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The Pastor's Heart with Dominic Steele
Christian leaders join Dominic Steele for a deep end conversation about our hearts and different aspects of Christian ministry each Tuesday afternoon.
We share personally, pastorally and professionally about how we can best fulfill Jesus' mission to save the lost and serve the saints.
The discussion is broadcast live on <a href="https://www.facebook.com/thepastorsheart">Facebook</a> then on <a href="https://www.youtube.com/@ThePastorsHeart">YouTube</a> and on our <u><b><a href="http://www.thepastorsheart.net">thepastorsheart.net</a></u></b> website and via audio podcast.
The Pastor's Heart with Dominic Steele
The evangelical application problem - with Richard Coekin
We evangelicals, says Richard Coekin, have a problem—and it’s a preaching problem.
Richard Coekin says we are too often careless—his word—when it comes to application in preaching.
We work hard on exegesis, we labour to understand the original context and the author’s intent—but then we stop short. We leave our congregations with sound doctrine, but little direction.
Richard has just concluded 29 years as senior pastor at Dundonald Church in London and as the founding leader of the Co-Mission network across the UK capital. He now heads up Reach UK.
Richard’s new book, Apply: How to Preach the Bible for Real Life, is about to be released—and today he joins us to explore why good application is not an optional extra, but the very purpose of preaching.
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it is the pastor's heart and dominic steel and evangelicals. We have a problem. That is what richard coken says. Richard, for 29 years, was senior pastor of dun donald church in london and leader of the commission network across the English capital. He now heads up Reach UK. Richard says we evangelicals in general are shamelessly bad at application. Careless is his word. He has a new book just about to be released. It's called Apply. Now he's with us today on the Pastor's Heart and, richard, it is something that worries your pastor's heart, how poor we are at application. It's nice to be with you.
Speaker 2:I mean, I'm not ready to say all evangelicals have a problem and I know the answer.
Speaker 1:Just most of us.
Speaker 2:No, well, I'll speak for myself. I think in the years of preaching, I think sometimes we've been weak. I've been weak in applying the bible to people. That sounds like diplomatic english understatement. It is. It is one of the great.
Speaker 2:It's funny when you, when you step back from um, you know a ministry after 29 years at dundonald and 17 at commission um, you miss preaching every week. Um, and I realize it's a bit like cooking. I mean, I I can't cook for toffee, but you know cooking. You prepare a meal for people that you love and you labor away at it and then sometimes they don't appreciate it, they just gobble it up. But you know you want it to be healthy, you want it to be tasty, you want to do people good, and I think it's a bit like that you miss cooking for the family every week.
Speaker 2:But I think that sometimes in our efforts to be accurate with the text and we feel anxious not to manipulate people, to avoid heavy shepherding, not to be too coercive in our preaching, that sort of thing, I think sometimes we leave people bereft of application. There are lots of reasons for it, but I think it's a serious issue in preaching, certainly in the UK and probably in places like Australia as well, so we leave people having had an academic meal but not knowing how to live.
Speaker 2:Yes, I mean, there are different kinds of preaching, aren't there? I mean, do you think?
Speaker 1:that this shapes our churches, that we end up with evangelical churches full of boffins and nerds and the Pentecostals end up with where they are doing application, end up with people who actually are trying to apply it to their lives but, on the other hand, are all bitsy in their thinking.
Speaker 2:Well, I'll come back to offending everybody later, but to start with let's say that the purpose of the bible is application. Um, you know the reason god's word is written is for salvation through faith in christ jesus. For for righteousness, you know, to equip us for every good work. Um, so that's what the purpose of the bible is, and it's the purpose for preachers you know what are preachers for? 2 Timothy 4, is to rebuke, correct, correct rebuke, and train in righteousness. And in other words, the purpose of a preacher is to bring the scriptures to bear upon the people listening. And actually people are desperate for application, because most people find it hard to go from principle to practice. In a moment they're often coming to a text they haven't had the chance to read. The preacher's been preparing all week or has been thinking about it for years, and so the congregation sitting in front of us are desperate to know.
Speaker 2:So what do I do with what you've just said? How do I live by it? I want to please my Lord. How do I live by what you've just told me? And actually that then cashes out in all sorts of ways. If we're not applying the scriptures, then we don't know how to talk to non-Christians about the benefits of our faith. We're just dumping theology on people, Bible statements on people, and haven't worked out how it applies into their lives. So I think it affects our evangelism. I think it goes further than that. If you're not good at applying, we won't get to good conclusions. That is basically doctrine and we can despise doctrine and church history, despise ministry practice. All the implications of God's word can be truncated if we don't see the importance of application. So should I keep going? Don't see the importance of application, so should I keep going? So it's interesting, isn't it?
Speaker 2:The apostle says to um titus and titus to teach what accords with sound doctrine. So don't just teach sound doctrine, teach what accords with sound doctrine. And then proceeds to do so in chapter two. He runs through a household in crete applying sound doctrine to the behaviours that he knew from his mission time there. And so he's saying you know to the women, you know to be sober. He's not suggesting that men have no problem with being sober, but he knew in Crete that was an issue for the people there. And so he runs through the household and applies sound doctrine to the lives of the people in terms of practical behaviour. And I've been worried by suggestions that we don't need to do this, that the Bible applies itself. You know that you don't actually need to work at trying to apply the Bible to the people in front of you.
Speaker 2:I think it's quite dangerous and in my travels I think we needed over the last 30 years we needed the pendulum to swing back away from sort of topical, isolated verses, taking them out of context and making up what we want to do. We need to swing back to careful attention, to the evident human authorial intention in the books of the Bible to work at why was the writer writing this, what was writing, so on. But if you go too far and you only do that and then don't then draw out what are the implications of the text, the necessary implication of the text for life, you end up with commentary sermons that are boring and dull, difficult for normal ordinary people to access, very academic, I think people get frustrated. I think sometimes then they actually move to other churches where the teaching is actually terrible because not much attention has been given to what the word is saying, but at least they can understand what they're supposed to do as a result. So I think there's an urgent need for reformed evangelicals who care about God's word to work with application.
Speaker 2:I was in Rwanda and in Nairobi and Kenya with networks that have really embraced careful exegesis of the Bible. But they were saying to me people are saying we're boring now and I was thinking this is tragic, and one of them said to me I think that we've swung too far, that we're just giving people academic commentary you know, observations of the text and not drawing conclusions for people's lives, the necessary implications of the text for people's lives. Do you want to say more?
Speaker 1:I mean, I'm just thinking. I spent so long just trying to understand the text, then I run out of time to think about. Well, what does it mean? Absolutely.
Speaker 2:And I think that's one of the dangers is because it necessarily application necessarily comes at the end of your preparation process and also your preaching time. It often gets left off If you're a pastor under pressure, do you?
Speaker 1:also find that I find that I can spend time wrestling during the week with what does this text mean? But it's actually only in the 12, 18 hours before I actually stand up that my head is completely in the mind of the person who's going to be coming on Sunday.
Speaker 2:Yeah well, I think there's a number of things here. Firstly, if we don't start early enough Look, let's get real.
Speaker 1:Pastors are extremely busy, Lots is expected of them, and I've got all these people saying the kingdom will fall if you don't do this now. That's right.
Speaker 2:So I don't want to say that, but I do think if we're not, in our heads, convinced that the people need our applications, then we'll spend what time we've got entirely upon exegesis, reading more commentaries and more text work and I'm saying, look, whatever time we've got, leave time for working out.
Speaker 1:How much time? How much percentage?
Speaker 2:Well, you know, I would say in my context I need for a new sermon on a familiar book.
Speaker 2:I'm going to need 10 hours to prepare a sermon, yeah, but quite often you've only got five or six hours. I mean, the reality is no one would admit it I've only got five hours. And so what happens is you spend your five hours on your commentary work and and actually that's not enough time. So I need to be fighting and I need to talk to my elders about how can I get out of some meetings, talk to my staff team, how can I get out of some meetings. So I've got a whole day and a half and I know one godly colleague of mine decided that because he was just couldn't get himself to, um, uh, finish his exegesis to get on an application, he decided that he would make a discipline for himself. He had to finish his exegesis by thursday evening so he would then have friday morning to work on the application and then get, get his outlines in for for the, for the ops team to produce, you know, the PowerPoint and the.
Speaker 1:Do you think there's a? Can you make some statements about where we get? I mean, you've talked about evangelicals everywhere, but give us some generalisations. You've given us a bit of a generalisation about some of the problems in Africa.
Speaker 2:I'm the master of generalisation, yeah.
Speaker 1:Give us some generalisations about problems in the UK, problems in Australia. Well, I think to take, Because they're different.
Speaker 2:I think yes, I mean to take Philip Jensen's very helpful analogy of an arrow. You know you've got the.
Speaker 1:The archer and the arrow.
Speaker 2:The archer and the arrow, so the sermon being like an arrow. I can't remember what he said, but the way I use it, and misuse it, no doubt. But anyway, the way I would say, don't worry about him. Um, great man, um, the feathers are the doctrine, that steer, you know it's the introduction to your sermon is, you know where are we? And um, that's your sort of, um, hermeneutical, hermeneutical spiral thing.
Speaker 2:You know, that's my worldview, my biblical worldview as it comes to the text didn't mean to say this, he meant he should have said it quite right, so anyway if the feathers of the doctrine then introduce it and then the shaft of the, of the arrow I feel like your time in the text, and then the arrow is the application, which is the point of the whole sermon I think that's pretty much what he did say well, he should have sometimes the the arrow was thicker and sometimes thinner well, I think I would say you know to generalize and offend everybody.
Speaker 2:then, um, you know, some of my reformformed and Independent brothers have very big, the feathers are very big lots and lots of doctrine and introduction and then a little bit of text time in the text and then almost no application, because you spent all your time in the sermon and probably in your preparation in the doctrine introduction. And then you've got your sort of Anglican evangelicals, you know much more disciplined, and they've got almost no feathers because they don't really care about doctrine. And then they've got your sort of Anglican evangelicals, you know much more disciplined, and they've got almost no feathers because they don't really care about doctrine. And then they've got the whole length of time is in the text, which is really really interesting because you're spending time on the specifics of the Bible, and then again the arrow is tiny, so there's no application. So if the first one is sound but dull, the second one is interesting but irrelevant because you don't know how it applies. And then you've got our more charismatic brothers, um, who?
Speaker 2:are more big head on the front more focused on the you know needs centered. So you know, very, very few feathers, very little shaft and a massive great arrow arrow. So it feels incredibly exciting because it's all about me, it's very, very relevant. It's just wrong. Now that's to offend. Now I think I've offended everybody.
Speaker 2:So, um, I think what we want to do is we do need to be reading around the topic and it's hard to do that week by week. That's why you want to delegate sermons to other people and have reading. You know, have time off for a reading week and all that stuff. Do what you can read during the sermon during the holidays. Um, you need some doctoral introduction. I would normally want the topic, that is, the topic that this where will this land? You do your introduction last, uh, so you work through, work out applications and then form out where will this cash out? So the opening question is have you wondered where you know does ever strike you that you know? What would you say is this because you know that's where the sermon's going to go? And then you give your broader context, that is, your doctrinal and biblical, theological thing. Uh, introduction to the topic that this will address. Then the specific context to this text where it is in the book, and then you're dividing up the sermon into the points that the text provides. But you've got to leave time at the end of each point and at the end of the sermon to apply this to the lives of the people in front of you.
Speaker 2:And one of the reasons why I come to church and sit at the back rather than at the front is because I want to remind myself of who all the people are that I'll be preaching to. And even if you've got a bigger congregation, you don't know everybody. The truth is, if I'm a guest preacher or whatever, I'll be turning around and staring at people for quite a long period. You know, embarrassing. I'm trying to work out who are you, who are the people who are not singing because they're not Christians, or who are the people who are crying because they're in the midst of grief. And, of course, when you know your congregation, you think, oh yes, she's just had a serious operation. Oh yes, her mum's just died. And you're reminding yourself of the people that you're speaking to. So often if there's someone I don't know, I don't recognise. They look like a non-Christianristian, I mean. Often they turn out to be the principal of barber college.
Speaker 2:But you know, they look like a non-christian um, and you're kind of thinking I I need to preach to to them and so as I'm preaching I'll be thinking about them and try and translate, say it again with that person in mind, think I know that sounds really weird, but I think I think what I'm trying to say is this and you're speaking to him and it's almost like with with young preachers when they come out of college, often as curates. You know, at first they're preaching into there, they're giving a talk, then they're giving a talk for the senior pastor or the elders, then they're giving a talk for whoever functions as the expository police in your church. You know the people you're worried are going to give you grief because you've got something wrong and then eventually you start fighting for the souls of the people in front of you. And that's when you become a preacher and it's like I mean I asked your wonderful Archbishop Kanishka in front of our staff team about you know what is preaching and he started out saying preaching. I can't remember exactly, but I did ring him up to check.
Speaker 2:We've misquoted a few people.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, let's misquote him as well.
Speaker 2:Actually I did ring, think he's preaching. And he said something like, um, preaching is, um, it was expounding the holy word of god. And then there was a gap and my heart sank thinking oh no, not, another guy is just going to say, it's just declaring the word of god into the air. And he said to the people in front of you so they might live by faith in the lord jesus christ, be holy and live godly lives. I thought, hallelujah, yeah, that is he's. You know, there is an experienced godly preacher saying I'm preaching the word of god to people, to people. And actually I want to say go further. It's not just about being functionally good. Um, I actually think it goes further than that. It's interesting in nehemiah 8, in the great revival by the water gate, where ezra, you know there's been this great revivalhemiah has completed the building of the walls In 52 days. They've gathered to hear the word of God and their weeping is to hear the word of God. It's interesting that we're told that, as three things happened Ezra read the scriptures, then Ezra clarified the text, which people think means possibly including translation for those whose Hebrew had lapsed.
Speaker 2:And then, thirdly, gave the meaning. The three things, the three little phrases, the gave. The meaning word is the word parash, which the Hebrews use for some of their practical commentaries on what to do with the scriptures. It's the word used in numbers what do we do with this guy who sinned? It's the application so the people could understand. In other words, understanding is not just reading the bible and explaining the bible. You actually need application to understand, and I think the reason why that is is if you don't explain what this will mean in practice, people actually don't understand what the words meant. See, if you just use words conceptually, you've got to give them concrete content for people to understand even what the word means. It's actually meaning. Application is part of meaning.
Speaker 1:Now you're saying application is what the Bible is written for.
Speaker 2:It's what it's written for, it's what the preacher is for, it's what congregations desperately need and it's not. I mean, there's a story. It's apocryphal and I don't know, but I'm going to tell it anyway. There's a story about John Chapman, the great Australian evangelist and preacher, visiting London and working in the office of his great friend Dick Lucas, founder of the Proclamation Trust, you know, father of preaching in London.
Speaker 1:So far, I'm sure you're telling the truth. Yeah, so far it's all true.
Speaker 2:Anyway, they're working in the office and John told me that he came out during the coffee breaks. And completely different characters. You know John, loud Australian, dick, very private in English and Dick is still with us. So, um, uh, you know a great man in the lord, he probably won't listen to this, but um, anyway, uh, john would say to him so how are you doing, brother?
Speaker 2:how you doing, brother yeah, and um, dick would say I'm struggling, I'm struggling and um, so what are you working? You know I'm just working on my talk for for sunday evening. So what struggling. It came out day after you know, like two or three days still struggling. What he's struggling? John had written three talks by this time. He says what are you struggling with? He says John, chapter 10. You know Jesus, the Good Shepherd. And John said how can you be struggling with that? You must have preached on that a thousand times. He said come on mate.
Speaker 1:Why are you struggling with that? Dick said oh no, no, I know what the words mean.
Speaker 2:I'm trying to work out what they mean for the evening congregation. Yeah, in other words, he was wrestling with not just the words. Say what will they mean for the lives of the people in front of him? He was wrestling with that and I think you know we've had a generation who think that if you just repeat what the text says, that is preaching. And I think you know obviously there's a wonderful warning for you know, comfort for chris derash in his book on preaching, where he says, um, that we can't be the world's expert on every aspect of culture. We can't be the world's aspect, you know, and everything, but we can still live amongst our people and try and give them an introduction to where would this passage hit their, their lives, to be thinking about the different kinds of people in front of you, different age groups and so on. We can make a start.
Speaker 1:I mean, just as you say, that I feel like some of my preacher friends are very disconnected to the real lives that their members are living. Connected to the real lives that their members are living? Yeah, and even I was saying to one guy a couple of days ago, how are you consuming the news? And really he isn't. Yeah, and I was thinking, actually most of the adults that he's talking to on Sunday morning are going to be reading, whether it's the Herald or the Financial Review or something like that, but they're going to be seriously engaged in where his congregation is and he's kind of living in a bubble.
Speaker 2:Well, let's talk about this because I mean, you are somebody who's very engaged with and very knowledgeable about contemporary life. Yeah, some characters as preachers are brilliant at listening to, listening to podcasts and they, you know, they read the week and they know everything and I think that's great. It really, really helps and let's just acknowledge it helps rather than saying it doesn't help. But not all of us are very good at consuming news and some of us aren't brilliant, you know, of course it's helpful when you've got teenage kids and, uh, young adults and still in the home and they can tell you to chat through things. It's great to have a wife, to have a wife you can talk through. It's interesting with Thabiti Anyabwile, who's a great Bible preacher, expositor in Washington. He said he presents two kinds of outlines to his wife in the middle of the week. I mean she's a great teacher in her own right, christy, but she sort of helps him think through how this would apply. So maybe you've got resources at home.
Speaker 2:There are, of course, resources in the text itself. There may be great truth. I mean, most of the Bible is about God, it's not about us. So just to clarify by application I don't mean find something for us to do? I mean draw out the necessary implications of the text, which will often just be trust God, he's amazing, or proclaim Jesus, he's beautiful. So a lot of it will be about someone. Sometimes there'll be things, implications for our lives. But there may be clues in the text, commands to obey great doctrines, to celebrate, but also think about the people in front of you. How do you get help with that? I think if you're not really in touch with the news and you don't know much about it, then it's worth it.
Speaker 1:It's not just news, but that's just one aspect of life.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think, to be real about it, one of the things you could do is well, look, why don't we you've just heard the sermon why not put five minutes aside for people to talk to each other about how this sermon applies? So you might acknowledge that as a preacher, you're not very in touch. But don't spend all the time available you've got you know on expanding the text and leave no room for what does this mean for our daily lives? So if you know you're weak, you know, if you're 67 and haven't watched TV and it can't read, I don't know. You know, if you're struggling, then it might be that you do your small group program then spends time applying what they've heard in your sermons midweek because you just don't want to leave the word of God left in the air unapplied. So it may be you have to look to other people. It may be you need to talk to your staff team. You know, ring up a younger colleague and say look this thing on, I don't know. Autonomy and accountability to God. Where do you think that affects your generation? You know, my younger colleagues often have brilliant insights into how this applies. You know, and I just say you know, where can I find some help on that and they go click, click, click and send you some podcast or a little doctrine or a paragraph or something. So work as a team, don't just work on your own.
Speaker 2:I mean, murray Capel has written a brilliant book called the Heart is the Target, and I think you know it's the more solid version of what I will be writing. I don't mean solid and negative, I just mean it's a slightly more deeper book, bigger book. My only disagreement with him slightly is he has a whole chapter on the life of the preacher and talks about you know, having deep wells. And of course he's right that the deeper you live as a human being, you know, the more engaged and you know with life, the more you will have to draw upon both spiritually as a Christian but also as a normal human being. And that's true, though I do want to say it's a bit of a council of despair, though. If I've got to be the person who knows and knows everything, I think that would be more true. I'm not really bought into this.
Speaker 2:The sermon comes through the preacher entirely, as if God is speaking through the preacher. I think God is speaking through the preacher. I think God is speaking through his word. Now, of course, as I explain the word, so as I apply that, I am mediating the knowledge of the scriptures to the person in front of them. Except that where people have got their own Bibles in front of them, hopefully on the screen they can see it, or in their hands, it's not just through the preacher, you know, the listener can also see the words for themselves and can interpret the Bible for themselves. So I just want to take a little bit of a load off the preacher that it's not, you know, if you're a sinner and a hypocrite, like we all are to some degree, that your congregation is lost. Thankfully, god still speaks through his word. You know the quality of the preacher does not condemn the congregation, otherwise you know we're all lost. So I just want to lower the tone a little on that, because I think people can read the word for themselves and wonderfully often say things and conclude things that you didn't say.
Speaker 2:But we have got to leave time in our preparation and in our preaching and I think, think actually would mean that if we had a bit more application, sometimes the pressures on us to only speak for 25 minutes would turn into no, no, you can have 35 minutes because you're using the extra time to help us all live by it and we're seeing the practical realities of it.
Speaker 2:I could listen to you longer because you're not giving me the finer points of the greek syntax. You're actually helping me live by it. So I think we need to leave some of our workings in the study to go back to the hours. If I have only got five hours to prepare a sermon, you're not going to be very deep and you're not going to have good applications. So you do need to think about building ministry teams, delegating ministries, not being in some meetings, letting other people run ministries, so that you can get yourself back to the 10 hours and then, every so often, try and give yourself a week. You know, read a book over the summer holidays, get yourself into a couple of books so that you can come in at a high level of understanding of a book as you're going on. But you've got to apply.
Speaker 1:Apply. You said earlier that there was a reluctance to apply because people might see that I'm heavy shepherding. Yeah, just unpack that for me.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there is a danger of going too far in application, and there's plenty of examples of that online. You know where you get some self-proclaimed bishop online telling people what to do with their lives. You know, sell your tvs and send the money to me. Um, well, the bible text does not say that. So, um, of course we need to draw back from um inventing things, that that is bad application. But you don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, therefore have no application. So we want to work out good application. Um, you know where are the clues for the response required to this text, both within the text elsewhere in the bible where that text is used, alluded to or quoted. How is this fulfilled in christ and what will that mean for me as a christian? But don't stop with what does it say. Keep going with what does it mean for my life? Because that is the purpose of the text and that's what you're there as a preacher to do, I mean, in the end.
Speaker 2:For example, why do we bother with preachers? You know, why would we bother with preachers at all? I mean, why did Paul write 2 Timothy 4? Why didn't he just stop with 2 Timothy 3? Hand out the Bibles for half an hour and let people read the Bibles on their own. You know, if the Bible is for these things, what do you need a preacher for? Paul didn't finish with 2 Timothy 3. He then goes to 2 Timothy 4, because the purpose of the preacher is the same as the purpose of the text.
Speaker 2:So the preacher enables the purpose of the text, that is, it might be, rebuking, correcting, training in righteousness, equipping us for good works. That's why every congregation needs its own preacher. That's why the particular preacher who lives amongst his people is more valuable, even than a great preacher like John Piper or Tim Keller being beamed in. Why don't we just not have preachers? Save a whole lot of money, spend it on musicians and just beam in great sermons from John Chapman or two Great preachers. And I'm not saying there's no value in that. It's great to hear, you know, a masterful preacher from the other side of the world, it's great to listen, but you often find when the guest preacher doesn't actually have much impact in a local church?
Speaker 1:They don't know me.
Speaker 2:They don't know life in this congregation. They don't know me. They don't know life in this congregation. They don't know what it's like to live here in Annandale. Yeah, and that's why an ordinary preacher amongst his people is more valuable and precious than a great preacher from afar. That's not to say there's no value in listening to the great guy, but he doesn't know what it's like living here in this new cell. So for those ordinary preachers out there thinking, well, I can't do it like them. Yeah, you're more precious to your people, more valuable to your people because you live amongst them.
Speaker 1:Don't then. And they can see your life, they can see you trying to live this out, they can see the way you're relating with your wife.
Speaker 2:So don't then fail to tell them how you're trying to live this out.
Speaker 1:Don't then fail to tell them how you're trying to live this out and actually share how I'm trying to live this passage.
Speaker 2:We don't want too much chat about ourselves and we don't want to bleed all over everybody with our sins all the time. But honesty, you know, is good, I do think. Sharing with the congregation to use we rather than you, you know. I wonder whether we need to hear this.
Speaker 1:You don't want to be accusing us. I'll get my script and then I will go search for the word you, and almost every time I can see that word you, I change it to we.
Speaker 2:I would do that. So I want to sit next to my audience and hold the Bible with them and say, brother and sister, isn't this marvellous? I think this means this, and I think what that means for us. I'm sitting next to them looking at the.
Speaker 1:I want to be not the prophet standing next to God, but I want to be the person standing next to the congregation. You know if I've got the Bible?
Speaker 2:behind me and I'm preaching at you. If I've got the Bible behind me and I'm preaching at you, it's creating distance between me and you. I don't think I've got the Bible. All right, I'm sitting next to you reading the Bible together. What is God saying to us? Us, even if you're non-Christians. People say what about non-Christians? I still want to say look for those of us here this morning who don when we weren't Christians is can I encourage us to keep reading? You know you're talking in we and us. For as long as you can.
Speaker 1:There's lots more to say. Thank you so much for coming in. Richard Gokin has been my guest. Richard has a new book just about to be released. The book is called Apply Now. It'll be released through the Good Book Company. My name is Dominic Steele. You've been with us on the Pastor's Heart and we'll look forward to your company next Tuesday afternoon.
