165- My Grandfather, Warren W. Wiersbe (with Pastor Dan Jacobsen)

165- My Grandfather ... Warren W. Wiersbe (with Pastor Dan Jacobsen)

Settings

Welcome to Strength for Today's Pastor, conversations with current senior pastors and leaders which will strengthen and help you in your pastoral ministry. And now, here's your host, Bill Holdridge of Poyman Ministries. Welcome to Strength for Today's Pastor.

Today, I'm with Pastor Dan Jacobson. He's a lead teaching pastor at Heartland Community Church in Olathe, Kansas. Is that how you say it? Olathe, it's very bougie, Olathe.

Olathe, Kansas, okay, close to Kansas City, I know that much. In addition to Dan's role as a pastor teacher, he's got the unique distinction of being a grandson of the now in heaven pastor and Bible teacher, the beloved Dr. Warren Wiersbe. This is gonna be a fun conversation for that reason alone, but wait, there's gonna be a lot more than that.

So Dan, welcome to the program, thanks for joining us. Bill, thanks so much. It is such a privilege to be with you and to speak with you today and to encourage a bunch of pastors around the country.

Thank you for this. Yeah, you're welcome. I mean, when we talked last week in preparation for this time together, I just thoroughly enjoyed our conversation, not just because we were talking baseball big time, but just because it was a life-giving conversation.

I really appreciate that and being able to have that kind of conversation with you. It's wonderful. Yeah, well, back then, not to make it about baseball, but both of our teams were still in the playoffs, the Detroit and the Kansas City thing, and now neither of them are, so I guess we're just solely focused, aren't we? We're focused, that's right, that's right.

May the best team win or whatever. I guess, if it's from New York, whatever. I know, I know.

So let's dive in. Dan, for those listeners who don't know who you are yet, I mean, they know this now, that you're the grandson, a grandson of Dr. Warren Wiersbe. Tell us a little bit about yourself, if you could.

Yeah, Bill, thanks. I presume nobody knows who I am. My last name is Jacobson, it's not Wiersbe.

My mom is Warren and Betty Wiersbe's second child, their first daughter, and so growing up in the Chicagoland area like I did, I grew up around church, just kind of had a love for the things of God early in life, but I also had this growing up experience where a kid who grows up around influential parents or grandparents can pick up a bit of a pharisaical, prideful streak, and when I was 16 years old, God really broke me of a few attitudes in my heart. I realized that I wasn't an utterly rebellious person in the sense that I had left God and forsaken him, but I had grown up in his backyard, but never actually walked into his home or let him be a part of my heart. And so when I was 16, I just had this conversion moment.

It was just this radical, like, God, I see how prideful I've been. And I really, at the same time, the Holy Spirit was just giving me this moment of illumination and helped me understand his word and this hunger, this insatiable appetite to know God and his word, and at the same time called me into ministry. And so I was a high school kid, felt the call to go to do ministry, and so I went to the Moody Bible Institute, got trained for that.

Just kind of step after step have followed. Jesus is leading into serving his people, serving his church, building his kingdom. Found out that I was, I knew my grandfather was a pastor.

I knew my uncle was a pastor, but what I didn't know at that time was that generations before me were also pastors. And so they'll have a fifth generation pastor. We've got a guy in our family who goes all the way back to Sweden who prayed a prayer that there'd be a pastor in every generation of our family.

I'm the fifth generation's answer to that prayer, but there's like dozens of people in the lineage before me, before my grandfather even, who God has just honored that faithful prayer of that faithful person. Johan Alfred Karlsson is his name, in case anyone knew him. But just, I love the fact that God has called me to love his people.

And there's this beautiful future thing to it, but there's also this beautiful retrospective past answer to prayer in the midst of it as well. So I grew up in Chicago, did pastoral work, and now I got called out to Kansas City. I serve at a local church, just in Johnson County, Kansas, and I'm a teaching pastor.

It's my passion, my joy, to help people understand what God's word says, the promises he makes, how they apply today, what he's up to in changing hearts. I just really believe that when we open up God's word, he meets with us, and he changes our lives, and he helps us become new. And so that's what I get to give my days to.

Wow, and the fact that your grandfather was the pastor of Moody Church, right, at one point? Yes, yes. And you got a degree there, and you've got the same passion he did, and that is for people and for transformation and for the word of God and all of those things. So maybe that was generational, too, in some ways, but there's a unique DNA that the Holy Spirit has put in you, no doubt.

Absolutely, it's a funny thing. I was a little reticent to even apply to Moody, given my grandfather's legacy at the church. So I flew under the radar for four years.

I didn't tell anybody that I was Warren Rearsby's grandson. I didn't need that hanging over my head. I didn't even put his name on the application, because it was a bit of my own Gideon's fleece for God.

I know you're not supposed to do that, but I was like, God, if you're calling me to this, it's not because my grandpa's Warren Rearsby's, it's because you got a call from me in a special way. And it's been so encouraging to see God give me specific steps of faith to take. But then on the backside of those steps, to hear the encouragement of, it was a couple of weeks after I went to Moody, my grandfather told me, like, hey, I've been praying for you for 40 years.

I didn't know it was going to be you, but we've been praying for someone to preach. Just so seeing God do that. Those things I didn't know.

I didn't know I was stepping into someone else's prayers. And God is just so faithful like that. And I just, I haven't found that his promises fail.

Right? So I just, he's really good at leading and guiding and doing the work when we just kind of follow his steps. Yeah, and now that your grandfather is in heaven, he is one of those great cloud of witnesses that we know are somehow involved with what we were doing. I don't know how they are, but they are in some way, I'm sure.

And he's one of them. So speaking of Warren Wiersbe, what an amazing, what an amazing pastor. I mean, he's so appreciated and so much an important part of so many pastors and thus church's lives, over 150 books, served in ministry since 1951, passed into glory in 2019.

And I didn't know this until I dredged this up somewhere. Before he passed away, he and his wife gifted their personal library of over 13,000 volumes to Cedarville University in Ohio. 13,000 volumes, and I bet he probably read them all.

Yeah, yeah. So these days, if you got YouTube, you've seen Rick Warren's library and there's like the purpose-driven life, opens up, he pushes a button, it all opens. That's a really sweet pastor's library.

But my grandfather kind of had that pre-Rick. He had this huge basement. Their house was modest, they lived in Lincoln, Nebraska.

You'd drive past the house and not know that was Warren Rearsby's home. When they moved from Chicago to Lincoln, my grandma literally told the real estate agent, we are looking for a library with a house attached to it, not a house with a library. The library is the thing.

Because he loved words. My grandfather couldn't do sports, he wasn't athletic, he didn't have a mind for competition. He loved words.

They were his tool and they were his life, that was his world. And so he lived in books and understood them all. And you're right, he read all of those books.

And so the books that went to Cedarville are all read by my grandpa, the Warren and Betty Rearsby reading room. It is his actual books. And you open up the back of the book, if you're in Cedarville, pull off a book from the shelf and then look at the back and there's an index.

You'll see what he thought was important so that he could go back to it. And he would underline things and he'd remember things. And if you ever got a book from my grandpa, which all of these behind me are from my grandpa.

Cedarville got a lot of the books. I got some of my own too. But they're his books that have been pre-read and it's a gem, it's the best.

And you can't get that on Logos. It had to come from him, the tactile actual book that he had underlined. 13,000.

That's old school, but that's a great kind of old school, isn't it? So the guy that does post-production on our podcast, his name's Jeff Jones, passing through Lincoln, Nebraska several years ago, he called up randomly your grandfather from his listing in the phone book and Dr. Rearsby invited him over and showed him that volume or that volumous library of 13. He told me about it, but when I read this 13,000 volumes, I thought, oh my, that's amazing. My grandpa loved pastors.

If he was on podcasts, he'd be on your podcast. He just loved pastors. If there was a pastor of any denomination for any amount of time, he wanted to meet with them, hear what God was doing.

Two questions, what are you writing and what are you preaching on was the standard fare. He never asked how big's your church or what's your budget, he didn't care. He had no concern, but he wanted to know what are you doing with God's word and what is God saying to you? And so anyone could call him up and get some of his time and it's really a precious model for what it is.

That's why he kind of got the moniker pastor's pastor is because any pastor had tons of time on his schedule for them. Yeah, so for any pastor listening to this podcast, if you've got something to say to pastors, ring me up. I'd love to have you on because I'd ask you the same questions.

What are you writing and what are you reading? That's great. So what have you learned from your grandfather? Well, I've got so many things. There's not really a situation in ministry for the first 15 years of me being a full-time pastor.

A problem person or a challenging situation that I didn't have the opportunity to call my grandfather and say, hey, think about this with me. He was so skilled in knowing people, knowing churches, knowing problems that he could dissect the core of the issue pretty quickly. He always gave me enough time to explain it, but he knew with pretty pinpoint accuracy how to find your way through and what God's word said about it.

And that last part is really what I think my main takeaway from my grandfather's legacy. God's word says something to us about how we live our lives today. And so that real conviction that God's word is living and active, it's sharp, it's able to penetrate.

He's just given me so much confidence that God's word speaks. But maybe the lesser known side of my grandfather's life that might only be privy to the people who were close to him. He was truly a person of prayer.

I would go visit him later in his life. My grandmother had a stroke and she was living in a assisted living home down the street. And so there'd be moments where in the evenings, it would be just him and I and we'd be wrapping up our day, going to sleep, and he'd stop me in the hallway and say, let's have a moment of prayer.

And he'd just pray over us and it was really sweet. And then grandpa would be up at 5.30 in the morning and I'd hear him down in his study kind of murmuring through the walls. He'd be talking out loud to God, wrestling through whatever's going on in his life in prayer.

When he passed, we kind of dug through all, there was a lot of stuff, there was a lot of stuff, 13,000 books had to get boxed up and sent out. And then all of his notes. And one of the things that we found were his devotional pages.

He carried a little planner, kind of like a Franklin Covey-ish planner. And every day he just jot down what he was reading in the scriptures, a New Testament, an Old Testament, a Psalm. And he'd scribble down just thoughts and notes and prayers.

And I have the collection from 1976 to like 2004. And my job is to kind of go through those. And at the end of his life, he said, guys, there's books in the devotional journals.

I was like, I don't know what that means, but we'll figure it out. If there's anyone who listens to or watched Arrested Development, it's like there's money in the banana stand is kind of the quote of that show. And I felt like there's sermons in the devotional journals.

And just looking at that, he prayed his way through the Bible. And I just appreciate the fact that there's a reception of what God has said and this dependence upon this relationship with God today. And he was just united in both the Acts 6 mantra, we'll devote ourselves to the teaching of God and prayer, God's word and prayer.

And so I just really appreciate that. When I think about my grandpa's legacy, that's the first thing I think about. Yeah, I mean, I can but can't see him doing that down there in his study.

I mean, reading, he probably was a reader of the Bible out loud when he was by himself. Is that true? He said, this was his quote. He said, I find when I talk to my Bible, my Bible talks to me.

Yeah, I think it's a weird way. That's a weird way to say it, right? But he was like, I talk out loud in my Bible. I go, what is this doing here? And why did God put it that way? Why didn't he say it this way? And he just let the spirit kind of ruminate through his conversation with God.

You know, scripture is an oral tradition. It wasn't always a literary tradition, it's an oral tradition. And so he would receive it that way and oftentimes try to practice his reading in that same manner.

And so the spirit of God was able to be active so much, not just in the inspiration of the scripture originally, but in the illumination of the scripture to your grandfather's heart. Yeah, 100%. He never really talked to me about the doctrine of illumination, but he lived it.

Yeah. You know, he just really lived it. His whole life was that, of having this eyes to see what God is truly, you know, let him who has ears to hear, let him hear.

I think my grandpa had ears to hear because he was in it and he wanted it. Yeah, oh wow. I would have loved to have met him.

That would have been great to have a conversation with him, knowing that he loves pastors from what you're telling. And it was obvious in his writings that he loved pastors and the church. He wouldn't take you to a baseball game, but it would still be a good time.

He'd make you laugh, he'd tell you stories. He'd spend a lot of time in the 1930s and 40s and 50s of his life, you know, and his Billy Graham days and some of the early Youth for Christ days. He just had a lot of faith experiences that provided tremendous stories.

And it was, I don't know anyone who ever walked away from a time with Warren Wearsby saying, that just was boring. He was always a hoot and a joke a minute, really quick wit and really just loved being with people. We need those kinds of mentors in our lives, don't we? You know, men that have that appreciation and they're living it, experiencing the word of God.

So with all those books in his library, 13,000 books, which of his commentaries have you used, if any, and are there any favorites? Yeah, well, so he had 13,000 books that he owned. Not all of them, by the way, were theology books. He had a decent collection.

He spanned the range of what he owned. And some of it was like historical books. Some of it was the Antinousian fathers and all the classic works.

A lot of them were preaching books. A lot of them were on Spurgeon. A lot of them were around Bible study and whatnot.

He himself wrote devotions, commentaries, and Bible studies, as well as pastoral aides and thinking about the task of pastoring and the call to pastoring and shepherding. When I go to do my Bible study, my grandpa, he knew how many pastors plagiarized him and it didn't bother him. He was kind of like, this is, I spent time thinking about it in a creative way so that God's people would get it.

So if you quoted him or not, that's fine. He never was hungry for the credit. But he was aware of the temptation to just rip him off.

So he told me, as an 18-year-old, I remember him saying, he gave me everybody else's commentaries and he said, I'm not giving you mine. Not yet. You need to learn to do your own work and then you can use my work.

And so the rule with Wiersbe is do your own work first and then open him up last to check yourself, is there a better way to say this or not? Otherwise, once I read my grandpa's outlines, I'm stuck in whatever he said. I can't see it any other way. But I will say this, Bill, this book here, I've got it, I know this is an audio podcast, but I'm holding up.

The Bible Exposition Commentary is a phenomenal series. It's five volumes, six volumes. I think there might be an index on it.

It's a heartbound series. Bible Exposition Commentary, of course, Bible Exposition spells out acronym B. He had written the B series, which is all his individual books. This is a deeper dive than the B series.

The B series was written for small groups to go through the Bible together or Sunday school teachers to learn how to teach a book of the Bible. The Bible Exposition Commentary is a bit more of his, the most academic he got. He was super accessible, but it's really him at his best, interacting with different ways to think about scripture and providing a cohesive experience.

It's a bunch of volumes, but it's the one that if I'm looking for what did he say, I don't wanna go to the, there's a two-volume set that I give away as a gift. It's the Old Testament in one book, the New Testament in another. I have that, that's great.

It's so good, and it's accessible, and it's affordable, and you can get the whole Bible. And I give that away because I love, my pastor friends love using that book. This has just got a little bit more to it, and the print's a little bigger, and I don't have to squint and all that stuff.

So I appreciate that one. Well, I really like what you said about, well, what your grandfather said. He wanted you to do the work first, and then he'd give you the commentary.

And the plagiarizing, he didn't mind that, that's fine. Pastor Chuck of the Calvary Chapel world, he used to say that about quotes from him. Well, did it change your life? Has it gone into your spirit? Well, then it's yours, it's free, use it.

But to just plagiarize it without having done the work, it just sounds so artificial and lazy. Like, wow, how come I didn't dive into this myself first? And then when you read a commentary like Dr. Weersbe's or another one perhaps, wow, somebody else came up with something similar, and that's confirmation of what I've received. Yeah, if it's novel, it's not necessarily trustworthy.

If you're the first person to have a thought, it's not swimming in the stream of Christian tradition or orthodoxy. And so we wanna make sure that theology is a conversation amongst the people of God through the generations. My grandfather definitely understood that.

He knew he was also a product of his time. There'll probably be a day when God uses someone else's works in a significant way, but I still have yet to meet someone who's in ministry, whether they're 22 years old or 72 years old, and they haven't read Weersbe and not appreciated the Jesus exalting, spirit-sensitive nature of what God's doing in his word and through his people. So yeah, he definitely was an accomplished Christian.

And a gift in that way. Talked to a guy at my church today who just commented, he's been gone for five years, and yet he still speaks and his words live on, and I just am humbled by that reality and grateful for his words, that he took time to invest himself in something that would continue into the future to be useful. I haven't listened to a lot of his sermons audio format, but I did listen to his series on Hebrews.

And it was remarkable. I mean, it was very, very impacting. And I'm sure that, I mean, do you have a good resource for that, Dan? Where can we find his audio resources? Yeah, thanks for the tip.

Actually, that's a podcast I run, is the Warren Weersbe Sermons Podcast. I didn't give it a creative title. It's just Warren Weersbe Sermons.

If you put that into Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Oh, perfect. Every Wednesday at 5.30 in the morning, I chose 5.30, because that's when my grandpa would have his quiet time.

This little tip of the hat to that for him. I just put out one of his old sermons. And we are continually, as a family, receiving from different institutions and churches and schools, more of his old recordings, and we're digitizing them and finding use for them.

Oh, I'm so glad you're doing that. You know, my grandpa, he was a radio preacher. He was obviously the pastor of the Moody Church back in the 1970s.

That was one of the largest churches, non-denominational churches in America at the time. It's been called like the megachurch before the megachurch movement. I don't really know how that went.

I know there was a lot of big churches. But it was on the radio. The Moody Church Hour continues to this day.

And despite his radio preaching and people hearing his voice through the airwaves, my grandfather, I think, as I've grown to understand more about him, his primary voice was written down. And he was such a strong writer and such a strong teacher through his written word. He actually would be self-deprecating to say, you know, I only had a couple of good sermons.

And I think every preacher feels that way, right? I think Billy Graham probably said, I only have a couple of good sermons too. He's Billy Graham. But there's something about the written word where you can look at it and go, yeah, this one's really good.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So something happened a while back.

I'm not sure when it happened for you, but you had a surprise and you discovered an unfinished manuscript that he'd started on. I think you may have already referred to it. It's become his next published book.

So what's the title of the book? So this is gonna be pins and needles time. You know, when this thing is released, it's gonna be, you know, there's gonna be a rush for purchasing it. What's the title of the book? And tell us a story about how you discovered the manuscript.

Yeah, so my grandfather, when he, the book is called Becoming New. It's written by Warren Wiersbe. It's a posthumous book.

When my grandfather passed away, it was May of 2019. And my family was kind of, my grandma and my grandpa passed away within five weeks of each other. It was a really sweet moment for our family.

There was just one of those poetic things that God called them both home in the same season. And so it led my mom, my uncle, my aunts and my uncles to go through my grandfather's stuff and kind of make sense of what was in their home. And you know how that happens after a loved one dies or a generation dies, you gotta deal with their estate.

My uncle was flipping through some of my grandfather's files and he kept a very robust filing system on paper for his life. And he found this manila file folder that was pretty thick and inside of it was a manuscript. And it was called one thing, I won't say the name of it because I didn't really like it and I don't wanna twist what it became into.

But he found this manuscript and it was very clearly a 100 days of learning how God changes a person. And he started down this road of understanding metamorphosis and he took it from Romans 12 to be transformed. That is one of the goals is becoming like Jesus.

How does the spirit of God through the word of God change the child of God into the image of the son of God? That's a very Weersbe thing to say. That's a great thing. And that was the idea.

Yeah, that was the idea of his devotional book. And his idea was there's a lot of devotions out there that are kind of like fluffy, good thinking and kind of nice thoughts. There are some devotions out there that are like written for scholars or like from the 1800s.

I like those, I read those. But he really wanted to make an accessible distillation of all of his years of Bible study to help maybe like a college student understand here's what God is up to in your life every day. Here's just the general what God is calling you into.

And so he started in Genesis and he worked his way through the book of Acts. He got Paul going to Rome and sort of like the birth of the explosion of the church. And he had outlined it all and it was substantially finished.

It was like 82% complete. There's like 82 really good ones and maybe like 18 were missing. And so through a bit of a story, I won't get into you, but eventually six months later, my uncle looked at me and said, Dan, you know this stuff.

Why don't you take a stab at finishing this project? And there was no, I so appreciate my uncle. He was like, there's no rush. You don't have to be a brilliant writer.

You don't have to try and be anybody you're not, but could you try and get this one across the finish line? And I thought, I've always wanted to do a book with my grandfather. I kind of thought we'd do it when he was alive, but that didn't work out. We had some ideas, we never really shaped them.

And my grandpa was really invested in this project. He had started it 10 years prior when he turned 80. So when I received, Bill, when I received the manuscript, it was like the diary of a madman.

And I say that in the sense of like, it was mid process. My grandpa was still very smart and brilliant, but he had pulled like his best thoughts from the years, from different parts of the Bible together. I could see he was just arranging thoughts in his word document.

There was maybe like 50,000 words at that point. So it was pretty substantially done, but it didn't have any definition. It didn't have any shape.

It didn't have any movement to it. And I was having children and like our kids were little and I was pastoring a brand new church at the time. And I was like overwhelmed by the thought of finishing a Warren Weersbe book that it sat on my desk for about two years.

It just sat. And then in the midst of COVID, I kind of realized like, this is my chance to like really, really get into this. And so I mustered up all the courage I had, all the prayers that I had, and started to get digging into it.

And through the process, can I tell you about the process? It was so fun for me because a lot of people know my grandfather and I knew my grandfather, but I had a chance to like see, what did you think about judges? What do you think about Joshua? What do you think about Ruth? What do you think about the ways God used them and the ways God used them in you? And so I started to really like understand a little bit more of what my grandfather was going for. And I started to have the courage to like add my own sentences in a Weersbe voice type of way, but authentically like trying to figure out like, here's what my grandfather would say. Over the course of the next couple of months, this thing rounded itself out and it just took some shape.

And at the end of it, I was just amazed because I've got two degrees in the Bible. I've written my thousands of words on my own. I've never published them.

But for the first time, I really felt like my grandfather had walked me through his understanding of the transformative power of Jesus for me. It wasn't about like a book for the world. It was just like a grandfather's discussion with his grandson about his savior.

And I have this thing where I kind of just like at the end of a project, I'll just throw my hands up in the air and just kind of sit back for a moment. Whether I'm building something or writing something or preaching something, I just kind of sit back and kind of just be like, my surrender is like it's done. I remember sitting back being like, wow, this is done.

I think the effect that God wanted it to have is being have like my life is being changed by God. And that's all I thought was gonna happen. And then I forwarded the manuscript back to my uncle and he forwarded it through our agent.

And then all of a sudden, David Cook was very excited about it. They read it and they were like, Dan, what do you mean you had to write some of this? Like, this is very authentically vintage Wearsby. And that was one of the greatest compliments of anyone could give me is like, hey, your legendary writing grandfather, you were able to work with him.

And my whole hope was to honor his voice and honor his legacy. And honor his theology and honor his heart for people to grow. And I think that's what we've done.

The book is called Becoming New. It's 100 Days of Transformation Through God's Word. And it's a substantial book.

I have it in front of me. I know this is, again, it's an audio thing, but I mean, this is a substantial book I'm holding. And when I see it, it's a couple hundred pages.

When I see it together, I'm overwhelmed by it. But I also really appreciate it because it's 600 words at a time. Each day is very short.

It's a page and a half. There's a lot of white space in this book. We want you to take notes.

We want you to scribble down thoughts. It's not all written word to think about. But my grandfather takes you through the arc of scripture to get the big story of what he's hoping you would understand from his decades of trusted Bible study.

So what you're saying, it reminds me of Mary, the sister of Martha, who sat at Jesus' feet and hung out with him to listen to what he said. And she's the one that heard a lot of the things that the other disciples didn't hear about the crucifixion and the resurrection, anointed his feet for burial. So that's kind of what you did.

And what a compliment. That just blesses me so much, that the Holy Spirit helped you nail it. You know, it was a seamless transition from your grandfather to you in the writing, the finishing of the 18 undone devotional pages.

You know, that's just, that's remarkable and wonderful. I could not agree more with you in that. It really was a lot of prayer and a lot of, I think, just sensitivity to what is the Spirit trying to do here.

I know that sounds really, I know that sounds really kind of like woo-woo, but like, it's been a real process for me. The Holy Spirit is real. The word is real.

That was real. 100%, yeah, yes, yes. Oh, that's awesome.

That's really awesome. So I know you had something that you wanted to give away to the people. I'm gonna let you do that right now.

And this is a good time for it right now. Yeah, let's do it, let's do it. The book releases on a very important day in America.

And I'd love to, it's election Tuesdays. If you've been following politics or whatever, you're listening to it afterwards, you remember the election of 2024. And just for whatever reason, this is the day that the book could hit the market and be ready pre-Christmas.

And it's a very giftable book. It's beautiful. It's, especially if you've got, if you're like me, you're a millennial, you got parents who respected Weersbe, or if you're a pastor who's a baby boomer and you've got kids who don't know what to buy you, tell them you want this book because I think it'll bless you.

But the book goes out November 5th. And because my grandpa loved pastors so much, and Bill, you got a podcast for pastors, we want to give away four copies to people who listen to your podcast. So if you, the listener, from now until election Tuesday, we will elect four winners on election Tuesday night at 11.59 and we'll reach out to you via email.

So Dan, I'm just going to go ahead and tell the listeners where to go to enter the drawing and receive a copy of Becoming New. So what you'll need to do is you'll need to go to strength.weersbe.com to find the form. Again, just go to strength.weersbe.com and fill out the needed information.

So that's strength dot, and the spelling is W-I-E-R-S-B-E, strength.weersbe.com. And then if you're selected as a winner, we'll connect with you and figure out where we can ship this book to you and you can enjoy just 100 days of your next devotions with God. And hopefully they can be, you can experience maybe the grandfatherly wisdom that I've experienced as well. Well, you know what? I'm going to get the book.

I'm not going to enter the contest, but I'm going to get the book because it just sounds amazing. And the whole idea of metamorphosis, which is, you know, why did God start this human family? He wanted a family himself that was larger than himself. And he wanted to give of himself and share with his own nature to the people that he has created who wanted to voluntarily love him.

And so we get changed into the image of his son. So I love this title. I love the whole approach to it.

I'm going to get it. I'm going to read it. I'm going to take my time with it.

And I'm going to let the spirit of God speak to me. And I'll probably read it out loud. Yeah, I think, you know, find a quiet spot.

And I think it'll minister to your soul that way. Every day starts out with a chunk of scripture. Sometimes it's a verse, sometimes it's a chapter.

His goal was for you to interact with the Bible and to use these devotions as supplemental understanding. Sometimes he links themes through the scriptures for you. So it's like a read a Genesis, read a Psalm and read a Matthew.

Sometimes it's just read a little bit of Genesis. And so, yeah, he kind of wants you to walk through the Bible and read it with your Bible open in one hand and this book open in your other hand. People can also go, if you've got YouVersion users, there's a YouVersion plan.

I don't know if it comes out when this podcast drops or if it'll come out the day of book release on November 5th. But there's a plan for five days and it's an adapted version of this. And you can get a taste for what that is.

The audio book. Can I tell you about the audio book real quick? I just hate to sell the book, but this is kind of cool. The publisher put a lot of energy in the audio book.

It sounds amazing. It's like this really great voice narrator. But here's the thing about it.

I found, not only did we find the manuscript, but I was digging through my Apple Notes on my phone the other day and stumbled across a sermon that my grandfather gave just our family. We were in Lincoln, Nebraska back in 2013. My daughter was like six months old.

We were bringing her to visit her great-grandparents. And on Sundays, my grandparents couldn't necessarily get out and go to church, but Sunday worship was very important to my grandpa. I just remember him pacing across the house being like, is there anything more important than worship? And it was a genuine heartbeat of a pastor, you know? And so he would have worship with us in his living room and he would preach.

And he'd preach from memory. He'd just pull out a Bible and he would preach a sermon. This particular day, I had the foresight to have my iPhone on my knee and to push record.

And he preached a message from Psalm 1. To the best of our ability, we believe this is the last recorded sermon of my grandpa's life that I know of is from this day. And so I gave it to the publisher and I said, hey, do you guys think you can, my daughter cries a lot. Do you think you can clean that up? Maybe you can amplify it and give it shape.

Bill, it's one of the best messages I've ever heard. Just his leading us through the Psalm 1 life. And so we added that as an epilogue to the audio book.

And so there's just a little Easter egg in the audio book as well and it's pretty sweet. That's fantastic. That's absolutely fantastic.

I love that story. That is so cool. Yeah, so with that in mind and books that your grandfather wrote, are there any other newly discovered manuscripts that might one day become a book that your grandfather wrote? So I can't say no.

There are some things that he had set up for us to mine. I already told you the devotion journals. He was convinced that there's sermons in there.

But there's also probably books in there too. He had outlined for us, he stopped at Acts for this book for becoming new. But he had outlined first Corinthians and second Corinthians in a hundred days.

He had outlined the pastoral epistles. He had outlined revelation. I don't know if we're gonna have the time or the energy to get into those.

I have a couple of his old books that I'd love to bring some new life to. Back when he was publishing, things were named interesting things. And so you might've missed some really great writings.

And we're trying to put some more stuff back out there just because it's so trustworthy. And his study is so, I'll say it this way. He's a rare person who can reach across the entire spectrum of evangelicalism.

From really progressive theologians to really conservative theologians, from the very charismatic to the very frozen. He really was loved by so many people. And it's because he kept his study aimed on the person of Jesus and not on necessarily his doctrinal convictions or whatever he was trained in for his theological traditions.

And so I think his books have just been a really trustworthy source for people. And we've got some more stuff that we'll figure out. Okay, good.

Well, you know, he stuck to the subject, to the scripture, which is Jesus. Basically, you know, the big theme, the big narrative. But he also, and this is for pastors, this is for me and for all of us.

He stayed in his lane. Yes. Writing and preaching and loving and ministering to pastors.

He stayed in his lane. He knew what God had called him to do. He knew what he was best at.

And so he stayed there. That's such a great example to me. I love hearing that kind of a story.

Yeah, he knew from an early age his limitations. And I don't know that he ever, he would talk about them all the time. That's why I know about them.

He would just, he would laugh at himself for the things that he was unable to do. He couldn't read a map. He had no, he got lost in Lincoln, Nebraska.

It's a town with one road. I mean, he had no idea where he was going, but he knew how to navigate the Bible. And so when you know what God's called you to do and what he's gifted you in, he really is an example of what God can do with a life that is solely devoted to living out your gifts.

And I don't know that in the 1950s, anyone would have looked at Warren Wiersbe and said, there's someone who's going to teach millions of people through his writings. But slow, steady, applauding. He wrote a book called In Praise of Plotters.

I think the Calvary Chapel might've given that out at their recent pastors conference a year or two ago. And just a great, great book, but that was kind of how he saw himself. Like just, I'm a plotter.

And the whole subject of that was Spurgeon's idea that by faith, the ant made it to the ark, like just slowly plotted along, like the snails made it and the ants made it. Like, we don't think about that, but it's a funny thought how they did get there. And so his whole life was directed that way.

I'd have to say, Bill, you can't talk about Warren Wiersbe without talking about Betty Wiersbe. And she was a bit of the protector to his life, protector to his ministry. I think she saw the value of what focus time did for my grandfather.

And so a lot of times, pastors would call and they'd get a little bit of his time, but she'd hop back on and say, I'm so sorry, Warren's got an engagement coming up. And the engagement was with his writing. And so she would hop in and provide some cover for him in a gracious way.

And if you talk to some of his friends who are still living, they all had it happen to them at some point. We discovered a letter written by him in 1993. I thought this was so interesting that he was complaining to one of his friends that he couldn't visit them to be a part of the revival week coming up because he had to do some writing.

And on a recent trip, he had brought his compact computer, which is like, and you remember the compact company? That's not even a company anymore. But it was like one of the first laptops. He had tried, he tried to be a man of the times.

And he was like, I just find my study. This is what he wrote. He said, I just find my study and my writing is prohibited when I'm not in my library.

And so he shaped his life around what he was called to and what he was good at. And he never resented it. He never, my grandma never resented him for it.

They just worked together and they were in it together. And so I think that's a really big lesson for pastors, pastors' wives, or whoever is involved in the pastor's life as a champion, because it takes a team and it takes a village. My grandpa didn't know money.

He didn't know how much money he had. He didn't know how much money his books sold for. He just knew that he wanted them to be cheap so pastors could buy them.

And my grandma did all the bookkeeping for him because that was something he didn't need to worry about. And she just is enjoying the heavenly spoils that she sacrificed for today. That's what she's got going on.

Her reward will be equal to your grandfather's reward. Yeah. I would predict that in a heartbeat because, and I love that you shared that, Dan, because the pastor's wife can feel like she's lost in a shadow and not feel like her life means much and thinks that the way to get out of the shadow is to get into the limelight and to take charge of some ministry or run some program or whatever.

And that may be something God calls them to do, but if their ministry is as Betty's was to Warren, what an important thing. And I'm sure she had her own life and relationships that were very fulfilling for her, but she played that role for him. I hadn't known that.

That's really good to know. So the women that are gonna listen to this podcast, they're gonna get an extra bonus at the end of the podcast episode. Because that's encouraging.

That's encouraging to me in ministry to women, and I know it's gonna be encouraging to women as well. Yeah. That's great.

Well, at this point, Dan, we'd like to give our guests an opportunity for you to share with them a word of encouragement. We call this the two-minute drill, particularly to pastors and leaders, so go. Yeah, Bill, I appreciate that this is not a two-minute drill without preparation.

Because when we chatted about what this could be, I heard my grandfather so many times say the church is always one generation away from extinction. It's been true of the people of God since there has been a people of God. And my grandfather worked in his life so much to make sure that the church would continue beyond his generation.

And it is, and it has, and I believe Jesus builds his church, and that's why there's a confidence here. But what my grandfather did is something I wanna commend to myself and to any pastor listening. Even in his eighties, my grandfather would go to his local church that he served in and sit at a round table with college students and be a listening ear.

He was a part of the college ministry as a volunteer, and he would invite college students to his dining room table to understand whatever book of the Bible they wanted. There's stories about my grandma and my grandpa teaching just one college girl, the book of Hebrews. And there's other pictures that we have of different college guys just sitting around the table with my grandpa, opening up the book of Romans together.

And I think becoming new, this book is an easy way for someone to walk through the Bible with somebody else using my grandpa's knowledge. But it's really that life on life love for God's word. My grandpa just didn't publish into the masses and then say, you guys figure it out.

He had a heart for people. And I think if our churches are gonna continue on in this season of life where everything's contentions, information is scattered and not trustworthy, everybody's gotta take a real relationship with someone who knows Jesus, is incredibly relevant and incredibly productive. I think it's the way God's gonna continue blessing his church and having us be a blessing to other people.

So that's my two minute drill. Get in people's lives, bless the next generation, help them understand the word of God. I love it.

It's what older pastors need to hear because until we draw our last breath, we're still viable potentially for the kingdom. Yeah, amen. So that's great.

Good bit of information. So, thanks so much for joining us and sharing with us today, Dan. Those are some personal things, a lot of spiritual principles and memories of your grandfather.

So tell us where can the book be purchased? You can go get this book anywhere books are sold. So Amazon is an easy place, Barnes and Noble, have it, christianbook.com, davidcook.com. You just go to weirsbe.com, W-I-E-R-S-B-E.com and there's links to help you out as well as a link to the podcast. And as we grow that site, there's gonna be more historical information about my grandfather, as well as we're building in his catalog of sermons and books and ways to help people kind of link his resources together to be more useful for the kingdom into the future.

Yeah, like you said, though he has died yet he still lives. That's great. Yeah, yeah.

So, thanks for who you are and what you're doing. Thanks for responding to the prayers of generations behind you and being the man that you are and that you're becoming in Christ. It's been really good to meet you and to connect with you this way.

So thanks again. I love it. Yeah.

Thank you, Bill, I really appreciate it. God bless. So Strength for Today's Pastor is the podcast ministry of Poyman Ministries.

Our team loves to connect with current senior or lead pastors of churches. So here's a reminder of what Pastor Dan Jacobson just shared with us. You can be a part of a drawing or a contest, if you will, to receive a copy of Becoming New.

Four copies of this book will go out to winning listeners of Strength for Today's Pastor. So here's what to do. Go to strength.weirsby.com and there's gonna be a form there that you can fill out and the winners will be selected on November 5th, the same day that the book is released.

11.59 p.m. on November 5th, the winners will be selected. And be sure to check out our website for more ways to connect with Poimen Ministries and we to you. And the announcer has all that information after we sign off.

So on behalf of the team of Poyman Ministries, may the Lord bless you and keep you and cause you to flourish in his work. Strength for Today's Pastor is sponsored by Poyman Ministries. You can find us at poymanministries.com. That's spelled P-O-I-M-E-N ministries.com. If something in today's program prompts a question or comment, or if you have a topic idea for a future episode, just shoot us an email at strongerpastors at gmail.com. That's strongerpastors at gmail.com. May the Lord bless you as you serve him, his pastors, and his church.