Lightning Round Questions

Well, happy Friday, everybody. Welcome back to The Clearview Today Show.

My name is John Galantis. Once again, I'm here with Dr. Abbadon Shah. Dr. Shah, welcome. I got to say you're looking very good. Thank you. I'm back in my Riddler uniform. And everybody knows what that means, right?

It means it's time for lightning round questions. Before we do that, we want to let you know you're listening to The Clearview Today Show with Dr. Abbadon Shah, the daily show that engages mind and heart for the Gospel of Jesus Christ. You can find us online at ClearviewTodayShow.com, or if you have a question for Dr. Shah, anything you might want to write in or suggest that we talk about on the show, send us a text at 252-582-5028. You can always email us at contact at ClearviewTodayShow.com. You can help us keep this conversation going by supporting the show. You can share it online, leave us a good review on iTunes, Spotify. Absolutely, we don't want to see anything less than the five-star reviews. That's what keeps us happy over here at The Clearview Today Show.

We're going to leave a link in the description of this podcast so you can do just that. But before we do, Dr. Shah, today's verse of the day is coming to us from Psalm 106 in verse two. It says, who can utter the mighty acts of the Lord? Who can declare all his praise? And it just got me to thinking about all the different names that we use for God, because he's so much greater than we can imagine, or so much greater than we often give him credit for.

Yeah. You know, I work out at the Y, and there's this one gentleman who works there, and every morning he'll come to me and he'll stand there and just talk about how good God is. You know, at first it was like, is he just making this up? Is he just like wasting time?

What is he doing? But no, he finds that as a ministry to just walk around and talk about that God gave him another day to live. And that, you know, he is so grateful for his little blessings in his life, for family, for health, for the ability to think. And then ultimately, because he knows Jesus Christ.

It's awesome. It's great that God puts people like that in your lives and in our lives, I should say. And I think about like, even like how much I try to talk about how good God is like in like this gentleman, like how much he does it every single day.

Even our most like extraordinary moments of praises will ultimately end up falling short of God's glory. Do you ever just like sit around and think about like eternity or like, like an eternity spent with God or how infinite God is. And then like just the gravity or the weight of what that actually is just kind of hits you. It's like when you're a kid and you're like at a sleepover, you're like somewhere really fun, like an amusement park, water park, like as the sun starts to set, you start to get that dread. Like I have to go home. Like the fun has to stop. It's one of those things where even as a kid, when I first got saved, I remembered thinking about heaven that way. Just like as soon as it starts to feel like it's going to be over, then it's just going to keep going until it feels like it's going to be over. And then it's just going to keep on going.

That's really cool. I wanted to talk about something that is happening here at the church that I think is just, it just has to be addressed. We have people who come and they bring us food and they kind of drop food off and they'll bring us like, because you know, we live in the South, a lot of farmers, a lot of produce that's happening. But then sometimes people want to bring us treats, which I think is great. But then like, so okay, for instance, I went to go put some whipped cream in my coffee, right? Because I got a little bit of a sugar addiction. So I'm like, I want to have my coffee. I've got my blueberry cobbler creamer, got my Splenda, but I'm like, I think I'll have a little treat. I'm gonna have some whipped cream. So I go to, and I see a thing of Cool Whip in there, right? So I'm thinking, oh, this is going to be great. I'm going to have some whipped cream in my coffee only to open it up. And I've got the spoon and it's French onion dip.

And I almost just slopped it right in my coffee. And so I saw, I saw the woman who perpetrated this crime. I saw her just a few minutes ago before we started recording and she said, she's not going to stop. She's going to keep bringing it and she's going to bring them in the wrong container.

I forgot about that incident. And I forgot it was her because I thought it was like, oh yeah, no, I'm bringing more. So I thought, okay, this is great. But now I realized it wasn't great.

She was mocking me. And then it got to the point where it was like, like, cause a couple of weeks after that, I was like, well, I know where some French onion dip is. I've got some chips.

I'm going to go get some. Then I see a thing of French onion dip, like a container. So I'm like, oh, she must've, she must've felt bad and brought me some French onion dip.

I open it up, watermelon rind pickles. Oh my. She's bringing that away. I think she's messing with your mind.

She's messing with me. Cause like now I'm like scared to open containers in my own house. It's phobia. It's a phobia. I call it the pho-dopia. What is that? French onion dip phobia. And a lot of it is subtle.

Like a lot of it is subtle, but she's sitting at home and she's thinking of new snacks to put in the wrong containers, improper behavior. Would not recommend it for the church, but listen, we've got a great show for you guys in just a moment. We're going to take a break. We're going to listen to a word from our ads. If you have any questions or suggestions for new topics, make sure to let us know. Text us at 252-582-5028, or you can always visit us online at cleerviewtodayshow.com and we'll be right back. Good morning, afternoon, evening, Clearview Today listeners.

My name is John and I'm David. And we just want to take a quick second and let you know about another way that you can keep in touch with Dr. Shah's work. And that is his weekly podcast series, Sermons by Abhad Shah, PhD. As a lot of you may know, or maybe some of you don't know. If you don't know, you do now. And if you don't know, then maybe just hop off the podcast. David, hop off the podcast.

I'm just playing, keep listening. Dr. Shah is actually the lead pastor of Clearview Church in North Carolina. Every single weekend, he preaches expository messages that challenge and inspire us to live God honoring lives. Well, one of the four core values of Clearview Church is that we're a Bible believing church. So every sermon is coming directly from scripture, which is great because that guarantees that there are timeless truths that are constantly applicable to our lives. This is a great resource because whether you're driving, whether you're cleaning the house, whether you're working out, you can always benefit from hearing the word of God spoken into your life. And God's word is always going to do something new for you every time you hear it.

Sometimes it's conviction, and sometimes it's encouragement. But know that every time you listen to God's word, you're inviting the Holy Spirit to move and work in your life. You guys can check out the sermons by Abbadon Shah PhD podcast. First and foremost, check it out on our church app. That's the Clearview app. You can get that in the Google Play Store. You can get that on iTunes, but you can also find the podcast on the Apple podcast app or on our website at ClearviewBC.org. And listen, if you've got a little extra time on your hands, you just want to do some further reading. You can also read the transcripts of those sermons.

Those are available on Dr. Shah's website AbbadonShah.com. And we're going to leave you guys a little link in the description so you can follow it. But for right now, David, let's hop back in.

All right. Welcome back to Clear View today with Dr. Abbadon Shah, the daily show that engages mind and heart for the gospel of Jesus Christ. You can find us online at ClearViewTodayShow.com. Or if you have any questions, anything you'd like for us to talk about, anything you'd like to hear from Dr. Shah, make sure you write in. Text us, 252-582-5028. You can also email us at contact at ClearViewTodayShow.com. And if today's your first time ever tuning into the show, welcome. We want to let you know exactly who's talking to you today. Dr. Abbadon Shah is a PhD in New Testament textual criticism, professor at Carolina University, author, full-time pastor, and the host of today's show.

You can find all of his work on his website. That's AbbadonShah.com. You know, I put in drquestions.com just to see what came up. Yeah.

404 not found. Really? Yeah, no. Well, maybe you can do something about that. I was going to say, maybe I could drop on it. I think you've got to do Dr. spelled out like Dr. Strange. Drquestions.com. Did it come up? That's available.

Dr. Questions is available. May not release this episode for a little while.

Maybe we should snag it while it's still hot. Today is our lightning round questions. This is where we say this at the top of every show.

Make sure you text us at that number. These are the questions that we let accumulate over the weeks, and then we will do these on every, maybe every other Friday, maybe every three Fridays, we'll do our lightning round questions. Who was that? That was Ryan that said that, and it has stuck, and now it's permeating my mind.

We do our Dr. Questions segment. I'm just going to jump right in. Jennifer G wants to know, I think we've answered this on the show before, but I think it's good, because if you haven't listened to that episode months ago, how do you prepare a sermon or a series? I have changed over the years. Initially, I used to just pray about it or ask Nicole and whatever, and then jump into a series. But now, I do some things differently, because our team, I've come to realize, has a great understanding of where our people are, where things are going. I bring you guys together, John, Ryan, David, Melissa, Nicholas, others, and I toss some ideas.

I ask them, look, I just came back from Turkey, and I did a lot of filming on the seven churches of Asia Minor. What do you guys think if I were to do the series? But wait, wait, wait. What if we start our content series?

Because I'm ready for that too. I did some filming there. I've done some filming here, so we can go both ways. We talk about these things. But then, I also pray. I pray and see where God is leading us as a church, what's happening, what's coming up. Where we are as a church, we're growing by leaps and bounds. I want to help people feed upon the word of God, so let's do church autopsy. You guys suggested that.

I said, we would love to do this one. Right. David R. wants to know, and this is something I'd actually like to know a little bit more about, too, because I know there's more. What is expository preaching versus topical preaching? I know those who are seminary trained or you sat under that, you know already what the answer to this is.

But for those who don't know, great question. Expository preaching is when you are taking the word of God as your guide and going verse by verse, studying it in its immediate context, in the context of that book, in the context of the New Testament or the Old Testament, and in the context of the Bible. So expository preaching is letting the word come from the text. Topical preaching is not evil. I know there are people out there who will say topical preaching is the worst thing they've ever had.

Wait, wait, wait. It's how you do it. If you gather that information from the text, topical preaching can be systematic theology. That's what systematic theology is. There's biblical theology, there's systematic theology. People often pit those two against each other.

They're not to be pitted against each other. They're just different ways of coming to the text. So don't talk bad about topical preaching.

Just use it. It still involves the text in some way. It can. Do proper exegesis when you go to that text. I always thought, and I don't know why nobody taught me this, but I always thought topical preaching meant you're picking a topic, like something that has happened out in the world, some big major event.

And that can. And now we're going to commentate on it with Christian viewpoint. That's fine. That can be topical preaching.

Yeah, of course. But expository preaching is more, we're going to let the text... We're going to go to the book of James. We're studying through the book of Exodus.

We're going to walk through the whole book and let just whatever is in the text dictate our topic and then go with that. Topical preaching is, you know, for those people who do not like topical preaching, think about Spurgeon. Spurgeon did not preach verse by verse through the entire Bible at one time. He just picked passages that he felt God was leading him to preach. And he did a good exegesis, but he was all over the place. So is topical preaching then, I have a topic.

I want to talk about this. I'm going to find verses to help back this up. Right. Right.

Now again, please don't misunderstand. I'm not saying Spurgeon was just a topical preacher. No, what I'm saying is he picked different topics, but then he went and found a text and then he stayed on that text as he addressed his topic.

He kind of married the two. Right. But then there's also topical preaching where you go into different passages and bringing them all together like systematic theology.

That's not evil. This was not a user question, but this is just something I thought of just now talking to you. When it came to preaching and being taught to preach, did you find that education... Did you take classes on this is how you preach the word? And if so, did those help develop your preaching style more? Or do you feel like it was more beneficial to start preaching and then grow over the years?

Or do you think it was a mixture of both? Mixture. When I was in college, once I realized that I was going into ministry, I shifted everything. The last year, I was going to take a lot of electives in my field, but they kind of ran out of electives anyway, so I was going to take this, that, and the other like tennis or whatever. This is your undergrad. Undergrad level.

Because you were in broadcast journalism and now you're shifting. Right. I had taken all the 400 level courses. All that was done.

But then you still have a few electives left that you can toss around and take whatever you want to. I focused on ministry quickly. I was taking intro to preaching.

I took it with my professor, John Tal Murphy. That was his name. He was a Methodist pastor and brilliant guy, a Southern gentleman. He talked very precisely, and he had a Southern accent, but very logical. He wrote a book on logic.

Really? Oh, yeah. He wrote that and written several books. He was a pastor. He didn't have a Ph.D.

It was tremendous. I studied preaching under him. Then I came to Southeastern, did my master's and I did courses in preaching. But I focused a lot on exegesis, Greek and Hebrew text, hermeneutics, those kinds of things.

Then, when I was in the Ph.D. program, not many seminars in textual criticism other than Dr. Robinson. I would ask him, what should I take? It doesn't matter.

There's nothing there in your subject. I was like, I know. Do you think I should just take whatever you want? Take whatever. That's a pretty chill professor, though.

It's like, hey, man, go for it. So, I took preaching with Danny Aiken. I took other advanced preaching hermeneutics courses and with several professors there. That helped me tremendously. I was preaching at the same time, too. It helped me tremendously. I was learning.

I have a list right now at home. One day, I may write a book on preaching. It's not today. I still have a lot to learn. But I have about 30 to 40 points of what makes a great preaching.

It doesn't mean that every Sunday when I get up to preach, I have all those 40 points lined up. It's like, yep, check, check, check. No, but I have them in my repository.

I have them in my system, really. That's pretty awesome. Did you feel your skills honing as you were doing it, or is it only looking backwards where you're like... No, I could tell they were honing. I would write down that point.

I haven't written in five, six years now in that three-page, ruled paper. But those are your points. Those are my points. Things like credibility, or Greek exegesis, humor, creativity. Those are things that are part of that list.

Dude, that can be a bestseller. Holy Spirit, anointing. Michael R., how did you land on the core values of your church?

Great question. When we sold our old, old building, the first building, the building where I came as the pastor, we sold that in 2007, right around the recession. God allowed us to sell the building, and then we had nowhere to go.

We finally were able to meet at a Jehovah's Witness building that they had sold to another person. We started meeting there, and I told our people, I said, just because we moved our location does not mean we're going to start growing. There will be people who will come, but that does not guarantee growth. So here's what guarantees growth. We need to examine who we are, and we need to write down three things.

Core values, mission, and vision. Now, this came to me, not like in a dream or whatever. It came because I called up a pastor in Georgia who had just turned this church in a downtown area.

He had turned this church around, and it was booming and busting at the seams. I emailed him, really. I said, please give me some advice.

I need some advice. He gave me his number. We talked on the phone, and he talked to me about these things. He said, you need to take the time to do this. He also told me to read a couple of books. Two books, actually, by John Cotter, a Harvard business professor. Sciplexer both books by the same author?

Shahin Khan Same author. Leading Change and Heart of Change. Any of you guys out there who are leading your church through a change for good? Hang on to the core doctrines, but how do we change? How do we adapt?

How do we do the best we can to take the Gospel out? Great books to read. Really, he meant these for the business world. Shen'an Lippincott We just talked about that exact same principle on Wednesday's show. We're talking about going back to those foundations that worked, but then talking to your culture for today.

Shahin Khan Right, exactly. This pastor told me about these two books, and I read them. I devoured them. I read Aubrey Malphur's book on advanced strategic planning. I learned from them how to create a mission statement, how to create vision and core values. Core values was like the four legs of a stool or chair. What are those four things that make us who we are as a church?

Wait. Two of them should be your actual values, and two of them should be aspiring. We discussed that for three or four weeks. Shen'an Lippincott What is the difference between actual values and aspiring values?

Shahin Khan Actual is who we are right now. A lot of things went on the list, and we picked two. We voted on two. The two were we were a Bible-believing church, and secondly, we were a loving church. This church was always loving. Look, they invited me. It's predominantly a white church calling me, an Indian man, to come be their pastor. Either it was desperation or love.

I like to think it was love. Anyways, they called me to come be the pastor. Then, aspiring are values that we want to be. The two were we want to be a worshipful church, where we really value our time of praise and worship, and we need to be evangelistic. We will use every Christ-honoring available means to reach the lost. That's how we voted.

That's how it came, yeah. Shen'an Lippincott Travis H., what's the most important thing a pastor should do in their first year? Shahin Khan Oh, my goodness. Don't do what I did.

I came up with a plan on how to grow the church, and they voted it down. Shen'an Lippincott They didn't like it? Shahin Khan They didn't like it.

Shen'an Lippincott Oh, no. Well, don't do that, Travis. I got a feeling he's a young pastor somewhere.

Travis, don't do that. Shahin Khan Well, you need to have the passion. You need to have the passion to reach the lost, to grow the church. I would never suggest to anybody, hey, just sit back and take it easy for the first three years of your life. People will think you're lazy. So work, do whatever you can.

Having said that, you should then try to do what you can to get to know the people, love the people, talk to the people, meet them where they are, those kind of things, and it will go a long ways for you. Preach. Preach the word of God. Don't get angry. Don't get mad, but preach. Preach your heart out. Get into the text. Get to the heart, the meat of what that passage is saying accurately. Get it accurate, and then get it clear.

Take the time to know what you're saying and not be in this fuzzy cloud. Let people hear clearly what God is saying. And then third, make it applicable. So, accurate, clear, applicable.

Shen'lef. That's one thing that you've always inspired me. I have no aspirations to preach, but one thing that you've always told me that has shaped me into not only the worker, but the man that I am, is be the best at what you do. Be good. You know what I mean? Like you said, you come in with your plan, and it's all detailed out, and you're not ready for that change yet. You just start by establishing that credibility just by being good at what you do and learning and growing.

Shen'lef. That's one of the things. I mentioned the pastor in Georgia, Dr. Ike Reichert. He told me that you have to really establish that credibility. You have to let your people know you're staying here, you're going to be here, and you're going to teach them and lead them and shepherd them, no matter what happens.

And maybe God will remove you and take you somewhere else. Well, great. But that's up to him, not for you. Shen'lef.

That's true. Lauren P. It's normal in most churches for 99% of congregational care to land on the pastor's plate, like Pastor Goan visiting people, calling people. How can a pastor equip his members to care for other members?

Shen'lef. That's a great question. I'm still working on that. I came as a pastor of a small church. When you come as a pastor of 20 people, that was a good Sunday for us, 20 people. I'm the one. I'm the one who goes and visits them. I'm the one who meets them in the hospital.

I'm the one who's there for whatever they need. Shen'lef. Did you see that growing up with your father?

Shen'lef. Somewhat. Because by the time I came along, our church had grown. But in the early days, yeah, dad was always there on his bicycle, going to see people and doing this and doing that. But in time, our church has grown. So we've had to bring in care group leaders. So now we have care. By the way, they're like deacons. So care group leaders, they give care to the people.

There's like 10 or 15, not 15, 12 maybe under each family. And they care for them. Sometimes I find out what's happening in people's lives and I'll inform them or some of our staff will inform the care group leaders.

Sometimes the care group leaders find out and they let us know. But one way or the other, we want to make sure that nobody feels like, man, I went through a difficult time. Nobody was there. Now I'll be honest with you. There are times we miss. How do we miss? Maybe nobody tells us.

Maybe we failed to see it on Facebook. Maybe the family hasn't been there for a long time. And what happens when you're not there for a long time, kind of people forget. And that's not a good thing. That's not something I'm proud of, but it happens.

But it's also not something that you excuse. I think what I respect about you and what I respect about the care group leaders at Clearview is that there does seem to be a disconnect where there are small churches, like you said, where the pastor does everything. Then it gets to a certain point where, okay, we've crossed the threshold from now on, the pastor, he just can't do it anymore. So the church does nothing.

And so there's churches like where like when you get to a certain point, the pastor's such a celebrity that people have never even met their pastor. But what I like about you is no matter how big we've grown, that's not the mindset. And that's not the heart.

Argersinger. At least that's my intention. When 2020 happened, it was very frustrating because a lot of people, fear came in and they backed away from service. So a lot of those responsibilities fell on our team, our staff. And we went from working 45 hours a week to 65, 70 hours a week. And that was not like, this is what we want to do.

We want to be nonstop work. No, it just church grew. And then 2020 happened and our main leaders, some of them backed off. It really put us in a bad place. And it's not good for me.

It's not good for our staff, families. Finally, we're sort of seeing people stepping up and saying, Hey, I'm here. I'm ready to help.

Can I help? But that's three years later though. It's tough.

It is. But I'm thankful. And I know I speak for Ryan and for David Nicholas and the rest of the staff and the team and really the congregation that it would have been really easy to take a backseat and just do what all the other churches were doing and say, look guys, let's just shut down and see what happens. Let's let someone else lead.

That would have been easy. And it would have been like, well, we can all pretend to be sad about it, but let's kick our feet up and just see what happens. But it was a choice that you made and it was a choice that we followed and we wanted to make as well and say, it's not going to happen because if we do that, we're communicating first to God and to ourselves that we're not essential here. That what we're doing really isn't essential.

And we're going to wait for who's really running things and who's really going to help us to tell us what to do. But if we truly believe God is with us, then we're going to stay strong and we're going to stay open. And I think God has blessed you for that and has blessed us for that.

And I'm grateful. Pue is in the pudding. Now, we're finally beginning to speak up. People in denominational levels, people in church planting or church revitalization efforts, now they're talking and saying, yeah, these churches are not coming back. These churches are going to die. They have to merge. They have to do something. They have to do this, that, and the other. If not, they're not going to make it. Finally, it's happening. But this is something we said a long time ago, that once you start shutting down, once you make it optional, you may have a very difficult time kick-starting this. O'Reilly, do you think we've even seen the full consequences of everything that happened in that period of time?

Or do you think there's still consequences? Argersinger, there's more. There's more. O'Reilly, that's awesome. I think we've got time for one more. This is from Harold B. Harold writes in a lot to the show. Appreciate you, Harold. Are you naturally evangelistic, or do you have to force yourself to do it? Shenmueh- Wow. Naturally evangelistic.

I would say yes. I am, but it's not that it comes natural, if I can say that. I am naturally evangelistic in my thinking that I believe that every person without Jesus Christ is lost. I know our culture bristles when they hear the word hell, but they're going to hell, a place of burning forever and ever.

O'Reilly, that's true. Shenmueh- How can I ignore that? How can I walk past people? How can I allow myself to be indulged in any distractions while people that I'm encountering, whether I know them or I don't, are dying and going to hell? That is my motivation to stay evangelistic. Does that mean that I'm constantly talking to people left and right?

Not necessarily. And I want to. There are many conversations I'll have at the gym or other places where I'll make sure I drop the name of Christ, or I'll mention something about, hey, I'll pray for you.

I'll keep you in prayer. For people I don't know, am I cold, evangelistic? I used to be. Not as much now. People are weird.

People are funny about people just walking up and talking. O'Reilly, just walking up to you, proselytizing the gas station or something, or McDonald's. Shenmueh- But I will definitely hand out a track, if I can. I will hand out a card. I've handed out cards before. Hey, here's my card. Let me know if any way I can help you.

Kline- That's a good point. That's a good way to do it. Very interesting. Very cool.

Well, thank you so much for writing in those questions. If you enjoyed today's topic or if you have any suggestions for future topics, make sure to let us know by sending us a text at 252-582-5028. You can also visit us online at ClearviewTodayshow.com. And don't forget, you can always support us financially on that same website, as well.

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