00:06:07.140The dragon's four-legged claw on his right went through exactly the same motion.
00:06:11.100Then he thought he would try his left.
00:06:13.020The dragon limb on that side moved too.
00:06:15.420Two dragons, one on each side, mimicking whatever he did.
00:06:20.040His nerve broke, and he simply made a bolt for it.
00:06:22.640There was such a clatter and rasping and clinking of gold and grinding of stones as he rushed out of the cave that he thought they were both following him.
00:07:10.500It opened and shut its mouth as he opened and shut his.
00:07:13.780He had turned into a dragon while he was asleep.
00:07:17.120Sleeping on a dragon's horde with greedy, dragonish thoughts in his heart, he had become a dragon himself.
00:07:24.660In this episode of the King's Hall Podcast, we'll aim to help you avoid the error of Harold Scrub and tell your children the right stories so they'll know what to do when they come across dragons.
00:07:37.500The King's Hall Podcast exists to make self-ruled men who rule well and win the world.
00:07:41.920well gentlemen welcome to this episode of the king's hall podcast brian what a
00:07:50.840banger of an introduction in a cold open telling the right stories one of the stories that i think
00:07:56.840is right is that you are french canadian here we go i just told eric yesterday that when eric
00:08:04.940opens a podcast everything is usually an insult of to both of us like here's the gay frenchman
00:14:40.540And I'm like tearing up because the one line where Brian says something like, I know there will be many years when a Fred, we didn't use our full name, when I will not be.
00:14:52.820But when you listen to the song and think of me, and I was like, I got to get 380.
00:15:41.740But I do encourage people on Winnie's song.
00:15:44.160You can do this with several of them, but Winnie's song in particular.
00:15:47.460If you go – I didn't even know this, but Brian said go on – you can go on Spotify and see part of the video, but there's actually a lyric video, which is hilarious.
00:15:55.660I think Winnie has a little cameo where she's throwing something in the fire.
00:15:58.640Yeah, I went and spent several days attempting to just get enough B-roll of Daphne and Winnie to make lyric videos with them in it.
00:16:07.020And it's hilarious trying to film a little girl do anything because they're just like, oh, I'm going to go over there.
00:19:40.020We talk a lot about the stories that we tell our children.
00:19:42.960So part of loving your family, I know you've said like your boys really love St. George and the dragon.
00:19:49.620Give me like the elevator pitch for why stories – it's not a throwaway issue, but why is it so important in the culture of a home that a father is setting?
00:19:59.920Because you could be the guy like Eustace where you're like all you need to know is taxes and drains and all these practical things.
00:20:07.480And here we are, some might say, wasting time telling these stories about dragons.
00:20:13.640Yeah. Well, actually the story of Eustace I think is a really good picture of what happens if you don't tell the right stories because there's a couple of layers to it. But the first thing is that storytelling actually makes a people. It's really important in the life of an image bearer that we absorb stories because God is unfolding this cosmic story.
00:20:39.300He is the ultimate storyteller. And he commands his people to tell stories, which we'll get into
00:20:45.760like in Deuteronomy 6 and with ancient monuments and things like that. But if you look specifically
00:20:52.060at the Eustace story, and then let's just say it's a parable for the types of stories that you tell
00:20:59.680your children, what they're in danger of. Well, really what you see is that the silly stories,
00:21:05.000you know, the fables, the fairy stories, they have some elements in them that are really important
00:21:11.640for shaping human beings, for shaping image bearers. And really what it is, is you're shaping
00:21:17.820them to have a good nose. Like they could pass a sniff test, right? So in those stories, in these
00:21:24.200stories, a lot of moderns despise fairy stories and fables because there's such obvious good
00:21:30.560and such obvious evil. There's not the troubled protagonist and the evil villain that's actually
00:21:37.680pretty good guy. There's not the blending. It's so clunky. But what happens is that you have
00:21:45.840children that they know what a dragon is and they know that dragon gold is something you shouldn't
00:21:50.120touch and that dragons are actually bad guys. And so with the story of Eustace, you see a boy that
00:21:56.640has been told all the wrong stories, but what ends up happening is, is just like children that
00:22:01.760are told the wrong stories in real life. It's not that they despise stories. They just consume the
00:22:07.760wrong ones and become dragons themselves because all of life you're being catechized. That's one
00:22:14.180of the primary ends of entertainment is actually, uh, Brian wrote a tremendous article on this
00:22:20.820some years ago about the catechism of Netflix. You're being catechized. You're being told this
00:22:27.720is good and this is bad. This is moral. This is just and this is unjust. And you're being told
00:22:33.820these stories over and over and over. And it actually begins to form you into that type of
00:22:39.640image. And so those types of stories are really, really important, even the fairy stories, even the
00:22:45.440silly stories, because it actually forms an entire human being. And so your children could become a
00:22:52.120dragon if you're not careful. Like, what is the chief end of man? Well, Netflix will teach me
00:22:56.520it is to enjoy myself, to glorify myself and enjoy myself forever. That's pretty much what
00:23:03.540it's trying to get you to believe. It's so interesting, Dan, to your point. And Brian,
00:23:07.520I want to ask you this question. The way that stories shape loves. So I was thinking of something
00:23:12.460Plato says in The Republic, that if you really want to shape a people, he said one of the primary
00:23:18.820ways you do it is as children, you have to teach them stories. Now, this kind of seems like, wow,
00:23:24.300that's an interesting comment. But certainly, Brian, stories shape loves as well as it's not
00:23:30.760just information, right, that our children need. So I guess how have you seen that, that stories
00:23:36.780are shaping loves within the home and what you share as a father.
00:23:41.620Yeah, this is, I mean, this is the key thing when you're actually talking about discipling
00:23:45.660your children is that the information is critical.
00:23:52.420The systematic is critical, but it's critical with the goal of their hearts loving it.
00:24:00.220If they just know it, that's not enough.
00:24:02.940If they can just regurgitate it, it's not enough.
00:24:05.600So you have to actually win the hearts of your children.
00:24:09.060And one of the things that stories do is they encode truth in a way that is far more potent.
00:24:15.760Like I think you can learn – provided that you do have the framework theologically of truth to filter and sift, story is one of the most powerful ways to actually learn about the world that God made and the God who made the world and about redemption.
00:24:30.880Was it Lewis who said that the stories are how you get past the watchful dragons?
00:24:33.900Actually, it's funny you say that. I literally, I have that quote pulled up here where it's his essay, sometimes fairy stories may say best what's to be said. And I'll read it here, actually. I think it's good. So he said, some people seem to think that I began by asking myself how I could say something about Christianity to children.
00:24:53.060He's specifically referring to the Chronicles of Narnia, which we pulled from in the cold open.
00:24:56.760He says, then fixed on the fairy story as an instrument, then collected information about child psychology and decided what age group I'd write for, then drew up a list of basic Christian truths and hammered out allegories to embody them.
00:25:10.040I couldn't write it in that way at all.
00:25:12.460Everything began with images, a fawn carrying an umbrella, a queen on a sledge, a magnificent lion.
00:25:17.640At first, there wasn't even anything Christian about them.
00:25:20.160That element pushed itself in of its own accord.
00:25:22.640It was part of the bubbling. Then came the form, and that's capital F form. As these images sorted themselves into events, i.e. became a story, they seem to demand no love interest and no close psychology. But the form which excludes these things is the fairy tale. And the moment I thought of that, I fell in love with the form itself. It's brevity. It's severe restraints on description. It's flexible traditionalism. It's inflexible hostility to all analysis, digression, reflections, and, quote, gas.
00:26:15.740which paralyzed much of my own religion in childhood.
00:26:18.460Why did one find it so hard to feel as one was told one ought to feel about God or about the sufferings of Christ?
00:26:26.360I thought the chief reason was that one was told one ought to.
00:26:30.460An obligation to feel can freeze feelings, and reverence itself did harm.
00:26:35.340The whole subject was associated with lowered voices, almost as if it were something medical.
00:26:39.880But supposing that by casting all these things into an imaginary world, stripping them of their stained glass and Sunday school associations,
00:26:46.760one could make them for the first time appear in their real potency could one not thus steal past
00:26:53.040these watchful dragons i thought one could end quote i love that whole train of thought from
00:26:59.800lewis explaining like this is how our minds actually work is that we often don't start
00:27:05.420with propositions and then reason our way down to action it's something deeper it's it's something
00:27:10.960more whole-souled for most of us, where we act out of a combination of our whole self and all
00:27:17.880of the influences in our mind and images and the stories are what shape us. And so then from those
00:27:26.060stories, Lewis realized that he could actually teach Christian theology and teach a love for
00:27:33.460Christ and a real like full-souled awareness of the glory of Christ's crucifixion, for example.
00:27:41.260Through story. And I just have to say for myself that reading Narnia, which I read almost, not almost, I read Narnia every single year at least once. And part of the reason is because it's one of those things that keeps the glory and the truth of the resurrection and of Christ's redemption and of his love for the world and just the beauty of creation and how God interacts with it and our hope for the kingdom of God.
00:28:09.600Like all of those things are there in Narnia in ways that sneak past the watchful dragons of systematic theology, and then they flow back into the systematic and they help you love the systematic the right way.
00:28:23.380So I think this is actually one of the most important jobs a father has is to make sure that his children have the right stories shaping their loves.
00:28:32.700What's really interesting is you're describing that. I was thinking – I think it was Glenn Sunshine in our conversation, which will be available in season three for After Hours. That will be an exclusive.
00:28:43.760One of the really interesting comments he made about the Reformation is that the Reformers were somewhat guilty of importing a pure rationalism into Christianity.
00:28:52.500They were trying to correct Rome's errors, but part of what we got was everything is thought of as systematics, propositional truth, all important things.
00:29:02.700But it can kind of, at points, I think, dull the sense of story and love.
00:29:07.800You know, I think even recently we'll have Joe Rigney on in the After Hours exclusive as well.
00:29:13.180And Joe's going to talk to us about Narnia and why those stories are so potent and powerful.
00:29:18.780But it really, like what you're saying is we're not just purely rational creatures that like digest the information like a phone book and then now we're good.
00:29:44.340One of the examples that I think of when I'm going through this exercise is actually if you're trying to communicate a truth, right?
00:29:54.540For example, if you were telling somebody in the congregation or your children, like, hey, you shouldn't commit this egregious sin because you will feel really guilty about it and you will be wracked with guilt and your life will be hell.
00:30:11.100But there is repentance on the other side.
00:30:13.900If that's what you say, like, okay, that's a bit of data.
00:30:17.420And then Dostoevsky tells crime and punishment.
00:31:02.540And feel the bleakness of where the walls are closing in and there's no joy or light anywhere until – and actually crime and punishment until real justice starts to break in.
00:31:16.200And I mean, better justice would have been the capital, but whatever.
00:31:46.040It seems like people are pretty excited.
00:31:47.660I noticed you got a lot of young kids.
00:31:49.020You got a lot of business owners, like what in the world is going on?
00:31:52.520And you start sharing the idea like, oh, no, we actually win down here.
00:31:56.800Let me tell you how that actually works.
00:31:59.180You know, the Bible says that the glory of God will cover the entire world like water is wet, like, you know, the waters cover the sea, you know, and start going through a lot of this post-millennial hope and saying like the gospel is effective for salvation.
00:32:13.980And you can have hopes for generations, thousand generations, you know, that your people will be blessed.
00:32:21.860And so we need to put our hands to the plow and you can just see it in the eyes of the men here when they're like, wait a minute, there's actually hope.
00:32:30.900Like the rapture isn't coming tomorrow or something like that.
00:32:33.820I mean, I'm not trying to dunk on anyone specifically.
00:32:36.020But when you share the story of hope and you share the story of the gospel and of the whole narrative of scripture in a way that's applicable to the life of a man or the life of a child or a woman, you're actually winning their heart to a vision and an idea and an ideal and a virtue, and they have something to strive towards.
00:33:00.140You could read a systematic on, well, this is what the post-millennialist eschatology believes, and you'd have the data points, but it's so much more than that.
00:33:09.020Just like you could take systematic of the entire scriptures, and you have all of the theological data points.
00:33:16.660But if you don't read it, if you don't read the narrative of the entire story of God's people from beginning to end, you're missing out.
00:33:24.420God tells stories because it wins people.
00:35:43.720And it was really amazing because at the end, Elizabeth genuinely and very Christianly repents to a man, to a man and says, I have wronged you.
00:39:50.840And what comes to mind now is because of, you know, we'll get into this in just a minute, but season three of King's Hall, which we're working on, doing all this reading in the medieval period and early Christendom.
00:40:03.320But my boys are also in the medieval period in school.
00:40:07.080And so I – they had actually been ahead of me in reading a lot of this material.
00:40:11.200But it was really interesting because I was asking my sons – this conversation comes up.
00:40:15.360They're talking about what they want to name their children.
00:40:17.800And, you know, my oldest, he said to me, he said, I think my firstborn, I want to name Charlemagne.
00:44:19.700So Where the Red Fern Grows was very big.
00:44:22.540It was one of those books that, as a young lad, definitely I came back to again.
00:44:28.440Books that I came back to over and over and over again that I think in general called a boy to – first of all, there are stories that understand what it is to be a boy, like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn.
00:44:41.940Those are books that understand – Twain understood what it was to be a young man because he, as a teenager, like ran away and became a steamboat captain on the Mississippi River basically.
00:44:51.740I mean, that was his thing. So he understood this adventurous spirit in boyhood and the humor and the love and all of it was there. The justice, the fighting. I also think of a book like Swiss Family Robinson, which is to our ears, super didactic.
00:45:10.440in it's like there's a lot of moralizing in the book where the puritan father is like every five
00:45:17.080minutes like now children let us kneel down and praise the lord and thanksgiving for delivering
00:45:21.120us from this wildebeest that came out and you know so there's an element where it's it's like
00:45:26.300not the most realistic book but what i love about it is that it just so straightforwardly presented
00:45:34.400this godly family piety with a strong Christian father and boys who sin and then are corrected
00:45:44.080by their fathers and submit to him like over and over in the book that happens that book comes to
00:45:50.280mind what I mean I don't want to say it but Lord of the Rings and Narnia are obviously everyone's
00:45:54.860show yeah Lord of the Rings was very influential for me when I was younger my dad read it to us
00:45:59.640when i was a kid the other books that i was attracted to and honestly i don't even remember
00:46:04.740what they're about necessarily but it was the red wall series by brian jocks yeah i remember i i
00:46:10.060just ate those up yeah absolutely loved them so i just give the caveat that i don't remember
00:46:16.200any of the story because yeah i don't remember if they're good or not but i remember loving them
00:46:21.060and like green ember or wing feather saga the sd smith or the um andrew i can't remember who
00:46:26.720wing feather is there are more modern stories that are kind of in a similar vein as red wall
00:46:32.000the red wall stories are like for that age um adventure stories like anthropomorphic animals
00:46:38.240kind of thing right but but intended to again demonstrate we're talking about stories that
00:46:44.020demonstrate truth as true uh evil as evil and that the world is embattled hard things are going to
00:46:51.560happen to you. You're going to be kicked down. You got to get back up, be a man, be a woman,
00:46:57.260those kinds of things. The world is not just stuff. The world is not just stuff. So true.
00:47:01.420All of it. So absolutely true. Couldn't have said it better myself, Eric. That's right.
00:47:05.260Brian, I do want to ask you just on the sort of biblical theology and, you know, as you look at
00:47:10.940scripture, one of the things that we were talking about before, as we were preparing for this
00:47:15.880episode that's interesting is so much of like Deuteronomy 6 and as the people are in the
00:47:21.560wilderness and going back into or going into the promised land and looking back, God is telling
00:47:28.360them repeatedly and Moses tells them repeatedly, tell your sons the stories of what God's done.
00:47:34.380One of the things that I hope for is that we transmit is exactly that. Look at what God
00:47:41.260has done in Ogden in our own lives. In our lives. Look at what the Lord has done and even keeping
00:47:45.820records of those things for future generations. But just talk to me a little bit about some of
00:47:51.520the theology behind this of, you know, biblically why God says stories are important for that
00:47:57.720generational work. Yeah, because people are forgetful. And even, so think about this. If
00:48:03.560the wilderness generation of Psalm 95, if they can forget God who saw the miracles and who saw
00:48:10.560God deliver them? How much easier is it going to be for the children who didn't see them
00:48:15.100to forget and to fail to transmit the wonderful works of God and the wondrous deeds of God on
00:48:20.480their behalf? So you have to have stories that capture powerfully the truth and the ugliness
00:48:27.280and the beauty and the redemption so that your kids, in a sense, can live the stories again.
00:48:32.720They can live alongside you what the Lord brought you through. So I think that's true in your own
00:48:39.260life, but how much more of teaching our kids how to understand the scriptures themselves,
00:48:44.520not as a story, or I mean, sorry, not as just a collection of random historical works that,
00:48:50.440you know, they've got some moral things that you should learn. Here's a couple like,
00:48:54.680the moral of the story is be a good boy, Johnny. Well, no, the moral of the story is Christ
00:49:00.000throws down the Leviathan and he wins his bride and you're a part of this story. And so go and
00:49:07.420follow him into battle. Like teach your kids to read the Bible that way, and then learn how to
00:49:14.280read their own family story, church story, their own life story through that lens. Cause you'll
00:49:20.780know what to do then when you come upon hardship and you're like, this happens to us all the time.
00:49:27.400Hard thing in the church or hard thing in our lives. And it's like, okay, guys, how are we
00:49:31.840going to lead through this as pastors okay well what would what would the hero of the story do
00:49:37.220well he wouldn't be a giant um pansy pansy he would be courageous and he would go and he would
00:49:46.540say full send and so we're going to full send well even even as we were talking about things
00:49:51.280like lord of the rings recently our very own deacon ben garrett uh was filling us in on this
00:49:57.780like mix i guess it's a mix of uh the life of than like a super cut of fate yeah super cut
00:50:02.880but like you watch that and then okay we have hard things to deal with pastorally and i say to myself
00:50:08.160go be a king like there's hard things and it is inspirational it kind of gives you the jet fuel
00:50:13.900to go deal with that dan it looked like you were gonna yeah no i was gonna riff off what brian
00:50:18.820had said one of the exercises that i've been doing with my boys uh because they're younger
00:50:23.740sorry i can deadlift them they're quite small though they're very it wouldn't be the numbers
00:50:30.360that you're putting up no is that i would read a passage of scripture you know for family worship
00:50:35.940at night and they're all kind of like their eyes are glazed over i mean they're like
00:50:40.120two three six you know like they're really little and i i still do that but one of the things that
00:50:46.760i started to do and i could see their eyes light up is i'll quickly like read over like david and
00:50:52.920Goliath, for example, myself. And then I tell them the story and they absolutely love it. And
00:51:00.120what it allows me to do is to, is to say like, boys, you're going to have giants that come
00:51:06.020against you. And so your call is to be like David. And I mean, there's lots of different
00:51:12.160applications. Cue the, you're not David. Yeah, I know. I know. I should have picked a different
00:51:16.200Yeah. But the point is that I'm using a true story and I'm telling them the story and I'm telling it to them in a way that they'll understand with the hopes of winning their heart. And then I'm hoping that we'll see what happens. One day they'll be reading through, you know, first Samuel or whatever book it's in and they'll get to David and Goliath and they'll go, I remember this story. I love this story, you know, and I'm supposed to be like David. I'm supposed to be courageous.
00:51:45.420Yeah. And the thing is, culture in the world is going to continually try to tell them other false stories that are intended and reverse engineered by the world of flesh and the devil to strip away all of the glory and wonder and all of the divine and all of the transcendence and all of the meaning.
00:52:03.240It reminds me of a quote from one of my favorite books, which is Notes from a Tilt-A-Whirl by Andy Wilson.
00:59:27.380I'm sure this will come up again and we'll go into more detail, all that good stuff.
00:59:30.160but um shield walls and the shield wall and and uh in ben merkel's book the white horse king
00:59:37.640um he talks about how alfred was at the front so this is very bloody style of combat you're like
00:59:44.140you have guys with shields and then other guys are reaching above around whatever to stab people in
00:59:48.080the throat eyes whatever alfred is at the front and they said well the thing is if one man retreats
00:59:56.200it will crush the whole troops because everybody will start retreating, and most especially the
01:00:01.600king. And I thought particularly of Denethor. Denethor has this line in Return of the King
01:00:06.660where he says, the wise ruler always fights from the back. And here you have King Alfred,
01:00:11.960the wild boar on the battlefield, leading his people, outnumbered, outgunned, and yet he's at
01:00:18.500the front. It's so important. That's a pretty practical lesson for today's church leadership.
01:00:23.080Yeah. Well, what's really interesting about that is it's actually part of the culture. It wasn't just Alfred was this Superman kind of character where he's like, no, I'm not going to lead from the back. I'm going to lead from the front. It was actually the expectation of the people. They wouldn't follow anyone that wouldn't fight in the front. That was the expectation of a leader is that they'd actually lead on the battlefield.
01:00:44.620And so that also tells you something of the type of people that the Anglo-Saxons were with baseline Christianity.
01:00:56.740And it does tell you something about the church because what kind of background culture do we have to where we actually anticipate that the leaders don't get dirt under their nails?