Tara-Leigh Cobble: 2024 Podcast Awards, Rd. 1

Good morning, my friend. Dr. Lee Warren here with you, and we're going to do

a little self-brain surgery today.

I am so excited. We're doing the 2024 First Annual Dr.

Lee Warren Podcast Awards. Last week, we played Pete Gregg, who is this quarter's

nominee for the best episode of quarter two, alongside today's guest, Tara Lee Cobble.

Tara Lee Cobble from The Bible Recap was on the show a few weeks ago,

and her episode is fantastic.

It's a great look at how we can find God in the story of the Bible.

Last week's episode was replayed for Pete Gregg. If you missed it,

there's a link in the show notes so you can go back and get him in top of mind.

Listen to Tara Lee's episode, and next week you'll have a chance to vote for

who's going to go up against Maddie Jackson Smith to become the semifinalist for this year.

Then in the third and fourth quarters, we'll do the same thing.

We'll take the two most popular episodes from each quarter lets you vote on

which one should go on to the finals.

And at the end of the year, we will have the winner of the first annual Dr.

Lee Warren Podcast Awards.

So I'm so excited about that. We just want to give something back to these people

for spending such great time with us, teaching us,

helping us, encouraging us, guiding us, and spending an hour with us to teach

us their view on how we can become healthier, feel better, and be happier.

Without further ado, here's this week's nominee, my friend, Tara Lee Cobble.

Today, I have a special guest, incredibly special guest, who's going to tell

us a story about how she changed her mind about the Bible and the way she changed

her mind about the Bible has led to literally hundreds of millions of people

also changing their mind about the Bible. This is an incredible story.

I've got Tara Lee Cobble from the Bible Recap on the show today.

She's going to tell us about how the first time she read the Bible through,

she didn't like what she saw very much. She didn't like the God that she found.

And then she made an incredible mind change.

She had a pastor come alongside her and show her a different way of looking at the scripture.

And the second time she read it through, she saw God in a whole new way,

fell in love with him, and that set the course of the work of her life,

and has changed millions of other people's lives, led many people to Christ,

and is now, she hosts the Bible Recap Podcast,

which has hundreds of millions of downloads and is one of the very top five

or six podcasts in the world at any given time, most of the time this week. She's led...

Thousands and thousands of people to start Bible study groups.

She's encouraged people to read the word of God and she's done it all by just

discovering that God is where the joy is.

And if that's not a great episode to have on Mind Change Monday,

I can't imagine a better one. So we've got Tara Lee Cobble today.

I will tell you this. We had some trouble with the internet the day that we recorded.

There were some storms and the audio quality was goofed up. There's something

wrong with the way the internet was working that day.

And I did a lot of engineering to make this better, but there's some echo and

just some funny things that felt like the enemy was attacking this episode and

making it almost impossible to get done.

I have significantly improved it, but bear with it, push through it because

the conversation is worth it.

If there's a little echo or something's bothering you with the audio, it's okay.

It's as good as it's gonna get. The conversation's worth it.

Press through and change your mind the way Tara Lee did.

And you might find that God is where the joy is because that's what she landed

on when she changed her mind about the word of God. And this is an incredible conversation.

Before we get into it, I have one question for you.

Hey, are you ready to change your life? If the answer is yes, there's only one rule.

You have to change your mind first. And my friend, there's a place where the

neuroscience of how your mind works smashes together with faith and everything

starts to make sense. Are you ready to change your life?

Well, this is the place, Self-Brain Surgery School. I'm Dr.

Lee Warren, and this is where we go deep into how we're wired,

take control of our thinking, and find real hope.

This is where we learn to become healthier, feel better, and be happier.

This is where we leave the past behind and transform our minds.

This is where we start today. Are you ready? This is your podcast.

This is your place. This is your time, my friend. Let's get after it.

Music.

Friend we're back and i'm so excited to be introducing you to

a person who really doesn't need an introduction i've got

tara lee cobble with us today from the bible recap welcome to the show tara

lee so happy to be here with you what an honor so grateful it's the first time

you've been interviewed by a brain surgeon right as far as i know yeah that's

so great well hey before we get started tara lee would you mind start saying

a word of prayer for us for sure Sure. That'd be great.

Father, what an incredible opportunity to talk to Dr. Lee Warren today and his

listeners and to have this conversation.

I pray for each person listening that there'll be something that you use to

bless them and encourage them and meet them where they are.

You know, every listener by name, you know, every Mark and every Teresa and

every Shirley and every Andrew.

And I pray that every person who's listening, you would show up in a way that

is very specific to them and.

Remind them of your attention to their circumstances, to their heart,

to the details of their lives.

And we just praise you that you are a God who can do that, that you are the

God who knows hearts and minds and life circumstances.

And you can speak individually through the same words to different people.

And so I pray that you would bless them. I pray a blessing over this conversation.

Will you be glorified in this conversation, Lord?

And we thank you for your son, Jesus, and we thank you for your spirit who dwells in us.

What a gift it is to be adopted into your family. We love you, too. Amen.

Amen. Thank you so much, Tara Lee. I'm excited to have this conversation with

you. And it just has a little bit of background.

About two and a half years ago, a listener of this show mailed a copy of your book to my wife, Lisa.

This is a gift and said, hey, you should check this out. And so thanks to that

listener, whoever you are out there. Isn't that great?

So and so she sent that book and we were already in the middle of a year.

We do pretty much go through the Bible every year.

And so we kind of set it aside for a while. And then this year decided we were

going to do the Bible recap and started doing the videos.

And it's just been so amazing because I spent my whole life reading the Bible.

And you have just every day something that Lisa or me or both of us say,

wow, I never thought about that before.

So it's been really great. And I appreciate you taking us through the Bible this year. So thank you.

I love that I get to read through the Bible with you. It's my favorite thing. That's awesome.

Hey, how did it come about? You know, how did your love for scripture turn into

a thing in your life and where did it come from?

And then how did that turn into the way that you choose to practice your profession?

Wow. OK, well, those would be two distinct questions as far as like the answers would be.

How did I fall in love with scripture? And then how did that become the Bible Recap podcast?

And the how did I fall in love with scripture? scripture, you know,

I grew up in a home where the Word of God was valued and esteemed.

My family owns a Christian bookstore.

My first job was working in that Christian bookstore at age six.

I had every opportunity to read the Word of God, to learn about the Word of God.

I was surrounded by concordances and commentaries.

And I took a lot of that in over time, but I had never read the story of scripture

in the order that it happened. And a pastor friend of mine encouraged me to do that.

And when he encouraged me to do it, I didn't want to.

Like, that's the honest answer. I didn't want to.

My experience of scripture was that when I tried to read the parts I was unfamiliar

with, they were confusing, frustrating.

I didn't know where to put them in the story, in the timeline of scripture,

because I didn't know at the time. But when you try to read the Bible front

to back, you're not actually reading in chronological order.

You're just reading in front to back order.

And I didn't know that the Bible was laid out like a library,

not like a timeline. And so, um.

This pastor friend offered to answer my questions along the way.

He's like, you can understand this.

And I was like, all that happens to me when I read the Bible is I accumulate

frustration and confusion, not understanding at all.

And he said, well, I'll answer your questions along the way.

So we had basically a phone call every week where I just brought my list of

questions to him and he answered them and it started to make sense.

And that first time that I read through, when I finished, the shocking part was not that I finished.

The shocking part was that I didn't like God. I finished reading the Bible the first time.

I was in full time ministry. And this was a really jarring, heartbreaking thing

to experience because my whole life has been attached to the identity of the person of God.

And yet when I come to try to know more about that God that my whole life is

built around, I find that I don't like him.

Unpack that for a second. Are you talking about like the God of the Old Testament,

the war and all the things that people talk about when they deconstruct their

faith nowadays about what they find in the Old Testament?

No, it was I had I had just problems with who I saw God reveal himself to be.

And so whenever I talk to my pastor about this, he said, I have another challenge for you this time.

I want you to read it again and I want you to stop looking for yourself. Start looking for God.

And so, you know, when you read the Bible and you hope that now this was I should

say this is not anything I was taught in church.

This was not anything my family taught me or believed or lived out or anything.

But I think inherently as humans, we have this idea that when we do good and

we follow God and we try to honor God, that we get what we want. That's right.

That it is we can exchange it for our desires. Right.

And I didn't realize that that was buried deep in my spirit, that that was.

So when I'm reading scripture and I'm seeing like, oh, these terrible things,

like the disciples all die, like really hard, terrible death.

And like Paul spends the bulk of his time as a follower of Christ,

like in prison and being beaten and being like, it doesn't go well for them.

And like some of the men that we esteem the highest are have been kind of horrible

people. And, you know, like even David, who is a man after God's own heart,

A, did some horrific things.

And B, even as a man after God's own heart, one of the big things he asked God for, God says no.

And so like it was just I didn't like it.

And so I'm reading scripture and I'm seeing that, oh, this isn't something I

can exchange to get what I want.

And I was experiencing that in my own life as well. So I really was,

that tension was very felt in my life.

I had been nailing it in the morality area.

I was checking all the boxes and God wasn't giving me what I wanted.

And I was in full-time ministry. I had given my life to serve and honor the

Lord and wasn't getting what I wanted.

And I was like, this doesn't sound like a great deal.

And the hard part was, I believed it was all true. I believe the Bible was true,

all of it. and I didn't like him.

And so when my pastor said, read it again and stop looking for yourself,

start looking for God. What does he love? What does he hate?

What motivates him to do what he does?

I was like, okay, that's a different challenge.

I've never really thought about it that way. And I had to remind myself every single day to do that.

Because I'm so bent on looking for myself. What are my takeaways?

What's my to-do list? How can I be a good Christian? How can I force God into

a corner to make him give me what I want? That's what I'm looking.

Help me. What's the combination lock? I need that code. Right.

And to read scripture, to look for God was just a whole different paradigm.

And whenever I did that, um, I fell in love, like same book,

different response because that lens changed everything.

It changed everything.

And, um, so what I, the way that a friend has described this,

that I now use as my descriptor is I went from having, um, a high anthropology

and a low Christology to having a high Christology and a low anthropology. Wow.

And that, man, it is wild, the difference that makes.

You're right. I'm going to steal that line. That's powerful.

You know, somebody said to me. That's how I fell in love with God's word.

I love it. Somebody said to me that because we're into neuroscience and we talk

about brain imaging and all that stuff.

And somebody said the Bible is the only book that scans you when you read it

instead of you scanning it.

And it's exactly a great metaphor for that. The Bible reads you.

You didn't like what you saw that first time. and then you found reading it to look who God is.

I heard you talk about Japheth in the Old Testament, and you said something

I'd never thought about before, when he makes this rash vow and his daughter

comes out and he's got to honor this vow that he's made to sacrifice her.

And you said he didn't have to do that.

God has already given us a path to untake a vow and take a punishment but not

have to carry out a rash vow. bow.

And we have all these stories where we think God's hammering us in some way.

But usually the truth is he's already handled that. We're just not obeying him.

Yeah. It's crazy. The things that we assume about scripture,

we just read them and we're like, why is God okay with David having so many wives?

And we're like, it doesn't ever say he's okay with it. It just says it's happening.

You know, it's descriptive, not prescriptive. That's right. That's powerful.

So then you you decided to make your whole life about the Bible?

How did that come about? Yeah.

So my first year through reading the Bible, not so great.

My second year reading through the Bible, when I started to fall in love with

the Lord, I was like, this is...

Transformative. Why is nobody talking about this?

Like everybody has to read the Bible this way.

Everybody has to like, it was again, I'd spent my whole life steeped in Christian

culture. I had never heard this concept.

I was in full-time ministry. I was at probably a different church every Sunday

and had never heard, I'd never heard preaching like this necessarily.

I had never heard, like it was wild to me, or maybe to be honest,

like maybe plenty of people had said it and they They just hadn't said it in

a way that I'd heard it. Right.

So to me, it was this incredible concept that my pastor had like my pastor friend had shared with me.

And I was like, I need to help other people do this. And I knew it was like an ongoing thing.

It wasn't just a you say it to somebody and then everything changes.

Like you've got to walk people through this because it's in human nature to

look for ourselves in the story.

And so I just decided to like there was a church that I went to at the time.

And, um, a lot of college girls at the time at that church that wanted to,

we like collectively wanted to study the word and there was not a program for that.

And so I went to one of the pastors and I was like, what if I just like,

could I just do something?

And he was like, sure. Yeah, this is great. Love it. No sign.

That's what you want to do. So we just met, um, every Sunday night and we like

studied the scriptures together and And I called it D group,

which is just discipleship group.

And lots of other churches and colleges have names like that.

I didn't care that that was a widely spread name because I didn't ever plan

on it being anything more than just me and those nine girls.

And it grew a lot. I think something like.

I don't know, 300 plus dGroups on six continents and men's dGroups,

women's dGroups. It has really grown over time because a lot of people want to study the word of God.

They don't want fluffy Bible studies and they don't want things that are,

again, high anthropology.

They don't want things that are man focused. That's right. And that's encouraging to me.

Every year, I would encourage the people in dGroup to read the Bible with me.

I read it every year. I read it chronologically.

Let's do this. And every year people would start off with me in January and

then they would fall off around, you know, February.

And I was like, goodness, this is so frustrating because you're going to learn

so much about God if you read the Bible.

And I know we're studying the Bible, but reading the whole Bible is different

than studying deeply in a specific text.

Both are necessary and helpful.

I wouldn't suggest just one or the other. I suggest both. And so that's why

I was like, we're in D-Group. We're studying these texts together,

these specific texts. We're diving into books of the Bible.

But let's also read the whole thing so we understand what this means in context.

But people would fall off and fall off. And so nine years into DGroup,

I finally had one member who said to me, Tara Lee, you said the only reason

you made it through was because Lee helped you, your pastor friend.

Would you help me? Would you answer my questions every week?

And I was like, oh, yeah, sure, sure, I'll do that.

Yeah. And nine months in, she was finishing the Old Testament and she said, we're on a walk one day.

And she was like, I cannot believe I'm about to finish the Old Testament.

First time in my life. This is incredible.

I couldn't have done it unless you would walk me along step by step.

And then I had the thought, OK, she only did it because I helped her.

I only did it because Lee helped me.

And I want everybody else in D group to do this. So how could I hold everyone's hand?

But remember, they're on different planets. They're not on different planets.

They're on different continents. That's right. Interplanetary Bible studies is a future thing.

They're on different continents. They're in different time zones.

How can I do this to serve as many people in DGroup as possible?

And I came up with the idea of like a podcast that DGroup members could listen

to, you know, at their own in their own time zones.

And my prayer was that 300 people in DGroup would do this with me.

And um at the time i think we had about 1200 so i think i was looking at like

a quarter of our membership just a quarter of the people in the group but so

i had a very small dream um that god had a very big plan for and was really

taken off guard taken it took me probably by surprise um.

So just praising God that he has used it in the lives of so many people because,

you know, he's done exceedingly more than I could ask, think or imagine. That's for sure.

And when you say that, I mean, just the listener may not know this,

but the Bible Recap was the number one podcast in the world recently,

ahead of Joe Rogan, ahead of everybody.

And it's every day right in the top of all the podcast categories.

Something like what, 25 million downloads the first year or something.

Is that right? Right. I, I'm terrible with numbers.

I did check the numbers right before this podcast, because I,

people often ask, we just crossed 350 million.

Um, uh, you know, this is our, we've had a little over five years on the podcast

now. So that's incredible.

Um, yeah, but I don't remember those first year numbers, but yeah, that's incredible.

It's happening because, well, let me ask you, why do you think that's happening?

What do you think God's up to

that everybody on the planet seems to be interested in reading the Bible.

Man, aren't we all trying to

understand life? Aren't we all trying to understand purpose and meaning?

And what I have found and what I state every day, you know, if you've read the

book, watch the podcast, watch the YouTube, I'm a creature motivated by joy. I want joy.

And every day we are finding it in God's word.

That's how we have every day's podcast with the phrase, he's where the joy is.

Every day we're pointing to the character of God. We're helping you learn,

training you in how to look for the person of God and his character in scripture,

even in the genealogies, even in those boring old Testament laws about boils

and sores, things that are disgusting or hard to understand.

We're finding the character of God and it is winsome and enticing and beautiful and joy-inducing.

And just, I think when people see that, not only do they want to share it,

which is why your listener sent you that book, they want to talk about it,

which is why we're having this conversation today.

And so word of mouth is getting out about how incredible the God of the universe is. That's right.

That's incredible. And I think you're exactly right. I think God is trying to

use, is using every available medium, technology, person, willing heart to share

his word and his love for people.

And, you know, I think when you talk about that God is where the joy is,

it would be a good time to tell you that a lot of the listeners,

most of the listeners of this show probably are people who have been through something really hard.

We call it the massive thing. You know, we lost a child in 2013,

and a lot of the listeners are bereaved parents or people who are going through

losing a spouse to cancer or something like that. And you're no stranger to suffering either.

So maybe talk a little bit about how you find your way towards hope through

Scripture and some encouragement for the listener that might be in the thick of that right now.

There is a quote, and I don't recall who said it, so forgive me.

But the saying is, the deeper sorrow carves into your being,

the more joy it can contain. That's right.

And so for those of us who have experienced the massive thing,

and it has just carved this rut into our soul, into our being,

into our hearts, that is the space.

And I know some of you listening are there and you're like, yes, and amen.

And some of you are like, I don't believe it yet. I don't believe it.

I don't believe that there's any way that joy can fill this cavern.

That is what I've seen to be true. I lost my sister Gina to brain cancer in 2016.

I'm sorry. It's her second battle with brain cancer.

And she won the first battle three years earlier. year. And,

um, I watched my sister, uh,

before her first, I tell people before her first battle with brain cancer,

if you had a conversation with her, she would have talked to you about one of

two things, guns and the government. Those were her two.

Those were the two things she really wanted to talk about with everybody she

encountered. And she had very strong opinions.

And, um, after her first battle with brain cancer, those opinions didn't change.

She just didn't care to talk about him as much. He talked about the Lord. Wow.

Um, that became her focus.

And so after her second surgery for brain cancer in 2016, January of 2016,

um, she woke up and she couldn't,

literally the only way that she would answer questions were with bits of scripture

that she She had memorized. Wow.

So, you know, we even wondered, like, is this, is her short-term memory gone?

And this is just her long-term memory that all she's holding onto is scripture.

You know, we didn't know. Yeah.

But the only way she would answer questions was with scripture.

Wow. When you asked her how she was, like, I remember one of the first questions

my mom asked her was like, Gina, how are you feeling? And she said,

God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of sound mind. Wow.

And she's a different person in the best way possible.

And so we lost her shortly after that. And then, uh, gosh, it was probably three

months later that I found out that I had to have open heart surgery to fix first effects.

So imagine me having to tell my parents who just lost their daughter to brain

cancer that their other daughter is about to have to have open heart surgery. Wow.

So three months after I found out that I had, so six months post my sister's

death, I had the surgery to repair birth defects.

And as they were prepping me for that surgery, they found out,

oh, you actually have another undiagnosed birth defect that we have just discovered

through this contrast dye CT that they had to do to prep me for it.

As soon as you get better from this open heart surgery, we need you back in here for another one.

Wow. So two months after my second open heart surgery or two months after my

first open heart surgery, I had to come back for a second.

The first one is a sternotomy. They went through my sternum.

The second was a thoracotomy. They went through my back.

And in the second surgery, I was electrocuted and it burned a hole into my back

about the size of a grapefruit.

And just trial after trial after trial thrown in there. My dad had a heart attack.

My brother was burned in an explosion and had to have skin grafting.

He was burned over a third of his body.

Just all of these tragedies that kept mounting in our family.

And the Lord met us in those spaces.

He received our anger. He received our grief. He received our praise. All of those things.

None of those are emotions that God rejected from us. He didn't like there was

never how dare you doubt me?

Like I read in scripture, God shows up in those spaces.

He meets our doubt. Like, I think it's Mark 9, 24, the man who says to Jesus,

forgive me if that address is wrong.

Lord, I believe help my unbelief. Like how beautiful that this man felt like

he could express to Jesus his unbelief.

It is a thing God receives from us. And so in those spaces when there are trials,

that is an opportunity to draw near.

And I love God more on the other side of those things. It doesn't mean those things hurt.

And certainly we've all heard people meet us in our grief with terrible things from Scripture.

They will, you know, the Lord gives and the Lord takes away.

Blessed be the name of the Lord. That's right.

God works all things together for the good of the... Like, yes,

those things are true. Now's not the time to say them. That's right.

And so don't let those people who mean well and say the wrong thing at the wrong

time, the right thing at the wrong time.

Don't let them show you who God

is like drawn near to him. Let his word reveal who he is. That's right.

I found that to be true after we lost Mitch. It was trying desperately to find

some place to put your feet down that would hold.

And for me, it was God's promises. Like he says in Psalm 34,

18, the Lord is close to the brokenhearted.

And I was like, okay, now's the time. I'm brokenhearted. Where are you?

And you would get a text message right then. Somebody would send you a scripture

or somebody would walk in the door with a hug or something right at the right moment.

And that was God showing up. And we found our way through that time by holding

on to his promises and watching them come true.

And you're right, even something like Romans 8, 28 comes out down the road to

be true, that good things can come out of that devastating tragedy.

But it's not the right time to say it at the funeral home. That's not why you want to hear that.

So how do people find that hope? And how do you recommend that somebody who's

right in the thick of it, what do they do in terms of gaining access to God's

heart in Scripture when they're really hurting?

Oh, man. You know, I think I would say this. It's not really the answer to your

question, but it's a response.

I encourage people to build the boat before the storm.

Yes. And so if you have the opportunity, if you are not in the moment of crisis,

start storing up your knowledge about who God is in advance.

Um so praise god if you

are not in crisis right now thank god uh now is

the time to find out who god is yeah to

build your life on the rock and not on sand and i think you know with my sister

gina i would say it feels a little bit like the the early before her first brain

cancer like a lot of her life was maybe like sand like you know um yeah and

but it's never too late to relocate.

That's right. I don't even know if what these books I'm reading,

these devotionals I'm reading, are they accurate or not? Because I've never

actually read the Bible.

So you might be building on sand on top of rock, you know, but it's never too late to relocate.

So pick up. Let's go. Let's build a life on the rock. Let's find out who God

is by digging into the word.

And if you are in a place of struggle, man, there are there are passages of

scripture that I spent a long time in during hard trials. else.

I, there were times where Lamentations and the book of Job were the only passage

of the scripture I had the capacity to read because I felt like they got me, they got me.

And, um, sometimes Ecclesiastes, you know, those are spaces that I would lean

into when I was aching, when I was hurting.

But the minute you have enough breath in your lungs to steady yourself,

when you don't just have to be carried along by scripture, when you have

enough footing to lean in and start

at the beginning and read the story of who god is yeah get to know the god of

the universe um if you're clinging to a life raft and it's just carrying you

along like that is great like blessed be the name of the lord that he meets

you in that space and we'll meet you there and he will you know he's near the

brokenhearted he saves the christian spirit so,

let whatever passages of the scripture carry you along carry you along and then

the moment you hit it drowned.

Start looking for the rock to build on. I love that. Never too late to relocate.

The listeners of the show will recognize that what you just said about building

ahead of time. We talk about something we call prehab.

If you come to see me in my office for back pain or something,

and I'm going to send you for surgery, before I send you to surgery,

I send you to physical therapy.

I want you to get stronger. I want you to build some tools to get over that

trauma that you're about to face so you're ready.

And we talk about that in the context of getting scripture, getting promises

in your heart, knowing who God is. before you face that thing that you're going to go through.

But when it's the acute thing and you weren't ready, I love that.

It's never too late to relocate, hold on to something that's true.

Because that's what's going to hold you up. When you get really in the middle

of that big thing, you need something that's true. You don't need platitudes.

You don't need your friends showing up, you know, telling you stuff like Job's friends did.

You need something that's true. And that's what we find in Scripture, I think.

What do you think that the future is going to hold for TBR? What is your kind

of dream for it? What do you expect to see next?

Man, what's been so cool to see is how many families are doing it together.

So the evolution of TBR over the past five years has looked somewhat like this.

A woman is doing the Bible recap and her husband is like, what's that thing

you're listening to every morning?

I hear that. That's interesting. I want to talk about that.

And so then the next year they're like, well, let's do this together.

We should let's let's listen to this together. Let's read this together. Thank you.

And then they invite their neighbors to do it with them or their home group to do it with them.

And then suddenly the pastor finds out about the pastor's like,

let me check into this thing.

Oh, hey, this is something maybe our our whole church could do together.

Like, let's have the whole church do this Bible reading plan together.

So then the whole church is doing it. And then the kids hear them talking about

it and the kids hear the parents listening to it.

And so the kids are kind of like curious as well.

And so we have just started a kids line of products.

That's great we released our first kids devotional um

it's for ages six and up for kids who are kind of like learning to

read our next endeavor uh in the

fall we're going to be releasing our next piece which is um for kids who are

reading to learn so ages probably 10 and up maybe um and we have we're really

leaning into the kids space because how cool would it be if you had a 10 year

old who had read the Bible five times. Wow.

Like, can you imagine? And the fact that they're learning from a young age how

to read the Bible, looking for the character of God, that they don't grow up

being fearful of this God who's going to smite them if they have a doubt,

you know, who's going to strike them with lightning when they sin,

if they actually understand the character of God.

And it is bringing families together. It is bringing churches together.

And so we are really excited to roll out more tools that help serve those those

units, the family, and the church.

And we've already built out a lot of things that serve the church,

a discussion guide that people can use as they do it in a small group,

daily study guide if they want something to help them dig deeper into the text on their own.

And we just want to use those as launching points to help the family and the

church, those two institutions, grow together, to know God more together.

And that's exactly what happened with us. Somebody mails Lisa the book,

then her sister the next year, her sister's the headmistress of a classical

education school in San Antonio, so she was doing the Bible recap,

and she kept telling Lisa, hey, you need to do this.

So this year it was like Lisa's like, hey, we've got to do this together.

So it was like multiple people bringing other people to the Word.

And it's just been amazing. We appreciate your insights and the way that you've

dedicated your life to doing this and leading all of us towards getting to know

Him more. It's great. All right.

One thing that you think that people don't know about Jesus that you wish they knew?

Oh, my goodness. I could go practical.

Like I'm thinking of just like common misunderstandings of Jesus that we have

often because of Renaissance paintings. Yeah.

We're, uh, we're working through tackling some of those things,

um, in some of the studies that we're writing and just like addressing some of those things.

Um, or I could go spiritual, which I think is, um, probably the more helpful thing.

Um, you know, we see, I think a lot of of people, a lot of people understand Jesus rightly.

And I think what they don't understand about Jesus is that Colossians tells

us he is the image of the invisible God, which means Jesus reveals what the father is like.

We have this idea that God the Father is the big angry one and Jesus is the

nice one. And the Holy Spirit is maybe the like mysterious one, right? Yeah.

The Trinity, the triune God, all of them, all three of them have the same character and will.

They just have different roles in how they engage with humanity and how they

bring about our salvation.

And Jesus is exactly like the Father.

They are exactly the same in their character. Yeah. And so he is the image of the invisible God.

He is the he has come to earth to reveal what the father's heart is like.

And so when you read the Bible with us through the Bible recap,

you're going to be having you're going to hear me point it out all through the Old Testament.

The beauty of the father's character. Like, hey, doesn't this look a lot like

Jesus? Hey, here's a place where God has really been misunderstood.

Like, this is this a big misunderstanding. And so I think that one of the things

that we miss is that Jesus reveals who the father is.

That's right. I think one thing I've really picked up on from you that I think

I sort of knew, but I never really thought about is that people think about

the Old Testament is God and the New Testament is Jesus. Like people have this sort of thing, right?

But Jesus is all over the place in the Old Testament. He's there in creation.

I mean, the Bible says nothing got made without him making it.

So when God said, let there be light, Jesus is doing physics and making light

like he's out there creating. And so I think I've kind of picked up from you

all the places to look for the angel of the Lord when you see that. That's Jesus.

He's in the story. So, friend, Jesus has always been there, always will be there.

And Terrilee is showing us how to see him.

Terrilee, I appreciate your time today. And I promise you, 35,

40 minutes, we're right up against it.

And I just want to encourage you to keep encouraging us.

You're doing a good thing for the kingdom and for the world.

And I just am very grateful for the work that you're doing and for the time

that you spent with us today.

Thank you so much. It's been an honor. I'm cheering you on and all your listeners.

I pray that God would bless you all.

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