Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - I Pledge Allegiance to King Jesus: An Interview with Matthew Bates

Episode Date: March 12, 2020

What do you think of when you hear “allegiance”? The Pledge of Allegiance (to the flag…)? Pledging your allegiance is dedicating your life to something. It’s not just being willing to suffer and die for a cause; it’s living it out in everything you do. Is that how you view Christianity? In this episode, https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/staff/keith-simon/ (Keith) and https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/staff/patrick-miller/ (Patrick) discuss allegiance and the gospel with http://matthewwbates.com/Gospel-Allegiance.php (Dr. Matthew Bates), a professor of Theology at the Quincy University, author of the newly released book http://matthewwbates.com/Gospel-Allegiance.php (Gospel Allegiance), and co-host of the podcast https://onscript.study/ (OnScript). Join the discussion to learn what discipleship looks like, how to be faithful, and where grace fits in. Interested in more content like this? Make sure to scroll down for more resources and related episodes, including a conversation covering https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/podcasts/kanye-west-jesus-is-king-the-christian-response-keith-and-patrick/ (Kanye West, Jesus is King, & the Christian Response). To learn more, visit our https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/ (website) and follow us on https://www.facebook.com/TheCrossingCOMO (Facebook), https://www.facebook.com/TheCrossingCOMO (Instagram), and https://twitter.com/thecrossingcomo (Twitter) @TheCrossingCOMO. 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 Tim Minut of 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. On today's episode, Keith and I are going to be interviewing Matthew Bates. He's a New Testament scholar and the author of a new book, Gospel Allegiance. We're really glad to have Matthew Bates here with us, author of Gospel Allegiance, a book that has really affected Patrick and I. And we're really glad that you came in town to visit with us about it, Matt. I want to get to know a little bit about you, though, before we get into the book. So you were an engineer who went to New Testament and got your PhD. That's not a normal course for most people. Tell us a little bit about that. Yeah, it is not a normal path. Although sometimes I wonder if there might be a little more link between the hard physical sciences and biblical interpretation. There's some sort of similar logic. But yeah, I did my undergrad in physics at Whitworth University. And in the midst of doing that, I think I found myself wondering,

if science really had the kind of ability to answer the sort of questions I wanted answered. And I'd hoped it did, but I think I came to find out that it did not. Science is useful. It's beautiful within its own domain and a very helpful tool. But the more I learned about it, the more I realized it depends on certain philosophical and theological presuppositions. And I got more interested in learning about those. And so started studying scripture much more seriously. I was already a Christian at this point in time, but began to do things like Lauren Greene, and study biblical studies in a much more intense way, and that led to seminary eventually.

When you were driving down here today, Patrick and I were trying to figure out what you would be driving because we knew you had a big family, and I picked the 15 passenger van, and I think I won that. You're right. It is a big Ford Transit. I love it. So I guess your family's just walking wherever they want to go today? I guess so. Your book, Gospel Allegiance, it has at least two main themes, more than that, but at least two that struck me. One is that the gospel is primarily centered around this great truth that Jesus is king. And the second is that our faith in him, when we understand it in the context of Jesus being king, is more about allegiance or better described by the word allegiance than maybe the word trust.

So before we get into the nitty gritty of that and kind of explore it, I'm curious what led you to start looking at the gospel. Was it something, would you start looking at it through a new lens? Was there something you were seeing in churches? Was it something you were seeing in your life? Is it something you came across in the scripture? What piqued your interest to say, I really want to go down this and start exploring this? That's an interesting question because as we try to look back and see the different strands, how did they come together and what was the confluence of streams?

Certainly, I grew up in a kind of broadly evangelical environment that had certain ideas about the gospel. And in my own personal experience with that, and also I think in watching the experience of other people around me, Certainly there was some sort of deficiency that concerned me in the sense that you are invited to trust that Jesus died for your sins, pray a sinner's prayer, and then you can walk out the door with the rest of your life with the sense that you have the security of salvation. That's how it's often presented and that nothing more is demanded of you. Now, of course, there's an exhortation. Well, don't you love your Lord?

Shouldn't you continue to serve him in some way? And maybe a guilt trip laid on in that kind of direction. but it doesn't seem like it was very well integrated with discipleship. And certainly as I, in my own personal journey, although I'd pray to sinners' prayer as a child, like in college, as I really began to take my own responsibility for Christianity seriously, I realized that it was this discipleship dimension that was really lacking in my life and that was really the heartbeat of what it meant to try to be conformed to Jesus. So certainly it did kind of emerge out of my own experiences,

and that caused me probably to ask certain kinds of questions about the gospel. But then it was really when I was in seminary that I began to look on the one hand more closely at faith, and then later on, especially beyond seminary when I was doing my PhD work at the gospel. So it was actually in seminary when I was reading an Inti Wright book on the Challenge of Jesus, that I first really began to think more about what the Pistus word group means as he had... Can you define Pistis for us really quick? Pistis is the word group that stands behind faith or faithfulness and is, really important to the New Testament, but it can sometimes be understood as belief or trust or faith,

but it shades into faithfulness as well. So anyway, Wright gives this example of, from Josephus, where there's this call that Josephus gives to repent and to believe in him as a general that he's speaking to people who are rebels in the cause. And it made me really think about what is faith? What does this belief word mean or this pistis word mean? So I was just pondering that. And in Meanwhile, when I went to do my graduate work at Notre Dame, my PhD work was on looking at Paul's use of the Old Testament. And Paul appeals to the Old Testament as he's presenting the gospel. He says that certain things like Jesus's death for sins accord with the scriptures. So that made me think, how does this all relate to the gospel?

So you kind of have two things happen at once. On the one hand, there's your personal walk with Jesus. And you're looking at your own discipleship, your own journey with him and saying, look, something is missing here. And that really strikes a chord with me because I meet with a lot of different people who have a very, very similar story. They would say to me, yeah, I prayed a sinner's prayer back when I was in middle school or high school. And then I just kind of haven't really been going to church. I haven't really thought much about Jesus for the last 10 years. But now I'm back. I'm always like, how did that happen? And they say, well, I never thought of myself as not being a Christian. I thought, well,

there's something weird going on where you can think of yourself as a Christian, but not be following Jesus in any way. And what you're saying is that as your intellectual journey goes on, you begin to realize maybe the missing piece is that we have misunderstood the gospel. We've made it into something that it's not. So Matt, when I became a Christian, I got involved in Campus Crusade for Christ. My wife became a Christian, both of us here at the University of Missouri, she even more directly through Campus Crusade. And we got involved with them. We're students for four years. Then we went on staff with Campus Crusade for five years. And of course, for you, those out there who know it by crew, it's the same organization just with a different name. So one of the things they're famous for

is the four spiritual laws. And that's kind of law one, God loves you, has a wonderful plan for your life, law two, people are sinful, law three, Jesus died on the cross of your sins, law four, you must accept Jesus as the Savior. At least that's what they were back then. I assume they're the same now. I don't think that's probably changed much. So when you hear that, do you think that's the gospel? Because that's what we used to share and call the gospel. Is that what you'd call the gospel? No, it's not what I would call a gospel, but let's back up a little bit. I want to say, first of all, praise God for crew, praise God for intervarsity, these amazing groups that are on college campuses in the trenches, sharing the gospel, extraordinarily important. And it's just a matter of being nuanced about these things.

I would want to say that as we share that salvation, those saving truths, we might want to call those four laws saving truths, they're true. But the gospel itself is something a little more precise and technical. So I would want to reserve the language of gospel for what the New Testament itself tends to call the gospel, which doesn't mean that we can't present saving truths to people and help people be led to Christ. Certainly we can. But when we're being precise in certain kinds of conversations, it's good to hone things and get more exacting. So it almost sounds to me like you're saying that these are saving truths, but they're not the gospel, so that we can get right with God, have our sins forgiven, be brought into relationship with him, have our eternity secured,

apart from the gospel. Is that what you're saying, or am I mishearing you? No, that's not quite what I'm saying. But I certainly would want to say some of the concern with the four spiritual laws approach would be that it kind of gives a very me-centered story about how it is that I can have a problem solved for me. Now, we all want our problem solved, right? We're selfish people, and that's probably where we start. But as we think about what the gospel is it's something objective. It's the truth that Jesus has become the king. It's nothing to do with you. He's become the king. And as part of the process of becoming the king, God the father sent him. He took on human flesh, fulfilling promises made to David. He died for our sins in accordance with

the scriptures. He was buried. He was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures. And then he was seen by many people and then ascends to God's right hand. And actually, when we pay attention to the New Testament, it's his ascension that really gets front billing. in the sense of his enthronement, right? That he's now become the king. And in light of that, he sends the spirit so that we can enjoy the benefits if we respond to the gospel, and he'll come again as king. So part of the idea then would be that, yes, indeed, like Jesus' kingship is good news for us, but it's a broad good news that's available to anyone who would respond to it. If you give your allegiance to Jesus, realizing that he's become the king. And as part of that

whole story, right, he's dealt with your sin problem in winning the victory. Well, then we begin to see that our personal selves are swept up into a larger story that's bigger than us. And that can be helpful for us reorienting. Why is it that we shouldn't live selfish lives in the first place? Well, because it's actually not about you. It's about Jesus who has become the king. And as part of that, you get the benefit of having your mess cleaned up if you respond to him. So if I'm hearing you right, you're saying the gospel is incredibly good news for us, but it's not news about us. It's a news about Jesus. And in particular, while there's lots of different things that come under that rubric of the gospel, the main centerpiece is that Jesus has become the king. That's the good news

that we need to announce in the church. It's the good news that makes us the church. It's the good news that the disciples went out and announced. And that, of course, called forth a response from people. And so the obvious question, I have to imagine someone asking right now is, well, how did that go wrong? How did we lose the Jesus is king bit of the gospel? It seems like it's a pretty central thing and doesn't make a lot of sense. I think the true answer to that question is that the church has never entirely lost it. It's not like there hasn't been a sense that Jesus is the king that would be part of ongoing theological reflection. But in terms of the center point of the gospel, I think that we ended up treeing Jesus Christ as sort of as if the Christ part is his last name. Then we started

talking about in Christ, this happens, through Christ, that happens. But we sort of evacuated the Christ part of its royal significance. We sort of started using Christ as if it's just a cipher for the person himself without seeing that, no, it refers to a specific person who has a royal office. And so as church history went on, I think that there was an increased movement away from a focus on Jesus as king to more of a focus on Jesus as Savior, that he died for our sins and that he's the high priest, that he intercedes for us. And so really faith got aimed at Jesus in his high priestly capacity and in his atoning capacity, his forgiving of sins capacity, without really thinking very much about how faith is also directed toward him in his royal capacity as the king.

I think if the average person heard the word Christ, there's some people who might think that's Jesus's last name. I don't think that's most Christians. I think when most people hear Jesus is the Christ or Jesus is the Messiah, they hear Jesus is my Savior. But you're saying that that title, Christ, really is saying that Jesus is king. Where did you get that from? Yeah, certainly it comes out of the Old Testament and the promises that God makes to David and the hope that Israel has in a future king, you know, and the word Meshach in Hebrew ends up being translated in Greek as Christos, which has to do with anointing as kings were set apart through oil anointing. So it connects ultimately to the Old Testament substructure, and when we think

about Jesus as Savior, there's a different Greek word for that at Sotter. So there's some distinct categories that we sort of just slide together in sloppy ways would be one way of thinking about what's happening. Is it too simple then to say that every time I read, read Christ or Messiah in my Bible that I can just substitute the word king for it? Is that more or less correct or not? I would say that's more or less correct that whenever you see the title, Christ, that it does have the primary valence of king, but we should realize that Jews had certain kinds of expectations about their king that might not map well onto medieval ideas of kings in England that might be more dominant for us. So I think that we have to be a little

bit cautious. And the Jews were looking forward to a king over their nation, that he would rule, but that as part of that, they envisioned the nations actually pilgrimaging to gain wisdom from this king and maybe even to be ruled by him, that the law would go forth from Zion, and that part of the way the law would be promulgated and embodied would be through a great king who would do this. A while back, you made a passing comment, and he said, if Jesus is king, this changes how we respond to him. And again, when I think about what's my response to the gospel, the answer I would give is faith. So what is faith in the king? Well, faith is a big word, right? As we already talked about, it's a pistis word group in Greek. And you can kind of think about this word as a word that is

multifaceted, so that on the one hand, in certain contexts, it can mean something just like trust or belief. In other contexts, it means something much more embodied. And especially an important background here is in the Greco-Roman world, the patron client structure. So that if you needed help as an ordinary person while you had a larger patron who would take care of you, and you had certain obligations toward that patron, and you needed to show pistis toward your patron. You needed to show loyalty to him. Similarly, generals, like soldiers needed to show pistice toward them, loyalty. So it wasn't just that you trusted. There was an embodied dimension to the exercise of your trust. As this spills forth, then we get into ideas of allegiance, especially when we think of, okay,

if the main metaphor for thinking about Jesus is that he's the king, and that's the climax of the gospel, then the most obvious actualization of what does it mean to give faith toward this king or to exercise pistis toward this king? Well, allegiance is the most natural metaphor. One of the things you refer to in your book is First Maccabees 10. And there we have this king, Demetrius, if I remember, right, who the people call upon to give loyalty to him. And that's the same word that is often translated, believe. And so it kind of gives this context of kingship and a subject to the king and people being encouraged to give loyalty to the king. So when I hear the word allegiance, I think the first thing that comes to my mind is I pledge allegiance to the flag. I don't know.

Is that similar to what you mean by allegiance, what we mean when we pledge allegiance to the flag? It's similar in a sense that I think that there is definitive acts of allegiance that can launch us on a trajectory. So I think one of the things that churches can be especially thoughtful about is how is it that we can create ceremonies that will encourage allegiance? And that's something I would like to do more thinking around as a scholar and someone who loves the church and would like to get pastors thinking about. But it's not the same as pledging allegiance to the flag in the sense that that's sort of a way of rallying loyalty to the nation as a whole and to its ideals, where this is much more personal. We're giving loyalty to a specific individual. And the problem that we have is our loyalty is to a nation and to the republic for which it stands.

We will use language, one nation under God. But oftentimes as we're saying those words, we have ideals that are. connected to our constitution that embeds us in a republic where we're kind of very individualized still within that. And there's not a lot of personal attachment to a specific individual. So that's one of the things that makes the metaphor difficult as we try to make that switch. Like what does it mean to be loyal to a specific kind of king, especially a king who wears a crown of thorns? So I saw a video recently of someone taking a citizenship oath.

And I'd never seen or heard anything like this before. but it's pretty extreme. You're not just committing yourself to the nation. You're committing your life and you're also renouncing all other loyalties. It's like if there's any other nation, any other power, any other principality, set it aside because your loyalty now belongs to the United States. And it made me think, man, maybe this is a little bit closer to what believing the gospel is, except instead of like you said, giving my allegiance and loyalty to a nation, it's giving my allegiance and loyalty to King Jesus over and above everything else. When we opened up, you were talking about how you saw a discipleship problem in your own life and the lives of other.

who come out of cultures where it's just believe in Jesus, get saved from your sins, and you get to go to heaven and move on. And you're saying, look, whenever we actually pledge our allegiance to Jesus, whenever we actually give him our allegiance, that changes our lives. How do you think it should actually practically change our lives? How does it deal with that discipleship problem? It provides an integrated framework, first of all, and I think that's critical to see that it helps us to see that our discipleship is bound up with our salvation rather than being like just a bonus thing you do once you get saved. Part of what it means to be a critical. Christian is to continue to confess Jesus Christ's Lord as the Spirit is present when we make that confession.

So it's as we confess it together corporately and then as you are integrated into that group that's confessing it corporately that the church is constituted. So one of the things I think it does is it actually encourages discipleship within community. It is it's a community that comes together and confesses Jesus' Lord ultimately. And there's something special about the Spirit's presence in the midst of that community. It's not that it doesn't belong to you. It's not that it doesn't belong to you individually, it does, but it belongs to you individually because of your share in the whole. And if we forget that part, if we forget that the church comes first, and the share of the whole comes first, and that we derive our spirit empowerment, partly from our connection to that

community that confesses Jesus' Lord, then I think that we have gotten things backwards. And so I think it encourages actually the local church and people to attach themselves to it and to pursue a life of discipleship in the midst of other people or confessing the kingship of Jesus. So it sounds like you're saying we've got it exactly backwards because I think most of us as Christians think of our individual relationship to God and then our relationship to the church. And you're flipping that and saying that the spirit of God works in our life through our connection with our church and primarily, or at least temporally first, and then into our individual lives. So before we go further, I want to distinguish allegiance from

works. Because I think when we hear allegiance or embodied faith or obedience or those kinds of things, one objection or at least one consideration people have, but maybe a pushback, is to say, well, that sounds like salvation by works. It sounds like you're saying salvation by me getting more committed. And they might even bring up something like Ephesians 28 and 9. You know, for my grace we've been saved, not works. Help us think through. I know you're not saying salvation by works. At least I don't think you are. So help us think through that. How is allegiance and obedience to the gospel to King Jesus different than saying we're trying to earn our salvation by good works? It is quite different because allegiance to a king involves an ongoing posture of trust. So it includes

trust and it's sort of just a bigger category than that. But it does involve our embodiment. But that doesn't mean we need to earn it. Just as if you're a soldier serving under a general, right? You don't earn your place in the army by your specific deeds of loyalty. It's as you've made an overall commitment to serve the king, and as you're working that out, right, or the general in this case, that we could talk about your posture of allegiance and your initial oath of allegiance to this general or to this army as being what constitutes you as being part of the body. If you do a heroic deed or if you fall short, as you were serving the king or the general, nevertheless, you're still part of the army unless you renounce it, right? Or,

unless you in some way deliberately revoke. So I think that we would say something similar seems to be going on whenever we think about our allegiance to Jesus, that he's radically for us. He doesn't demand perfect allegiance, and it's our union with him that is our merit before God, so that it's as we give our loyalty to him, that we are attached to his righteousness and his righteousness counts on our behalf. So it's not that we need to earn it any more than we need to have like special measures of faith in an intellectual sense. That would be a problematic idea under a traditional model would be like, well, since I'm saved by my faith, I need to have a great quantity of it. We would see that as a problematic idea, similarly allegiance, right? We wouldn't think that what happens that you have to have a

tremendous quantity of it so that you need to earn your salvation. Rather, your basic trajectory of allegiance is sufficient. Okay, so that was a great explanation. But I didn't hear you say anything about grace. How does grace fit into the good news that Jesus is king? I'd want to say that God has given us grace primarily through the gift of the gospel itself. I think one of the biggest problems in thinking about salvation is that we've tended to abstract away from the gospel, as if somehow God's grace is independent from the gospel or could be considered entirely apart from it. When we think about the saving grace of God, doesn't it make sense that it has to flow through the gospel in some way. So whenever we think about grace in that sense that God has already given a gift to

us. Yes, we didn't deserve it. The gift is Jesus is being sent by the Father, his life, death, resurrection, his enthroned in his king, his sending of the spirit. All that is the premier grace of God. But grace doesn't mean something that doesn't have any kind of response component to it. We've tended to think that grace means that it has to be entirely God and none of us. Those ideas about grace are simply wrong and don't stack up very well to New Testament and early Christian understandings of grace, where grace demands reciprocation. So God gives us a gift. We don't deserve it, but we do need to respond to the gift. And our response is our response of loyalty or allegiance to Jesus the King. Okay, I love that. And it is a little bit different approach to grace than probably

most people, including me, have thought about for a long time. We're always so afraid to have any response as if the response nullifies the grace. But I think if I hear you right, you're saying that the grace is a gift. There's nothing about Jesus's life, death, resurrection that we've earned or deserved, but it does require some sort of response. And that response isn't an earning response, but what word would you use? A appreciative response or a devoted response? Is there a word you would put in there instead of earning? Certainly I'd want to say it's a personal, externalized, relational, loyal response, that it certainly does involve ongoing commitment of fidelity to Jesus that's inclusive of trusting him, inclusive of trusting in his saving work on our behalf, but extends beyond

that into his lordship or kingship. Okay, one more thing I want to follow up on is that you say in your book, Gospel Allegiance, that Jesus is the saving king. So can you help me? me think through how the saving part relates to the king part. We want to say that Jesus' kingship is an objective fact. He has become the king. He's been enthroned at the right hand of God. And nothing that we can do personally changes that. Our personal response to that is our subjective response to the objective fact that Jesus has become the king. So when we talk about the saving part of it, we could say that on the one hand, there's objective facts that Jesus has conquered death, that he's come out the other side,

that the demonic powers have been decisively defeated in him, that sin is broken, but it's only broken inasmuch as we allow it to be, on the other hand, because there's a subjective dimension. So Jesus's rule or his kingship is not forced or coerced. So as we respond to Jesus by confessing him as the king, he gives us the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit empowers us to live a life of victory over sin over the evil spirits. And ultimately, his resurrection life flows through us and gives us victory even over death itself. But we don't have those benefits. We don't have the saving perks that come along with salvation apart from giving allegiance to him. So there's an objective dimension to their availability in the fact that Jesus has already won the victory,

but there has to be a personal appropriation of that. I think since reading your book, the same gospels that I've read over and over, the same stories about Jesus' last week have come alive to me or I've seen them in a different way or given new importance to them. I don't know exactly how to say it, but I now see Jesus writing on that donkey on Palm Sunday declaring his kingship and the crown of thorns and the royal robe and the Roman soldiers bowing down mocking him as king of the Jews and Pilate bringing him out and the Jewish crowds, those crowds saying, well, we have no Lord but Caesar, no king but Caesar. And then him being wasted up on a cross, and it says King of the Jews over him. And I don't know how I miss it. So clearly, he's being

enthroned there. He's not the kind of king that comes to defeat his enemies. He's the kind of king who comes to die for his enemies and to give his life so that he can save them and invite them into the participation of his kingdom. And your book has helped me so much see things that I've read over and over and over, but have a whole new appreciation for. One last question. We're about to enter a highly contentious political season. How does the announcement that Jesus is king, how can that help us get through that? Well, the one thing that we can't do is we can't put Jesus on the ballot, even if we want to. You might want to post out on your Twitter, I'm voting for Jesus in 2020, but the reality is, is that's not an option. It's only an option that we can

provide an alternative politic in the spaces of our church where people can finally experience what it means for Jesus to be king. A better way to announce a political program for you than to say Jesus in 2020 would be to say, come to my church in 2020 because we're proclaiming Jesus as king, and as we proclaim him, you'll see he rules in our midst, that he's enthroned here and now, because we're confessing him as king and in so doing, we're giving him space to rule here. And if that's really happening, if Jesus is really being proclaimed by people who are entering doors of your church, then the Holy Spirit is present, and Jesus is indeed ruling there in a way he's not ruling elsewhere. It's like it can be a refuge for people to begin to enter into an

alternative sociopolitical reality, the one that's filled with the goodness of the king. I find, as I'm looking forward to, again, this upcoming election season, I feel exhausted already. I feel tired by politics as they stand. And it's incredibly encouraging to me to know that as a Christian. My calling isn't to go be a part necessarily of some sort of political program. My calling is to announce the kingship of Jesus, to be a part of his politics, and to say that the answers to the solutions that both the left and right promise to give. They say, hey, I've got the answers. He's really the only one who has the answers to those questions. He's really the only one who can heal our broken world. And so there's no better place to turn than him. Thanks so much, Matt, for coming all the way to

Columbia from Quincy. You have spent a lot of time with us, not only here on our podcast, but with our pastors and staff all day, and I know that we got a lot out of it. We really appreciate not only you coming here, but your investment and your education and your family's investment in that and how you've used your gifts to bless our church. And I think bless a lot of churches. I've really enjoyed reading this book, Gospel Allegiance, and it's been a big impact on us. I've been reading it with other guys. If you're looking for a book that maybe will challenge you a little bit, but I think you'll

get a lot out of, I would pick it up, Gospel Allegiance by Me. Matthew Bates. Thanks so much for coming. Thanks, Keith. Thanks, Patrick. It's really a pleasure to be here, and let's keep serving our king together. If you found today's episode fascinating and you want to learn more about what Matthew's talking about, this King Jesus Gospel, and I want to encourage you to go online and buy a copy of his book, Gospel Allegiance. It's available on paperback, e-book, and on audiobook. 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.