Ep. 245 Michael Pahl - How Did Jesus Read Scripture? How Should We Read Scripture?

conversation. My guest is Michael Paul, author of the book The word fulfilled, and he brings a really thoughtful, nuanced perspective on this topic. One of the key things that emerges is how Jesus didn't see Scripture as a flat, equal text, but rather prioritize certain passages like the book of Isaiah that spoke to his core mission of bringing God's love and justice to the world. Jesus didn't just memorize scripture, but read it through the lens of loving God and loving your

neighbor as yourself. And that has huge implications for how we should approach the Bible. Rather than just looking for rules or proof texts, we need to ask how the scriptures are calling us to a deeper ethic of compassion and concern for the marginalized. It's not about winning arguments, but all, but about being transformed by the radical love that Jesus

embodied. Paul also gets into the challenges of actually living that out, the kind of non violent self giving love in the face of a culture that often prizes power and retaliation. He points to inspiring examples like the civil rights movement, of how that way of Jesus can actually bring about profound social change. It's a rich, thought provoking conversation that I think will really challenge us to rethink how we engage with the Bible. So join us. Here's my conversation with

Michael. Paul. Michael, welcome to shifting culture. Thanks for joining me. Really excited to have you on.

lives. I think about the way that I experience the Spirit of Jesus in my own life. So Jesus is, to me, all of those things and multifaceted then.

responded to people? Those are the kinds of things that then inform how I live out my life. And with Jesus at the center,

was my own background. We tend to read the Bible as sort of a flat text, as if every part, every every word, every statement, every story is is equal in some way. And we get that from some very good, very good reasons. We think, okay, the all of the Bible is inspired. Second, Timothy three, the whole All Scripture is inspired by God. And so we then take that to mean that it's all equally relevant or equally important for us. And that's, I

think, not the case. That's certainly not the way that Jesus read, read His scriptures. And I think that that's very instructive for us then. So that's just one example of a kind of lens that we have often, especially those of us who have come out of an evangelical background, is thinking about the Bible as a flat text. It doesn't have peaks and valleys, but everything is kind of the

same. And what I would say, as an Anabaptist Mennonite, again, is that Jesus is the center of our reading of Scripture, and so that means that we do in some way prioritize the Gospels, in particular, the New Testament generally, and the way that Jesus is described in those scriptures helps us to read the rest of Scripture as well.

Bible through a Jesus lens. In fact, I would say it's pretty much impossible to do that when you're looking at the Bible through a Jesus lens and you're saying, what did Jesus in the gospels? How did Jesus in the gospels interact with other people, and how did Jesus and the Gospels talk about loving our enemies and those kinds of things and and then it's, it's you have to approach then the sort of genocide passages that sort of lend themselves to that, that reading you have to

approach those differently. You have to read them differently than if you can take a Jesus lens, so taking a flat text kind of approach, can you can pull out whatever passages you want to justify, whatever it is you're wanting to justify, and say that's equally authoritative to anything else. And because this seems really clear over here and is equally authoritative to what's over here, where it's where you know somebody might be silent. Jesus might be silent on this.

Therefore this is the one we should go to and and elevate that. I think we see this, for example, too, in the rise of Christian nationalism in in the United States. It's actually happening in Canada as well, to probably a bit of a lesser degree, but it's still present here in Canada. You have people who are focusing on particular texts of Scripture, and they're not reading through the lens of

Jesus. They're not looking at the gospels in the way that Jesus talks about his kingdom being not of this world and those kinds of things, the way Jesus approached the political realities of his day. And so you can pull those things out from other scriptures. But when you when you start reading the god, reading the Bible through the lens of Jesus, especially as found in the stories in the gospels, it's much, much harder to come away with a Christian, nationalist reading of Scripture.

things. This is, this is my Bible that I came to Jesus with, and it's very significant for me. I don't use it anymore because it's so fragile. And also. My my notes that are in there don't actually, well, some are good, some are not so good. You know, that's 35 years ago, so it's starting to show its age. But Jesus didn't have a

Bible like like that. Jesus didn't have a written collection of sacred writings all bound together in a single book like that that was centuries away, actually, for for people to have that, and I think we often miss that. We kind of think of the Christian life. A key aspect of the Christian life is reading our Bible that we've got, and that Christians have been doing that for all throughout church history. Well, it's not the case. That's a relatively recent

reality. And so for Jesus in the first century, as a Jew, in the first century, he wouldn't have had a personal copy of the scriptures. His family wouldn't have had a personal copy of the scriptures. It cost a lot of money to be able to copy the hand copy all the texts that

were were used. And so in a small village like Nazareth, they might be lucky to have a copy of the Torah, the Five Books of Moses, they might have the Psalms, they might have Isaiah, maybe some of the other prophets, but they would have a single copy, and it might be held at the synagogue, or if they didn't have a secure synagogue, it might have been held by a wealthy patron who perhaps actually paid for the

copies to be there. So that would have been Jesus Bible, a single handwritten copy of not even all of what we call our Old Testament, available pulled out maybe once or twice a week for reading of Scripture in the Sabbath, synagogue service, perhaps for study, if he went to synagogue school, if that was available in Nazareth through the week. So that would have been Jesus Bible, which changes the way. Then I think that we think about how Jesus read his Bible, and how we should then

read our Bible. You asked about the that the texts that that would have been available to Jesus? Well, those are some that would have been available. But we also see in the Gospels, Jesus really focusing on particular Old Testament passages and not other ones. And so in my in my book, I look at in my book, I look at seven particular passages that are prominent for Jesus as described in the gospels, and look at what they were, look at how Jesus read them, and then what that

means for us today. But one of the key biblical books, Old Testament books from the Jewish Scriptures that Jesus really appreciated was, was Isaiah. And in fact, in the in my book, I kind of make the case that if we want to read the Bible with Jesus, we need to actually put my book down and pick up the book of Isaiah and read it through. Because so many of the themes, the language, that show themselves in Jesus, life and ministry are coming through the book of Isaiah.

every every Sabbath. And here he is in his hometown synagogue, and he as a an honored guest, known as a rabbi, at least by some, is given the opportunity to read from one of the prophets and then to expound on it, which would have been a normal practice in a synagogue in the first century. And so Jesus gets up, and you know, whether that's the reading for the day, or whether Jesus just knows exactly where it is in the scroll. Maybe he's actually even used that very scroll when he was younger,

studying that. And so he knows where it is, and he goes right to that scroll, a passage of Isaiah 61 and quotes from it. So, so Jesus there, then is, well, I'll put it this way, Isaiah there is actually referring to some passages from the Torah the Books of Moses, which talk about the the year of Jubilee. So every 50th year there was supposed to be this year of Jubilee in which land was returned to the families that that originally inherited

it. And so I. Slaves who were debt, slaves would be set free. Debts would be forgiven. It was this amazing time of sort of a reset button for the for economic justice in ancient Israel. Whether it actually happened that way or not in practice, we don't know, but that's the way that the Torah, the law of Moses, describes the year of Jubilee. And so Jesus there, when he is talking about, when he quotes from Isaiah 61 he's pointing through Isaiah back to that year of Jubilee.

And then he says, this is fulfilled in your hearing. In other words, this year of Jubilee that Isaiah said was going to be coming when the kingdom of God comes. The reign of God comes is going to be like this perpetual year of Jubilee, and the it will be good news for the poor. The debts will be forgiven, slaves will be freed, all of these things will happen.

And Jesus grabs hold of that and takes that as sort of his mission statement for for his own ministry, and says, I am the one bringing about this year of Jubilee that Isaiah talked about, and that goes all the way back to the law of Moses. It's really a profound, wonderful statement, and it has implications then for how we understand what our ministry, our mission is today, following in the footsteps of Jesus. Jesus,

significant. And there would be some people that would be taking a be taking offense of that at that and in, you know, in the story, as it says there, you know, isn't, isn't this Joseph's son, Mary's son. What's going on here? We know this guy. How can he say this? And then, and then Jesus goes on and says, Well, this can be then taken to other people, if we're not going to receive it here. So that's another aspect of that that gets

people affronted. There is this idea that perhaps even this Jubilee is not just for Jews, but it's even beyond that for for non Jews as well. And so Jesus probably, I think it's in both of those ways, the way that he ties it in and says, This is being fulfilled in my ministry. In other words, he's saying, I'm a crucial agent. I'm the agent by which this is coming in that would have been hard for them to

hear. But then also the idea that this could be available, not just to Jews, but even to those Romans, those Romans who are oppressing us, of this, this empire that our enemies, that this could be available for them as well that's hard for them to take. So

And so Jesus would have known that from from a young age, he would have he would have heard his his parents singing that, who would have heard others singing that, chanting that, in the morning, in the evening, every day. And he would have learned that himself by heart and Jesus and speaking to all of his his Jewish disciples, as well as the crowds, they would have all been very, very

familiar with the Shema. And so when, when Jesus is asked a common question of the time for rabbis to discuss, what is the greatest commandment in the Torah? And Jesus, right away, goes to the Shema. And nobody would have been surprised by that, because they would have said, Oh, that makes sense. The Shema is what we say every day, twice a day. It is the greatest commandment. That we should love the Lord our God with all of our with everything that we are, this undivided devotion we need

to have that for God. But the thing is that there are many, many ways in which we can show our undivided devotion to God. And there were many options in the first century among Jews for how to show your undivided devotion to God. And I think that that's the case for for us today, we can sometimes, as Christians, we can say, well, we need to show our undivided devotion to God by by our moral purity, by our holiness, by the way that we separate ourselves

from sin and sinners. And so then we can get ourselves into some problematic kinds of things where we say, not gonna I'm not only gonna separate myself from those sinners, but I'm gonna separate myself from those that associate with those sinners. And you have a similar kind of dynamic happening in the first century as well, and people saw that as how they were showing their their love for God, their undivided devotion to God in that kind of moral purity, and Jesus doesn't define love for

God that way. The significant thing that Jesus does is he takes that second commandment, you shall love your neighbor as yourself, and he adds it onto the love of God commandment, and says, This is the primary way, the preeminent way that we show our love for God is by how we love our neighbors and loving our neighbors as if their needs were our own needs as loving our neighbors as ourselves and so Jesus all those different options for how you could

possibly Love God. Jesus takes this one love your neighbor as yourself, and puts it with that one, with love of God, and says, This is the primary way that we show our love for God. All these other things, they are good. You know, we do need to actually separate ourselves from sin, not necessarily separate ourselves from sinners, but we do need to separate ourselves from sin, but that still is not the primary way that we show our love for

God. It's an important thing, praising God, worshiping God, studying our Bibles, praying. All of these things are good things, but they're not the primary way that we show our love for God. Jesus says that's we show our love for God by loving our neighbors as ourselves, and that's pretty significant, because it's

horizontally to others. So that, in itself, isn't even the significant thing, but that Jesus was part of that context in which that was happening, even the emphasis on love of neighbor as ourselves and kind of pulling out that, that that commandment from Leviticus 19. There were other Jewish rabbis who did similar kinds of things later on, after Jesus. There are some Jewish rabbis that actually directly pull out that

commandment. But a generation before Jesus, you've got the great Rabbi Hillel, who, in a story that that that told he has a Gentile seeker coming to him, and the Gentile seeker asks, says to Hillel, teach me the Torah while I stand on one one foot. And so, in other words, in a very concise way, so that I can just stand here on one foot while you tell me the whole torah and Hillel says that which is detestable or hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. Do

not do to others. And essentially, it's kind of a reverse golden rule, but it's drawing on that same idea of love your neighbor as yourself. So in other words, those things were kind of in the air of, you know, ways that rabbis talked about our obligations to each other. So it's not surprising that Jesus pulls out either the Shema or the love your neighbor commandment when he's asked, What's the greatest commandment? What is What is distinctive?

What's interesting about that is the way that Jesus puts those two together side by side, and says that the love your neighbor is the way in which we show our love for God. And really melding those those together in that way, that's significant. So to answer your question, Jesus was very much a part of his his own

culture, very much a part. Of His own, His own Jewish rabbinic tradition, in the ways in which he did this and and yet he has some distinctive things about how, how he does that, as well. What motivated him to do that? It's, it's hard to say, you we could say, of course, God's Spirit in in Jesus, you know, it filled with the Spirit Jesus is saying these things. Jesus, as the Son of God, is saying these things. But I think, I think also it would be some of his own

experience. We know that Jesus grew up in in Galilee, which was a hard place to grow up. He lived there, ministered there, a lot of economic depression and injustice in that area. A lot of a lot of hardship that economic depression and and disparity and so on would have showed itself in in health issues. I mean, just the Gospels are filled with people who are in debt, people who are sick, people who are

diseased. And so you get this sense that the people that Jesus was interacting with from even as a small child, he would have been well aware of the needs of neighbors, the needs of others. And so I think that, yes, of course, it's Jesus as the Son of God, Jesus filled with the Spirit doing this connection of love of neighbor and love of God. But I think it's also Jesus own personal experience living and growing up and living in Galilee and seeing the needs of his neighbors. What does that

and how we read Scripture. One is that we should be reading scripture to learn how to love God and to love our neighbor, and so if we are reading scripture in a way that takes us away from loving our neighbor as ourselves, then we're not reading scripture correctly according to Jesus. And more positively, you could say that when we read Scripture through the lens of Jesus in the way of Jesus, then we will learn how to love our neighbor as ourselves

in the way that Jesus did. And so then we can connect the way Jesus lived out that love of neighbor. We can see those threads throughout the Old Testament and through the New Testament as well. And really pull those out to highlight how we should ourselves learn to love our neighbor as our neighbor, as ourselves. I think it also, though, helps us to prioritize scripture in a way that's a that's a strange idea, I think, for some people, but it gets back to that flat scripture

idea that we have. Jesus Himself prioritized certain scriptures and really didn't talk about other ones. Jesus didn't, doesn't even mention Ecclesiastes or Esther or there's a few other Old Testament books, Jewish Scriptures that Jesus doesn't even mention, and many that Jesus really highlights. And I think that this helps us to to kind of prioritize how, how we read scripture, which scriptures we see as most relevant. It's not that they're not inspired.

It's not that they're not useful for preaching, teaching, training and righteousness, as Second Timothy three says, but rather it's that some of them are more relevant, are of more significance for us as followers of Jesus and so to read the Bible through that lens of love means that we are looking, when we read say the Old Testament, we're looking For the ways in which God's love is shining through the description of God as the God who is gracious and compassionate, showing mercy

those kinds of descriptions all the way through so recognizing the loving kindness of God, the hesed of God, all the way through the the Old Testament, but also seeing the way in the Old Testament, that command to love your neighbor as yourself is is brought out and is is witnessed to in various stories and other teachings all the way through in the in Proverbs and the Psalms and the Prophets, not just in the Law of Moses and so you It helps us to discern what are the texts that should most

shape our reading of Scripture, and most shape our living, of our, of our, of our, out of our faith. Because

even growing up. One of the things I like to play with and play with a little bit in the book is, did Jesus have a rabbi? Did Jesus have a teacher who taught him? I think he did at that synagogue in Nazareth. He I think he probably went to synagogue school. It would be really interesting to find out who Jesus rabbi was. I suspect it was a no name, little known rabbi, not one of the primary ones, but still, how influential was that person on the way that Jesus thought about these

things? What was Jesus' experience of growing up and living in Galilee like that

influenced this? But yeah, in terms of that bigger picture, that arc of Scripture and the story of Scripture, Jesus certainly does have a sense of where his place is in this bigger story of God and this bigger story of the world, this bigger story of the people of Israel, and even that Luke four passage that we talked about earlier points to that, that Jesus sees himself as being a crucial at a crucial place, and a crucial agent for the fulfillment of that story, taking place and moving into

this perpetual Jubilee. So yeah, that large story of Scripture, that large story of God, was very significant. But it wasn't. It wasn't just any story. I think what you see in the first century among Jews was that there were, there were several stories of God, several stories of God's people that were out there, almost competing stories in some ways. And so Jesus is, is telling that story in a

particular way. And that story is that God is a God of love, and that God is as a God of love reaches down, especially to the poor and the needy and the humble, the humble of heart. Those who look to God with humility, this kind of the do justice and love mercy and walk humbly with God. Those are the ones that are close to God's heart and that that's that's an important part of this story of

God. God is the God who is merciful and loving and who walks with us in mercy and love and calls us to that mercy and love. That's a particular story of God that is, is kind of tailoring or coloring the larger story of God and God's people that Jesus tells.

Jesus. And so we look to how did Jesus teach about this love? What did this way of love look like as Jesus taught it? But also, how did Jesus live that out? Because Jesus teaching in His way of life were combined and as disciples of Jesus, our Rabbi, we're called not only to learn his teachings, not simply, certainly, not simply to memorize the teachings, but we're not even just to understand them, but we're also called to imitate his life. We're called to follow in his

foots. Steps in a more literal, concrete kind of way. And so we look to Jesus to what this love is all about. And so we learn things like love of Jesus has the love in the way of Jesus has this kind of open hearted, open armed approach to others. It's not closed fisted closed arms towards others, but it's a stance of openness. It's a, it's like a it's like a father waiting for his Prodigal Son to come home and watching in the distance and then running for them. That's, that's the Jesus

way of love. It's, it's like, you know, a woman who is searching for a lost coin, or a shepherd looking for a lost sheep, even if that means that the 99 get get neglected. The majority get neglected because you're looking for this one who you know is lost and is desperately in need. That's love in the way of Jesus. So we look to Jesus teachings. We look to the way Jesus lived out his life

to define what that love is. And what I found was really interesting is when you do that, then you also start to see that in the rest of Scripture, when you look at love in the way of Jesus through the Gospels, and then you go to say the way that that the apostle Paul or John talk about love, and you start to see that they're actually talking about love in the same way that Jesus did first. Corinthians 13 is essentially the character of Jesus that you

see reflected in the Gospels. Or you go back to the Old Testament and the way that God is described as being a God of love, all of those threads are woven together. And you see them in Jesus life and in his teachings, and so you you start to see then this, this continuity of these themes through scripture, and that love in the way of Jesus is, is this thread that ties all of this together?

chief Christianity today. It says pastor after pastor has described for me almost identical experiences in which they would parenthetically quote somewhere in a sermon, a statement along the lines of turn the other cheek, only to be met with after the service with irate church members demanding to know where they had gotten. The liberal talking point at first, I chalked up such controversies to biblical illiteracy instead, though often the angry Christians knew exactly who had said those

words. As one congregant said to his pastor, we've tried to turn the other cheek. It doesn't work. Now it's time to fight. We have arrived to the point at which, for many people who name the name of Jesus, Christ, Christ, likeness is a compromise. How did this happen? I think that's a sad state of affairs, if this is actually happening in a church that says we're the Church of Jesus, like this is like we're Jesus people.

Are we misreading scripture? Or are there other things that are saying this, following Jesus way is too difficult. This way of love that Jesus is reading things through is too difficult. What does that say for our culture, and how do we get to the place of being more like Jesus, even though it is a difficult road, because it is a narrow road, it is a hard road, it is not going to be easy. But how do we get back to the place of, I'm going to embody Jesus and this way of love and everyday life?

works or not. And we have a way of determining whether something works, because we see success or failure based on parameters that we have determined in advance, our success or failure. So I find that interesting, and I think that that's a telling comment on on our culture and in our Christian culture as well, that we we we're looking for a Christianity that works, and that works in certain ways that that the bring about change that we want to see, and bring about

that change immediately. So that, to me, those those kinds of notions need to be addressed. A in a in a discipleship kind of way nuts, and that takes time.

But approaching that in terms of in our in our churches, in our preaching and our teaching, in our mentoring, our discipleship generally, to kind of call people to be more counter cultural in those kinds of ways, not to be quite so pragmatic in the way that we are thinking about that, but to think to get us back to what back to Jesus again, and constantly pointing

us to Jesus. On the other hand, I would also want to say, I'd want to push back against the idea that those things don't work, that turning the other cheek and so on, that it doesn't work. We've tried and it doesn't work. I'm not really sure that we've tried it. I think that we have. We've talked about it, we've kind of moved, we found ways to justify not trying it. But I don't know how much we've actually tried this way of love that Jesus puts forward for us.

And so I guess that would be another call that I would say is that we need to call people to, let's, let's actually try this and and I think maybe here's another indictment on on our Christian Christianity in our world today in North America, at least, that is very individualistic, and so we have this sense that I've tried it on my own, individually, and it doesn't work. But what we have to do is try it in community. We need each other. We need the

support of each other. We need our local congregations to be committing to this way of Jesus together. And that means that, yes, individually, we're going to fail. Collectively, we probably will too, but individually we're not going to be able to to see we're not going to be able to see this work to so to so to speak. But collectively, we can encourage each other. We can support each other. We can do things

together. We can follow this way of love, this way of Jesus, together in a way that's going to be much more quote, successful. We'll see more results when we do do that work collectively, and we have that support for each other collectively. And I think that that's crucial. And

addiction and so on. Are significant aspects of the neighborhood in which our church exists, and seeing the way that our church wrestles with how to respond to that, how to walk with our neighbors, and then practically working that out.

The people that come every Sunday to host a Sunday morning coffee and conversation with our neighbors, and we get dropped people dropping in all the time, and the conversations that happen in the way that practical support for those people happens, and then the way that those people are neighbors who are in such desperate need, the way that they then see our church as their church, even if they don't participate in in

other ways. And so the ways that that that ministry and that support, that love gets shown is pretty, pretty significant in that way, I think more broadly, I mean, you're asking the question, I think specifically about turning the other cheek. Jesus, way of non violence.

There are, there are examples, historically, of change happening because of that, probably in in the US, the most significant example is the civil rights movement and the work of Martin Luther King, taking the principles of Jesus way of love, Jesus way of non violence and and working those out in a particular way of non violent resistance to to injustice. And, yeah, you can look at that and you can say, well, it didn't

didn't always work. There were people who criticized Martin Luther King for for this saying that it's not working, it's not working, but he persisted in that and and this movement was. Created that he was a part of that did bring about significant change, that did bring about greater justice, and so on. And it was done through that way of non violence, of turning the other cheek.

violent ways. And so to me, like I think, I think often, of Stanley hauervas, and this about how he said, You know, I need to be a pacifist in theologically, because otherwise, and I won't quote him exactly, but otherwise, I would just be a hateful person. So I need to have that theology to drive me to be that way. I need to be a theologian to drive me to be that way. And I think that that's true. We all, we all need

that. We need something beyond ourselves that calls us towards non violence for us to pursue, pursue that. And you see that with people like Martin Luther King Jr, you see that even with with others like Mahatma Gandhi or others that have pursued a way of non violence, they they they had something that they look to beyond themselves that prompted them to that because they knew they didn't have that in themselves. But it's an interesting thing we've bought

into. You know what Walter wink called the The Myth of redemptive violence, that that violence is redemptive, that it brings about good things. And while that may be true in terms of short term effects. I think there's examples of that right of the way that you know police forces work, the way that various short military interventions have worked in history of bringing about some short term goods and short term

peace. But you're still sowing the seeds, further seeds of violence by using violence that are going to grow and show themselves later on. So you're not really winning against violence by using violence in

the in the long term. And that's been proven again and again and again, I think again, we, we, we haven't really tested out the way of non violence in the way, in the way of Jesus, to its full extent, and yet we've given up on it as to why it's so, it's so anathema, that we would be willing to to kill people for it, or willing on the reverse side of that, why we'd be willing to to die for that. Why

does that happen again? I think it just gets back to those, those larger societal or deeper human needs that we have for exertion of power over others, control, having control over others. We don't like things to be outside of our control. Maybe that's part of it. I don't know. Great question. Thank

need to read Scripture. We need to read the various commandments of Moses, we need to read other teachings in Scripture through this, this lens of mercy, of God's mercy, and so love and mercy together are really significant as providing a lens for us in reading scripture. So something else that I think that that is significant. Is just reflecting on the way that Jesus would have engaged scripture when he was both growing up and throughout his his life and

ministry. You know, again, he didn't have a written copy of Scripture like my NIV student, Bible to go to and underline and then go back to and read through on his own. And so in order for for Jesus to engage scripture, it was primarily orally, and orally, so through through mouth and through ear. And so I think there's something about getting

back to that. And I think that if we can find ways to do that collectively in our worship, collective worship together, but also individually, to get to get back to hearing scripture, to reading scripture aloud, to having more of that in our in our worship services, to, you know, music that puts scripture to music, and really engaging in Scripture in those kinds of ways, other things like the Shema, which is, you know, every, every day, twice a day, Jesus would be reciting

Scripture as a prayer, as a kind of prayer, Creed. So how can we do that kind of thing? You know, Scott McKnight, in his book Jesus creed, talks about that love of God and love of neighbor as is providing a kind of creed like that that we can say to ourselves daily as a way of grounding ourselves twice a day, three times a day, whatever it is. And I think that that's a

great thing to do. It's a great spiritual practice to just remind ourselves to ground ourselves in what Jesus called the greatest commandment, loving God by loving others as if their needs were our own. Really

that was happening. And I, like anybody, probably, who's young, who has a significant spiritual experience, you're on fire. And lots of other people get burned in the fire because you're so on fire for Jesus that you you Yes, that you don't actually love your neighbor as yourself, always very well. So I would, I would go back to my, my 21 year old self, I would say, you know, loving God by loving your neighbor is really, really

significant here. So be careful of the way that you even show your zeal for Jesus, to make sure that you're not burning others and relationships and so on. Because you're so zealous for Jesus,

past? And so I'm looking for other ways of thinking about about evangelism that are faithful to to the Gospel, faithful to the Great Commission, but yet that are not in that kind of colonial mindset. So that's just one example of some of the stuff that I'm I'm looking at related to that.

I love this conversation. Thank you so much,