Easter: Seen. Known. Loved.

The crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus proves that you are seen, known, and loved by God.

We can go for a very long time without hearing the voice of God, and then God finds a crack. And that crack becomes a wedge, and that wedge becomes a door or a window, because He loves us, and He's doing the work in our lives if we are willing to receive it. Welcome to Building Relationships with Dr. Gary Chapman, author of the New York Times bestseller, "The 5 Love Languages" . Well, each one of us has a deep need to be loved, to know someone is in your corner.

They value you as a person. Well, our guest today spent many years trying to find that kind of love in a lot of different places. You'll hear his story of going from atheist to embracing the truth about God. York Moore is our guest, and his life is a living, breathing example of God's love in action. He and Dr. Chapman teamed up to write our featured resource today. We've talked about it, Seen, Known, Loved, Five Truths About God and Your Love Language. You can find out more at the website, fivelovelanguages.com.

Click on Resources, then Building Relationships at fivelovelanguages.com. Gary, this is a special weekend for followers of Jesus. Talk about that. You're right, Chris. I think the death and the resurrection, of course, which we're celebrating tomorrow, that's the heart. That's the heart of Christianity. You know, leaders of other world religions lived and died.

There's no other religious leader ever who defeated death. And of course, you know, what he did on the cross for us in paying for our sins so that God could forgive us and still be a just and holy God. I mean, that's the Christian message, the heart of it. And we're celebrating it this weekend, so it's a great time to be talking about the Christian faith.

Yeah. You know, I've always struggled with Good Friday and Easter Sunday, rushing past Good Friday, because of the, you know, the great thing that happened on Sunday morning, but here we are in that time between. And there's probably some people listening today who are going through some rocky times in their own life, and you want the resurrection.

You know, you want the sun to come out and everything to shine and new life, but you're not seeing that right now. And I want you to listen to York Moore's story as we get into it. R. York Moore. He's a speaker revivalist and abolitionist. He serves as executive director, catalytic partnerships and as national evangelist for InterVarsity Christian Fellowship USA. York became a Christian from atheism while studying philosophy at the University of Michigan.

We'll hear more about that. He also has an MA in global leadership from Fuller Seminary. He's the author of several books, lives in the Detroit area with his wife and three children.

You can find out more about him and the book Seen, Known, Loved at FiveLoveLanguages.com. Well, York, welcome back to Building Relationships. It's great to hear your voices again, brothers. I'm in the south, you're in the north, and Chris is in the west. We got it covered, don't we? We got it covered.

From the four corners. We're glad to have this opportunity today. Yeah, today, yeah.

So, why don't you answer that same question that Chris asked me. Why is this weekend so important for followers of Christ? Well, it marks the high holidays of what we call the Christian faith, but really at the crux of it is the resurrection, right? Without the resurrection of Christ from the grave, we are still in our sins. We are to be pitied above all. But that's where our hope is. Our hope is in the glorious resurrection of Jesus.

And it's not just a holiday that we commemorate. It's where we find the epicenter of the power for Christian living. You know, God doesn't just want to forgive our sins. He wants to transform our lives.

And it's that resurrection power, that same power that raised him from the dead, is what enables us to live lives, the kind of lives that God has created us to live. Now, you didn't always feel that way. So, take us back to how your family would celebrate Easter when you were young.

Oh, I don't think I even heard the word. We were homeless on the streets of Detroit, in and out of homelessness for many years, even though my parents were master's degree holders, educators. Drugs and alcohol, you know, dismantled our family. But when we weren't homeless, we had a sign on the front of our home that said, The Moors, The Atheists, we had a barrel on the side of our house for burning Bibles. The R in my name stands for Rand, I'm named after an atheistic philosopher named Ayn Rand. And so, I was steeped in atheism.

When I went to the greatest university in America, the University of Michigan, go blue. I was, you know, reinforced that commitment to atheism, my nickname in my fraternity, was Satan, persecuted Christians, wrote papers against Christians. And it wasn't until I had a crisis moment where I actually met the living Christ, the resurrected Christ, that I had a change of heart. And then I began to learn about things like Easter. Now, everybody knows about Christmas, because that's when Santa Claus comes and sees you.

And so, there's some affiliation with Jesus, so Christmas is famous. But I didn't really know much about Easter. And I actually was baptized as a new believer on Easter morning, the year I became a Christian.

So, yeah, it's a Saul to Paul story for sure. Did you observe any Christians when you were in, like, elementary school? I don't think I had ever seen or heard of a Christian until I was probably all the way into high school. I never met a Christian, at least not that I would have been able to tell.

No Christian teachers, no Christian students, nothing. We had a couple of brushes with churches that were trying to help us during our season of homelessness. And so, we actually were living in the basement of a church at one point during our homelessness. And we felt so bad, they kept on inviting us to church.

As atheists, we would say, kindly, no. And then finally, we said one Sunday, we'll go. And I'll never forget sitting in the pew, wooden pews, and they're passing plates of money.

I thought they were giving the money away, but we were supposed to put the money in. And then they said the children should go to the Sunday school class, juice and cookies and Jesus on a flannel graph. And I'll never forget sitting at that table with other children. So that was my first encounter with Christians.

And they were reading the Bible story of Moses in the burning bush. And not knowing that I was blaspheming, I began to take the name of the Lord in vain. And I was thrown out of the class for something called blasphemy. So the first time I went to church, as an atheist, I got kicked out of church for blasphemy, whatever that is. So you grew up really with a kind of a dislike of Christianity, right?

Yeah, I inherited that from my parents. I was rather indifferent until I went to college, and then I really began to grow a hatred for people of faith. I saw them as enemies, as weak intellectually, hypocrites, all the normal things that people typically will sling at Christians.

That really described my view of them. Did anyone ever bring up to you the whole thing of crucifixion of Christ, the resurrection of Christ back in those days? So when I went to college, I did start having experiences where Christians were evangelizing me.

Now, they were very terrible at it. And, you know, I don't know what they were thinking, but I found it almost like a game. So every time I was evangelized, I thought, oh, you know, we'll make some fun of this. And I'll never forget a woman in a mall about my age, early 20s, and she just stopped me and said, do you realize that God loves you?

He has a wonderful plan for your life. The normal kind of intro that you'd expect from an evangelistic encounter. And there was just something about her spirit, Gary. There was just something about her demeanor. Not only was she beautiful, but she was kind and she was patient. I didn't think she was very bright, but there was a presence in her that was just different. There wasn't enough to change my mind, but I thought, oh, at least I'll hear her out.

At least I'll be kind in return. And that'll show you something. You know, a lot of times we think that we're going to win people into the kingdom of God through some kind of intellectual prowess. When in reality, what people need to experience is the presence of the living God. And one of the most powerful ways that we can actually experience that presence is by personifying the characteristics of Christ.

She didn't win me to Christ that day, but she sure softened my heart. Thanks for joining us today for Building Relationships with Dr. Gary Chapman. He's the author of The New York Times bestseller, "The 5 Love Languages" . We're hearing from York Moore today about five truths about God and your love language. Our featured resource is their book, Seen, Known, Loved. You'll find that and more simple ways to strengthen relationships at fivelovelanguages.com.

Again, go to fivelovelanguages.com. York, would you have ever believed you would be doing what you're now doing way back in the days when you were growing up? I'm assuming that would never have crossed your mind. Never in a million years. Not in my wildest dreams. It's almost as if God is poking fun at me in His divine comedy, making an atheist into an evangelist.

But I'll tell you, Gary, I would never trade it for the world. I mean, not only do I get to know Christ, but I get to make Him known. You know, it's just an incredible honor to speak well of Christ and to preach and teach Him across the country. And now I've taken up on TikTok. I got so sick and tired of this pandemic as an evangelist, I said, you know, I'm going to preach Jesus online. And so I started a TikTok ministry in July. And to date, I've reached over 30 million with 110,000 people praying to receive Jesus. I have 240,000 followers. And I'll tell you, besides the metrics and the numbers, every single one of those numbers is a person who God has locked His eyes on and has a plan to change their heart, change their mind.

Every single morning, including this morning, I woke up this morning and I get a message in my TikTok inbox. And a young person will say, you saved my soul. You changed my life. I have to remind them, no, I didn't. Jesus did. He died on the cross.

He rose again. I have to remind them. But every single day, hundreds and hundreds of young people are coming to Christ through my TikTok ministry.

And I'm just one of many, many Christians who have taken to TikTok to preach Christ in these days. It says, does it not, the hunger of people out there, you know, whatever their background, when they hear, they're searching. Yeah, that's right. No, there's a hunger in them. And I think, you know, we try to fill that hunger with the things of this world. And we can go for a pretty long time, especially if you're in the West.

I mean, let's face it, even the poor amongst us, we live like kings. And there are lots of things to keep our appetites spinning. And we can go for a very long time without hearing the voice of God. And then God finds a crack and that crack becomes a wedge and that wedge becomes a door or a window in my case. And next thing you know, God climbs right in and he invades those secret spaces and begins to create what I call a sense of holy discontent, where we begin to realize that the emptiness of the things that we thought were filling us are really folly. You know, a lot of people don't respond to that, but God's gentle and he works his way into the cracks of our lives because he loves us. And he's doing a work in our lives if we're willing to receive it.

Yeah. For those who haven't heard what happened, how did you finally make the leap to believe that Jesus really did rise from the dead? That's an interesting phrase, a leap, because I was an existentialist and the leap in the dark was exactly what I didn't want to do. And so that's an interesting turn of phrase as somebody who studied Nietzsche and Jean-Franco and these kinds of thinkers. But, you know, Gary, it really came to a head, you know, I went to college to find the meaning of the universe. Can life have meaning without God? Is it all just a social construct?

Is it a fabrication? And so I became an honor student in the psychology and the philosophy departments focused on research methodologies, statistical analysis and philosophy. And my main question was, you know, how can we actually find any kind of transcendence or meaning or purpose in a world where there is no there is no divine? And after three years of entertaining this question from a from two disciplines perspective, you know, I came to the conclusion that there really is no God and you can't have meaning. You can pretend to have meaning. But when you die, you cease to exist. So I became a nihilist and I said, well, if that really is the case, I'm just going to go ahead and kill myself. And it was an intellectual decision. It wasn't because I was depressed.

I had lots of reasons to be depressed, but wasn't depressed. And I said, well, you know, it doesn't matter if I live a day or 100 million years when I when I die, I'm going to cease to exist. And why not just take my life right now? And so before I before I did something so final and drastic, I thought, you know, let me just double check, because I had you know, I had encounters with various religious people and it was always the Christians that would say this disturbing phrase.

Right. It's appointed unto us once to die and then the face judgment. There's no other name under heaven given by which we must be saved except that of Jesus. And so it's this idea of Jesus only. He's the only way to the Father. He's the only way to heaven.

That was really disturbing. And so I thought, you know, I'll focus all of my energy on making sure that Jesus isn't real. And because if it's Allah, I can work myself out of hell. And if it's Buddha or Krishna, I'll have lots of opportunities.

But boy, this Jesus person, he really scares me. And so I interviewed Christians and I had a pastor friend because the ladies in church seemed to be easier to get along with than the non-Christians. And so I interviewed Pastor Dave and Pastor Dave gave me a bunch of books. And I'll never forget, though, asking him, I said, Pastor Dave, why do you think God exists? So, well, you know, York, it doesn't really matter if the Bible is God's word or if Jesus was ever born of a virgin.

How can we know such things? And in my mind, like, I didn't know there were Christians that would claim the religion of Jesus without his power. I thought, well, this is just a waste of time.

This is a colossal waste of time. And the more I got to talk to Christians, the more I became convinced that Jesus wasn't real, because I didn't know one single Christian who had any good reasons for the faith that they were claiming they had. And so I said, OK, before I do such a terrible deed, I'll go ahead and pray. So I began to say, you know, dear Allah, Buddha, Krishna, Jesus, he, she, it, whoever you may be, here I am, reveal yourself to me. And I was expecting the angel Moroni to show up on the front porch or some algorithm in the sky, you know. But when God didn't reveal himself to me in my terms on my timetable, I became very distraught.

I'm like, OK, I'm speaking to nobody. And it all came to a head December 25th, 24th, rather, Christmas Eve. I'm watching The Little Mermaid in the theater. That shows you how old I am.

I wasn't watching it on stream or DVD. And I had just gotten done praying this prayer. And I had what I thought was a religious epiphany, that there is no God. Here we are in a Christian nation on the verge of a national Christian holiday, Christmas Eve. And it doesn't matter if you're an atheist or a Christian. All we're doing is we're entertaining ourselves to death. We're just entertaining ourselves to death.

And there is there's no me in life. So that very moment I decided to kill myself. And so I dropped my fiancé off at the time and got my car going about 90 miles an hour down the freeway. And my plan was to smash it on the viaduct near our home. And as I got that twisted sense of courage, fully intending to do the deed, the presence and the power of the Spirit of God filled that car.

And I wouldn't have used that language at the time, but I had a divine encounter with the living God. And it steered me. He steered me to safety. It got me home that night. I fell asleep in a cold sweat, woke up Christmas morning in a cold sweat. And for the first time in my life, I prayed a prayer of desperation. I said, God, if that was you last night, I need to know right now because I'm still going to kill myself.

I walked into the next room. I had two older brothers who were also studying at the greatest university in America, University of Michigan. And one of them had brought a picture frame of the poem, Footprints in the Sand.

I'm an atheist scholar studying at one of the most elite schools in America. And God chooses to use a simple hallmark-like poem to reach into my heart. And I had read it before, you know, the Footprints in the Sand. If you're not familiar with it, it's a simple story about how God is active in our lives. He's working in our lives.

Even when we don't see Him, most of the time at points where it's difficult. And I'm reading this poem, and all of a sudden I hear the voice of God. And God says three things to me that changed my forever. He said, number one, I do exist. Number two, I'm the reason why you exist. And those were the only two data points I needed as a philosopher.

Everything else was a derivative. But the third thing blew me away. He said, number three, I'm the one who kept you from killing yourself last night. Which meant that God knew my name. He was involved in my story. And He cared enough to intersect me at a point of crisis. Right then and there, Gary, I ran into the other room in tears. And I said, God, if you can take my life and make anything out of it from this day forward, I'm going to live for you. Well, well. Not everyone has an experience that dramatic, I'm sure, who come into the family of God. But you mentioned earlier, Paul in the New Testament, who was Saul before he met Christ. Really had a similar experience, didn't he? Yeah, absolutely.

Radical conversion is always very splashy. And it has an impact on many people who are watching. But, Gary, here's the testimony I want my kids to have, that they were raised in a Christian home by two loving Christian parents who taught them the love of God and modeled a life of righteousness and holiness. And they love God because they've seen His power and His faithfulness. And, you know, that's the good testimony. I got the consolation prize with the drugs and the homelessness and the near-death experience. No one should have the story that I have.

It's a terrible story, but I'll use it for the glory of Christ whenever I can. Yeah. Amen.

Amen. Well, York, as you know, you and I wrote this book together, Seen, Known, and Loved. You had read "The 5 Love Languages" . I, of course, wrote "The 5 Love Languages" . And one of the things we deal with in the book is that there are so many people who struggle to feel love today. Talk about that.

Yeah. Well, first of all, thank you, Gary, for "The 5 Love Languages" have transformed so many people's lives, hundreds of millions, perhaps, the world over. And our marriage is indebted to you, as many marriages are. And when you and I began to collaborate on this book, what you and I had agreed upon is that we wanted to write a book where people could apply this evangelistically, holistically to their lives in a way that they could have an encounter with God that was real, substantive, where they could actually feel God, not just know that He loved them, but sense His presence and His love for them. And isn't that what we've all been created for? If we are created in the image of God, who defines Himself as love, love isn't something that God does. Love is who He is. And if we're made in the image of this God, there is a way in which we'll never be complete, we'll never be whole, we'll never be everything that we were meant to be unless we're actually living into that love. So the experienced reality of love is what you and I were really hoping to get after as an entry point to help people make the most important decision of their lives, a decision to make Jesus their Lord, a decision to walk with God. And so in these five or six simple chapters, what we do is we help a person understand through their love language how they can experience God's love, how they can feel God's love, how they can walk in that love. And that I think has helped so many people realize that intellectually they can have a concept in God, believe in God, and yet experientially this concept helps them experience that. Now, the normal thing I think for most people is we all, almost everyone agrees that one of our deepest emotional needs as humans is the need to feel loved by the significant people in our lives. But the reality is when we're seeking love from other people, it often leads to emptiness, right?

We're being loved by people who have the same sin sickness that we do, and even with our best motives, our best attempt, oftentimes we get it wrong. I'll never forget when I was first married, and this was obviously before I read "The 5 Love Languages" , Gary. I thought I was loving my wife well through my own love language, which is words of affirmation, and I'll never forget that we were both working at the time, and she would leave for work in her car before I would. And I would come in after she would return home, and I would always block her car.

And this went on for weeks and weeks as newlyweds. And, you know, she would get up in the morning, and I would sleep in, and she would move my car for me, and she would take her car to work. And I thought, oh, what a loving thing she's doing. And so I would encourage her with the words of my lips. And after several weeks of this, my wife finally blew up, and she said these words. If you really loved me. Now, whenever you hear those words, boy, take note.

If you really loved me, you wouldn't block me in in the first place, and you certainly wouldn't make me move your car every single morning. So my wife's love language is acts of service, and she felt terribly unloved because I was obviously not caring for her in the way that she was designed to be cared for. And that's the same thing with our relationship with God. God speaks "The 5 Love Languages" fluently.

They were His idea. In fact, I'm convinced that the wild success of your work is because it's inherent in what it actually means to be created in the image of God. And when we tap into that in our relationship with Him, it can unlock really just an incredible new story, a new chapter in our relationship with Him. So many people, they engage with God through a window, and it involves knowledge and understanding and doctrine, and that's all very important. But if your love language, say, is physical touch, there's a whole world to explore in your relationship with God through that love language. If it's words of affirmation or if it's acts of service, God speaks that love language, and He wants you to experience Him through that window as well. York, that's what we want to unpack in the next segment, is look at "The 5 Love Languages" and how these help us in our relationship with God. But you've experienced this in your TikTok ministry, right?

Absolutely. You know, there's something electric about applying this to the lives of non-Christians. And as I shared, you know, just hundreds of thousands of people engaging with me on TikTok, and I'm applying this same philosophy that we do in the book, helping people connect how they've been created to the living God. So I will very frequently create TikToks that are specifically designed for an acts of service listener, a word of affirmation listener, a gifts listener. I might not be teaching that because, you know, you're talking about 50, 60 second clips, but over the course of many, many clips, what the listener is actually getting is a window into the heart of God specifically designed for them.

And the impact has just been incredible to see. You don't sing or dance on this, do you, York? Not yet.

We'll see. Coming soon. You're listening to Building Relationships with Dr. Gary Chapman, New York Times bestselling author of "The 5 Love Languages" . Find out more about the love language concept and an easy assessment you can take online at FiveLoveLanguages.com.

You can hear a podcast of the program and find out about the book we're featuring today by York Moore and Dr. Chapman. It's titled Seen, Known, Loved Five Truths About God and Your Love Language. Find out more at FiveLoveLanguages.com, FiveLoveLanguages.com. Well, York, walk us through "The 5 Love Languages" and describe the struggles that people have. You know, words of affirmation, gifts, quality time, physical touch, acts of service, and how this relates to our relationship with God.

Well, that's not intimidating at all to talk to Dr. Gary Chapman about "The 5 Love Languages" . Well, one of the things that, you know, after reading your book in my 20s as an evangelist, I began to apply this to relationships with non-Christians. And a concept that I've developed over the years is what I call heart hopes. And so my conviction is that for every love language, behind that love language is a quest, if you will.

And every person has one of these quests. So if we take, for instance, a words of affirmation person, which is by far my love language. You know, what people with that love language are really questing after is the idea of having an impact, leaving a legacy. A person whose love language is an acts of service, they're asking the question, does my life matter?

Is what I'm doing important? Quality time, a person is asking, am I known deeply? You know, these are quests of the human heart. And I think what happens in people's lives when their love language isn't spoken, their heart hope goes unanswered, they fall into what I call a deep despair. And that deep despair can take people to some pretty dark places. I mean, if you think about a person whose love language is gifts, for instance, I believe that their quest, they're really asking, do I have worth?

You know, a person who likes to give and receive gifts, and that's how they experience love. My personal belief is that they're asking the question, do I have worth? And boy, if somebody really comes to the place where they feel worthless, I mean, you can see how many ways in which we can destroy ourselves with cutting and eating disorders and pornography. And I mean, the list goes on and on.

There's no end to the way in which we can sully ourselves when we feel as if we are worthless. But here's the great news. Again, God not only speaks these love languages fluently, He cares deeply about our heart hopes. And all of the answers to our quests are yes and amen in the person of Jesus. And so we're talking about the crucifixion.

We're talking about that Saturday, a place of despair where we're waiting for Resurrection Day. And when Jesus rises from the dead, He answers every single one of the quests of our hearts. He speaks it fluently through our love languages, and they're all yes and amen. And what a great privilege we have to introduce people to the living God who knows them so intimately, wants to speak their love language, wants to wrap His arms around them so that they can know His love, right? The Bible uses a word.

It's not gnosis. It's not the knowledge that we acquire from doctrine or facts. Eternal life is actually knowing God. It's an experiential knowing. And so what we want people to have is an experience or an encounter with the living God.

And how do we do that? We introduce them to the God of the Bible. And as they encounter the God of the Bible, and you and I have done careful work and field testing in, seen, known, loved, making sure that people connect with the Word of God. In fact, we did a field test and we found 100% of college students who went through seen, known, loved, they made a commitment to actually begin regular Bible reading. And when you get into the Word of God, you will encounter the God that speaks your love language and has an intimate knowledge of who you are and what you need.

Yeah. You know, I remember a young lady who said to me, she was an alcoholic and she ended up in a treatment center. And she said, they of course were teaching the Bible and they got to the place and they were saying things like, God loves you and God wants to give you the gift of forgiveness. She said, I was under such a burden of my life and how I'd made such a mess of my life. And she said, I couldn't believe it that God would want to just give me forgiveness because of that Christ had already paid my penalty. And she said, I'd always thought I'm not pleasing God and God doesn't love me. And at any rate, she came to recognize that God loves her. He has given her, wants to give her, you know, the gift of forgiveness of her sins, give her eternal life, give her a relationship with himself. And I tell you where I encountered her, she'd come to one of my conferences and she brought me a loaf of bread and gave it to me. And I found out, she said, what I do now, she says, since God has given me so much, I bake 20 loaves of bread every week.

And I just look for opportunities to give them to people throughout the week. You know, she's speaking her love language back to God. She's giving, expressing her love by giving gifts to other people, which I think is another part of this that we don't deal so much with in this book. But I think when we do become believers and have a relationship with God, we just naturally express our love to God in our love language, you know. It's a beautiful story.

But our whole objective here is to help people recognize that as you do read the scriptures and listen to the scriptures taught, you come to recognize that God does speak all five of these love languages and whatever your love language is, he communicates to you and if you're listening, if you open your heart to listen, you will recognize he's speaking his love to you. Well, you know, today, of course, is a time of social media and you're using social media in a really, really positive way. But social media has also complicated things when it comes to understanding love, hasn't it? You know, you and I actually wrote a chapter in the book about this and it's another one of those chapters that really connected very strongly with young people. Social media is both a positive and a negative.

It's not a net neutral. And so the likes and the shares and the compliments that people can garnish on Instagram can also backfire and cause them great sorrow and shame. We've seen that through the data that's just been released through Instagram in terms of body shame and body positivity issues that young people are facing. And so social media can be really a dark place, but it's something that God has determined. You know, there really isn't, if you know that Kuiper quote, there isn't a place in the universe that Jesus doesn't claim as his.

He says mine over everything and that includes social media. And so many of us are in places like YouTube and TikTok and Instagram with the light of Christ. And isn't it always the case that the light of Christ always shines best where it's the darkest? And boy, I'll tell you, Gary, TikTok is a very dark place. Anything that your mind could imagine lives just on TikTok or just beyond its borders.

A lot of wickedness, a lot of hate. But there is a revival happening. I'm convinced of it. In fact, as we speak right now, there's a gathering of young Christian TikTok evangelists in Dallas, Texas that are gathering for collaboration. And the cumulative reach of this community that I'm a part of, 20 million people we're reaching every single week on TikTok. And we're reaching them with a very positive message, a biblical centered message, preaching Jesus, preaching the cross, inviting people to repent of sin. And what we're seeing really is a revival in our midst.

There is something happening in Gen Z that is just unlike anything that I've ever seen in the 27 years of professional, quote unquote, professional ministry that I've been engaged in. And it's because God has a plan for every single person. God has a great love for every single person. And he's not going to give up just because the pandemics come or, you know, the Ukrainian crisis is happening. God is going to continue to build his kingdom. And we get to be a part of that. You know, it's so interesting how things that we would never have thought about God designs and God uses. Like, I'm sure that when before the pandemic, you were speaking all over the country, everywhere, until consequently, you weren't thinking that much about social media and using that as a means of touching people. But God led you into this aspect of the ministry when you were kind of not allowed to go around the country.

Yeah, that's right. Very much like you, right? All of us author-speaker types. All of a sudden, we had a lot of time on our hands. And I thought, boy, I got to do something here. And now, literally, I go to sleep, Gary, and in my sleep, people are still praying to receive Christ.

And I get messages from Latvia, from Canada, from South Africa, from Sweden. People who, they prayed to receive Christ, and they say, I want to be baptized. How can I be baptized? Or you know what they'll say, I want a Bible. I say, well, download the YouVersion Bible app. No, I want the real Bible.

These are young people. I want the real Bible. Never in my wildest dreams did I think we would see anything like this. Yeah, that's amazing. Just amazing. Before we go to the break, York, I want to play one of your TikToks. You keep these really short.

They're like a minute or less, right? Yeah, that's right. That's all you got. Here's one titled First Step to Heaven. Here's how you can have your name written in God's book of life. God wants your name in his book of life. He wants to save you. He wants to deliver you.

He wants to prosper you. Can I tell you, my friend, that God loves you, and he has a plan for your life. And it begins by having your name written in his book.

In Revelation chapter 3 verse 5, it says this, The one who conquers will be clothed in white garments, and I will never block his name out of the book of life. The book of life is the recording of those people who are in God's forever family. My friend, God loves you, and he wants to write your name in his forever family book.

And if that's something you want, you want to take the first step. I want you to pray this prayer. Jesus, come into my life. This is my sin.

I believe that you died and rose again. Be the Lord of my life. If you prayed that prayer, in the comments, I want you to write first step.

Hit that follow. Type anyone that you can think of that needs this word of encouragement and challenge. God loves you, and he wants to write your name in his book today. Well, that's a TikTok post from York Moore. Our guest today on Building Relationships with Dr. Gary Chapman. His book is our featured resource, Seen, Known, Loved. I want to find out from you, what kind of response did you get from that?

What are you seeing? Well, it's interesting. That one was one of my very first, what I would call a viral video, when the algorithm takes it and starts pushing it out to my non-followers. And so that was viewed over 90,000 times.

I reposted that video. And I think that's a really good response. I think that's a really good response. I think that's a really good response. And I think that's a really good response.

And I think that's a really good response. It was viewed over 90,000 times. I reposted it a few times. And so it's well over 150,000 views. And what's interesting is that the gospel is powerful enough to change a life in a moment. And that's part of what's happening on TikTok. But really what happens when a person is impacted or moved by one particular video, what they end up doing is clicking on my profile. And I've had many reports of people saying, I took the deep dive into your TikTok. I watched 30, 40, 60, 90 of your videos, and I've prayed to receive Jesus.

Now what? And so the response is just incredible. Now I don't want to minimize the fact that there are also people who have problems and questions.

And I'm engaging those people as well. In fact, one of my favorite stories is a person who came on with a lot of vulgarities and very angry about my TikTok. And over the course of probably about two or three weeks, myself and other people who were engaging this person in the comments, they wore him down, and it was really the Holy Spirit.

And he actually changed his heart and gave his life to God. So don't think of any one particular TikTok as just standing by itself. It's the whole corpus.

It's the whole body that has made an impact. And the last thing I'll say is that I get into some very controversial issues on TikTok. But over the course of, let's say a person watches me for a few weeks, they're getting more biblical theology than they probably would in an entire year if they were in a youth group. I write every single one of these TikToks for an imaginary kid that lives in my mind, 14-year-old Nick. His mother's just picked him up at the back of the SUV. He's going from school to soccer practice, and I have 50 seconds to get his attention. I'm six inches from his eyeballs on his phone, and I'm reaching into his heart with the Word of God, inviting him to take that first step with Jesus, and many, many of them are. York, this weekend, of course, people who haven't thought about religion or Christ, it's Easter, and they have heard about Easter.

Maybe they have the concept of the bunny, Easter bunny. Folks who basically don't attend church and are not sure about God, if God really exists, what would you say to them today? I would say open your heart and keep an open mind.

Just reach out to Him. He's closer than you think. Oftentimes, when we grow up outside of the church, as I did, we think that God, if He exists someplace, He must be a million miles from me or my circumstances. Whether a person is going through a hard time like homelessness or maybe a cancer chemo treatment, or maybe there's relational strain or chemical dependency, whatever it might be, the circumstances of our lives lead us to believe that God is someplace very far away. The Word of God tells us, what does it say? The Word is near you.

It's in your heart. If you confess with your mouth, Jesus is Lord, you believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. I think this idea of God being near is really the scandal of the Christian faith. I've studied the world's religions. I've read the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads and the Koran. I've been to mosques. I've been to various temples in Cambodia. The gods of this world are always very far away.

They're always austere. They're always transcendent. The scandal of the Christian faith is that God became man, took on flesh, lived as we did, a perfect life. He went to the cross, suffered and bled and died, and He rose again on the third day. All that story comes every single year, compressed in a single weekend, for us to just look at and marvel at the specter of the nearness of God. So if anyone's listening and feels as if God is very far away, open your heart and you'll find Him standing right next to you in the midst of your circumstances, not waiting for you to get it right, to clean yourself up, but weeping with you where you weep and working with you in those places that are hard and difficult and oftentimes carrying you without you even realizing it. York, how does the Bible come alive to us when we do open our hearts to God's love? This is where I think one of the love languages that's probably most difficult for people to imagine in their relationship with God really becomes electric, and that is the physical touch.

So how can we have a physical touch relationship with an invisible God? And the reality is that when you open your heart to God and you welcome Christ in, He comes with open arms in a way that is so powerful, it's even more powerful than the embrace of a grandchild or the embrace of a spouse or a loved one or a dear friend. You know, we think about God crashing into our lives in beauty with sunsets and swirling snow and waves on beaches, but isn't it in those moments there's just something that pulls at our heart from another world? And when we stop to listen for the God who's near, the God who's all around us, particularly in places of beauty, it's almost as if we can feel His arms around us.

And I don't want to make this show about TikTok, but one of the things that I've done on TikTok is I have what I call a prayer of encounter. And I invite the person to just open their hearts through listening prayer, to invite God to speak to them, to touch their lives, and the response has just been amazing. People report that they sense God's presence, they hear His voice, as I did when I first became a Christian, and that is God's invitation to us each and every day. And I don't want to mislead people and say that God is always talking all the time and we can converse with Him as if we do other people.

God is selected with His words, and I'm thankful for that, Gary, because every time God has spoken to me, it has been very disruptive, and it's changed my life in ways that I wish had not been changed. And so I'm glad that God chooses silence from time to time because it would be overwhelming. But the reality is God is speaking all the time, and when He speaks, it's as if He's wrapping His arms around us and welcoming us into a holy relationship, something that is only enjoyed between the Father, the Son, and the Spirit.

And if we spend more time exposing ourselves to the Bible, particularly the life of Jesus, and just read the account of His life and what He did before He died, and why He died, and the resurrection, then we experience that for ourselves. Speak briefly also to, as we open our hearts to God, the whole aspect of worshipping God. You know, often we worship with music. It doesn't have to be music, but how does participating in worship help us feel the presence of God? When you have an encounter with a living God, you cannot not worship. Worship just comes out of you, and it can take the form of journaling or crying or weeping in song.

It can take the form of service. I mean, worship can look a lot of different ways, but what worship basically is, it's the outpouring of our hearts after we've had an encounter with the living God. And what a beautiful thing it is when you see a young woman, a young man enraptured in worship, not even knowing that that's what it's called, but because they've been touched by the living God, they just respond. And I think we've made so much, particularly in America, of this idea of worship through song.

There's a whole industry with record labels and deals and big stages. And I've been in those places, and there's something beautiful about that, and there's something meaningful that propels us deeper into the heart of God, and so I don't want to denigrate that, but here's the reality. Worship is accessible right here, right now, and it comes after having an encounter with the living God. And I just go back to the Bible, because really, there isn't a time where I don't pick up the word of God, where even when my heart is hard, even when I feel far away from God, even when I'm struggling with sin, if I pick up the word of God and I open it with a heart to listen, what comes out of me is worship. What comes out of me is praise, and the word of God tells us that God inhabits the praises of His people. And isn't that a beautiful thing, that in that moment we have a connection with the living God, we are living into what God intended when He created this in His image, this divine community that we get to participate in, and worship is the language that we speak when we're in that community.

Well, Yorick, it's been great talking with you today. I'm also very excited about how God has used this book that you and I wrote together, Seen, Known, Loved. In fact, this Easter, 250 prisoners here in our city were given a gift bag that had this book in it. The leader of that ministry called and said, Gary, have you got something that would be appropriate to give to prisoners? And I said, yes. We're all prisoners.

Some of us in jail, some of us not. But before we come to Christ, we're prisoners to our own ideas. So I continue to be encouraged by the way God is using this book. And I hope those who are listening today will see it as an opportunity that they can use with people, just to put it in their hands and say, read this and tell me what you think about it.

It can be a conversation starter for people. So thanks for being with us today. May God continue to guide you in your ministry, both as you travel and on TikTok. My pleasure.

And God bless you too. Well, if you have someone in your life who doesn't embrace the love that God has offered, this resource can help you and them understand that they are seen, known, loved, five truths about God in your love language. Find out more at FiveLoveLanguages.com. Our guest has been Ari York Moore. And you can hear this conversation again, if you'd like, at FiveLoveLanguages.com. Don't miss a powerful conversation. A big thank you to our production team, Steve Wick and Janice Ton. Building Relationships with Dr. Gary Chapman is a production of Moody Radio in association with Moody Publishers, a ministry of Moody Bible Institute. Thanks for listening.