Sharing THE truth when truth is considered hate speech, with Dr. Jeff Myers

it is never going to be possible to share truth fully effectively and personally through social media social media is organized and this is a claim that I'm making but I can support it it is organized for the purpose of creating conflict and monetizing that conflict so that the social media companies can make money [Music] foreign [Music] ERS podcast where we equip Christians to identify the core beliefs of historic Christianity discern its counterfeits and proclaim the gospel with Clarity kindness and Truth Now most Americans believe that truth is up to the individual it's relative to each person rather than it being something that you can objectively know people talk about speaking my truth or living my truth but we are faced with utter chaos in our culture unprecedented levels of social conflict purposelessness hopelessness studies are showing people are more anxious than ever more depressed than ever and we desperately need to know whether or not truth exists and how we can find it Well two books have just come out one of which if you're a regular listener or viewer of my podcast you're already annoyed by because I've brought it up so many times but that's my book Live Your Truth and other lies exposing popular deceptions that make us anxious exhausted and self-obsessed it's launched week guys I'm so excited and so thankful for all of you who have helped promote the book posted about it on social media it's now out into the world and so that is very exciting but I also want to talk to you today about another book about truth that came out on the same day and that's a book called Truth Changes Everything by Dr Jeff Myers so I just got to tell you I'm going to bring Dr Myers on here in just a moment but I I get asked to endorse a lot of books right and I'm typically don't have time to do it anymore because um just if I'm going to keep up with my own Ministry I have to pretty much press the pause button on that but I wanted to I wanted to read through this one to see if it would be something that I would want to endorse because of my respect for Dr Myers Ministry we've had him on the podcast before and of course uh just curious to see what he was going to say and I was telling him before we went on the air this book uh was way different than what I expected I I think that possibly I kind of expected it to be another take on the typical apologetics building the case for truth moving on to the existence of God the reliability of the Bible there are so many wonderful books that do that and we've recommended some resources that are like that but this book is a bit different in that he's really tracing truth through history and its impact on the way people lived in different cultures in different places how truth impacted politics how it impacted plagues how it impacted so many different things throughout history and honestly it was just a totally fascinating read and so it was my honor to to be able to endorse this book that was so good so um I want to bring Dr Myers on here of course many of you know he's the president of summit Ministries which is a colorado-based non-profit organization that equips and supports the rising generation to embrace God's truth and Champion a Biblical worldview course I've been there to teach it's an amazing program if you have students in your life that you want to make sure that they get bolstered in truth and a Biblical worldview definitely consider sending them to Summit Ministries so Dr Myers welcome thank you so much for coming back Lisa I'm really looking forward to our conversation when we had our show before I think we talked about politics which is something that's very difficult to talk about without everybody getting really upset the conversation was was terrific and I'm excited to be back well a lot of my viewers really appreciated that conversation because that was pretty much the first time that I've wandered into the political sphere with this podcast in fact before that I shared with you that I had tried to kind of keep political opinions sort of out of it and it became impossible to do that because it's virtually impossible for a Christian to keep your politics separated from your theology so you helped us create that really strong Theology of politics how should we think about politics so if anybody has not listened to that episode or watched it go back in the archives it's definitely worth listening to because um Jeff has such a uh he's thought this through quite a bit and has such a great Theology of politics so check that out but I want to talk today about truth changes everything it's a great cover I like uh I like the blues and the the little uh stained glass window there that's great with the hand so um like I mentioned this book was surprising to me I it took a different approach than I possibly expected so I'm kind of curious like what led you to write this book what why now why why was this something that you wanted to say like we need this book right now well I've seen the same statistics that you've seen Elisa that we're in a tough spot in this country Americans tend to be independent and that's one of the things we we Americans appreciate about being an American but it it has led to this idea that truth is that even true truth itself is up to the individual it's not just that our rights are individual but truth itself is up to the individual and so the old idea that truth capital T truth exists and we can Discover it has given way to this idea that all we really have are truths that no one can really know anything ultimately true and so we just have our own individual social constructions and so it's truth capital T versus truths small T and we've now passed the Tipping Point Elisa that's I think one of the initial motivations for me was okay wow we're now actually to the place where the majority the vast majority of Americans now believe the truth is up to the individual and in the church which is of concern for me we've now gotten to the place where we're right on that line right at the Tipping Point where even Church attending self-identified Christians now say there is no truth out there to be be discovered I decide what is true for me right and I think we see this play out even among young people especially young people in my life who are very committed Christians they love Jesus they have you know a personal relationship with Jesus they read their Bibles and yet I think they've been conditioned by culture to say well I'm not going to tell somebody else that that's necessarily true for them and that's I think where we see the erosion of truth even making its way into the church but one of the things you do in your book that's so fun is you share examples of how quirky and really determined Christian figures throughout history led the way when it comes to things like science art medicine education politics Justice and even the idea of meaningful work which was a fascinating topic as well can you share a couple of your favorites you know obviously there's there's many of them in the book because you go all through church history but can you share a couple of those quirky figures that really demonstrate how truth changed the way people thought about things and really affected the world oh these are stories I love to tell and a lot of them haven't been told before which is one reason I was really excited to write this book but the you know the basic the basic question I had to deal with is should I just write another book refuting relativism should I write a book you know defending how we know there is such a thing as truth and I decided what would happen if people who really lived as if Jesus is the truth um live that out in every aspect of their lives and it turns out the world we have is that world because that's exactly what Jesus followers did uh one of my favorite stories that I told in the book there's a chapter on Art there's not a lot on Christianity in the Arts to be honest there aren't very many books on that there aren't too many people who've thought through how you relate your faith to the world of the Arts and so I tell the story of Antonio Vivaldi and he was a composer it was actually a priest but he wasn't very a very good priest because he was constantly distracted by wanting to write music in fact at one point he was conducting mass and just left right in the middle to go write music and then came back a little while later and finished the mass his fellow priests were not amused by this uh they they said this guy he's can't be a priest we can't we can't have him here and his head of the diocese and you'll appreciate this as a musician he said Vivaldi cannot be in his right mind because he is a musician it and it was it was a it was a conflict for him I I've been called to the ministry but I'm really a musician how do I take those two things and put them together well he became a composer for Orphans there was an orphanage in Venice at that time called the hospitality de la pieta and there were thousands of children who had been dropped off many of them had physical deformities many of them had were born into from a mother who was in prostitution and didn't want to take care of the child so they were dropped off at this orphanage they were all fed clothed trained the boys could be released at age 16 to go get jobs but what about the girls in that particular period in history young women had no prospects unless they could get married and these young women had no ability to get a dowry which means they couldn't be married so Vivaldi turned them into the finest orchestras and choirs in all of Europe they became famous all throughout Europe and what's especially cool Elisa to me is that Vivaldi became a better composer because he had so much composing work to do to keep all of his orchestras and choirs busy you know a concerto is a orchestral piece that features a solo instrument Vivaldi wrote 500 concertos that we know of this is the equivalent level of difficulty of writing a book he wrote 500 that we know of in fact in one six year period of his life he wrote a concerto on average every two weeks and therefore he became known as the founder of the Baroque Period of Music along with Johann Sebastian Bach I always thought that was a fascinating story he didn't see a conflict between his call to be a Christian and is called to be a musician and in fact he used it in a way that gave purpose in meaning and a vocation to young women who otherwise would have no hope I love that story it's one that I had not heard before in fact many of the stories in this book I had not heard before I was particularly intrigued by how you talked about the plague and when you start to describe what truth actually is you you go back to the plague talk about that a little bit why you chose to start that way well it the as I was writing the book of course we were dealing with covid in in the United States and around the world and lots of people were affected by this economically uh millions of people sadly passed away so we were familiar with the idea of rapidly spreading disease in our time and I thought I wonder how people in the past dealt with this because I remembered having heard in my history classes about the black death how many people had died and it turned out it was probably the greatest Calamity to ever befall Humanity a third to a half of the people in many European cities passed away from this and the most gruesome way possible and you would think Elise if there was any time in history where people would have said clearly God has abandoned us we're going to abandon him that would have been it but that isn't what happened instead people who loved Jesus and believed that Jesus is the truth and I should just make a parenthetical note here that's really the key to it the Christian claim is not just the truth exists as a set of logical propositions or that it exists as a mathematical model that accurately describes reality it's that truth is a person it's Jesus that's what people brought into this situation so Catherine of Siena for example who's not widely known by a lot of Protestants our Catholic friends would know very well who she is there's a feast day named after her but she was one of those who said look if you if if you want to be with Jesus Jesus is sitting with the suffering so you go sit with the suffering and you'll be with Jesus it was a fascinating difference between her and the medical authorities of her day who were so unnerved by the plague that anyone who had the means fled but Catherine and many others who were Believers stepped into the situation rather than trying to escape from it and they became the ones who really ministered and it changed everything the church because the Civil governments fell apart the church became the ones to step in and say you know we need to have a program of quarantine just the 40 idea of 40 days of Moses and of Jesus in the wilderness the idea of a quarantined 40 days came out of that they said we need to have sanitation programs we need to have health care to take care of people all those different things that became really the basis of our modern medical system were started by Christians who said it is not true that God has abandoned us he is here with us suffering with us yeah that's really put putting your money where your mouth is you really have to believe that's true in order to stay in a in a situation like that that was such an impactful story and now you've talked about Vivaldi and and the Christian influence in art talk about maybe the influence in science you tell several stories about the the Christian influence in the world of science and how truth relates with that well it's it's so incredible because people believe there is a battle between faith and science that faith is something that's unproven you know as Mark Twain said you know faith is believing what we know ain't so and that's what a lot of people think trust the science people say this kind of thing all of the time but our science and Faith really at odds well the more I studied it in history the more I realized it was actually people of Faith who gave us science as Rabbi Lord Jonathan sacks who was a Jewish leader in London passed away a couple of years ago said science takes things apart to see how they work religion puts things together to see what they mean and so there wasn't a conflict there and as it turns out when you go back in history you see all of these people who they didn't see any kind of conflict at all Nicholas Copernicus was teaching a study on apologetics and wanted to be able to reliably prove the date of Easter so he started doing some astronomical calculations and realized that the Earth revolves around the Sun and our whole understanding of the solar system came out of his teaching what was the equivalent of a Sunday school class you have people like Leonard Euler who was a mathematician and a logician he was so brilliant and discovered so many things that people in that field To This Day joke that if you discover something Euler's probably already discovered it and and so you just name it after the first first person after a Leonard Oiler to have have discovered it but when you look back at his writings you realize he believed that his work in mathematics and logic was a response to God's call that you you start with you start with if you want to do science you have to first of all believe that the world is real you have to believe that it's predictable that an experiment you do at time a in an experiment you do at time B are in the same world which is not something you could have derived from most of the Greek philosophy or or Eastern theologies you would arrive at it if you believed that the world's design because there's a designer that there is a law because there is a law Giver well of the 52 individuals who founded modern science Elisa only one of them was an atheist I never heard this no one ever told me this at College they all gave me the impression that if you want to be a good scientist you pretty much have to leave your faith at the door the opposite was true in fact John Lennox from Oxford University says that two-thirds of the people who have ever won the Nobel Prize and science list Christian as their affiliation wow it was Jesus followers who led the way in science and there's so many other great examples there's one American Precious uh a woman who's a brilliant scientist her name is uh uh Gladys and she's Gladys West is her name and she she's the one who did all the mathematical calculations to develop GPS none of us would be able to get anywhere without Gladys West because he was asked do you have faith she said I don't even remember a time when Jesus Christ was not at the center of my life Wow that that's so fascinating to me especially in light of um so this week during our home school with my 14 year old daughter um we kind of took it we're doing a Bible curriculum but we took a break from it this week to do something a little different and what we did was watched a debate between our friend Frank Turek and famous atheist Michael Shermer and so I'm kind of having my daughter analyze the debate you know what was Frank's strongest Point what was Michael's strongest point you know what were the best rebuttals and we're just analyzing the debate and it's very interesting to me that at one point you know you just mentioned this idea of trust the science and and that's something that people say a lot in our culture and it was interesting because even the atheist Michael Shermer in this debate said science is always getting things wrong like he made that point that science is constantly getting things wrong that's why we have to go back to the drawing board and make a new hypothesis and you know gather more evidence and scientists are always getting things wrong and yet that was kind of his point was that that's why we do science we just have to that's really the only way he didn't say it exactly like this but the impression was this is the only way to really discover what's true and then he made this point he said you know what religion and of course this is all a paraphrase but he said religion really um was just like something that people kind of believed and then science started to chip away at religious belief throughout history and he was saying you know we used to think this or that about sorry like I was even just reading this is random but I was reading about the history of um Mead and the Vikings and how they used to think that when the honey water would become fermented that it was the spirits uh you know like little spirits in the world that were invigorating the the liquid and it was Odin showing his Blessing by sending these supernatural beings essentially to ferment and Bubble Up the water right and so he he would say you know they used to think that but then science we learn about bacteria and all these different things and how that all works and so that starts chipping away at religious belief and so then he said to Frank you know what you're saying is you're just trying to shove God in these gaps of knowledge that we have and really science you know if we just trust the science for long enough then science is going to have it all figured out but the picture you're presenting in your book is very different from that so I wanted to let you comment on that and see what would you say to an atheist or somebody who might say look eventually science is going to give us all the answers and we won't need this religion stuff anymore as a guy who was sort of went through the philosophy World in Academia the the thing that always bothers me when somebody says in the future this is the way it is going to be is that that's simply simply something you can't know it it just isn't uh now science I I do agree with Michael Shermer in the sense that science essentially is our way of organizing and learning from failure in the physical world uh that but it but it's not something that gives us absolute truth now uh there are scientific facts so I I think the the way I would approach that with somebody who's a non-believer is just to say what are the core assumptions of science that can be supported if you begin with the idea that nothing knowable exists you know the only the only science can deliver truth to us because how do we know you know what do we know how did the physical world even come into existence all of these kinds of things are are best understood from a Biblical worldview in the book I actually shared seven different core assumptions of science none of which you can derive from a purely naturalistic worldview all of which are derived or at least consistent in with a Biblical revelation and if you start with those things you get science if you start with naturalistic assumptions that there's that everything is essentially meaningless there's no core organizational principle there's no one doing the organizing you wouldn't ever arrive at true discoveries about the world so it's it it's difficult to to have that conversation in just a couple of minutes there aren't a lot of sound bites that you can use but it's fun to look back at the history of Science and realize um you know all of these people the father of modern the father of virtually every single science or the mother of virtually every single science that we think of today was a Believer who started with the reality of God yeah well I want to swing back around to something you mentioned earlier because it's a theme in the book and that's the difference between truths and truth I wonder if you could unpack that a little bit for us what is the difference between truths and Truth well truth capital T says that truth exists and is knowable truth when I use the term truth I mean what really is what is really real so truth actually exists and it can be discovered not perfectly but it can be discovered by us the truth's viewpoint on the other hand says truth is a social construction that no one has access to ultimate truth even if if it does exist so therefore all we have are our individual perceptions so truth says seek the truth truth says Speak Your Truth that truth Viewpoint was the classical Viewpoint the Greeks believe that the Romans believe that the Hebrews believe that it's been believed all throughout history the the Christian uh change transformation so to speak was the realization that the truth isn't just a set of logical propositions it's a person and that it's very personal as well but but so there's there's a huge difference if somebody says speak your truth that's different than saying speak of the truth and illustrate it with your personal experiences to say Speak Your Truth is to say that's all that exists so you have to become more persuasive you have to get your Viewpoint across you have to assert power you have to use shame in all of the other tools of social influence to try to get people to stop talking if they disagree with you and the problem Elise is that this is actually bled into every aspect of society now people are teaching mathematics saying well you know if you make claims such as there are correct answers to these questions then you're you're being ethnosed Centric you're right you're you're being racist or you're being uh you're being a capitalist pig or whatever you know that but it's actually being taught that way uh people are saying things in the political space Stanley fish who's scarily enough a professor of the First Amendment at a law school says you are entitled to your own facts if you can make them stick wow well if that does that mean just just persuading enough people to go along with it is that what you mean you can persuade enough people to go along with you then you are right wow so of course you wouldn't want to have the first amendment that guarantees the freedom of speech if that is correct because your whole goal is to gain power and not so it reminded me of a lot of the the warnings the prophetic warnings that I remember hearing from 20th century Scholars like will Durant who said uh the country is never destroy captured from without until it has destroyed itself from within and Peter um Sorokin said if you give up the idea that there are absolute truths all you have left is physical Force now think about that for a minute we have a cancer culture the goal is to ruin people destroy their reputations shame them make sure their voice is not heard why would we think that's an acceptable social response because we believe that anyone who claims to know the truth other than the idea that there is no truth as a truth anyone who claims to know that is just trying to gain power they need to be shut down because we want the power we don't want them to have it yeah and that's something we see all over our culture right now in fact I talk about that in my book how it's the infection of critical theory from the higher you know Academia into the wild it's just in the wild now to where truth claims especially when they would be made about things like religion and morality you don't ever see people well I shouldn't I shouldn't exaggerate of course there are conversations happening where people are rooting it in truth but typically on social media what you're going to encounter as a Christian if you make a truth Claim about a religious idea or what but what might be morally right objectively for everybody a morally right or wrong um very often and this can be confusing for Christians you might find yourself um with somebody commenting but they're not interacting with the claim you've made they're trying to figure out the power Dynamic like why what who are you trying to control by saying this what's what's happened in your past that what trauma have you gone through that makes you think this way because as you've just articulated our culture has come to interpret truth claims especially with morality and religion to be power grabs and and I think that that for me was like a light bulb moment because I would make certain statements about Progressive Christianity or something that's unbiblical or something that is not in line with the historic Christian worldview with Progressive Christianity and if progressives came on my blog comments or maybe on the Facebook page or something uh it was it's very it's very rare that somebody will actually say I think you're actually wrong about this and here's my reasons right it's really more like oh you're just trying to uphold white supremacy or you're trying to do this or that and it's it's incredibly frustrating because it's like rather than answering the claim there's this psychoanalysis that starts to go on which can be kind of exhausting so I'm glad you brought that up because that's an important thing for Christians to be aware of all right we've all become amateur psychiatrists at this point we all think that we have the capability to discern what is right or wrong about somebody else's motives right and that's the that illustrates the point that I'm trying to get at when I have conversations with people about this I just try to start with okay what are the things we can't agree on so let's say for example we we can agree that there are scientific facts yes science is always learning yes science fails a lot but there are certain things we've established for instance if I were to say to a person water boils at 212 degrees Fahrenheit at sea level uh it would not be an appropriate response for that person to say oh well keep your opinions to yourself you know that that wouldn't be an appropriate response an appropriate response would be well it depends on the atmospheric conditions and so forth but it wouldn't be appropriate to say that's an opinion keep it to yourself same similarly if you had a historical fact so Martin Luther King was shot on April 4th 1968 it would not be appropriate for someone to say well you know in my culture it's different no because we know that we've established that it's a historical fact in the same way there are moral facts so if I were to say statement a it is good to care for abandoned puppies and statement B it is good to torture abandoned puppies we know there is a meaningful difference between those two statements we can't just say I use words however I want no we know there's a meaningful difference and what what is always interesting to me you mentioned Progressive Christianity is that there's this constant focus on Justice that's unjust this is unjust you know we need to be pursuing Justice hold on a second if truth is entirely up to the individual Justice does not mean anything it is it's a meaningless concept if we try to use it in any objective sense it's only in a world where there is such a thing as truth that we can discern that Justice even takes on meaning as a concept so that's where I start with people in conversations and sometimes it resolves and they say oh okay I think I get what you're saying when I'm saying speak my truth what I'm really saying is I want my opinions to be heard and taken seriously right well yes I want your opinions to be heard and taken seriously as well but we've got to be careful of the language we use yeah because we're we don't want to Grant assumptions that we don't hold to well you just mentioned the conversations that we have and I know that this I it's it's interesting because I don't know if you experienced this same thing but when you put out content that has a lot of the what's you know the the the actual here's what this is here's what this is when when I go and speak in churches all the questions that usually surface in the Q a are the how questions how do I communicate this to other people how how do I help other people see these things and sometimes honestly I feel like I'm still trying to figure out that how as well but in the book you write that Christians today can breathe life into others through conversation so how does that happen yeah I I wrote a chapter on uh called uh how to speak the truth and be nice at the same time right and uh I immediately got some blowback from one of my friends who said I don't think Christians are called to be nice maybe you should have said kind or gentle and I thought oh that's probably more consistent with the way scripture talks about it but the point I'm trying to make is very simply that you don't say I'm going to refuse to talk because I don't want to offend anyone or I'm just always going to say let's agree to disagree or you have your truth I have my truth that contributes to the problem dialogue is what begins to solve it and the Apostle Paul talks about this to Timothy he says the Lord servant must not quarrel but must be gentle to everyone able to teach and patient instructing his opponents with gentleness perhaps God will grant them repentance leading them to a knowledge of the truth then they make they come to their senses and escape the Trap Of The Devil who's taken them captive to do his will that's all that's a mouthful but there's a lot there about how we can and should engage in the cultural discussions of our day so I'm teaching my students at Summit Ministries just open the conversation up I mean how many times are you in class and you get the impression that the teacher is shutting down thought that happens all the time every student I've ever worked with tells me that's exactly what's going on in my classes you cannot bring up any contrary viewpoints they are not tolerated so you'll be the one to open the conversation up say things like tell me more about that what do you mean when you use that term how did you arrive at that conclusion how do you know that's true we can use conversation and dialogue to instruct and bring truth to the surface yeah that's concept of view this is something actually I've been thinking quite a bit about I know in apologetics people are talking about the objective nature of beauty and you actually address this in your book and you give a Biblical understanding of beauty and how human sin actually twists what beauty is supposed to be into other things like Rebellion self-centeredness cruelty uh so so talk a bit about how Beauty and Truth are connected what's their relationship is beauty just in the eye of the beholder is this just something that is random and subjective or is there something more deeply rooted in truth about the concept of beauty well we all have our sense of something that we look at and say oh that's beautiful we think maybe of our design Styles I might like the living room to look this way another person might like it to look a different way we have those opinions and we we think about them in terms of symmetry and other sorts of things that coherence that we think represent our opinions and it's important to be able to say this is my opinion and this is why I think it's a valid opinion but when we're talking about beauty Elisa we're going to a deeper level now if truth is what really is the question is is beauty something that's just a surface appearance of Truth as it really is that we sort of perceive differently because we have different life experiences or is it actually part of reality and it's funny when you start looking at for example scientists who look at really incredible things I was I was quoted from an ornithologist from Yale University who said you know you look at things like the male Bower bird in New Guinea this is the this is the bird that that builds a bower arranges all little Pebbles and and berries and things like that to sort of create a pathway into his Bower and then when a female comes by he does a little dance for her you've seen you've seen this on on videos before he said you can't explain that evolutionarily he said it's there's no survival value to that he says sometimes this is his quotation that I put in the book sometimes the outcomes are merely decadent in other words it's just Beauty for the sake of beauty that that exists uh it's it's interesting musicologists have looked at this there was a huge Harvard music project where they they took musical clips that they gathered from all over the world thousands and thousands of them and they put it all together and realized there is an essential Unity to the idea of Harmony that musical forms though different in the world have the same core pieces all put together and I which I thought was fascinating too because you know the old scientists used to talk about the Music of the Spheres that people people in Past Times had a much clearer sense that the beauty that we observe isn't just inside of us it's actually out there and we're privileged to be a part of it in our observation rather than our observation being the thing that gives meaning to everything else yeah wow well I I love thinking about that and you dive into that in your book um so well and explain that so well you also share 14 uh ways to practice speaking up in a way that builds trust and this is I think what is so difficult for so many Christians right now because it seems like I know that I receive emails from people that just feel so overwhelmed with trying to communicate on social media or they might post something that's their opinion and they just get attacked and it can feel like just this uphill battle but but you talk about communicating in a way that builds trust can you just give us a couple of those maybe just highlight what you think are the the most important ones or um that people could use in a practical way even today in their in their Communications online and and in person with people in their lives yeah well in this chapter true changes everything I'm smiling because I if if what I'm about to share helps you as much as it helps me this will be worth the entire episode it is never going to be possible to share truth fully effectively and personally through social media social media is organized and this is a claim that I'm making but I can support it it is organized for the purpose of creating conflict and monetizing that conflict so that the social media companies can make money and we now know that this is true the algorithms are set up in such a way that posts that Express indignant disagreement receive two and a half to three times more exposure than other posts so you it the more personal the better back in the 1960s a psychologist named Albert morabian looked at how we communicate and he found that 55 of our communication is through our posture and facial expressions 38 of our communication is through our tone of voice only seven percent of our communication is through words wow 93 depends on you being incarnational you being present with other people when you're talking about things that are really especially things that are really tough this is why it's a really bad idea to have an argument with someone through text messaging because you cannot bring most of the communication gifts that you have to bear in that context I used to teach business students in an MBA program as when I was a professor and my students would they would come in and have 15 to 100 people who were their direct reports while they were all you know they were still in school getting their masters of business administration and I would tell them choose the most personal option every time so if you if you can be there in person if you can't make a phone call if you can't do that then maybe use email but text messaging would be your last resort email would be your second to last resort and they found that that transformed the way they LED you know email's a good example if when I tell my team look at your what you need to respond to if you if if it would take you longer to write the email then make the call choose the more personal option and it really feels like if we could get away from the idea that what happens in social media has to be reality for all of us and come back to the idea that you know most of the time it's not going to be that way we can't we can't allow this platform that's been set up in this way to dictate how we're going to engage with others support what you're saying so I'm currently researching and writing a book on deconstruction and as a part of the research early on my co-author Tim and I had a few Zoom meetings with people who have big Platforms in the deconstruction space so not everybody agreed to talk to us but there were a few who did and what was really fascinating is that even as hard as I try to be who I am all the time online I I always I always try to Endeavor a very very intentionally to communicate online as I would face to face and but even so they had an impression of me maybe based on what other people had written or maybe what they had heard and then I had an impression of them based on their platforms and when we got to like on the zoom looking into each other's faces I'm just thinking like this is such a nice guy this is a really nice guy and then I even had one say you're a lot different than I expected you to be and it's it's and he even commented isn't it funny when you just put down the walls of what your platforms might be you know saying back and forth and just talk to each other face to face bringing that human element into it and and we had delightful conversations with people in the deconstruction space so it's it is really I think what you're saying is really true and I think we all deep down know it that when we do just take that extra step to communicate in person looking into the eyes of each other it just goes so differently doesn't it yes it does yeah we can never underestimate the value of having a cup of coffee or a pint together or just talking about it but the another fact that I that I talk about briefly in the book that uh it wouldn't be widely known because we're just starting to get the word out we've done a lot of research in polling at Summit Ministries to understand our cultural moment and what we've discovered through National polls is that only about five to eight percent of people in this country are real jerks about five five to eight percent and what I mean by a real jerk is they they believe that the best way to solve conflicts is to cut other people out of their lives they believe that people who disagree with them should have no Viewpoint that they should be allowed to express and and so forth several things like that so your chances of running into a person who's genuinely hostile your chances are very small maybe one out of 20 and even if you're in a very hostile environment such as a college campus it might be one in ten it's not very high most people say that they value they they would like to think of themselves as people who listen respectfully they they would that's the kind of people they want to be so the more personal we can make it the better but don't let your fear of coming across that one in 20 who's really upset and really cranky dissuade you from engaging intentionally with the other 19. yeah that's really good advice in a moment I want to have let you kind of encourage our audience who might feel just walloped by the chaos of culture the loss of Truth and culture the abandonment of Truth and culture but before we do that final word I want to ask you to talk about this new study curriculum that you've released through Summit of course I've been a part of at least Strobel and some others are a part of it talk about that because I'd love for our audience to be able to have access to that and it's just a great small group kind of uh discussion study talk about it what is it well we put together a course called now we live because we wanted to put into practice the things we're talking about here how do you start conversations and keep them going so now we live it's a series of six videos this is season one we just finished releasing all six of the episodes they talk about world view reality truth Jesus and society and the videos are 13 minutes long you're featured in one of them along with Lee Strobel uh John and Corey Cooper who I know are friends of yours from Skillet are featured in it Kurt Cameron Chris Brooks who's an urban Pastor from Detroit and and many others they're really compelling they they allow you to take that 13 minutes to watch a video and then a 45 minutes of a discussion so you can get together over coffee with your friends even non-believers and say hey watch this with me and let me know what you think and then you have a you have an opening to have the conversation you can also do it with small groups a lot of churches are saying this is our small group course for the fall and which is really fun on so thousands and thousands so as of yesterday it was 7 000 people have gone through this already and we just just released it but uh it's now we live now we live.com you can go there and sign up there's no charge for it all we ask is that you just invite other people to go through it with you to make sure that you're using it as a way to build a platform for truth that's great now we live.com go there and check that out so as we close out our episode today Jeff I I would just want to give you the opportunity to encourage our audience um many Christians just kind of want to throw up their hands and say look everybody's abandoned this idea of objective truth especially as it would relate to religion and morality what what would you say to Christians who believe truth is lost what kind of hope would you leave them with today truth smooth truth is most meaningful in times of crisis and we are in a time when our opportunities to speak truth are greater than they've ever been secular worldviews are leaving people high and dry when it comes to anything important the young adults I work with 75 of them say they do not have a sense of purpose that gives them meaning in life it's almost like they're wandering around in the wilderness with the compass which should help them except that they insist that the red needles should always Point toward them and that's how they'll be found but that's actually how they'll be lost so I think we've got this time and the big question we've all asked is does my life make a difference does it matter that I personally speak up for truth or that I personally engage other people and the lessons of History especially in times of Crisis that I'm sharing in the in the book truth changes everything show that you don't set out to change the world none of these people wrote that on their college application I want to change the world they just did what God had called them to do they did it Faithfully they did it to the best of their ability and they change came about these scientists didn't say I want to change the world they just said I want to be the very best scientist I can possibly be because I believe that Jesus is the truth and things changed as a result it is that everyday faithfulness that really matters well I want to thank my guest Dr Jeff Myers of summit Ministries pick up his book truth changes everything this is so great for uh you may be more well it's really great for everybody it's written in a way that's accessible for the average person um got a lot of history a lot of really cool facts of course don't forget to pick up Live Your Truth and other lies which is my new book that's uh dealing with the more Pop level influencer uh type of platforms that are promoting some of these things so look how good these look together right this is you can just that's right it's the little pair right so it's almost like our it's almost like our designers had something in mind I know look at this I mean they just like same color scheme look at those spines you know it's a good one punch yeah that's right all right so if you're again as always if you are watching on YouTube subscribing clicking that Bell icon to be notified every time we release a new video is the best way to stay informed you can also don't forget to go to alisachachilders.com and you can click the Subscribe button and that will put you on our email list we will not sell your address to anybody else or give it to anybody else but you'll we'll just keep you apprised of what's going on if new blog posts come out if new podcasts are coming out just all the things we have going on on social media of course if you see this post on social media clicking like and sharing it really helps get those algorithms going and then of course if you're listening on audio platforms going over to iTunes or Google or Spotify leaving five star reviews really helps trigger those algorithms you guys have done such a great job with that I mean I think we've got over three or four thousand reviews on iTunes which is so helpful because that tells iTunes hey we wanna we wanna suggest this to more people because obviously this is something people like so check that out and as always as we pursue Christ let's keep a sharp mind a soft heart and a thick skin we'll see you next time [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: Alisa Childers

Views: 29,294

Keywords: apologetics

Id: PWZnzA6dcs8

Length: 49min 45sec (2985 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 23 2022