Welcome to dwell on these things. A podcast by dwell Community Church in Columbus, Ohio, where we hear stories and examples of how God is moving in the church at dwell and around the world. You Well, I'm Mike Sullivan, and today we're here with Gary. Delish. Mint, one of the founding pastors of dwell Community Church, Gary, good to have you in how you doing this morning? Doing great. Glad to be here. Gary's been teaching the Bible and writing in various capacities for over 50 years, and we brought him in today to discuss his new book, drawing near to God, which is basically a collection of daily meditations. It's a daily devotional, and it's coming out just in time for Christmas. It's got to feel good to be done. I think that it is good to get a project completed. Yeah, well, I know it's been a widely anticipated book, and also know you've been working on various forms of it for some time, and I was curious what the original spark was that led you to writing devotionals in the first place. Well back in 2020 when we were starting our seniors ministry pace setters, we got we got shut down before we started by COVID. And a couple of months later, Ben Faust, two leads pacesetters gave me a call and said, What would you think about writing something short for the people who can't come out to Bible studies and who are kind of, kind of locked, locked down. And so he gave me the challenge of writing devotionals or reflections on specific passages, not more than 1000 words, okay? And that was, that was a great challenge, kept me, kept me busy, as well as hopefully building those folks up. So we just put out one a week for probably, probably a year and a half, okay? And so it sounds like the basic goal being, how do you help people who are removed from community stay spiritually vital during a hard time? I wonder how many of those original devotionals made it in to this book, or did you write new devotionals as well? Well, I would say the majority of the devotionals in this book were were written during that time and for those people. But then I've just, I got it kind of got in that mode of thinking more about individual passages, and so I just started adding to it. Yeah, I know that the original audience was specific to pacesetters, but my understanding is that you had a, maybe a broader, a different audience in mind for this book. Well, yeah, I mean, pretty quickly I realized that anything that's going to be helpful and fortifying for people seniors is going to be with very few modifications, is going to be applicable to everyone. So I was writing for with to a broader audience. From the beginning, I was reading some of those because they were posted on our website at one point, some of them, and I was reading, reading them back and forth with a friend of mine in his early 40s, and he loved it. It was super helpful. So one thing that's kind of interesting, if you're listening in, is, you know, we've been at church for a long time, and views of devotionals and the idea of a devotional life maybe have evolved over the years. And I wonder, just having been here from the beginning, how do you think you've seen our churches, or maybe your own perspective toward the devotional life, change and develop over time? Well, back in the early days, anything that was we kind of rebelled against anything that was churchy. Yeah. So, you know, if, if, if, in the church, people were urged to have a devotional time or quiet time, then we kind of reacted against that and say, Why are we limiting it to just that time? Why can't we have that mindset all the time? Then, in addition, a lot of the devotional literature was pretty shallow, pretty sentimental. There was not a lot of biblical content. So I think we, yeah, we so we had a negative reaction, and the result was that you. People felt that they, you know, didn't, didn't need regular time alone with God just reading their Bibles. And so, right? That created a different problem, and so we kind of have been trying to correct that. And I think it's, I think people have responded well to i May I run into people all the time who refer to the time that they spend alone with, with the Lord, with the scriptures on a on a regular basis. Yeah. Can you think of just during over those decades in your own personal life? Was, was there ever a a period where you felt like you were really pivoting, kind of deciding, I want to, I want to dive in more to the one on one time I'm getting in my own life with God, well, there were several times over the years where I've just reached a point of desperation in my own walk. I remember several times just feeling like I can't keep going in what I'm trying to do with unless I get somehow get a deeper connection with God. And then that that. And then there'd be times when in studying for a teaching a passage would strike me in a special way. And I thought, Why do I have to wait until I'm preparing for a teaching to read the Bible that way? So yeah, it was, it was came out of my own personal, personal times of real need spiritually, and just from reading some of them and just hearing what you said about maybe some devotionals are a little fluffier, not as much content, maybe you could tell us a little bit more about how you're trying to tether what you're writing in these devotionals directly to The Bible itself and the passages that you're expounding on. Well, the hope was that what I'm writing in the devotional comes directly out of just meditating on individual passages. So the idea and again, again, the idea is that, in my mind, was that hopefully people, as a result of reading these would realize I can do the same thing. I can read Scripture carefully. I can spend time meditating on not only the meaning of the passage, but its relevance to my life and to the situation that I live in. Some of these so a lot of the devotionals just came were directly things that I'd been thinking about for my own life over a period of time. Others were more contemporary in the sense. I wrote a devotional on from Isaiah eight on conspiracy theories, right? That you know, because I think that that was needed at the time. I wrote one out of Philippians three kind of as a response to a nationalistic attitude, where Paul reminds the Romans, your citizenship is in heaven. So it's a mixture. Yeah, the that's one of the things I think people may enjoy about this collection, is they've been written recently and really address some of the cultural issues that have come up in the last five years or so I know you, you probably read about as much as anybody I know, and you retain what you read. Well, I'm wondering, as you started crafting these devotionals, what prior devotionals maybe have had an effect on you, or might have even shaped the approach you took. I haven't read a lot of devotional literature. I read Oswald Chambers my utmost for his highest, and I was struck by that some years ago about how short they were, and yet how, how much impact they had. And that was, it was really intriguing to me that you could write a short reflection on a specific scripture, and in his case, obviously, see how, how much impact it had had on people. Yeah, beyond that. I mean, I've read Jack Miller has a book on of devotionals, I think that he did not write, but that were called by one of his kids after he died. Yeah, that's similar, short, but impactful and biblical. Yeah. I remember. While back, you mentioning we both were reading Francis schaeffer's letters those, you know, yeah, had a, almost a devotional character. They did. And again, the fact that they were short. And in his case, they were, they were written to individual people with real problems, real situations, and to see how he could apply scripture to them in a way that gave them direction and encouragement. So as you're you know, finished with something that took a lot of work. It's like shooting shooting the cannon. It's going out into the world. What kind of impact are you hoping this book would have? Well, I hope that it will be personally encouraging and personally challenging to people who read it. I hope that they that God would take some of these devotionals and use them for people in to speak to them right where they are in specific situations. And again, I I'm my real hope is that people would realize in reading these devotionals that they can do the same thing they can. They can prayerfully meditate on a specific passage. They can turn it over in their minds. They can think about how it applies to the cultural situation that we're in, as well as their own lives. So that would be, that would be the best impact so on that if you were going to encourage, maybe somebody that aspired to do this, to maybe put on a page or two, just their thoughts on a specific passage. Is there a structure or an approach like, you know, here's what I here's how I kind of walk through trying to do that. Um, there is, and I think in the afterwards of the book I've given some ideas there. It's, I think you start with small passages that God has already drawn your attention to, at least that's been the case with me. And when, when he lights up a passage, so to speak, then that's a signal for me to spend more time in that passage. It's helpful for me to commit the passage to memory, because then I can carry it around with me wherever I go. If I don't know, if I know I need to pray, but I don't know how to pray, then I can begin by, in a sense, praying that passage back to him, and then, as I do that, I just try to be attentive to any other insights he gives me into that passage, how it connects to other truths that I've noticed elsewhere in Scripture. It's you know, it's meditation. You're just kind of chewing, chewing the passage, and squeezing every, everything you can out of it. Yeah, I like that. So what's personally been kind of radioactive to me, that I'm reading, what's really leaping off the page, meditating and memorizing and then praying some and asking for insight into how it might be applied, and maybe what connections, yeah, people can make to the culture today or their situation, sounds like a good formula for sure. I I know that you've been not teaching as much recently, because you've had some pretty significant health challenges that have extruded you into kind of new spaces, new life routines. I just wonder if you might be willing to talk some about how some of those health challenges have affected your own one on one time with the Lord? Yeah, I was diagnosed in early two, 2023 with the multiple myeloma, and so that led into about nine months of weekly treatments, and then one of the things that the myeloma affected were my kidneys, and so I had to wind up going on dialysis about six or eight months ago. So it's limited me. I've, I've, haven't had the energy to be on a fixed schedule of teachings, because I'm not sure how much energy I'm going to have from day to day, right? And, you know, it's an it's obviously something that has, like Paul says. Corinthians, one reflecting on some great affliction that he'd recently gone through, that that he had the sentence of death within himself, so that he might not trust in himself, but in God who raises the dead, and so that that's the great thing about a serious illnesses that you're just you're cast into something that's beyond your strength, and it you hate to you hate to think that you have to be forced into depending upon God more. But I think that's, that's the nature of our own fallenness that left to ourselves will be self sufficient, yeah, so that's, that's been one of the great things about this experience, for all the limitations that it's brought and things like that. It's, it kind of forced me into more of a, you know, I need to get my daily nourishment and fortification from God, and the place to get it is from the scriptures, daily bread. Yeah, Daily Bread related, related to that. Just thinking about, you know, when you're not sure what the next day, month or year, will bring, and you realize just how much your future is totally on. God, one word that comes to mind is refuge, the idea of seeking Him for refuge, seeing him as refuge. I know that's been on your mind some I wonder if you have any thoughts for us on that, yeah, it's it's really kind of wild. Before I got sick, I was reading Psalm Psalm two and Psalm one and Psalm two, kind of comprise the introduction to the Psalms. And at the end of Psalm two, he says, How blessed is the is the one who takes refuge in God. And that phrase just kind of leapt off the page. And I thought, we know it's such a cool image to be able to take refuge in God. So then. But what I realized, as I read on Psalm three through 12, is that that word refuge comes up again and again. And then I started thinking about the Psalms, synonyms for refuge, like fortress and rock. And I realized, man, this is all over the place. And what I came away from that is that the idea of taking refuge in God is probably certainly a main theme of the Psalms. It may be the main theme of the Psalms. What's fascinating to me about it is that, then that I feel like God probably showed me that before I got diagnosed, he was preparing me for this time when I've realized that I really, I really do need God as my refuge. So, yeah, it's interesting how God, especially in retrospect, can look back and see how he was preparing us for these situations before we enter into them. And that's super encouraging, yeah, and faith building too, for sure. I I know that you have probably a mountain of potential writing projects, just because you've written so much on so many things, and most of what you've written isn't in book form. But what's next after this? What are you thinking about doing? Well, I have some unfinished business. I I have a couple of courses that I've taught on biblical principles of leadership, which were gathered from the pastoral epistles first and second, Timothy and Titus. And I've got about I've turned those into chapters. And I've got about, well, I've turned some of them into chapters, and I've got more work to do on that. I'd kind of like to to get that gathered together in book form. And then I have more devotionals, you know, I just once, I started writing them for our seniors ministry. I just got, I it became an enjoyable exercise. So more that have not are not included in this book, and that undoubtedly there'll be more. So folks can look out for a volume too, maybe, if it's helpful. Oh, I, I'm I'm confident, having read quite a few. Of them that it will be super helpful. Now you, if you're listening in, you may not know this, but back in the day, Gary used to write some poetry, and there's kind of an artistic side to you that I don't think a lot of people hear much about. But I wonder, as you were, you've taken a deep dive in the Psalms with this theme of refuge, and some of those psalms are covered in this devotional book. But I'm wondering that that side of things kind of bringing your creative side into reflecting on what God's written. I wonder how you feel like that is enriched your experience with the word. Well, prior to coming to Christ, I I had begun to write a fair amount of poetry, and I actually had aspired to be a writer, and then when I came to Christ and He gave, began to give me the opportunity to teach, I kind of reached a crossroads, where I felt like only got so much creative energy. Is it going to be poured into creative writing, or is it going to be poured into teaching? Because I'm not probably going to be able to do both. So for many years, then I I directed what creative energy I have into writing teachings. But in the very early days as a Christian, my I continued to write poetry. But rather than just being a personal diary of sorts for what I was going through, I began, in retrospect, I began meditating on Scripture and scriptural truths, and that's what began to come out in my poetry. So, yeah, I've since thought I'd like to go back to that, but it's, it's, it's once. That's once that those creative channels have been turned off. It's hard to turn them back on, but I think there's something special about poetic reflections on biblical truth. Yeah, I you think about Newton and Calper. Or you think about all this, the the lyric writing, lyrics for the music that was created during the Jesus movement. And it does seem like there's some kind of connection between these acts where we see God really pour His spirit out and work and this explosion of creativity, yeah, for sure. And there's something about lyrics, especially when they're set to music, that, well, they're not only conducive to memorization, but they, as it's been said, they speak to the heart as well as the head. So that's it's a unique way of getting biblical truth deeper down into our souls. Yeah, and that's got to be good. So maybe volume three will be a book of Gary's poetic reflections various passages, maybe, maybe not. Well, I'm excited to see this book come out, and I know we've talked about it for a bit, but I'm just curious, is there anything else about this whole project that you'd like us to know? No, just again, that it would be both personally helpful and faith building to people, and that it would be maybe an inspiration for them to personally dig into Scripture and in a reflective way that that makes it, makes them, makes it more applicable to their lives. And the beautiful thing about reflecting on scripture for your own personal edification is that the gems that God gives you can be passed on to other people. You know, there's a passage in Isaiah 50 about the servant. It's a passage about Jesus, and it says that he he's able to speak a word that lifts up the weary, and it's because, day by day, he listens to God's word as a disciple. So that's, you know, it's a win. Win. You. Yeah, you come away nourished and and challenged and built up, and then it's amazing how God then walks you into situations where you can use that very passage to help others. And that's that's what it's about. Yeah, flow of life. We take from God and then we give it away to someone else. Yep. So, so great. So. Well, it's been awesome talking, and super excited to see the input, input impact that this book is going to have going forward. And I just want to thank everybody that's listened in on this conversation. Gary's new book is going to be available at the dwell bookstore, at our main campus and at the Fourth Street location, which are open on Sunday mornings. The title, again, is drawing near to God daily meditations for spiritual refreshment. And you can also grab it on Amazon. And if you've enjoyed listening to Gary teach over the years, and I know a lot of you have, I think you're gonna love this book. If you've enjoyed this episode of dwell on these things, we invite you to subscribe to our podcast, to follow it, or to subscribe to dwell Community Church. You can access it that way as well, and for more resources like This, go to dwellcc.org, thanks for joining us.