Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - How COVID-19 Unveils Secular Salvation Myths

Episode Date: April 23, 2020

Most secular people don't think of themselves as religious, but COVID-19 is pulling back the curtain. Religious language and themes are making their way into pop culture, unveiling what's always been true: secularism is rooted in one of the most powerful and persuasive salvation stories every told. https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/staff/keith-simon/ (Keith) and https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/staff/patrick-miller/ (Patrick) examine this story together. Interested in more content like this? Scroll down for resources, references, and related episodes, including https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/podcasts/what-keeps-people-from-following-jesus-learning-to-follow-jesus-luke-5-27-32/ (What Keeps People From Following Jesus?) Like this content? Make sure to share it with others and leave us a rating, so others can find it too. To learn more, visit our https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/ (website) and follow us on https://www.facebook.com/TheCrossingCOMO (Facebook), https://www.instagram.com/thecrossingcomo/ (Instagram), and https://twitter.com/thecrossingcomo (Twitter) @TheCrossingCOMO. Does this panic and pandemic have you thinking about existential questions and the end of time? You're not alone. Starting April 24, https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/staff/keith-simon/ (Keith) and https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/staff/patrick-miller/ (Patrick) will be teaching a Zoom lunch Bible study on the Book of Revelations: Revelation of Everyone. https://info.thecrossingchurch.com/revelation-for-everyone-bible-study (Sign-up here) to join the discussion. Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now.

Welcome to 10 minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life and the time it takes to get to work. I'm Keith Simon. And I'm Patrick Miller. In this episode, we're going to do a little cultural examination. We're just going to step back for a second and say, what has the coronavirus taught us about ourselves, but more than just us as individuals, our whole culture. And I don't just mean American culture. I mean almost global culture. because I can't remember a time in which the whole world stopped and talked about one issue. I don't know a time in which the whole world struggled to figure out life because one little

virus has thrown all of our lives, no matter where you live, upside down. What is this taught us? What can we learn from this? I think one of the most fascinating things has been the migration of religious language out of the church into secular culture. It hit me the other day. I was watching a commercial on ESPN, and it's this incredibly hopeful commercial. I mean, it feels so life-giving, but the very last line in this commercial is this, where else, and it's talking about sports, where else can we find something to believe in? And I read it and I thought, that is religious language.

I mean, this is the kind of thing you expect to hear in a church, right? That's something you might sing in a church or hear people pray in a church or hear weird church people say on the street. Where else are you going to find something to believe in? But now all of a sudden, we're seeing it on. ESPN. It's almost as though we're admitting sports have always been a religion. Or what about the John Krasinski some good news. I love what he's doing, by the way. I find it fascinating. But think of the term good news. That is incredibly religious language. It sounds like it came out of the gospel of Mark, out of the mouth of Jesus. Good news is what gospel means. So it's interesting

that John Krasinski is proclaiming the gospel. good news in this culture in this time. But he feels this need to tell people that there is good news out there. I think it's interesting because, I mean, John Krasinski, he's a relatively big deal, but I don't even know if he's an A-list celebrity. Some good news is outperforming everything. He's outperforming Jimmy Fallon right now. So there's something about that language, some good news, about the idea of giving people good news that is connecting with not just a few people, but a massive amount of people. Sounds like the good news that John Krasinski's found is good news for his career.

So what is happening about this religious language? What do we need to learn from it? There's an article in The Washington Post by a woman named Kate Cohen, and you should go read the whole thing. It's super interesting. We'll link to it in our show notes. But let me read you a couple lines. Now, by this time in the article, you already know that she would consider herself Jewish ethnically, but not so much religiously, but is still part of this Jewish family that she grew up in.

She said, we don't need religion, but as the crisis reminds us, we still need certain things that religion can provide. We need ways to express gratitude, to face death, to comfort ourselves. We need community and ritual and dates that can't be easily deleted. We could add more, right? we need identity. We need purpose. We need hope. We need, most importantly, a story to live inside of, something that makes sense of our lives where we've been and where we're going. And that's true of all people, not just religious people. That's the whole thing about Kate Cohen. She doesn't consider herself religious, but she knows that she has these needs that she says religion can provide.

Yeah, anytime I hear an atheist admitting a need for religion, it always catches my ear. I mean, probably the same way we catch an atheist ear if I, as a pastor, started saying, actually, people have no need for God. It just seems counterintuitive. It's not what we'd expect. And as I read it, I'm sitting here asking myself the question. I mean, is secularism finding religion? Is that what's happening right now? Have they suddenly discovered religious ideas and religious language, and now they're claiming it for themselves from the church? Is that what's happening? I want to read you a quote by an Australian named Mark Sayers. He's a pastor, kind of cultural thinker.

But first, before I do that, there was a study recently that showed that the nuns in Western Europe. Now, I don't mean nuns like Catholic nuns that walk around in little habits. I mean nuns in O-N-E, those who profess no religion. That's why they're called nuns. I read the study that said that they are more religious than Christians in Western Europe. So here are these people who profess no religion who have all these practices in their life that the researchers say, are very religious. So secularism isn't just finding religion all of a sudden. The point you're making here is actually there have been studies well before coronavirus that have drawn out

the point that secular people in Western Europe, which is far more secular than the United States where we live, secular people there are actually more religious than the average religious person. So enter the Mark Sayers quote. It helps define a little bit about what we mean by secularism. He says, the story of secularism is a story which says that as the world moves away from faith and belief in God, that the world will inevitably become a better place. I think that's what post-Christianity is, and its belief in progress is a desire for the kingdom without the king. So Mark Sayers says that the secular story is a story that as we get away from religion, that's where the good life, that's where the prosperous life, that's where all the things we want, equality or social

justice, that will be found if we can move away from religion. It reminds you of the John Lennon song. Imagine there's no heaven. If there were no heaven, no religion, no Christianity, well, then things would go really well. Now notice that what that story tells us is that there's this kingdom we should all want and we should strive to make that kingdom happen here on earth, but we've rejected the king. So I want the kingdom, but I don't want the king, mainly Jesus. So what you're saying is that secularism isn't just a story. It's not just a narrative we live in about progress. It's a religious story, that at least the Christian religion has always been a religion in some senses of progress. We have a hope that one day the world will be made right, that what's wrong with the world will be undone. And secularism has kind of taken over that religious story and said, look, you don't need Jesus, you don't need God to do any of that. We can really do that on our own. And so, Now, secular people, whether or not they realize that they're living inside of that religious story of progress. And coronavirus, it's actually pulling the veil off. All of a sudden,

it's beginning to show that people who never thought of themselves as religious, when they're in the middle of a pandemic, will start grasping and grabbing at religious language to try and express what has always been there. So I think the key thing there that you just said, Patrick, is that it's always been there. In other words, the secular story is trying to meet these religious needs. That's not new in the age of coronavirus. That's just being exposed now more than ever. The secular story has always been trying to meet these religious needs that people have. For example, just take the workout community. You know, CrossFit, Soul Cycle, Peloton. They're all trying to meet needs that people have. Yeah, I have a lot of friends who do CrossFit. And I kind of

assumed it was maybe like this vein thing. You know, you're going there to look good. But as I talked to people, it became totally apparent that people weren't going there for their bodies. I mean, that's part of it. But they were going there for their bodies. They were going there for community. Because when you get inside of a CrossFit box, you have friends and people who you are seeing every day and you're going through these rituals with each other and you're getting to know each other. And it's a really robust, really deep and meaningful community. Well, just think of the name Soul Cycle. I mean, that's not about your body. At one level it is, but they're pretty overt. They're not hiding the ball on you. They're trying to address a need that your soul has.

I read an article on Pelotin. A lot of my friends have Pelotons. And I think it was in the New Yorker, but I'm not positive. But Pelotan doesn't have some piece of technology or equipment that they own, they devise, they have a patent on. Instead, what Peloton is selling is community, that you're doing these bike rides or whatever the exercise is with all these other people and you get to know them virtually. Sometimes they even meet up in cities. They've met up at the Peloton headquarters. And so what they've identified is this craving for human community around a bigger purpose.

And that used to be filled by the church. That need was met by the church. But now as the church has declined, or at least attendance at churches have declined, their people are trying to meet that same need through exercise. Now I can imagine someone listening to this who, you know, maybe you see yourself as a secular person. You'd call yourself a nun, N-O-N-E, none, not an N-U-N-N-N-N-N. And you'd say, look, the need for human community is nothing new. The church can't claim that as their own. That's not something that's wholly unique to religion. So what are some other examples? I think a fascinating

one is the way that rituals are starting to become more and more prevalent in the secular world. One of the most fascinating ones I heard of recently was the Beyonce Mass. So apparently in San Francisco, Over a thousand people streamed in to participate in the Beyonce Mass. And what they did was they sang Beyonce songs, which are actually full of all kinds of religious symbolism. And it was a way of doing something together, participating in a ritual with one another around a almost godlike icon, Beyonce. Well, I think we all realize that Beyonce's songs are filled with a lot of religious symbolism.

I read an article in the Atlantic, the one you're referring to, there's this reverend in there who said, Beyonce is a better theologian than many of the pastors and priests in our church today. Now, I don't think most of Beyonce's fans think of her as a theologian, but she is. She's communicating truths, at least the way she sees them and understands them, about God or self, us, purpose and life. She is one of the new theologians. Yeah, the church has always sung its theology, its beliefs and ideas about God. And this is a way of saying that when people are singing along with Beyonce, they are singing

a counter story, but it's still a religious story. It's fundamentally a story about maybe not how to know God. I'm sure a lot of people who were going to this had no interest in God, but it might be a story about, again, how to achieve and experience the good life, the kingdom, the world that we all want to be a part of. And it's not just Beyonce mess. I mean, there's a place called Oasis Church. It's an online atheist church where atheists get together every Sunday to experience rituals with one another. And even if you're not an atheist doing Oasis Church, all of us find a lot. ways to put ritual into our life. I mean, just think about your daily iPhone ritual. Most people I know, the first thing they do is exactly the same. It goes across culture. They roll out of bed. They open up

their iPhone and start checking email, social media, text messages, the weather. And even right there, our iPhone, this device that secularism has given us, it's given us a daily ritual that we can participate in. Please don't misunderstand. We're not criticizing any of these things, like an iPhone or music or working out. That's not the point at all. We love all those things and participate and enjoy them. What we're doing is we're just kind of examining our culture and saying here are ways that secularism is meeting the needs that religion used to. Or another way of saying it is that secularism is very religious. You can see it in even something like the way we talk about dieting. What kind of words do we use? Well, we say things like we're going to go on a cleanse.

Well, cleansing ourselves in what? Well, from impurities, from toxins, poisons. All of a sudden, it starts sounding like you're reading out of the book of Leviticus. It's crazy that this religious language has been attached to just dieting. It's not just that. I think about intermittent fasting, and I've done this myself. I don't know why we don't call it not eating for 16 hours. For some reason, we call it fasting when we're going to go 16 hours without food. And the reason behind it, of course, is to lose weight, but the fact that we attach a religious word to it, something like fasting, I think, again, it hits the point that secularism really is fundamentally religious. It's tapping into those religious longings that we have. How about this? Brands have become lifestyles.

They have begun to tell us that we belong to a certain group of people and provide a certain identity for ourselves. Think Apple or Lulu Lemon. They tell us that we are people who exercise or that we're not PC people, we're cool, we think different, we're changing the world with Apple. And instead of just providing us a product, now these companies, these brands, they provide us with an identity. They tell us who we are, who we belong to, what we value, and that is something that the church, religion used to tell us. Sports are exactly the same. I mean, you go to church every Sunday, and there's something else a lot of people do every Sunday. We're going to watch the football game. I'm a Chiefs fan, and if you're a Chiefs fan, you say you're part of the Chief's

Kingdom. Well, that language, I've used it, and still, it always strikes me as a little bit strange, because the Christian story, it ultimately leads up to the coming, the full arrival of God's kingdom. As a Chiefs fan, it's a way of saying that that hope, that fulfillment, that can actually come through sports, right? If we win the Super Bowl, the kingdom has come. Everything has happened that we'd want. And, you know, it's funny. We actually won the Super Bowl this year, and I talked to a few guys afterwards who told me what a letdown it was. I mean, they were excited. It was fun, but afterwards they're like, wow, that wasn't as fulfilling as I thought it was going to be. I thought this would make my whole year great, but it turns out it was just a

really fun night. Secularism even has its own sense of high priests. When you hear the word high priest, you think of really religious books, right? Religious communities. And you should. Read the Bible and you see that a priest stood between people and God. But secularism has its own high priests. It could be your personal trainer who stands between you and the good life of a fit body. It could be your therapist who stands between you and a clear mind. It could be your doctor that stands between you and a healthy body. Historically, pastors, priests, they've been expected to be dispensers of wisdom.

You know, you go to them and they're going to be able to tell you what you need to have a full life, to experience and live out the good life. But what Keith is saying here is that in secularism, we haven't gotten rid of pastors, we haven't gotten rid of priests. No, we call them doctors. We call them our therapists. Again, I've gone through counseling. It's been a really beneficial thing in my life, but it's fascinating. I talk to friends sometimes who will tell me, well, my therapist said X, so I can't do that. And it's funny. I'm like, well, they're just your therapist. It's not holy writ. It's not some sort of sacred. law that you can't do whatever they say that you shouldn't do. And yet that makes the point, right?

They're not just a therapist. They're a priest. They can tell you what you need to do to experience, not God, but the good life. Along the same lines, this may be kind of a silly example, but we haven't even gotten rid of holy books. Christianity, Judaism, those are two of the early religions that really look to holy text as being sources of life and wisdom. But in secularism, even though most people haven't read their Bibles and don't know much about their Bibles, we still have holy books. We call it the Oprah Winfrey Book Club. We call it the Reese Witherspoon book club. And you know that people view these kind of like holy texts because any time either of those women say, here, read this book, they become bestsellers. People are going to read them as they think, well, there's something

in these books that's going to make my life better that's going to enrich my life. I'm going to learn something. I'm going to grow in a certain way. And so I need to go read the holy book to be transformed. Secularism has a kingdom that it promised. The kingdom of secularism is usually ushered in by our political hero. It's a political kingdom, a place where the world is ordered according to what we think is right. And of course, everyone will have a little bit of a different idea of what the kingdom will look like. But we all have this sense of the right world. Maybe it's social equality. Maybe it's economic equality. Maybe it's some sort of justice issue, like creation care that you are passionate about. But your key,

kingdom is going to be ushered in by your political hero. And then we almost have this global kingdom that we talk about, where everybody works well together, like the United Nations actually functions well, that the World Health Organization is able to solve all the problems that we have like the coronavirus. So there's this kingdom that secularism promises and that it wants. And, you know, I think that in some extent, and maybe we'll talk about this in a second, but the coronavirus has exposed that the kingdom that secularism promises, ill, it just can't deliver on it. One of the greatest religious mythologies of the West is that democracy will be able to solve the world's ills. The promise, and we tend to believe this a little less, this side of, you know, the Iraq war in 9-11,

but the promise has been that if you can just get places to become democracies, then those places will become better. They'll experience everything Keith just talked about. It's interesting. If you talk to anybody in the West, we just believe it. We don't know why we believe it. But if you ask almost anybody what's the best form of government, the answer is always going to be the same. We should have democracies. That's the kingdom. That's what's going to solve the world's problems. Maybe we even see some of this in how we talk about our political opponents. First of all, we're extremely threatened by them because they are opposing or standing in the way of the kingdom that we want to usher in. And we come up with all these horrible names to call them. They are. are not just people who disagree with us, but they are the enemy. I've even seen people refer to presidents, both Republican and Democratic, as the Antichrist. This is the person who opposes all that is good in my political kingdom, the way I see it at least. I work in the church, and I think I can say this with all honesty. I have seen more conservative Pharisees and liberal Pharisees in my life than I have seen religious Pharisees. People who will assure you that

that their political beliefs are the answer to the world's ills and will show incredible self-righteousness and vindictiveness towards anybody who disagrees with them. And the whole battle between us and them, it is a credibly religious battle. Well, I think we could do a whole episode on self-righteousness. And of course, the church has often been accused of self-righteousness, and deservedly so. I mean, the church definitely has a self-righteous streak. Maybe it's fair to say that every human being has a self-righteous streak. But the conservatism and liberalism self-righteousness, here's what it leads you to do, to look down on others, to feel smug, to think those poor Neanderthals would be so much better off if they just listen to you because you've got it right,

you know what's right, you're doing it the right way, and then it produces judgmentalism and anger toward those who aren't doing it your way. Religion gives us a story to live in. That's what all religions promise. And our point here is that secularism, not just after coronavirus, but before coronavirus, has been a story, a story that is promising that through human ingenuity and technology and problem solving, we will be able to progress and create heaven on earth. That's the promise. That's the thing that we think our political solutions will lead us to. That's what we hope our dieting solutions will lead us to. That's what we hope our workout communities are going to lead us to. That's what we hope our sports teams that we love and we care about are going to lead

us to. All of these longings are deeply religious longings, and they've been met by secularism. So maybe that takes us back to the Kate Cohen comment in The Washington Post, where she said that we don't need religion, but we need all the things that religion can provide. And I think what she's doing is she's admitting that she has needs that the secular story just doesn't answer. And so almost against her will, she's turning back to religion to address some of those. All those needs were their pre-coronavirus. It's just that this virus and the way that it has shown that we're not in control of our lives and that the way that it's turned our lives upside down and literally stopped us in our tracks has put its finger on a human need and a human condition

in a way that really nothing else has. The coronavirus is crushing in a moment secular salvation myths. It is decimating all of the things that secularism promised we're going to usher in heaven on earth. Globalism promised to make everybody wealthy, right? Lift everybody up out of poverty and give everybody the things that they want and the things that they need in a finger snap and two-day delivery, maybe one hour delivery if we're lucky enough. And again, all of a sudden, that myth of globalism doing all these amazing things for our world, It's gone. Borders are closing. State borders are closing. We can't trade the way we used to. All of a sudden, I can't get an Amazon book in two days. I have to wait a whole month. Xenophobia is rising. We've seen that Asians have been targeted in the United States, but we've seen also the scapegoating of other individuals throughout the world. We've put to death this idea that government can usher in a kingdom of safety. They don't know what they're doing. It's not that they're not doing.

their best. I'm not criticizing them. I would do far worse, I'm sure. I'm just saying the idea that a particular president or a particular party is going to be your savior, probably not. I know people who before coronavirus would assure me, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that their political party, their political hero was going to be the answer to the world's problems. And those same people now are admitting to me, we're in a leadership crisis. My people don't know what to do. Your people don't know what to do. No one knows what to do, because no one knows what to expect. No one knows what's going to happen in our economy. No one knows what's going to happen in health care. No one knows. Our leaders actually have no ability to protect us from whatever's still standing in front of us.

If your high priest was your doctor, well, good luck with that, because the doctors are incredibly brave, and they're working around the clock to try to figure this thing out. But they can't control this. They can't even agree on this. You've got doctors saying, look, this is no bigger than the flu, and you've got other doctors who are saying, we're going to lose 50 million lives. You've got doctors saying the masks are indispensable, we should all be wearing them, and you've got other doctors saying, well, they might help with your anxiety, but they're not actually going to do anything for the coronavirus. The same thing goes if your high priest was your financial advisor.

Again, I have lots of friends who are giving all different kinds of financial advice, stay in the market, get out of the market. And the truth is, not a one of them knows. Not a one of them is going to be able to secure your financial future. Not a one of them can tell you, if you go this way, your 401k is going to be all right. Your retirement's going to happen whenever you want it to happen. You're not going to lose your house. You're not going to lose whatever it is you're afraid of losing.

So our secular salvation stories are all being toppled. They're being smashed. They're being crushed. If you thought your salvation was a great retirement, maybe a great 401K, that's gone. If your salvation story was that you were going to live a lot, long prosperous life. Well, that's gone. If your salvation story involved your health, well, no, if community, you can't even see people. I mean, Zoom's great, but I'm getting a little bit tired of it myself. So what we're finding is that the kingdom that was promised by secularism,

they can't deliver. What they're finding is that you can't have the kingdom without the king. The reason why it can't deliver is because secularism, despite its promise, that via technology, via human progress, we can control our world, we can control our reality. That promise doesn't work. And do you know what it takes to break the promise? A microscopic virus that no one can see. That's all it takes to unveil the truth that all the things, secularism said, we're going to bring in the good life, bring in the good world, that those were fundamentally at the end of the day, empty promises. They always have been, but now all of a sudden we're seeing it for certain. And when we look around culture and we see all this religious

language getting taken over, I think it might be the secular person's way of going into denial. Rather than doubting secularism, rather than doubting the salvation myth and the mythologies and the religion that secularism has always been bought into, rather than doubting it, we're just hunkering down. We're just trying to go all the deeper and say, you know what? We weren't actually wrong, just wait it out, and we're going to figure it out. Or maybe like Kate Cohen, they're borrowing from some of the religious practices, knowing that theirs failed. They're looking for some other story to make sense of any of it. But coronavirus in this pandemic, it hasn't just exposed secularists either, has it. It's also exposed kind of

the cultural Christianity, the kind of Christianity that thinks of itself as being Christian, maybe goes to church some, maybe votes according to what they think of as their Christian values, but doesn't really follow Jesus in a serious, meaningful way. Because what you find is that Christians are panicking, just like those who are living inside of the secular story. And that panic reveals in any person, any group, what they're really trusting in. If your hope was in the market, then by all means panic.

If your hope was in health, and you thought that doctors or medicine could deliver that, or a good workout routine or a good cleanse now and then, and you thought that that was going to deliver you the health you wanted? Well, by all means panic, because it turns out that's just not true. If you can't be happy without sports, if you can't have the good life without knowing that you can trust your doctor and everything, if that's what your life is based on, then that's shattered. It's all falling apart. And our point in saying this isn't to say that Christians shouldn't be disappointed or that we might not be grieving or concerned. No, we should be disappointed. And there

are things that we should be grieving. And we should be working for the best of our world. That's not what we're getting at. Our point is this. Our hope was never in those things. Our hope, if we were following Jesus, was always supposed to be in King Jesus and the promise that he would return, him and him alone, to make things right, to make the world that we longed for. Yeah, we as Christians, we want the kingdom. absolutely and we just believe that that kingdom can only come through the king. Jesus is the one who can fix this broken world. He's the one who can heal our broken bodies. He's the one who can give purpose and meaning and identity to us that we so badly, desperately want. He's the one who can bring about real community.

You want globalism? Yeah, Jesus does too. But that globalism comes through him and doesn't come from ignoring our sin, but dealing with our sin. The church has always been a global community. Today, it's a global community. People from every country, from every ethnicity, from every race that speak every language, all come together and find unity in Jesus. So Christians want this kingdom as well as anyone else. We just say that only Jesus can bring that kingdom. And the beauty of this kingdom is that it's not controlled by three giant tech companies. It's not controlled by human world governments. It's controlled. It's governed by a king who laid down his life for us, who bled for our sake, who rather than coming to earth and saying, all right, I'm here, it's time for me to take over the empire,

laid his life down. He gave his life into the empire's hands. That's a different kind of globalism. That's a different kind of kingdom. We all have a deep down heart longing for this kingdom, but it cannot ever be fulfilled by human means because there's only one person who we can trust to be the king of that kingdom. We rightly fear totalitarianism. We rightly fear dictators and autocrats, people who use a moment like this to take control and gain for themselves more and more power. And we rightly fear that and reject that because we know that no human being is capable of wisely using that kind of power.

But King Jesus doesn't use his power to dominate, but to serve and love and forgive. He didn't come to defeat his enemies, but to die for them. So we can trust this king, a good, wise, loving, compassionate king. We can trust him to usher in his kingdom, the kingdom that will meet all these legitimate needs that every human being has. Jesus' kingdom comes by self-sacrifice, not coercion. That means it's different than any other kingdom that has ever been on earth. I think that the pandemic is an incredible opportunity to kind of take our own temperature,

to see what's happening inside our own hearts. Maybe you're someone who's really bought into the secular myth. And my hope would be that coronavirus is helping you see that deep down, you do have a hunger and longing for some kingdom, for the good life, for the world, the way that it's supposed to be. And perhaps you thought that we were able to do that through human progress and technology, but now you're beginning to see, actually, that breaks apart, that falls apart. but the hunger hasn't left me. The hunger hasn't left me. And that tells me that there must be some way to

satisfy it. It wasn't the way that I thought that I was going to satisfy it. It's not going to come through people. No, the way to satisfy it is by trusting the king of the kingdom, is by trusting Jesus. I want to let you know that Keith and I are going to be doing a Bible study through the book of Revelation starting tomorrow online. Revelation is one of those weird books that confuses a lot of people. It's confused me a lot in the past, but it was written so that it could be understood by everyday people. And I think it's designed to help people walking with Jesus grow incredible resilience and courage and also to resist the temptation to live our lives in the pattern of the empire and the pattern of selfishness, others destruction. It's an incredible book. We're really

excited to go through it. Sign up online. The link is in our show notes. Thanks for listening. If you've enjoyed this content, please subscribe and give us a rating. That helps others find this podcast more easily. Also ask yourself who you could share this podcast with. Texting an episode to a friend or family member is a great way to help them grow spiritually. If you want to go deeper, check out our show notes for book recommendations.