make a man inconsistent.

11:53

So if it, I mean, that's kind of a, it's an interesting take. It's like piety, holiness. Holiness is what enables people to try to be consistent.

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And it's not to say they're perfect or they've arrived. They're confessing sin just as much as anybody else.

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But somebody over here is confessing at this threshold and you're confessing at the other threshold.

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So like you can dial it way back. We have 17 cousins now, first cousins, that have dinner at my parents' house about once a week.

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So my sisters and I and our spouses, we go to my mom's house, bring all the kids.

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There's now 17 grandkids for my parents. And my mom will put on dinner for 30 once a week.

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And one of the things that's kind of astonishing, I was just commenting on this to my dad this last week, is

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I don't remember the last time we had to intervene in a fight between cousins. When we have 17 of them in close quarters coming together and there's no yelling, no smacking, no,

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I mean, it just doesn't happen. Because the instant it starts to, the instant the seeds get planted that would take you there, it gets landed on and addressed and everybody gets back in fellowship.

13:09

So I feel like my grandfather's hyper, very pastoral, wise instruction to my father on how to stay right, how to stay right with God and how to stay right with his fellow man is a huge factor in why he was able to live a consistent life, which is why

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I could see a picture of a man who lived what he said. And that's what I want to imitate myself. So it'd be very, very easy to stop living what

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I said in Tilt -A -Whirl. It'd be super easy, like I do it all the time. You know, you start to drift, you start to forget God's presence, you start to sin.

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You become an atheist, like I say in the book. You have to become an atheist in order to sin. And it's very simple to do that.

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And you have to always be correcting. Like the car never just stays on the road by itself. There's always cliffs and guardrails.

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You could ruin your life in any given five minutes. And living one faithfully has to be done over the course of decades.

14:05

So it is really, it's kind of interesting. My grandfather's teaching on bitterness, on resentment, on envy, on how to kill those things and how to always be working on those things,

14:14

I think has been a remarkably freeing for his descendants. You know what's really cool, you think about something, is all of this,

14:23

Moscow, New St. Andrews, your dad's ministry, him getting in fights, with atheists and the worldviews.

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All of it seems so very heady. Like it's very, I gotta think about that.

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I gotta work on this. I gotta work on these three different, classical education, I gotta work on that. How do we educate and do it in the right way in music and literature?

14:45

And it all seems like it's overwhelming. This is so much. Like you walk into New St. Andrews and you're like, well, okay, I feel very dumb now.

14:51

I'm gonna go across the street and have a beer. Right? Like, you know, it's - At a bar opened by New St.

14:56

Andrews. Yeah, that's right. That's owned by them. Okay, but what I'm getting from you, and it's actually really encouraging, is that the weightier things and what really looks like convinced you to really pursue a life of delight in God was just consistency.

15:15

Yeah. Meaning what you say. Yeah. And living it. Yeah. And that's so very basic.

15:20

That goes way beyond the intellectual stuff. And it gets down to, well, what spurred me on and what motivated me was just consistency.

15:29

Like, they actually mean what they say. Yeah, and the opposite of consistency is hypocrisy. Yeah. We all know, we can all know what a big deal hypocrisy is.

15:38

Yeah. Like, wow, hypocrisy's really potent for turning people away. Yeah. But you don't think about what the opposite is for drawing people, or what the opposite is for keeping the next generation in.

15:50

And the next generation, and the next generation. So it's, I mean, we're all inconsistent. Every time we sin, it's a failure of consistency.

15:58

Yeah. And it's a lifetime journey. But it's one of those things that, it's amazing how much we fail to read any kind of story.

16:08

So if, when we don't like to judge people by what they do, we will say things like that, you know, what

16:14

I just said, that doesn't accurately reflect who I am. Mm -hmm. Yeah, it does. It reflects who you are perfectly, in fact, and who you are should change.

16:24

And we don't want to judge God by anything he does. So we want it to all be very serious, and he makes a bumblebee, and we draw no conclusions about the personality of God from the fact that he made a bumblebee.

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It's like, that's just, we just don't ever bother to connect it. So some of it's just not like we're being a hypocrite about the bumblebee, it's just we're failing to think, like failing to push it through.

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So push it to the edges, and then find those inconsistencies, those places where you say one thing and do another, and just kill him, and we just root him out.

16:56

So, and it is also funny, my dad's such a brawler. He's known as such a brawler. But it's, he's such a jolly brawler.

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I mean, he's such a merry guy, and it's funny to watch people on the other side of the country think he must be furious.

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Because they assume, anytime they ever get in a fight, they're mad. And so they project that onto him.

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When he's actually just going home and playing his guitar. And no, he didn't see their

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Twitter feed. Because he doesn't look at anybody's. So it's just, he's just playing his guitar, and writing some rap lyrics, or an old gospel tune, or just whatever takes his fancy.

17:35

I mean, we're so far behind on what he produces and what he does, even getting it out there. I think he's got probably 40 books written that aren't published.

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I mean, it's just, he's just going. He's living his life and enjoying it.

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And delighting in every aspect of it, because he knows all of it's from God, and he believes it. So that,

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I mean, that's what I'm always looking to try to imitate in him. But it is, it's really unique to watch somebody you know has a blood pressure that's bordering on dead.

18:06

You know, that's where he is. I mean, his blood pressure is just barely alive. Engage in really raucous combat, cultural combat, and how confusing that is to the opposition.

18:19

Yeah. Which enabled him with Christopher Hitchens, for example, enabled him to not ever take offense. Like when

18:25

Hitchens was needling him, or trying to get him to react, he would just really genuinely amused. Yeah. And they could become buds.