"I’m the Squeaky Chair!"
EPISODE 167
Draw Closer in Your Relationship to Jesus
It’s been four years since we started the podcast, so this week we decided to press pause on the upcoming guided studies to step back and take a look at where we are, where we’ve come from, and where we want to go next. We start with what Jesus Said about how we’re drawn to him, and end with a Reach Out question about areas of the show we hope draw listeners closer to The Lord. We also invite you to help us shape the future of the show — what would you like to hear about? Do you have any Bible questions we could help answer? What subject would you love to have a study guide on? We’re grateful for the input! And whether you’ve just discovered the show or have been with us since the start, thanks for listening! May the Lord grow and develop us all as we follow him!
Takeaways
The Big Idea: Spiritual conversations with close friends are an incubator for our development in Christ.
This Week's Challenge: Let us know where you’d like to see the show go next.
Episode Transcription
It's a squeaky chair, man. But yeah, in what, 167 episodes? It's not shown up as a third host of the show yet, so. I'm Bryan Schiele I'm Ryan Joy. And I'm the squeaky chair! Eee-oo, eee-oo, eee-oo. Well, hello everyone, and welcome to the Bible Geeks Weekly Podcast. This is episode 167. I'm Brian Shealy. I'm Ryan Joy. And thanks so much everyone for tuning in. We are back from our break week. I don't know, we do this from time to time. It's always helpful to kind of take a breather. - Yeah, and it's also helpful just for our content to think about, just pause every seven or eight episodes and think, hey, where are we? Where do we want to go? Which is kind of what leads to this episode. - Yeah, this is gonna be a weird one. I think in times past, we've sort of jammed one series right back to back with another series and we've been doing these guided studies here recently. We were going to roll right into our third guided study here, which we kind of teased on the last episode at the very end, but I think it's time maybe to kind of give ourselves a little breather. And I always love in those episodes, those guided studies episodes, where we're getting into some heavy stuff, and then all of a sudden we hit the icebreaker, and it just sort of lightens the mood, and we get to laugh a little bit. I think hopefully that's what these next handful of episodes are gonna be. And maybe today on this episode, talking a little bit, kind of a meta conversation about the show itself, where we're at, what we've been doing. I think it's a good time to kind of stop and maybe take stock and figure out where are we headed? Yeah. Every once in a while you have a state of the union address from the president. Well, this is a much less significance in the scheme of things, but a state of the podcast, where we are, what we want to accomplish, and also just sharing with everyone an opportunity to weigh in and engage with us and let us know where would you like us to go next? Yeah. And I think we would be remiss for not starting as we always do with something about Jesus and let's kick this thing off with a Jesus starter. Yeah. And as we began this podcast, if you have been with us for a long time or have gone back and listened to some of the early episodes, we had a practice of dropping a surprise Jesus said on the other one. So every week we would take turns. And so that's what we're going to do. Brian doesn't know my Jesus said, and I'm going to ask him for some initial improvised thoughts here on what Jesus says in John 12 and verse 32, the purpose of this show as a whole, like not just this episode, but what we have stated as our purpose is to draw closer in relationship to Jesus, to help others do that, to help each other do that. And that idea of drawing closer brought me to this statement that Jesus said in John 12. And it's at this period where Jesus is thinking through everything that's happened. He says, "And now what shall I say? "My soul is troubled, but shall I say, "Father, save me from this hour? "For this purpose I've come. "Father, glorify your name." And so he hears this voice then that says, "I have glorified it and I will glorify it again." this voice from heaven and there's a crowd there and they hear it, they hear that it had thundered. And some people say an angel spoke it to him and Jesus said, that didn't come for my sake, that was for you to hear. And right now the judgment of the world has come, now will the ruler of this world be cast out. And here's your verse, Brian, and I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself. So what does that mean to you? It reminds me of Nicodemus, actually. As Jesus told Nicodemus, "As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, "so must the son of man be lifted up, "that whoever believes in him may have eternal life." You know, it was sort of that picture throwing back to the children of Israel as they were wandering in the wilderness and they were complaining about the food that they had and how they wanted to go back to Egypt. And they basically were just being a bunch of whiners and how God sent serpents to come and bite them. Of course, Moses had to provide for them a way to not die in the wilderness. And so God told him to make a serpent that was on a stick or whatever. And everyone was supposed to look at that and they would be saved. They just had to look and trust that God was going to save them. God was teaching them that you need to trust in me. You need to understand that I'm in control. That's I think the picture that Jesus is giving here in a small way that when he's lifted up that all people will be drawn to him because just like back there in the Old Testament, everyone was drawn to that serpent who needed to be healed. We are all broken people and we are all in need of healing. We're all people who need Jesus and we need Him to save us from our sins, save us really from ourselves, from our own desires. And I think the more we get to lift Jesus up not only to ourselves and look to Jesus, but I think the more we get to lift Jesus up in the world and and reflect the light of Jesus into the world and let people see Jesus living in us. That really is the whole thing. And that's, I guess, what you were talking about, the purpose of this podcast. I think that's what we're focused on trying to do here. You know, we have silly conversations sometimes, we laugh about things and we try to get real with each other. But ultimately, this isn't just self-serving. This is an opportunity for us to lift up Jesus into the world because we are fully convinced that Jesus has the power to heal us from the greatest disease that we've all had and we all suffer from, which is sin. - That's a really helpful place to take this, just connecting it first back to John 3.14. I hadn't thought about that, but that is one of several places in the book of John where Jesus talks about being lifted up and this idea of setting up the cross as not just a instrument of humiliation and torture and death, but as a really counterintuitive, shocking exaltation, like you said. And this idea of us drawing people to Jesus, I think it's helpful to think about how, like you said, when we point people to the cross, when we point people to what Jesus did as he was lifted up, much like someone who's trying to escape the serpents back in numbers would point people to the one thing they have to look at to be saved. We're pointing to salvation and that story, that truth of what he did and who he is has the power in itself to draw people. It's thankfully not our job to do all of the drawing, but to-- - I'm terrible at drawing. (laughing) to tap into that power that the Lord has given us access to to be able to draw people to Him. So it's such a powerful idea. Jesus can draw us up because of what He did for us on the cross. - Hopefully, as we've been doing here for 167 episodes, hopefully some of these things have pointed people to Jesus. And I love, you know, even just starting out this conversation talking about Jesus, hopefully focuses this conversation on things are a little more important. So let's get into a conversation here about the state of the podcast. It was back on February 7th, 2019, where we kicked this thing off with episode one, with a really weird episode called "In Development." And I think that episode, we talked all about how the show began and where we kind of came from, but you can kind of see some stuff in there that kept going through future episodes, but a little bit more extemporaneous in our conversation. There wasn't a whole outline and a focus We were we were driving toward very bad recording quality. Oh and man my part especially Seriously, yeah for anyone who was like, you know I just couldn't get past the first episode like give it a few episodes and hopefully the quality got a little bit better But yeah episode one was fun 167 episodes later almost four years later I guess a little over four years after that not too long after that We started up a new podcast which was our daily download podcast a little bit shorter episodes maybe two to three, maybe four minutes long, that we would do periodically. Maybe we misnamed it "Daily" because after a while, it just became not something we could do daily because it's a lot of work. 272 episodes of those. Over the years, we've had two guests, and I know you know who those two guests are. Episode 21, for the longest time, was like one of our most popular episodes, and that was bad advertising with our wives. That's the name of the episode. Having our wives on isn't bad advertising. - No, that was definitely not. - That's bad advertising. - It was pretty awesome though. That was one of the most popular episodes that we had. We have done a whole bunch of series over this whole run, I guess the last four years. Really we've had four big series. We first kicked it off with an into the book, New Testament Bible reading plan that we did for an entire year. And then the year after that, we decided to get on this cross training discipleship development course that we did for a whole year. And both of those have complete books that are available for free on PDFs worth saying, you know, all the intros to the whole reading plan and all of the weekly intros are available in the Into the Book guide and then the whole cross training series is complete and there's 52 different topics for character development, shaping our hearts, our relationships, our attitudes, our behaviors towards the Lord. And I think that's a great point to make because as we were going through those year long series and we were creating those guides, those downloadable materials, I think that's at least in my mind, that's sort of what solidified the value of some of these conversations that at the output of that, we could create something that other people could use and leverage. And I've heard from a handful of listeners who have gone back and actually one person I know of who started in 2023 going back through and doing cross training again. And it's pretty cool to see how people can go back and use these things and maybe kick them off at the beginning of a year or maybe for a season and just focus themselves on these things and creating these downloadable guides I think is what rolled into our training wheels guided study where we decided to start really focusing on making things that people could use to have their own conversations. Absolutely. One of the things we heard from people occasionally is the need for creating and publishing materials for Bible studies, for Bible classes, for people to work through on their own. It's not that there isn't any good material out there, there is, but there's always a desire for more and for information and guides for particular topics that people need. And so that was something that several people pointed out to me. And as we were starting to kind of lean that way anyways, it started to really make sense for us to start developing these into those guides. And as we were sort of trying to figure out the place for the daily download podcast and also the weekly podcast, I love how they kind of came together in this way that we could create these conversation starters that were short little blurbs, maybe two and a half minutes, three minutes long, and we could drop those out all at one time to kind of get people's juices moving, you know, and thinking about things. And then how we were able to take those conversations and kick off every weekly episode with one of those as we worked through that particular topic during the week together. And I think that helped sort of tie all these things together that they weren't like disparate and disconnected from each other. And, you know, obviously in 2022, we had taken kind of a long extended break just dealing with family stuff and whatever. But then we came back and we dropped our fourth big long series, which was our second guided study about what's good. And we actually just finished that. If you haven't downloaded the guided study, the full PDF of that discussion, those are available on our website, Biblegeeks.fm/good. That's where those are. So you can go download that and use those yourself. But I love that, Like you said, at the output of all these things, we have material, we have something that we could give somebody. And I guess maybe, I don't know about you, thinking about it for myself, like if 10 years from now somebody comes back and they find these conversation starters, or they find these study guides and they're able to take them, print them out and use them in some way, I mean, I feel like the work that we put in has paid off in some way, I guess. Well, that's definitely something that I've thought about a lot as we've done these different projects is thinking about how do we make something that is standalone, that can really stand the test of time. And I think that the value of each of these different formats is they're really consumable, I hope. They're intended to be at least for different situations. You know, a three minute or two minute type of video is really shareable. And it's something that what what we try to do is really capture all of the different aspects of a particular topic, like humility, but in a really bite-size, put it in a nutshell kind of a way, that hopefully sets up a conversation where you don't have to really lay a whole foundation of what it is. The basics are really laid out, but also makes you want to talk about it more, because there's so much left to say. And I think that there's a need just in the world for really good biblical shareable content. I'm always excited whenever I see someone sharing the gospel or sharing the truth about a particular topic on social media or just emailing it to a friend or pointing someone to something and being able to let the tools we have kind of spread these things. And then I think, you know, the conversations we have are more something that you can just throw on in the background while you're cleaning or while you're driving to work or something. It's not something intended to be dug into in the same way. Hopefully it lets people start to digest the content and then keep thinking about it in a way that's accessible. - Yeah, but also we did not just these big, big series, but we also had a few smaller series over the last four years. We did a series on the fruit of the spirit. - It's hard to find a better topic list than that one. - Yeah, and then we also did the miracles of Jesus and we called that Here's Your Sign. So that was fun. I think we went through the miracles in the Book of John, if I remember right. And then we went through a series that I think we refer back to every now and again, which was our Young Folks series. And in that we also referred to talking to ourselves and what we would say to our younger selves. - Did we call it young folks? 'Cause that really sets the tone for what it is. - We did for sure. - It's two old guys talking about young people issues. - If we go back and listen to some of those episodes, we 100% made fun of ourselves in the moment. - Absolutely, absolutely. - So I think it's interesting, as I was thinking back to some of the first moments that we started this podcast and we were doing things together, I can remember one of the first times we recorded And I was listening back to the episode and I was trying to edit it. Of course, the audio quality wasn't great anyway, but I remember like we said, okay, here's a passage and all I heard was like you turning your pages in your Bible on the audio recording. And I was like, okay, dude, we're going to have to figure something out. Cause I cannot listen to pages in a Bible flipping on a podcast. And, uh, I think it's kind of interesting how the tools that we've maybe enabled have kind of evolved over time. I don't know, what have you noticed about your Bible study or even just prepping for this show that's kind of changed over the years from when it first started? - Well, the biggest thing is that we prepare. (laughing) Except for this episode, not a whole lot of preparation. - Except for this episode, not much prep for this, but we've started to have a format and an outline that we work through. We just do a Google Doc that we share and build our plan for the episode. And we keep it loose enough that we can just go off on our tangents and have fun with it. And if we see something new, you know, it's still meant to be a time of discovery and really listening to each other and creating something new from the conversation. It's still meant to be not a presentation, but a dialogue. But I definitely have a little bit more idea where the show's gonna go than I did at the start. you know, when we would start an episode, we might have a topic like, okay, we're gonna talk about Bible meditation. And I know what I think about Bible meditation, but I didn't have a list of notes or an outline. And I think that was intentional too, as we were exploring just getting in there and talking. And it was really fun, but I think that it definitely gives a little more direction and serves listeners a little better whenever we've thought a little bit about what we wanna say and then let it, if we get away completely from what we had prepared, which does happen more than I thought it would, that's okay too. But that's the biggest thing. I mean, we definitely have, you have improved my recording quality. We've used a lot of different recording tools. - It was only up to go from where you were at, so. (laughing) I think I remember early on, actually, your microphone was pointed in the wrong direction and you were recording the room and the echo in the room. that you were in? Oh man. - Oh yeah, yeah, the office, yeah. And there was a heater that would come on in the middle of things. - It was so bad. - And it would just be this (imitates explosion) blast in the background. (imitates explosion) - My hands as we talk are going crazy. So if you tied those down, I wouldn't be able to say anything. - Oh boy. I think the prep and formatting and just the outlining that we've done for myself has been really helpful. It's just, it's hard sometimes to speak extemporaneously and you want to be able to sound genuine. But at the same time, I think if you're really passionate about something or you're like working through something still, I think it's hard to speak in a way that people find value in because as you're working through something or you get excited about something, like you just may not land on the thing that someone needs to take away from it. And I don't know for me, that's been some of the biggest challenge is just trying to balance that natural speaking, natural tone of voice, but also speaking in a way that people can get something out of it. And we could drop an episode that's like two hours long and just ramble our way through things and edit it within an inch of its life. - We definitely could. - We easily could do that. But for a lot of people, I know they like, their time is scarce and listening to podcasts is not something that they wanna do or can do all the time. And so respecting people's time is a big deal, but then at the same time, it's like, how do you balance putting a lot of meat in there and sounding like you're not just reading off of a sheet of paper, putting your voice out there, having fun with it. And that's, I think, what the biggest challenge has been over the 167 episodes we've done so far. I think we still have a ways to go, but I love where we've come since the very beginning. It absolutely has continued to evolve, but I think it really goes with what we talked about from the beginning about what we wanted this to be. only the purpose of drawing people into deeper relationship with Christ, but having this sense of devotion in everything we do. With love and loyalty and enthusiasm, we said as our value proposition that what we want to do is create content that surprises and delights and challenges Christians and seekers who want to grow with biblical insights that draw them closer to the Lord. And we've talked about the value of clarity and we've talked a lot about trying to edit things down and be tight with what we say so we're not wasting any time and we're purposeful and trying to just be real and authentic about what we, we're just guys that are, you know, try to take ourselves not too seriously, just guys under development ourselves. You know, we call ourselves disciples under development and that's what we are. in the process of growing. And for that purpose, hopefully seeing us grow or listening to us as we're challenging each other. And I'm realizing as you're talking about your conversation with your daughter that, you know what, I need to have some conversations with my daughter that I haven't had yet or discovering something new about an area of our lives that we haven't really put the spotlight on. As we go through that process of growing ourselves and relying on these weekly conversations as sort of an incubator for our own spiritual growth, hopefully that is a blessing to others. I love the marketing side of you, my brother. And from my standpoint, just sitting down and doing something feels like enough. And you're the guy who sits there and before we do it, let's talk about why we're doing it and who we're doing it for. And I think the balance there has been super good. So maybe looking back at the state of the podcast, that's kind of where we had come from. Where are we going though? What is on the horizon? And I think from the standpoint of these guided studies, I think that's where we're gonna continue to go. Guided studies in my mind really tie everything together in a nice way as we've already been talking about. And we did tease it on the end of the last episode, but thinking about this talking to yourself series that we're working on right now that we're gonna drop middle to the end of April. I think that's gonna be something that I'm looking forward to. You actually go back in the history of our daily downloads. That series actually was one of the first series that we did in those little short videos. And so broadening those out into a bigger conversation, kind of excited about that. And I think that's the opportunity 'cause we've done a lot of episodes, we have a lot of content on our website, but I think even just molding these and turning these into some of the more valuable conversations like these guided studies are, I think that's gonna be a huge thing. So if you go back in history and you had a favorite series that we did or a bunch of topics, I would love for people to reach out and let us know like what series you actually wanna hear about and what would you like to have a guided study created about? Maybe it's not something we've ever talked about before. Maybe it's something brand new that you're interested in having conversations with others about, reach out. I mean, I love when people get in touch with us. We have a lot of ideas. If you know anything about Ryan, he is an idea man. And so that's something. - So many possibilities. - Yeah, maybe we can talk a little bit about some of the ones that we've been thinking about. - Well, I think that you're onto something with this idea of making some of what we've already done more accessible and more useful to people. I remember not long ago, a brother was asking me a bunch of questions about the end of time and what will happen at the end. And I keep telling him things and directing him to different resources and sharing some things from the Bible. And I said, you know, you're familiar with the Bible Geeks website. We have some stuff on there too. We have a whole series where Brian and I unpacked what is going to happen in these three minute clips from the resurrection to the coming of Christ and the judgment and all these different aspects of what the end is as opposed to some of, of course, the false ideas about what's going to happen that are out there. And he was like, I didn't have any idea. You guys really dug into this. I didn't know that there was all this stuff there. And he was somebody who listens regularly to the weekly episodes. So I think pulling some of those out and making them more useful and diving deeper into some of those subjects I think will be useful. One of the things we've talked about is a guided study called Meet Your Bible, where we can take the subject of scripture and all of the confused ideas people have about it, all the places people get stuck with scripture, whether you're just starting and maybe you're sitting down with someone, a young person or somebody that doesn't know the Bible at all and you're trying to show them, here's what this book is first of all, and then what it's about and then how to engage with it. Or maybe you've been studying scripture for a long time, but you've gotten into some bad habits. I think that's going to be an exciting subject to explore. These are all things we haven't yet laid down the exact format or plan for, but I've talked about. We have talked quite a bit about a series directed towards kids for families to go through together about grace and we've kind of mapped that out called Amazing Grace. I think that's something that as a kid and even as a teenager and a 20-something Christian, I didn't have a very good grasp of what grace was and what it was about and how it affects a Christian's life when we're engaging with it in a healthy way. And so I'm excited about that. I love the kids focus. You know, if you really think about what these conversations are about, these guided studies, of course, you're going to want to study with your kids. Of course, you're probably going to want to study with people who don't know much about the Bible. And so meeting your Bible, hopefully that'll be a great way of introducing people to the Bible and what it's all about. And even just people who don't know about Jesus, who are not yet familiar with salvation and they don't know about the gospel. I mean, there are plenty of conversations that we could have that are focused on maybe evangelism or just teaching people the gospel and even maybe explaining why we believe things. I mean, there's all kinds of ideas that we've been floating around about different conversations that we could have. And even, you know, if we go back and think about some of the old series that we've done, we did the "Into the Book" series on the New Testament. And we could totally turn one of those around and turn it into an Old Testament, into the book conversation, where we put it all together in the same way that we've been doing with these guided studies. Lots of ideas. But if you have feedback, if there is something that you would love to hear us talk about on an upcoming episode, or to create a guided study about, please get in touch with us. There are a lot of people who support the show. And one of the biggest ways that you can help out with the show is to reach out and let us know, like, what are you thinking? What do you want to hear about? Even if it's not a full blown series, maybe we can tackle some Q&A and just do some real lightweight topics. Maybe we'll do that actually in the next couple of weeks. But thinking about Q&A, thinking about feedback, thinking about series you wanna hear about, I would love to hear. I'm sure you'd love to hear too, Ryan, from all the people who listen to the show. - Amen to that, absolutely. It would be really helpful to know what kinds of content is needed. Where are you seeing a need? What would you love to have a conversation about or to hear us engage and put together some videos about and things like that. And then as you say, we're about to in this next stretch get into some Q&A episodes and we've gotten some questions in the past that we haven't gotten to yet, but we would love to get some new ones also because we need to restock that collection of questions. And so if you can shoot us an email, a message, a comment on Facebook, whatever way you want to engage with us, talk to us if you see us and just let us know, what would you like to hear about? Is there a question? Is there an issue you'd like to see addressed? - Yeah, so we've got obviously a contact form on our website. If you go to Biblegeeks.fm, you can find that there. We'll have links in the show notes to all the places where you can get in touch with us as well. But these kinds of things are opportunities for you to get involved in the show and shape where we go next. If we're talking about what's on the horizon, that's a great way to do it. And one other thing that I think would be helpful to mention here on this episode is a new project that we're gonna be doing, just off the cuff, little bit of floater episodes in between these big, big series. One of the things that we've been talking about for a little while is creating a little bit of a book club. I know there's all kinds of opportunities to read spiritually focused books. I know people who listen to the show are big readers also. And so we thought about maybe sharing a few episodes coming up here soon at the end of March, early April, where we talk about a book that we're reading together. And I think actually this first book we're gonna read is "Celebration of Discipline" by Richard J. Foster. It's a book we've read before, but for me it's been a long time since I've read it last. And it's an interesting one. We referred to it on the show quite a bit, I think even early on. It's a book that really had a lot of impact on me. And I thought maybe it'd be cool if we just sit down and talk about that book. So if you haven't read "Celebration of Discipline," maybe read it, or you could just listen to the conversation that we have and hopefully we'll pull out and draw out all the resources out of it that would be useful for people to hear. But I love that book and hopefully we can have a good discussion about that coming up in a few weeks. - Definitely, it's gonna be good to think about spiritual disciplines like prayer and Bible meditation and service again and go through some of these ideas. I have mentioned this book to several people before, and sometimes people have loved it, and other people have really had some challenges with some of the ideas there. So I think that's another value of having this kind of a conversation around it. We wanna put disclaimers around any book that we put out there or suggest that's not the Bible, even stuff that we put out, please check the scriptures and look for book chapter and verse for everything. This is an endorsement of everything, but I think that there's some really powerful ideas and practices, which is really what that book is about, that will be helpful to everybody to think about. And it'll be exciting to start looking on the horizon for new books. Maybe somebody has a suggestion for that for another book that would be great for the book club. So we'll look for those also. - So Bible Geeks Book Club, I mean, that just rolls right off the tongue, I'm sure. - I love it. - And as we look back to the last four years as we've been going, I think one of the things that Ryan and I have maybe wanted to improve on a little bit is wrapping some other people up in these conversations too. Like we said, it's just the two of us, except for the time in episode 21 where we had our wives on. And so we are thinking about having some more guests on the show. We would love to have people come in and get involved in these conversations. and we have some folks lined up that we're really excited to talk to in the next few weeks. So I guess that's just sort of what's on the horizon, what we're looking forward to. And maybe this would be a great time to stop and reach out and ask each other a question to end this episode. ♪ Reach out, reach out and touch someone ♪ - All right, so here's our reach out question for each other this one. What areas of the show do you hope draw people into a deeper relationship with Jesus? - And we have talked about some of them, I think. I think that these reach out questions are an interesting way to engage that is not the kind of thing that I grew up doing in a spiritual context. To dig in and relate to each other and share spiritual conversations. I didn't really ever sit in a Bible class where people opened up about their own struggles or their own victories or where they interact with a Bible passage in their own life very much. just talking about the truth and boy am I grateful for that. It's not just a criticism, but sometimes we need more than just the doctrine and we need to see each other working through it and make ourselves think through how these truths affect us. So I think that's been a helpful area. Just since we're right here, we just heard the song, "Reach Out and Touch Someone." That's the first thing that comes to mind as I think about these areas where Hopefully people are able to draw into a closer relationship a deeper relationship with Jesus that idea of deep is something we talk about a lot more than I've Heard about through the years either things being deep things that being meaningful. I think that there is There's a quote. I believe at the beginning of celebration of discipline that says something like "What the world needs is not," and he gives a whole list, "smarter disciples," or "nicer disciples," or whatever he says. "What we need is more depth in our discipleship." And what that means to me is that we are taking the time to let the Word sink into us and change, not just the surface areas, but our deep ways of looking at the world, of looking at ourselves, of looking at marriage and sin and everything about our lives. We're diving deeper into prayer, again, not just having a routine, but spending the time it takes and doing the work it takes to really draw closer to Jesus in the way that you have some friendships that you see each other and you can have a nice conversation about how the Phoenix Sons are doing, but you wouldn't really go in to the real stuff and you don't really feel like there's a profound connection there of any kind. And then there's other friendships that are different. And that's what we wanna draw people into with Jesus. I think all of this content, the more we can dig below the surface and start to unpack these ideas and their significance for us, That I think is the opportunity to draw people into a deeper relationship with Jesus. What about you? - Well, this is exactly what happens when you don't prepare for the show and you don't have outlines and you don't have notes and you don't know what someone's gonna say 'cause that's exactly what I was gonna say. - Welcome to the good old days. - Seriously, that's exactly what I was thinking. You know, really just these conversations highlight to me that you can really go deep into the scripture. You can really go deep into living and putting into practice these things. And I know you were talking there about how that's not something that is common sometimes. And it is so easy to just scratch the surface on some of these topics. And I love that when we really just plan out these conversations and we think through these things together, there's stuff in here that I just did not expect to be getting into. And we're doing word studies, we're doing character studies, we're going through and summarizing a book and all of the things that we try to do and we try to have a lot of breadth, but at the same time, like you said, We try to have a lot of depth in these conversations. For me, I think that's the power in just talking to people and talking to people in real serious ways. And that's what I love about talking to you really is that yeah, we can go through and talk about how the Phoenix Suns are doing, but which by the way, they're doing okay. I mean, not terrible, but they're doing all right. But we can also then shift that conversation into something that, wow, it's just is something I'm gonna chew on for the entire week. And hopefully not only are you gaining the benefit of this as the listener in hearing two guys talk about the Bible. But like, hopefully you're able to shift these conversations to people who you're close to too, and ask them deep questions and get into deep Bible studies with them about things. And so maybe as we close this thing out, I know it's been a bit of a different episode, but it just feels right to close this thing out with a challenge. - I am ready to face any challenges that might be foolish enough to face me. - So if we haven't said it enough on the episode, the challenge this week is to let us know where you'd like to see the show go next. And that is a really simple challenge, not really a super deep, spiritual, philosophical issue, but if you— - Slightly self-serving, perhaps? - A little self-serving, yeah. But if you would love to reach out to us and tell us where you want us to go next, we would love to hear it. We'd love to hear your feedback, your thoughts, your plans, the questions you might have, whatever it is. Reach out, get in touch with us, and we'd love to have a conversation with you about where we're going next. And I guess that's kind of the end of the episode. You got anything else? - I can say shalom, but that's about it. (both laughing) - You can say shalom. I love how that also sort of morphed into something over the course of the show. - Maybe that's a good place to go to close out. If you don't know where the words that we close with come from, it comes from the priestly blessing in Numbers chapter six, at the end of that chapter. There's a blessing that the priests were told to give to the people, to put God's name on the people. And a blessing is one of my favorite ideas in scripture is this idea of speaking a prayer, but speaking, calling on God's name to someone else. And so what we're trying to do as we close out is now we're the priests, all of us who are believers, and we're trying to bring the blessing of grace and peace to the world. That's how many of the New Testament's letters close, drawing from that priestly blessing is for God to be gracious and give you peace or shalom. Shalom is the Hebrew word for peace. So that's how we'll close this one out like all the others. So thanks everyone for tuning into the Bible Geeks Podcast. You can find us on our website at BibleGeeks.fm. You can find show notes for this episode in your podcast player of choice or at BibleGeeks.fm/167. Please reach out to us. Please let us know what you want to hear on upcoming episodes. We are going to be doing a Q&A episode soon. Look forward to the Book Club episode coming near the end of March, beginning of April, and look forward to hearing some more guests on the upcoming episodes. And until next week, everyone, may the Lord bless you and keep you alone.