00:00:41.000He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:00:47.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:01:24.000So we got a whole hour here and then we're going to Dream City Church in a couple hours and we're going to hopefully have a really big, big group there.
00:01:31.000I want to talk about Summit Ministries.
00:01:33.000I also want to talk about your book, which I found to be really, really helpful and I really enjoyed.
00:01:38.000So, but first, tell us about Summit Ministries and the work you do.
00:01:40.000Well, Summit's in Manitou Springs, Colorado, little hippie town right at the foot of Pikes Beach.
00:01:46.000We have been, Summit Ministries has been there for 60 years.
00:01:49.000And during that time, they have focused on helping to equip and support a rising generation to embrace God's truth and to champion a biblical worldview.
00:01:58.000So we're not just looking for young adults who believe that Jesus is real, but who take that as the basis of their reality and expand it to everything else.
00:02:07.000So we want them to go into law and politics and the military and medicine and science and all these different areas, taking those biblical convictions with them.
00:02:16.000The summit's been able to train about 100,000 young people in just two week-long courses.
00:03:07.000Well, we talk about a biblical worldview.
00:03:10.000So a worldview is a pattern of ideas, of beliefs, of convictions, habits that help us make sense of the world and God and our relationship to God and the world.
00:03:20.000So everybody operates from a set of patterns.
00:03:22.000If you want to be successful in sports, you had better understand the patterns of play your team is using.
00:03:27.000And you need to understand the patterns of play that will be operating against you so that you can counteract them.
00:03:39.000We can see what's going on in the world.
00:03:40.000And if we operate on that, not only do we live more successful life personally, but then we become the kind of people who can watch a television show, immediately figure out what worldview is being presented, and then know how to respond intelligently to it.
00:06:14.000And it was that personal aspect of truth that actually enlivened people in science, art, medicine, education, politics, justice, and all of those areas to be the ones who really changed the world.
00:07:17.000That's the word they used to describe the obviousness of reality.
00:07:22.000So in John 1, you only have to, if you can only read one thing in the New Testament, read John chapter 1, because John says, in the beginning was the word logos, the obviousness of reality.
00:07:34.000All Greeks would have been tracking with him at that point.
00:07:37.000And then he said, and the word became flesh and dwelled among us.
00:07:43.000And we observed his glory, the glory as the one and only son of the father, full of grace and truth.
00:07:48.000And everybody reading that would have been going, whoa, the obviousness of reality is actually a person.
00:08:13.000And I said, now, think about, because he said, if you could just communicate, if you could just broadcast one message to the whole world, what would it be?
00:08:21.000And I said, I wouldn't broadcast it that way because you have to go there.
00:08:25.000If you want to have diplomatic relationships with another country, you don't just send them long letters.
00:08:46.000But entirely aside from that, it was people who believed that that developed the idea that we have souls, that our souls say something different about who we are as human beings.
00:08:55.000Therefore, every human being has value.
00:09:38.000He wrote a devotional book, an apologetics book called The Christian Virtuoso on how you can be a good scientist and be a believer.
00:09:45.000Yeah, there's, we could spend a whole hour on this, but if you believe that God created the heavens and the earth and the world has order and you want to just, you want to inquire to that order to serve man, that's where science was born, as we know it.
00:11:32.000I've read it, but I haven't really studied it.
00:11:35.000Obviously, the prophecy is profound and confirms our faith in many ways.
00:11:39.000But let me ask you, do you think that, because you're a very studied man and very thoughtful, and your book is very clear, do you think that Christians should understand the Greek tradition to better understand the context and also the language that is used in the gospel?
00:11:57.000So understanding the original languages is important.
00:12:00.000If you can at least get a commentary, a Bible dictionary, look at some of the words that are being used.
00:12:06.000And I would say, so the Old Testament's almost all in Hebrew.
00:12:09.000The New Testament's almost all in Greek.
00:12:11.000So those are two ancient languages people aren't that familiar with.
00:12:15.000The Hebrew, I think, is super important to understand.
00:12:18.000I've been talking with a lot of Orthodox Jews about the nature of the Hebrew language.
00:12:23.000They believe that it's the prototype language, that all language really came out of that.
00:12:27.000Of course, Moses would have been, that was a total groundbreaker, how educated he was.
00:12:31.000The brilliant philosopher that he was, and then also a leader.
00:13:17.000And so there are synonyms and multiple meanings of the root words.
00:13:22.000But to go deeper in that, do you think that Christians should at least be aware of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle and the Greek tradition that was bubbling up during kind of the Hellenistic domination of the region as Christ ministered?
00:13:38.000I take sort of a C.S. Lewis approach to this.
00:13:41.000If the Greeks, if Socrates figured out something, it's because he's recognized a truth that exists that's bigger than him.
00:13:48.000He wasn't revealing anything new to us.
00:15:08.000And in the ancient world, polytheism was the norm and the Torah, the books of Moses, saying that there is only a oneness of God, there is one God was a transformational idea and was really a minority opinion at the time.
00:15:22.000And this idea of monotheism and having a singular God was not a well-head belief at all.
00:15:29.000So we're up against a break here, but the Ts, I do want to get into the nice thing.
00:15:33.000So I do want to ask you, though, as you talk about truth and having that centered on Jesus, does, should we study the Torah or the books of the Old Testament?
00:15:44.000Because pastors will email me and or I'll see their sermons like Andy Stanley.
00:15:49.000He says we should just forget the Old Testament.
00:15:55.000Obviously, I think that's nonsensical and silly, but this is important because you do some at ministries and I'm sure you get an objection here or there from somebody who says, yeah, I'm cool with the Jesus thing, but that Leviticus, that's why I'm not a Christian.
00:16:10.000So should we study, appreciate, understand the totality of the Bible, or should we just truncate it?
00:16:18.000Say, hey, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, we don't need Leviticus or Deuteronomy or numbers.
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00:17:27.000So, Dr. Jeff Myers, truth changes everything.
00:17:30.000Should we just kind of do the Andy Stanley thing and just kind of say, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, Leviticus, you're a waste of time.
00:17:36.000To me, that's a grave mistake, Charlie.
00:17:38.000And I'm not here to pick theological fights, but the truth is all of scripture is inspired by God, the Apostle Paul said, and is profitable for teaching, correcting, rebuking, and training in righteousness.
00:17:49.000He was not at that point, as far as we can tell, talking about Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
00:17:55.000He was talking about the Old Testament.
00:17:57.000When you look at John, again, we were talking about John.
00:20:06.000Hey, this proves our point, you know, and people like the Bible, so let's throw this in here.
00:20:09.000They were actually looking back and asking, what did when God gave the Hebrews this government, what about it really reflected the human nature of sinfulness, but also the human nature of we're amazing and we are born in the image of God.
00:21:24.000And we are living in a golden age in the sense of there has never been more access to robust, clear, and transparent Old Testament commentary in the history of humanity.
00:21:38.000From Prager to Strong's commentary, there is, I mean, if you have a question about Leviticus or I don't understand why Lot and his daughters and that whole thing, it doesn't make any sense.
00:22:04.000Yeah, you realize your buddy, your college roommate, may not have all the answers.
00:22:10.000And you think, well, let's surely somebody out there has thought this through.
00:22:14.000To say, I don't understand it, therefore it's not true, is the height of narcissism.
00:22:21.000It's the same reason we like, you know, delivery services that bring food to our house.
00:22:26.000They will bring me only what I want, only at the price that I want to pay, exactly the way I want it, exactly the time that I want it, or I'm going to give them less than a good review.
00:22:36.000All of these things, it's like a kind of a grubhub narcissism that we have going on, where if it's not served up to me in a way that's obvious, then it doesn't work.
00:22:45.000At Summit, one of our speakers one time was talking to the students and he looked around.
00:24:01.000Now, you have to ask pointed questions sometimes.
00:24:04.000It doesn't mean that nobody will ever get mad.
00:24:06.000It doesn't mean that everybody in your life is going to love everything that you say, but there is a way that you can communicate the truth.
00:24:14.000If people get offended, here's what to do.
00:24:17.000If people aren't believing what you're saying, here's how to demonstrate it in a reasonable way.
00:24:22.000Mainly, Charlie, it revolves around asking questions.
00:24:26.000So a lot of times people come into a conversation and they think they know more than they do.
00:24:30.000And so they just blurt things out, like a bumper sticker slogan or whatever.
00:26:34.000That doesn't want treatment, obviously, the ones that do.
00:26:36.000Well, and the family doesn't sometimes want it either, because it changes the person to the point where the whole family dynamic is disrupted.
00:28:24.000That's the idea that truth is whatever helps you win.
00:28:26.000The second one we talked about earlier, pragmatism, which says that the truth is whatever works.
00:28:31.000Well, the question is, works for whom and in what way.
00:28:35.000Pluralism says truth is whatever helps us get along.
00:28:39.000And then the other, the final view is deflationism, which is just kind of a cynicism.
00:28:43.000That's more of a thing philosophers think.
00:28:45.000Nobody else thinks about deflationism except philosophers, but basically they say truth is just an addition to the language that's unnecessary.
00:28:52.000If I say the sun rose and then I say it's true that the sun rose, I'm saying the same thing.
00:29:00.000So you're ending up in one of those directions if you say there's no truth.
00:29:04.000And so when the postmodernists will say that you have your own truth, that you get to decide truth, that it is not able to be ascertained objectively outside of your own will, your own experience.
00:29:59.000We don't really access a truth that is out there independent of us.
00:30:02.000Now, of course, there's nothing about this conversation that makes any sense if its underlying premises are actually followed or actually true.
00:30:10.000If words mean only what I want them to mean, then we can't have this conversation with one another.
00:30:16.000I can't even have that internal conversation with myself.
00:30:18.000M. Scott Peck in the 1970s was a psychiatrist.
00:30:21.000And he said, if you're dealing with a mental health issue, the very first thing you have to do is grapple with reality as it actually is.
00:32:19.000And so I'll ask him, okay, can you tell a difference between these two statements?
00:32:22.000Statement A, it is good to care for abandoned puppies.
00:32:25.000Statement B, it is good to torture abandoned puppies.
00:32:29.000Can you tell a difference between those two statements?
00:32:32.000And if they say yes, it's because they know that words actually have meaning, which refutes the entire point of postmodernism, which is that words don't bear any necessary relationship to the things to which they refer.
00:33:28.000And we didn't even touch on this, but when you do not have a society, civilization, generation, or people that can say there is truth, you will get a despot, a dictator, a Caesar, a tyrant, or a czar.
00:33:39.000Peter M. Sorokin, the Harvard sociologist who formed the sociology department there at Harvard, wrote a book of the sociology of all civilizations.
00:33:47.000And he said, in the absence of a moral absolute, in the absence of existence of God, physical force is the only thing that remains.
00:33:56.000And that in some ways, that's the postmodernist pitch, which is just we're just going to go back to tribes.
00:34:03.000Thanks so much for listening, everybody.