#136 | Life, C.S. Lewis, and Stories of Sharing the Gospel, Pt. 1 | Jerry Root

And I start reading Lewis voraciously. And I read Surprised by Joy, his autobiography.

And that's the book that hooked me because he talked about the deep longings of his heart and the quest to find the object of that longing. I knew the longings existentially. He gave me a vocabulary from my own soul.

It's watering time, everybody.

It's time for Apollo's Watered, a podcast to saturate your faith with the things of God so that you might saturate your world with the good news of Jesus Christ. My name is Travis Michael Fleming, and I am your host. And today on our show, we're having another one of our deep conversations.

Have you ever known someone that you look at as just plain wise, who you just want to hang out with and really soak in everything that they have to say because you know that they typically care about you and they have something important to say? That is our guest for today, Jerry Root. I met Jerry several years ago.

I was told about this group that Jerry had that met at his home on Thursday evenings where these guys would get together and talk about poetry and talk about the Christian life and. And just fellowship together.

In interacting with him, I realized that he broke the mold of so many different stereotypes I had in my mind of what a man of God could be. I mean, he was so broad. He knew so many different things about so many different subjects.

I mean, he's a former college football player who says he had read probably six books before he ever went into college. He became a pastor and then a scholar of C.S. lewis and an evangelist, an evangelism professor.

He just retired not too long ago, and he might be retired, but it doesn't mean that he isn't doing things. In fact, he's probably busier than he's ever been. He's speaking, helping people to meet Jesus and speaking to guys like me.

He's never lost this down to earth warmth and care for people. He is one of my favorite people, and I was excited to have him on the show because I really do just simply enjoy talking to him.

And our conversation was fantastic. It focused on one of my other favorite people, and that's C.S. lewis. We also talked about evangelism and how do we introduce people to the Savior?

But in many ways, this conversation is about the Christian life, about what God wants for us and how God can use people like C.S. lewis to open our worlds to what God is already doing, to see how God is at work and calling us to a dynamic faith in every area of life.

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Simply go to ApolloSWater.org, click the Support us button and you'll be glad to know you have made a difference in the lives of others. But enough about that. Let's get to my conversation with Jerry Root. Happy listening, Jerry Root. Welcome to Apollo's Watered.

Thank you. I'm really grateful to be here, Travis, and it's good to reconnect with you after a few years.

Well, are you ready for the fast five?

I don't know if I'm ready for anything. I used to be an athlete. I used to be relatively fast, but now I'm old and I just actually, I need a cane.

Can I walk through the fast five with a cane?

You can walk through the fast five with a cane. So it is kind of in between seasons as we're recording this, but I'm going to ask you this. Pumpkin spice or peppermint mocha?

I think I'd go with the pumpkin spice. It's a little more subtle in its flavors and so on. I like subtlety about this question.

You are a man when fill in the blank.

You're a man when you can look at your own mistakes, own them, ask forgiveness where you need to. Ask forgiveness, learn from your failures and grow so you don't make those same mistakes again.

That's really good. I thought you were going to say bench press £400. I like the first answer, though. That's really, really good on owning your mistakes.

That's actually very, very good. Now, you've been. How long were you a teacher for? I know you've retired from teaching. Well, retired.

And I put air quotes around that because you're still teaching. But how many years were you in the classroom?

Well, I was a pastor for 23 years, mostly in college ministry. But in those 23 years I was an adjunct professor all through for 16 of those years.

And then I became a professor full time for 25 years and was a full professor at Wheaton College.

That's a long time.

Yeah, that's a long time because when I retired from Wheaton College, I got a call from the archeology department and they told me they had shelf space for me.

Because you're a fossil, put.

On a little bit of weight. So I thought the shelf might cave in. So I.

Well, here. So since you've been a professor what's the funniest classroom experience you've ever had?

It was when I was lecturing one time, and a student came up to me while I was lecturing and whispered in my ear. And then he went and sat down, and I had to turn around and pull up my zipper.

I laugh at that because I was speaking at a camp of high school students, and I was doing a Q and A where they would pass questions up, and I'm reading the questions out loud, and it says, travis, your zipper is down. I was in front of everybody. So, yeah, that was quite embarrassing. And I've had that.

Actually, while I was preaching, someone in the back made motion and I had to definitely take my jacket off and fix that. It was embarrassing. So embarrassing. Okay, number four.

If you could own a pub, I mean, you're a CS Lewis scholar, you love Tolkien, you love the Inklings, but if you could own a pub, what would be the name of the pub and where would it be?

Well, I already do own the pub.

What?

Yeah, it's in my basement. I have a full in my basement. I live on Shady Shady Lane, so we call it the Shady Lane Pub. I'm a shady character on Shady Lane.

Next time you're by, I'll take you down to the Shady Lane Pub. I know the owner. The drinks are free.

I like that. Interesting.

The Eagle and Child is for sale.

Is it? For how much, though?

I don't know. You should call them and see. Maybe you could do your podcast from the Eagle and Child.

Well, that would be interesting. Oh, that would be very interesting. Okay, number five. Here we go. Craziest ministry experience you've ever had.

You could go so many ways with that. You know these things that happen and you say, wow, there was some real coincidence there. Just a coincidence. Don't let it build your faith.

You know, that sort of thing. But you also have ones where you see people do stupid things.

I was out sharing Jesus with people, people the night before the Rose Parade and the Colorado Boulevard in Pasadena. It's like there's a million people out there. We were walking through Pasadena City College, and we saw this guy lying in his own vomit.

And we picked him up and we started cleaning him off. We put him on a bench and so on, and we started sharing Jesus with them. As soon as we started sharing Jesus, he started cussing us out.

He was so angry. He says, you put me back where you found me. I said, you were laying in your own vomit. You put me back.

I don't want anything to do with this Jesus stuff. So we laid him back down in his own vomit. And I think, I think that's the way it is.

Why would anybody refuse the message that the God of the universe loves him with intensity? He's done everything to set what's wrong right in their life in Christ. And why would they want to just go back to their own vomit?

It's a little bit like Pharaoh. Remember there was like the frogs, and he says, okay, I'm done with the frogs. Get rid of them. And Moses says, when? And Pharaoh says, tomorrow.

So he was willing to spend one more night with the frogs. I think some of the craziest things I've ever seen is how people will reject God for the mess they've made for themselves. I do stuff like that, too.

God help us all.

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Get one today because understanding the Bible changes everything. And the NLT is the Bible you can understand. So let's hear the Jerry Root story. I mean, as you, you alluded to, you're an athlete from California.

Been in, I mean, you've done ministry in a lot of different ways. College students, Professor C.S. lewis, scholar. But give us the Jerry Root story.

If you, if you say I was an athlete. That's right. You have to, you have to believe it by faith. Now though I grew up in almost South Central Los Angeles. You know, Los Angeles.

The original street was Alberta Street. Alameda runs right alongside of it. Goes all the way to San Pedro. You went straight south from the central street in LA down Alameda.

I live Three blocks off of Alameda, between Florence and Firestone. If you saw the movie Bloods and Crips, Made in America, the documentary about how the gang started in la.

The first gang was called the Slauson Street Club. The police started calling it a gang, so it was a Slauson street gang.

My high school was on Slauson street, and I played high school football with guys that got free televisions during the Watts Riots. And a guy was shot in the leg at the end of my street. It's interesting though, because they got free tv, so now I could watch color tv.

It was kind of nice, you know. It wasn't all that bad, you have to think about it. But I grew up there. People didn't go to college, many from where I grew up. Some did, but not many.

I didn't really have any interest. I wanted to play sports, so I went to college to play football.

And I ended up getting accepted to a school that I think at that time you had two options. You had to pay tuition and you had to breathe. They would negotiate the breathing part, but the tuition was non negotiable.

So I got accepted on probation and I went there. And the first week I was there, my older brother, who was a Christian, invited me to a Campus Crusade for Christ meeting.

And I heard the gospel and it blew me away. I didn't know that I could be loved by the God of the universe unconditionally. You know what does the Hound of Heaven by Francis Thompson.

He says, human love demands human meriting. How has thou merited? Of all man's dingiest clay, Thou art the dingiest clot. Whom will thou bind to love ignoble thee? Save me, save only me.

And when I heard that God loved me like that, I just freaked out. And that he forgave me of my sins. Nobody had to tell me I was a sinner. I was too well aware and it was good news for me. So I become a Christian.

And I made it my goal to share Christ with every guy I played football with in college. And every year I'd share with them all. I saw about 15 guys a season come to Faith. Some of them went on to really live strong lives for Christ.

Some of them just sort of went along over the years and so on. But nevertheless, my friends would ask me questions. And I never heard of these questions. I never asked them.

If God's good and all powerful, why does evil exist in the universe? I had never once asked that question before. As a Christian, I'm ashamed to say it I've written a book about it.

It's a matter that concerns me, but my friends asked the questions. And I'd say I don't know the answer to that. But I won't leave a stone unturned until I can find a substantive answer that will help you.

I don't know if we ever get to the last word on any of these questions because we're such pea brains, you know, and we're talking about big things. Remember Lucy? She says to Aslan when she encounters him the first time, the Christ figure, the lion of Narnia.

When she encounters him for the first time on her second visit to Narnia and Prince Caspian. She says, aslan, you're bigger. He says, oh, no, child. Start reading Lewis voraciously. And I read Surprised by Joy, his autobiography.

And that's the book that hooked me because he talked about the deep longings of his heart and the quest to find the object of that longing. I knew the longings existentially. He gave me a vocabulary from my own soul. Life really matters to me. And I went and dug, and this is what I found.

How could they refuse listening to your answer when they asked you the question and you did all that work to help them with the answer? Sometimes they just ask another question. But every time they ask the question, as I dug, I started growing in my faith.

Many times they asked the question when I share with them the answer. They trusted Christ. But a lot of times in the literature, I saw a name crop up. CS Lewis. Who's this guy?

I liked his answers that I read as people were quoting him. My older sister was a Christian and she was reading Lion, Witch in the Wardrobe to the fifth grade class she was teaching at her school.

And she told me one night when I was visiting her over dinner the plot of the lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. I said, what, there's books like this? I think I read six books before I went to college, not counting comic books.

And there was a professor at Whittier College where I attended. And there were only three professors who I knew who were Christians.

And this philosophy professor was very respected and he was requiring some Lewis books for his classes. So I basically majored in that professor. I wasn't a philosophy major. I was a PE major.

But I had enough units for a minor in philosophy except for one Eastern religion class where I would have had that minor. But this guy really helped me, too. So I go to seminary. You know, they had a. The seminary went to Talbot Graduate School of Theology.

They accepted a few Students on probation. I mean, my academic interest in college was to stay eligible. I didn't know how to spell it, but it meant everything.

So the grades to keep me eligible, but not grades to get into grad school.

But Talbot said they would set aside a few people that they would let in on probation because maybe God was doing a work in their life and maybe they were a late bloomer or something like that. I think I took the entire quota. When I came to, Talbot let me in, they let me in.

And when I got in, I did better in grad school, but I had to write a thesis. There was no way I was going to write a thesis on the use of the optative mood in the Greek text of Philemon. It just wasn't going to work.

But they said I could write on C.S. lewis, so I wrote on C.S. lewis. So that was the first time I put pen to paper about Lewis. And then I started writing on him.

Eventually I did my doctorate on Lewis and started lecturing on him. And I used to teach a course at Biola University on C.S. lewis.

I actually taught there for about 32 years as a visiting professor, but I taught a class every semester. At that time I was living in Santa Barbara. If you believe in Jesus when you die, you go to Santa Barbara.

I taught at him in a community college here in Illinois, back when I was pastoring for 10 years Lewis courses. And then when I came to Wheaton, of course, I was teaching Lewis every semester.

And again, I've lectured on him at 79 universities in 19 different countries. It's interesting to me because I still think of myself as that inner city kid who was a PE major. You know, we're defined by our early experience.

But if nobody was interested in Lewis, I'd be all in. And he opens more than wardrobe doors. Lewis was a. For me, my skeletal structure through the liberal arts. You read Lewis.

He's so persuasive, but he doesn't persuade by coercing. He persuades by standing shoulder to shoulder with his readers.

And he defines and describes things in such a way that you're fascinated by the things he's talking about.

So through Lewis, I started reading Homer, I started reading Plato, Aristotle, started reading the early church fathers, reading Athanasius, reading Augustine, reading Aquinas, reading Dante, My Word, reading Chaucer. And Milton and Philip Sidney and Edmund Spencer. And Milton, I think. Did I say Milton already? Shakespeare.

All these authors, you know, you keep reading then his near contemporaries, you know, George MacDonald, G.K. chesterton, Tolkien, Charles Williams. My heavens.

And the whole thing has been a liberal arts opportunity for me, but it's been breathtaking every step of the way. It's filled with wonder. G.K. chesterton once said, the world will never starve for want of wonders, only for want of wonder. And Lewis opens up wonder.

He feeds your curiosities. And curiosity should always lead to the quest for answers. These answers should lead to awe and wonder.

And wonder should always break forth in worship. So he's been a wonderful experience. Boethius, too.

I have to mention Boethius Lewis said that he was the most influential author of medieval literature after the Bible. And he said a person wasn't considered educated up to 200 years ago, I think it was. He said 150, but let's give it some extra time.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

If they didn't know Boethius, and it's true, you read Milton, you read Chaucer, you read Chaucer has one character in Trois. And Cressida Pander, who recounts the entire argument of the book. Dante is referring to Boethius. They're all referring to Boethius.

Nobody even reads him. Nobody even knows he exists anymore.

And I think the reason why is because the Enlightenment put up a mesh that filtered out a lot of these great authors of the past. We don't read them. It's unfortunate we're bereft. It's our poverty. We're impoverished because we don't read a lot of these authors.

Darkness falls can't see my reflection at all Caught in.

Going back to CS Lewis for a minute. And that's one of the reasons why I wanted to talk with you.

We got connected via a thing we called the Brotherhood of the Briar, which is a group of guys that would come together on Thursday evenings and discuss philosophy and poetry and just be around a fire and have fun and really just try to engage the mind. Why is Lewis such a figure that he's hard to nail down. He transcends categories, and yet people love him across the spectrum.

What is it about Lewis that draws us in or draws people in? And why should we read him today?

There's several things that happen there. One, he sticks with mere Christianity, so you can find people who are Orthodox, Catholic, Coptics, Protestants of all stripes.

And they read him because at the core they have something that still allows them to be called Christian, whichever branch of the Christian faith they're in. And Lewis sticks that core.

He's not afraid to talk about the fringe, but he has a difference between what he says is a sure word versus opinion, and opinion is based on probability rather than certainty. It's subject to doubt, and reasonable people could differ over matters of opinion.

Lewis doesn't fight over matters of opinion, but he holds a firm ground to mere Christianity. I think that's good. The other thing, too, is that Lewis said to a bunch of students lecture he gave called on the English Syllabus.

It's published in the book called Rehabilitations, a Lewis book that nobody ever reads, but nevertheless, it's a good book. And in that, he said to the students, we have fulfilled our whole duty to you if we could help you see some given track of reality.

We tend to be projective. We tend to project ourselves on our world. And we treat the world like a ventriloquist treats its dummy.

We're basically uttering our own ideas through whatever it is we look at.

Lewis says, no, you need to see this thing outside of yourself, the world outside of yourself, that you can grow into that world rather than atrophy into your own. And he has a line in his mature literary critical work called An Experiment Criticism, probably is his last literary critic.

Discarded Image was his last one, but one of his last literary critical works. He says, in coming to understand anything, we must reject the facts as they are for us in favor of the facts as they are.

So Lewis looks at the real world and he's describing it. And a person begins to see something of the robustness of that world, and they become interested in it, and they break out of the dungeon of self.

Lewis helps us with that. Not only that, Lewis writes with such descriptive precision. He trained as a poet. He was not successful as a poet. I think his poetry is great.

My academic friends don't think it's great. And they think that the fact that Lewis was rejected as a poet was a great thing because it drove him to prose.

And we've all benefited by his prose, but I like his poetry. But nevertheless, he trained as a poet. A poet has to let each word count for more.

You know, the narrative author can put together a paragraph to communicate an idea, and a poet will try and capture that same idea in a few words. And Lewis picks his words carefully. And there's little ambiguity with Lewis. And I think that's helpful.

The other thing is he's such an imaginative author, so that even in books like Mere Christianity. He makes a propositional point and then he depicts it somehow imaginatively.

And he said, the imaginative man in me is older, more continuously operative than the rational man. It's not that he's downplaying the rational side, but he loved the employment of the imagination. As a child, he was a lover of the myths.

He was a lover of story, and he employs story, and he sees the value of story as well.

So just to depict this a little bit, George MacDonald, an author who influenced Lewis, once said in his novel Annals of a Quiet Neighborhood, we do not have souls. We are souls. We have bodies. You tell a child he has a soul, he thinks like anything else.

He has his books, his keys, his lunch, whatever, that he could leave it behind. He thinks when he dies, he goes to grave and his soul goes off someplace else.

McDonald says, no, tell the child he is a soul and he has a body, and when he dies, he goes to heaven and he leaves behind his body like clipped hair on a barbershop floor for those who still go to barbershops. Right?

Neither one of us.

I say, why should I have to pay as much as that other guy over there? The barber goes, it's finder's fee. We got to find it before we could clip that. So what is the soul?

And I think I could lay out proofs of the existence of the soul, the immaterial part of what it is to be human. I've read a lot of books on it and stuff like that, but.

But basically, traditionally we've said the soul, the immaterial part of us, has a thinking part reason, it has a choosing part volition, and it has a feeling part, the emotion. And even coming from an academic environment, I would suggest you the reason is, hands down, the weakest of those three.

If I make a bad choice, a bad decision, my reason doesn't kick in and say, jerry, that's stupid. You follow that line, all you're going to do is hurt yourself and hurt people who care for you.

No, my reason, being weak, is marshaled by my will to start making excuses and rationalizations for the bad choice. Lewis wrote, continued disobedience to conscience makes conscience blind. Aristotle put it this way. Vice is unconscious of itself.

He takes a word, Ekrasia. Krasia is the Greek word for command. But the alpha negation, you lose command of your moral life if you make bad decisions and rationalize them.

You lose moral clarity, you lose moral sight. Basically.

Having made these excuses, Lewis says, reason stands like almost a dragon sentry before my heart, keeping things from getting to that heart through its excuses and rationalizations. And Lewis says, sometimes story gets past the watchful dragon.

And so Lewis gains a hearing, even in a skeptical world, because of his use of the imaginative depictions in the stories. That people who have resistance to anything, to Christian faith will let down their guard, and all of a sudden they can begin to hear and see.

Underneath me is the current thy love.

It's my contention that we've lost a lot of what the Christian imagination is because the imagination is such a powerful tool that we have at our disposal. And I think that Lewis, as you mentioned, already, had tapped into that in a way that not too many authors have.

Have we lost the idea of a Christian imagination and our contemporary culture, that we've been bombarded with images and we're just so caught up in having the entertainment done to us that we've really lost our ability to imagine? Or are all the images that we have in front of us indicative of imaginations that are becoming more awake?

I know I've done work on Lewis and the Imagination. You talked about the Brotherhood of the Briar and that pipes group that meets at my house for discussion.

And there was a guy at that group named Mark Neal. And Mark had written a couple of really good articles on Lewis.

And in my study of Lewis, I found that he writes about the imagination at least 31 different ways. They say Eskimos live in snow. 24, 7 have 30 words for snow because they can nuance it better.

And Lewis, I think, who lived in the imagination, had all these words. So I said to Mark, you and I need to do a book on this. So we wrote a book called the surprising imagination of C.S. lewis.

We're going to do 31 descriptors on these different imagination. The publisher gave good advice. They said, no, just do 15, but show how Lewis works it out, one of his books.

And I think that was a good editorial comment. So we did with the appendix, then giving the other ones that we didn't, that we didn't describe.

But the fact that he looks at this in such nuanced ways and all things human are fallen. So there could be broken ways that the imagination is used that are not for our good. And Lewis talks about those, too, but most of them are helpful.

He borrows a lot of these from different authors, but Samuel Taylor Coleridge talked about primary imagination or common sense. You have five gates of empirical data coming in touch. Sight, smell, taste, and hearing. And all that stuff is coming in all the time.

And it's just a cacophony of information. But something makes sense out of them. Primary imagination or common sense. And that's itself not an empirical activity.

It's an activity of the imagination. You have bad uses the imagination, what Lewis calls transforming imagination. It's basically psychological projection.

Doesn't make any difference with the thing. Thing is, I project on it what I need it to be because I want to sustain myself in this sort of Akrasia.

But you also have what he calls from Shakespeare the penetrating imagination. He writes an essay, variation in Shakespeare. Penetrating imagination seeks to go deeper into a thing.

He says Shakespeare can in one sonnet maybe have seven metaphors. He's just getting all around the thing, showing the nuance and the complexity.

And he writes another, a piece called Similes and Dante where Dante does something similar. But then he talks about the realizing imagination that he thought was a medieval form. And it's like the.

The thing in bud that opens up to a wider flower and the realizing imagination takes it out wider. He talks about the great thing about medieval stories is that they embellish the old things that came to them.

So you take Homer's embellished by Virgil, Virgil's embellished by. By Boccaccio and the Decameron. Chaucer takes Picacho and embellishes it and trailers and Crest.

We do it today, but we're probably not as aware of it because we're not aware of the old material. But you take a story like a West side Story, it's Romeo and Juliet retold. You take August Rush and it's basically Oliver Twist retold.

The Robin Williams character is the Fagan character. You take a brother, Where Art Thou? That's the Odyssey retold. You take the Lion King, it's basically Hamlet retold.

You take Bridget Jones Diary, it's Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice retold. Colin Firth plays Darcy, character named Darcy in both stories in the BBC edition.

And the Bridget Jones thing, it's like the director's taking a two by four and hitting the reader or the watcher over the head by saying, I'm just retelling Jane Austen here, in case you don't get it. I've got Colin Bird planning a guy by the same name. In both stories we're embellishing stories all the time. That's the realizing imagination.

You've got others too. The material imagination, you've got a host of others are very, very interesting.

And as we study these things and see how Lewis nuances these things so well, then it draws us in and it draws us in. In this way, any development and thought will require some use of the imagination. A scientist begins a scientific method with a hypothesis.

It's not a thing, it's an imagined thing. And then they test the hypothesis. And if they discover something, they depict what they've discovered in models.

That's not the thing itself, but it's an imaginative depiction of the thing. Even theology develops along those lines as well. Walter Elwell, the theologian, used to say, all theology is approximation.

And we always seek better and better approximations. You look at the history of the Church, we've got the first council in Acts 15, and we see a model there.

If the Church wants to solve a controversy, let's get together and get more eyes on the thing, if we can. But then during the Roman persecution you had a lot of heresies that were developing. So now let's solve these things. What are we going to do?

Is Jesus really God? So they met at Nicaea. I was interesting. I was just at Nicaea about three weeks ago.

It's a fairly nondescript place, but something that still is rippling through church history happened at that place. They got together and they formed a trinitarian understanding of biblical revelation captured in theological doctrine.

But it wasn't enough because the controversy still went on. Okay, if Jesus is God, how do we reconcile the two natures of Christ as human and his divine?

So they have the Council of Constantinople in 381, they have the Council of Chalcedon and 451. And it's through this imaginative development even of theological doctrine to try to understand this stuff.

We imagine something, then we go back to the Scriptures to see if what we've imagined has merit or not. And Lewis is not afraid to do that. And consequently then his faith is not static and inert. It's dynamic. And it's dynamic and orthodox. It's wonderful.

How do, how do we hold onto that? I mean, how do we cultivate a similar Christian imagination?

Now I think one, we have to not be afraid to ask questions and not be afraid of our doubts. I tell my students, if you have no questions about your faith, you're delusional. You think you've achieved omniscience. We're pea brains.

We're trying to understand and grow. And you can't grow unless you lean into the things you don't understand.

And then leaning in, you may come up with a misdiagnosis or a misunderstanding. That's why you need to do it in community. 60% of the word you, in New Testament Greek is plural. Part of that's pragmatic. Right.

They didn't have printing, so people would come to the church to hear the reading of scripture and so on. So the letters were written to a community. But also I think still it should be written to a community. We should understand it. And community.

None of us can do really great theology in isolation from others. We need to do it in isolation. And I would say something about that too, in light of evangelism. I don't know what this is.

I remember one time I thought, I need to tell people about Jesus. And I've always had this since I became a Christian. I was talking to people about Jesus. I still do it.

If you want to go to a donut shop, you go from six to eight in the morning and you see these people dropping by for their donut in their cup of mud before they go to work. And I think you could write a doctoral dissertation on the sociological subcultures of donut shops and America.

Eight or ten little tables at this donut shop, chairs around them every day. I'd go. I'd see people sitting at the same table. Same people, same table, all that stuff. I didn't have any strategy. I was a doofus. I. I had a heart.

I was praying for the people at the donut shop. My strategy was this stupid. I thought I'd go have my Greek Bible there. I'd be reading my Greek Bible. Somebody come in and say, what's that?

I'd say, it's a Greek Bible. They'd say, oh, can I ask Jesus in my heart? You know, that's.

There was this guy who would come in donut shop every day and, and, and I would just go on Tuesdays and Thursdays. We'd come in, he. He looked like Walter Matthau. Remember that actor?

Yeah, yeah.

Like he'd either been weaned on a dill pickle or baptized in lemon juice. I mean, he had a smile on his face. And he'd walk in and I'd say hi to him. He would scowl at me and he'd sit at a table just to my right every day.

Never said a word to Me, I'd say, hi. Hi. Good to see you. He'd say, I had in my prayer book, you know, the grumpy guy.

One day I'm reading in my Greek Bible, and all of a sudden I hear somebody say, can I sit here? And it was the grumpy guy. I said, yeah. What's your name? He said, gene. I said, what do you do for a living, Gene? He says, why are you writing a book?

And I made a dumb mistake. I asked too much to sin. And I realized you can ask a public question of a person. What's your name? This donut shop was in Whittier, California.

I could have said, are you from Whittier? It's a public question. It's not intrusive. He's in Whittier.

And then you listen to the answer, and the answer lets you go deeper with the next question because the answer gives you permission to ask about the data. They said, one time I met a guy. I said, what's your name? He said, peter. I was in Chicago. I said, are you from Chicago? He said, no.

I grew up in Albuquerque. But when my parents divorced, I moved with my mom to Chicago. He didn't have to tell me that gave me permission to ask about that.

And eventually, as we asked deeper and deeper questions and he gave deeper and deeper answers, I knew how to share the gospel with him in a way that would be heard. Because I got to that place now with Gene. I screwed up. I didn't know this step.

And a lot of times what happens is if we share our faith with somebody and it doesn't go well, we just say, okay, I'm out of here. This is too difficult. I don't want to do this and stuff. We don't treat any other area in our life like that.

If you're married and you get married and it's all great fun and stuff, and then all of a sudden you have a little spat, you say, well, this is a little more complex than I thought it was going to be. Do you bail on your marriage? You have troubles with your kids? You bail on your kids? No.

Why do we treat evangelism different than any other area in our life? And I don't understand this thing. I met a man who was out on. He chose to wander this world all alone.

He said, heaven can't help me. I'm so far away from where they.

Found me on that day.

You said something that I've. I've heard you say before.

You said, you give a public answer, and then if something in public that you can agree upon, meaning that he's in Whittier, California. You can talk about Whittier, California, because that's a public thing. But when you went into Gene's, you know, what do you do for a living?

He hadn't revealed that yet, so it was private. Therefore, you skipped the process. Go back to that for a moment, because I think that's pretty profound.

Describe this process that you use when you go through, when you evangelize.

Well, first off, with Gene, though, I realized I went too fast. But it ended up that every Tuesday, Thursday after that, he started sitting with me and we started going deeper.

And in time, I found out he was a guy who had twice been married, had no clue where his former wives were, had two kids in the world, had no clue where they were. Have you ever heard of a deadbeat dad? Dean was the guy. And guess what? God loves deadbeat dads.

And if we're not in context where we can meet those guys to tell them of the love of God, you know, they may still hear it. I think God engineered Gene and I meeting. He became a Christian nine months later. But it took time, you know, and I had to learn from my mistakes.

But Gene was a good teacher in a sense. He hung in there with me. He didn't reject me when I went too fast, too soon.

I was coming back from Slovakia, as in Bratislava, giving some CS Lewis lectures over spring break. And I had to fly back to Wheaton to their classes after spring break.

And the people dropped me off at the Vienna airport, which is only about 45 minutes from Bratislava. I check in my luggage, I go through passport control, and I go into the.

Where I was waiting for the gate, the gate area, and I'm told the flight's three hours delayed. I love the anonymity of airports. I pull out a book, I start reading.

I see this young woman walking into the gate area, and she's got a clipboard and a lanyard, and she's going up to people and I can hear her talking in German. Vienna is a German speaking city. I figure she's doing a survey for the airport.

Sure enough, a moment later, she comes up to me and she speaks some flawless English. And it gave me great insecurity. What was I wearing that gave it away? I wasn't German speaking. Then I realized. So I was reading a book.

She probably saw it was in English and spoke to me in that language. So she said her name. She said she was doing a survey for the airport. And I said, what's your name? Public question. She said, allegra.

I said, allegra, are you from Vienna? She said, no. And she says, I'm a student. So now I've got a billion questions I could ask. Where do you go to school? What are you studying?

And you follow that line of questioning all the way through. And then I say, do you have any other family in southern Austria? Only my father. And he's a very bitter man. Why is he so bitter, Allegra?

She didn't have to tell me that. Well, my mother left him to go with her lover to Canada. But she had good reason to leave him. He's very toxic.

And so we could talk about her relationship with her father for a while and find out how that was troubled him differently. I said, well, do you have any other family members? She says, a brother. Where's he at? I gre. He's also at the University of Vienna.

Well, do you have much relationship with him? No, we're kind of estranged too. And then she goes, and it's worse than that. I said, how's that?

She said, my boyfriend went to Florence to study art for six months and asked me to wait for him. I waited dutifully. He came back yesterday to tell me he met somebody better in Florence.

Here's a woman whose whole life is full of estrangements, relationship longing, but vacuous as far as the reality. I know how to share the gospel with her. I know the place where when I shoot the arrow, it won't be at hazard aimed. It will be aimed at the target.

Because I could talk with her about the God who wants to reconcile us to us to him and have a relationship with him because he loves us. So finally, 20 minutes I've been asking her question. She hasn't asked me one question. I said, allegra, and I know her life.

I said, allegra, you need to ask your questions. But I said, but I need you to know I've been sent here to tell you something.

Then she thought I was a plant at the airport to see if she was doing her job. I said, no, it has nothing to do with that. So she asked me her questions.

How long it'll take me to check in, get through passport control, all the things you'd expect. Finally she says, what is it you were sent here to tell me?

And I think every one of us needs to realize we are people who are called to Christ and sent into the world. Come and go. Jesus says, come unto me, all you who are weary, laden and weary and heavy. Laden and I will give you rest.

Go into the world and make him known. So she said, what were you sent here to tell me? I said, allegra, the God of the universe knows you and he loves you. Allegra, he loves you.

Sometimes you have to say it three times for it to fit in. Allegra, he loves you and he won't abandon you. And she just started sobbing in the airport. Loud sobs.

Everybody's looking at me as if I'm torturing this poor girl, you know, and. And she says to me, volunteers herself, but I've done so many bad things with my life. I said, oh, Edgar, he knows about every one of them.

And so great is his love that he has forgiven you of all of it. And he longs to have a relationship with you. She heard it. She heard it because you went slow and you listened to her. You asked appropriate questions.

And I don't think we take Jesus to anybody. He's already there, more in love with that person than you and I will ever be.

We go to make explicit what God might be doing already as he's tugging at their hearts. But we have to listen.

Allegra's story hits me hard. Jerry's willingness to treat her well, his genuine concern for her as a person, are more than a little convicting.

But the power of God to break through the hurt and abandonment she felt. All because Jerry took the time to care for her, to ask the right questions.

As I think back to this first part of my conversation with Jerry, I keep thinking about the power of story and asking questions. How God uses these to shape us and to allow us to bring people closer to Jesus. We are in the Advent season now, preparing for the coming of Christ.

I can't help but think of both how difficult this season is for many and how open people are to a God who loves them. It's pretty amazing that we get to be a part of what he's up to, isn't it?

I want to thank you for listening to our show today and as I said at the onset, please prayerfully consider supporting us and helping us meet our year end goal of $50,000. We only have $27,000 left to go.

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