Interview with Dr. David Jeremiah

Audio on Demand from Vision Christian Media Your Future A new project that can be found on the YouTube channel or on YouTube.com or on YouTube.com. You'll find a little more timely message. Tell us about your new project, Forward. Well, you know, I wish I could tell you that I was prophetic minded enough to know that this book would be needed right now. What I knew was that it was a message that I felt necessary in my own heart and in the lives of people that I knew back in April of 2019.

I love him. Well, he came to our church, Sheila, and we had a concert on a Sunday night and it was almost done. And he said, oh, by the way, before I leave, I want to leave you with a new song I've just written. And the name of the song was Forward.

Wow. And it was really powerful when it was over. I turned to Donna and I said, honey, I think that's the name of my new book. And from then until now, I have thought about almost nothing else. I've read probably everything you've ever written. And I as you know, I love your writing. But this book, this felt so you. The message felt so you. Did it feel that to use your writing?

Yeah. There's more personal stuff in here than any other book I've ever written. And I think the reason for that, Sheila, is that these principles, while I didn't realize it at the time, these are the things that have been driving me forward over the years. And to put that down in writing and to be able to isolate it into these chapters was pretty neat. Did you have a particular audience in mind?

Were you thinking of those who were perhaps in senior years or those who were just beginning? Who are you writing for? Well, I suppose you always write for yourself at first. So there's a part of that in there.

But, you know, forward is not a place where you are. It's a direction you go and everybody needs to move forward. And there seems to be a kind of a malaise in our culture right now where everybody's just sort of, you know, settling in. The sheltering thing has exacerbated that and made it even more so. But even before that, that was something that I noticed was happening. Christians especially don't bother me with anything I need to do.

I'm happy with my life and I just want to be left alone. Why do you think people concentrate more on the rear view mirror than the windshield in front of them? That's a really good illustration, isn't it? The windshield is huge. The rear view mirror is small and yet some people choose to live in their rear view mirror.

Why do you think that is? Well, the past is something you know for sure that's happened. Maybe you feel like, you know, I wish I could go back there.

You always hear people talking about the good old days, which I haven't been able to figure out when they were. And obviously sometime in the future they'll talk about our days as those days. Let's dive in though. The first step in moving forward is dream. And you write, seize your tomorrow today.

What do you mean by that? Well, you know, the way we're constructed, the way we're built, before we can go someplace we have to see it in our mind. We have to be able to negotiate our destination before we start the journey. And while we don't realize that that's happening, we've done it all of our lives. And as you get older and you begin to realize your life needs direction, you need to ask God what it is He wants you to do. And that becomes your focus in your dream. You talk about unfulfilled dreams. Have you experienced that in your own life?

You know what they call that? They call that the death of a dream. I've had some dreams die.

When we first came to California years ago, we tried to build this worship center. It took us eight years. Every year it felt like that dream was dying.

That was a struggle. Some people would say, well, isn't dreaming just for the younger people, you know, for people who have their whole life ahead of them? But you write, no, don't dismiss that so quickly. Well, when you stop dreaming, you start dying.

If you don't have any reason to get up, if you don't have anything you believe you need to do, if you don't feel any calling from God for what's next, something happens and it's not pretty. The next step you talk about is one that is so central to our faith, pray. But I love the fact that you chose the life of the prophet Nehemiah to illustrate what forward praying looks like.

Why did you choose him? Well, because Nehemiah's prayer was associated with his dream. And I thought that was a great way to tie those two thoughts together. The Bible says that when the Jews went back to Israel and started to build the wall again, that they got discouraged and they quit. Nehemiah was in Shushan, the palace, working for the governor, for the head of the whole empire, and he wanted to go back and help rebuild the wall, and this is what he said. He said, God, put it in my heart.

That's where the dream began. And he began to pray, and the reason it was put in his heart, because he began to pray for his friends back home. He was broken hearted, he was in tears. And during that prayer, God put it in his heart. How many times has it been when you've prayed and God said, okay, you answer your own prayer? That's so true. That's what happened in Nehemiah. But you powerfully illustrate in that chapter the way that Nehemiah shot up that quick prayer, because sometimes you have time to pray for a long time. That's such a great thought.

You don't have a long time for a lot of introductory phrases. You just pray to God. That's called instantaneous prayer. I often thought that all of us know what that's like to say, God help, I don't know what to do. What does forward focused prayer look like? Well, I think you begin to pray the words of what you want God to do out loud. You begin to allow yourself to say out loud, Lord God, this is what I believe you want me to do.

This is where I think you want me to go, and you verbalize it in very strong language. So the third step is choose. And I thought it was interesting, choosing your priorities.

I think people feel pulled in a million and one directions. How do you learn how to prioritize and get rid of distractions? You know, one of the interesting things, Sheila, is that the word priority, when it was first invented, the word itself, it was always in the singular. It took 1400 years for us to figure out you could say priorities, and that ruined the whole thing. Because priorities are too many.

You need one priority. And so what I've learned is if you want to say yes to something more, you have to be willing to say no to something you're already doing. That's been a really hard lesson for me because I'm a yes person when people ask me to do something. But in order for you to realize your dream and get to where you believe God wants you to go, you can't be doing everything. Yeah, it took me a while to learn that no is a complete sentence. Yes it is.

It is indeed. Getting back to basics, when it comes to choosing priorities, what does Jesus say about how we go about that? Well, you know, one time he was asked what was the most important thing, and he said, the most important thing is to love God with all your heart. And secondly, love others. And then thirdly, which surprises most people, love yourself. That often is misunderstood and misapplied, but it doesn't mean it has to go away.

Love your neighbors as yourself. And until you begin to realize how important it is to take care of yourself, you don't have anything to give to anybody else. You talk about the importance and the next step of focus. I think a lot of people feel like they get stuck in the past.

And I was wondering, how do you find that right balance between balancing the past, the present, and the future? Well, you know, that chapter is kind of built around maybe the theme verse for the whole book, where Paul says, forgetting those things which are behind, I press toward the mark for the high calling of God in Christ Jesus. And what Paul wasn't saying is, do away with my past.

But what he was saying is, I'm not going to let the past control my present or my future. And when you stop and think about it, Paul had some awful things to forget. He was the great persecutor of the church. He probably killed some people because of their faith. I know he imprisoned a lot of them. I know a lot of people that have bad things in their past and they can't get beyond it. But Paul also had some good things. His pedigree, which is in the Bible twice, is like none you'd ever read in your life.

He was so well qualified and he had so much going for him. And Paul said, neither my failures nor my successes control my life. I don't let those things control me. I have a goal for the future and that's what drives me forward. What did you mean when you wrote, make the one thing the main thing? Well, just kind of what we were talking about. It's not easy to come up with one thing, but when you realize what it is that God wants you to do, when you figure that out, then you spend the rest of your life trying to make sure that it keeps its place as your priority.

And it is attacked every single day. It's interesting though. I hear particularly from a lot of women who say, I want to have a ministry and I'll ask them about their life and, well, I have three young children at home. And I think it's interesting that sometimes we don't see that that one thing for that time is the greatest ministry you could possibly have.

Absolutely, yes. And if you have one thing and it's the wrong thing, it's really not a good picture. And a lot of people, they get off track. Like you said, maybe a young mother feels like she should be on the road teaching the Bible and she neglects her children. She'll regret that her whole life. That's not God's will.

We know that for sure. I love the next step, risk, getting out of the safe zone. We don't always think about as believers of taking a risk.

We think of that maybe as dangerous, careless behavior. But in your experience as a pastor, why is that so important to be able to move out of a safe place or place of risk? Well, I suppose to be honest, Sheila, risk is just another more secular term for faith. Living in the unknown beyond where you can see. And if you're not willing to risk as a believer, if you're not willing to walk by faith, you can't go forward.

You're always going to be waiting for the next place where you feel secure and you will never go beyond your security blanket. And that's where a lot of Christians are. And the Bible doesn't allow us that.

The Bible is so filled with stories about people who risked in their walk with God and that's where the joy is. That's where the advance is. And you highlight that powerfully through the life of Caleb.

Yes. Tell us about that. Well, you know, Caleb was among a bunch of guys who went into Canaan supposedly to spy it out. Really just to confirm what God had already told them was there. And when they got into Canaan, ten of the guys saw the people that were there, the giants, and they came back and they said, we can't go in there. We're like grasshoppers. These are huge men.

We'll get destroyed. And Caleb and Joshua came back. They had a much different report. They were in the minority. They risked everything to say that isn't true.

We are able to do this. I've always thought this. The ten guys who said we can't do it made the mistake of measuring themselves against the giants. Caleb and Joshua measured themselves against God. And they realized that while they were not able to do it, they had a big God who could help them take the risk. And you know the rest of the story. The people who didn't believe, the spies, they were immediately destroyed. And all the people who believed the spies had 40 years until they all died before they were allowed to go into the promised land. When it was all said and done, only the two guys that risked, Caleb and Joshua, had the privilege of going in.

Amazing. You talk on the next step about chasing your dream. And I think many of us are guilty of not doing that.

We almost kind of quit and give up. And one of the questions I get asked often is, is it possible to know God's will and plan for your life? I actually do believe that it is. I believe you can know what God wants you to do. And I think there's a passivity that fills the hearts of a lot of people because they think, well, if this is what God wants me to do, he's going to do it and I'll just be a participant. I actually hear people teach that.

Wow. I tell the story in this book about how when God called me to be a pastor, I was a senior in college. And I thought my life was headed toward a career in radio. And I knew that God had called me.

I just had no doubt about it. When that happened, I didn't just sit back in my chair and say, okay, Lord, I'll wait for you when you have something for me to do. I got on the phone with a friend of mine that I knew was a teacher at Dallas Seminary. And I said, you know, I'm supposed to be a pastor, but I haven't got a clue what I'm supposed to do.

Can you help me get in seminary? What I was trying to convey in that chapter was as soon as you know what God wants you to do, be aggressive about it. Be passionate about it. Don't just sit there and wait for it to happen to you. Follow your dream with all that you have and never stop.

Yeah. One of the interesting observations you make is that when God kind of changed direction for you, it wasn't because he was dismissing your dream. It was because he was saying your dream was too small. Well, you know, when God called me to the ministry, Sheila, I was okay with it. I knew this is what he wanted me to do, but I had loved radio, every part of it. And when I was called to the ministry, I thought, well, you know, I guess that's it for me. I put it on hold for four years when I went in the seminary. And when I got out of seminary, I realized God didn't call me into the ministry to steal my dream. He called me into the ministry because my dream was way too small. Isn't that amazing? I would have been sitting in some little radio station, probably in Ohio somewhere, doing the 9 to 5 every day, and God has something much better than that for me. Oh, and we are all very grateful. This is slightly off script, but what do you think it would be like if every believer in our nation actually dared to dream and asked God what is your purpose and then embraced it?

It would be a much different world than we have right now. I don't know what the percentage of people are who do that. It probably isn't as high as we might even imagine. You know, when you're around somebody like that, it's infectious. You can sense, you know, this man, this woman, God has a plan for them and they're invested in that plan. You talk about the next step, believe, getting your mind right. What's the difference between, I mean, if you go to typical bookstores, there's whole sections on self-help and psychology, but there's a difference between believing, trusting God, and just positive thinking. Well, one of the problems that you have if you're an aggressive type A person is you're comfortable with motivational literature. You read it, and you know, in the world which is so negative in which we live, you probably need to do that once in a while.

You may not believe the theology of the person who wrote it, but if they're positive in terms and they don't violate the scripture. And I know for a long time I struggled with that, Sheila, because I grew up in a good home, but I grew up in a very negative church. My church was known more for what it was against than for what it was for.

I could tell you everything we were against, but if somebody asked me, what are you for, I couldn't come up with anything. And that was kind of the way it was in some of those days when I was growing up. And when I went to Dallas Seminary, I found out that wasn't the way life is, and I learned to be positive. And that whole chapter about get your mind right, which is a favorite statement of my favorite trainer, Todd Durkin, that whole chapter is about being positive in your life. And I use Paul as an example. Paul said, I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. That's not neutral motivation, that's spiritual motivation.

Wow. How has the Bible helped you to remain positive? Because I know that you have gone through tough things in your life over and over. How has God's word helped you to remain positive? Well, when you read the Bible, you just keep running into these people who, like for instance, Joseph. His brothers wanted to destroy him, and his take on it was, you meant it for evil, but God meant it for good.

Amazing. And there's so many stories like Daniel's that way. If you read the Bible, you just run into these people over and over again and you think, I have no right to complain. The things men and women went through in the Scripture make our battles today seem rather petty. And there really isn't any reason for us to be negative if we know the God we claim to know. That's so true. That is a great perspective.

I love this next step. Invest. Outlive your life. What do you mean by that? Well, you know, Sheila, you can live your life in such a way that after you're gone, it keeps on going.

And that's not double talk. I tell the story in this book about when I was 16 years old, my parents gave me a copy of the Scofield reference Bible. Now, many of the younger people look at you like, what's that? But when I was growing up, there weren't a lot of study Bibles. Now everybody's got a study Bible.

You go into the bookstore, there's shelves of them. But in those days, there was basically one for evangelical Christians, and it was C.I. Scofield's study Bible.

And I still have it upstairs in my office. And my mom and dad gave that to me, and I remember I started to get interested in studying the Bible, and I would run into stuff I didn't understand. And oftentimes there would be a note in that Bible that explained it, especially about prophecy, because he was a great prophetic writer. One day I was reading that Bible, and I looked down, and I realized that it was written in 1909. Wow.

This was in the 50s, 60s. I realized that man was already in heaven, and here I am. I'm sitting there studying his Bible.

He was living even though he wasn't living. And then I thought, in 2013, I wrote a study Bible. I love it. And I pray that when I'm not around anymore, down in the future, if the Lord doesn't come back right away, somebody will be reading that as I read the Scofield Bible. And I will still have an influence in their life, even when I'm not here. That whole chapter is about living your life in such a way that you invest in the word of God, in the work of God, and in the wealth of God in such a way that it lives beyond you.

That's beautiful. And then you talk about you're not done until you're done. Your next step is to finish.

And reading that chapter, I don't know how you felt writing, but it felt like the most personal chapter. Yeah, because it's kind of where I'm at in life. I wanted to use the byline, if you're not dead, you're not done, but they wouldn't let me do that.

I thought that was the better one. I like that. But if you're not done, you're not done. And I just talked about all the things that are about finishing strong, making it all the way.

I remember an evangelist in the Southern Baptist Convention used to pray this prayer, Lord, help me to get home before dark. You know, help me to finish strong. And there's some really amazing things in that chapter. I mean, I tell the story in that chapter, Sheila, about this guy up at Fuller Seminary who did a study of a whole bunch of people in the Bible, 49 of them that were classified in the sense that you knew how they started and how they ended. And of those 49 people, only 30 percent of them finished well. 30 percent of those people in the Bible. And then, of course, you got Samson and you got Eli and you got Saul and some of those people that they didn't finish well.

And thank God for the 30 percent, Joseph and Daniel and some of those others. And so finishing well is not always as easy as it may sound. What are some secrets to finishing well? Well, first of all, you need to focus until you're finished. You need to realize it's so easy to think you're finished when you're not.

We have to stay focused until we're finished. And then I think something else is you got to deal with retirement and think about it. I'm not a fan of retirement, obviously, because I'm way past when I should have. But I see a lot of people who think they have to retire at a certain age and they're very unhappy.

They don't know what to do with their life. I can just say that for all the years that I've been alive, including up to right now, I've gotten up every day excited to do what God has called me to do. I mean, I have my bad days like everybody does, but I've never, ever thought about, oh, my goodness, what am I going to do with the rest of my life? I'm sure my life is going to run out before I get done with everything I want to do. I'm so glad you didn't stop after the last book because this book has already had a huge impact on my life. So we finished well. Is there one more step?

Yeah, to celebrate. Yeah, love that. And the reason I think that's so powerful is because a lot of people think, OK, this life is like a compartment that's ended. And then after that, then there's this big transition and you go to heaven. And I don't think they realize how much of what we do now we're going to do in heaven without any of the distractions, without any of the problems. For instance, in heaven, we're going to work.

Yeah, love that. But we'll never get tired. We'll always be able to finish everything we start.

We will not have any opposition. It will be work as unto the Lord, so joyous and wonderful. And you go through a lot of the things that we do now. The one thing we can't do in heaven is there won't be any preaching, which is kind of tough on me, because we're going to know even as we are known there'll be worship. But, you know, I just think heaven is going to be everything that we started to do here with all of the negative taken out of it.

One of the things I love about this book is you talk about taking personal responsibility for living forward. What does God expect from us? Because I can imagine people thinking, well, I want to do all of this, but I can't do this by myself. But God's not asking us to do that, is he? Our responsibility is to take the instruction God has given us and put it into action. There should not be any doubt in our minds about what God wants us to do, because he's given it to us in his word.

We know all that we're supposed to do, we just don't do it. And I'm praying that maybe this book will drive people forward in the trenches that God has laid out in his word so we can begin to accomplish what he's called us to do. So that would be your prayer that when people have finished reading this book, listening to this study, that they would hear from God personally in their own lives and begin to live their life forward looking through the windshield and not in the rear view mirror. Exactly, and for many of them, Sheila, they already know it.

But to get doing it, pursue it, get their mind right. On behalf of the multitude of people who will be impacted by this message, Dr. Jeremiah, thank you so much. You're welcome.

My privilege. Well, there you go. That was my interview with Sheila just a few days ago, kind of going over the contents of this new book, which we begin teaching tomorrow right here on Turning Point. And I hope that you'll be a part of the first lesson as we move forward together.

Have a great day. For more information on Dr. Jeremiah's new teaching series, Forward, please be sure to visit our website where we offer two free ways to help you stay connected. Our monthly magazine Turning Points and our daily email devotional. Sign up today at davidjeremiah.org forward slash radio. That's davidjeremiah.org forward slash radio. And when you do, ask for your copy of our 14 month 2021 calendar, Colours of Creation.

It highlights God's breathtaking handiwork and it's yours for a gift of any amount. You can also purchase the Jeremiah Study Bible in the English Standard and New International versions, as well as in standard or large print in the New King James with helpful notes from over 40 years of study by Dr. Jeremiah. Visit davidjeremiah.org forward slash radio for details. I'm Gary Hoogfleet. Join us tomorrow as we begin the new series, Forward. That's here on Turning Point with Dr. David Jeremiah.