Special Wisdom Program

Hello and welcome to Wisdom for the Heart with Stephen Davey.

I'm Scott Wiley. Today's broadcast is going to be a little bit different compared to the normal broadcast we bring you each weekday. This is going to be more of a conversation. This is normally a time when we would be doing a question and answer session. We've been doing that for many years, the first and third Fridays of each month. This is actually going to be the last of our Q&A sessions, at least as far as what we do on the radio.

Stephen's going to continue answering your Bible questions. It's important for us to start putting those in print. You can read, footnote, tuck away, and maybe even do a little more study on your own rather than listen on the radio and hope you catch the gist of the answer. Yeah, we've had a lot of people actually call in with questions that had been asked in the past, and this will make it so much easier to go back and find those. We're also going to archive those on our website. In fact, some of those are actually there now. If you go to wisdomonline.org, the archive of Stephen's teaching ministry is posted there, and there's a new page called Bible Questions. You can see some of the questions that other listeners have already asked and that Stephen has answered for them.

Yeah, so that's one change. Scott, I hope you're going to rattle through a few of the things that have happened in 2020 as we look back over our shoulder. It's been quite a year. It really has.

We started early in the year with this disease and didn't really know what was going to happen, but the Lord has blessed the ministry of Wisdom for the Heart and Wisdom International immensely. It's been a great year. What are some things that we've done differently that people might be interested in? We are sitting in a brand new recording studio. Well, it's not a new building or a new room, but we retrofitted our storage closet, a large storage closet, into a beautiful soundproof recording studio, retrofitted the office. Yeah, we were quite tired of having to stop recording every time a Harley-Davidson went down the road or a truck pulled into the gas station across the street.

We literally would have to push pause. Well, now we're tucked back away from the road in this inner room, which allows us the ability to soundproof it, and we hope the sound is clearer for those of you who are listening. And of course, Stephen, you've already mentioned Heart to Heart magazine. Heart to Heart magazine launched April was actually the first issue of that, and the response to Heart to Heart magazine has been tremendous. Stephen mentioned that we would love to get that into your hands if you don't get it, and that's true.

That magazine features articles from Stephen. It features a daily devotional guide to help you stay rooted and grounded in God's Word every day. We've started throwing in some fun things like a recipe and some quotes and other things and ministry insights as well as updates on new resources that we have available. You can call us today at 866-48-BIBLE if you've not seen Heart to Heart magazine, and there's also a link on the website where you can sign up to get the next three issues. We'll send those to you just as our gift to you so that you can see it. Another thing that happened in 2020 was a new website, and so now we have a website that we're proud of and that makes it easier for you, our listening audience, to navigate the resources that we have available for you there. The complete archive of Stephen's 35 years of Bible teaching is there. You can listen to every one of those messages. You can read the manuscript that Stephen prepared as he was writing those sermons.

All of that's available to you free of charge at wisdomonline.org. And Stephen, we have some big news on another front. Friends, you probably all know that in addition to being here at Wisdom for the Heart, Stephen and I both serve on the staff team of a church together. Stephen's been there—well, Stephen's the founding—you're the founding pastor, so you've been there since the beginning. I came in 1995. Yeah, I was there before Moses.

It feels like it sometimes, maybe. But we have some news that we want to let you know about regarding that church. Yeah, and I think it'd be helpful for you, even though you're not part of our church and our church does not fund Wisdom for the Heart. Wisdom International is really a separate ministry. But because you know I'm in the pulpit of Colonial and have been for all these years, and you hear me introduced periodically by Scott as the pastor of Colonial Baptist Church, we wanted to just allow you an opportunity to know some of our thinking at the church and why we changed the name. As of January 1, our church changed its name to the Shepherd's Church.

There's a little apostrophe at the end of Shepherd's, which indicates we belong to him. And it might be helpful for you to know as well, our elder team, and I'm on that elder team, decided this before COVID, before cancel culture, before rioting, before disturbances, before any of that stuff ever happened. And I think the background would be helpful for you to understand why we did it even back then. Well, I grew up near Williamsburg, Virginia, and I can recall many visits that created an appreciation for the Colonial-style architecture. And if you saw our buildings, you would see these corner coins. They're like white blocks interspersed with the brick. You would see columns.

You would see the curved Palladian windows. Well, when my father planted a church in Virginia Beach while I was away at college, I immediately liked the name he chose for the new church, Colonial Baptist Church. So 34 years ago, September of 1986, when I moved here to Cary with Marsha, my wife, and our five-month-old twin sons to launch our church, we had 28 people show up that first Sunday.

Scott will never forget that. And we had put an ad in the newspaper and prayed that somebody would show up, and 28 people did. We knew none of them. And by the grace of God, six months later, we had 56 committed adult believers, and we officially chartered our church membership. We had a doctrinal statement, we had bylaws, and we had, by the way, that same official church name, Colonial Baptist Church. And I joke with our staff and our congregation that we had started a family franchise.

My dad had one, I had one, and for $10, you could have one, too. Well, at any rate, everything was going along swimmingly until about 10 years after that point, and I traveled over to India and to Africa to preach in different parts of those countries. And in both countries, I quickly realized, and this is now about 25 years ago, that the name of our church was creating confusion, and it raised questions.

And the questions were fairly transparent. Why would you name your church after Great Britain's colonial expansion? Are you related to England? Are you representing Great Britain? In fact, at several rallies, I had to follow my host's introduction of me with an explanation that the term colonial was an architectural style.

It wasn't a statement on imperialism or early American history. And the audiences, I remember watching them relax and smile and look at each other and go, oh, okay. And I realized then, wow, this name is not a good name for around the world. Now, at that point, we weren't on the radio. The internet hadn't even been invented yet, but I realized this wasn't going to work well overseas.

And then Wisdom for the Heart launched in 2001, which, of course, expanded the global impact of your teaching ministry. Because now we're heard all across mainland China, and our Mandarin broadcasts were heard all across the Arabic-speaking world, the Spanish-speaking world, the Portuguese-speaking world. And the name colonial in many of those cultures has actually been a barrier because of what you just mentioned, that Great Britain's colonial expansion of some of those people groups.

Right. And they were confused as to why we would name the church something like that. Now, again, for here stateside, it's not a problem. For the average individual, they think of early American history, Williamsburg, they see the colonial architecture, and they get it.

But it, over time, became more and more of a problem. And then, of course, the Baptist name. We are not changing our doctrine, by the way. We're continuing with our commitment to the Baptist's distinctive, I guess you could say. It's really a biblical distinctive of baptism by immersion. I was not raised in a Baptist church. I got my final master's degree from, really, a Presbyterian seminary, predominantly. But I emerged from my graduate studies committed to immersion simply because that's what the word means.

Baptizo means immerse. And so I was committed to that. But over the years, it's, again, created an obstacle. Are you part of a convention? Are you part of an association? Are you one of the independent Baptists? Are you a Southern Baptist?

Are you a free will Baptist? There's just this long list of names and a spectrum of what it means to be a Baptist that, again, was confusing and so forth. For the most part, we've spent a lot of time telling people what the name of our church is and then explaining, but we're not this and we're not this and we're not that and we're not that. For instance, we have a plurality of elders leading our church.

Why? That's not a Baptist distinctive, but it is biblical. And so we have attempted, by the grace of God, to pursue a biblical model for ministry.

And we continue to, especially with the international reach, face one obstacle after another. Steven, you mentioned that our doctrine is not changing. Seems like it was maybe four or five years ago that we went through the process of not changing so much as expanding our doctrinal statement. Wisdom for the Heart and the Shepherd's Church share the same doctrinal statement, and that's not changing in any way. But I wanted to mention that because, friends, if you'd like to see that and just be able to read through that, there's a link to that on our website, wisdomonline.org.

We also have some printed copies of that. However, it does have the old church name, Steven, so if you don't mind us giving those away. It'll still say Colonial Baptist Church, but it is the exact same doctrinal statement for people who would like to just read through what it is that we believe are our distinctives as a church and as our broadcast ministry here at Wisdom for the Heart. Another thing that's happened over the years is the expansion of a family of ministries using the term Shepherd or Shepherds. We started a few years ago, eight years ago now, Shepherds 360. That's a national conference for church leaders held on our campus, our church campus. And we have hundreds of church leaders come annually, and you've probably heard Scott and I talking about that to encourage you to register and show up. We typically have that in the fall. Last year, we had a wonderful luncheon for those who could come from our radio listening audience. Got to have lunch with you and our good friend Erwin Lutzer here in the studios.

This year, because of COVID, everything was a little bit different. Hopefully, we'll be back up and running here in the next fall session. We also started the Shepherds Network, and that's a growing fellowship of church plants that primarily we as a church family have either mothered, dawdered into existence, or mentored, and just finished a goal of planting or revitalizing 20 churches by 2020, so we praise the Lord for that. We started Shepherds Theological Seminary, and that has been going now for nearly 20 years, fully accredited graduate school anchored on our campus, partnering with our church. It's again fulfilling the vision of our church to train a generation of servant leaders for Christ, and it's growing tremendously, nearly 200 students, a full faculty.

It's just phenomenal to see what God's done there. And then more recently, we started Shepherds International, and that's our own mission-sending agency where our church mobilization office serves as the headquarters to aid and to send and organize global workers around the world, and so we're excited about that as our church sends out global workers. We now have the sending agency, so you can see that Shepherds 360, Shepherds Network, Shepherds Theological Seminary, Shepherds International, and it almost made perfect sense to rename our church the Shepherds Church. Now, none of the other shepherds have an apostrophe in it, the Shepherds Network, Shepherds Theological Seminary, because it's talking about us. We are shepherds.

We are training church leaders. But as a church, there's an apostrophe, the Shepherds Church, because we're making a statement that our allegiance is to the great shepherd of the sheep, the chief shepherd of the church. And moving forward, our prayers that our new church name will be associated worldwide without any confusion to our allegiance, not to a denomination, but to our Savior, not to something that could be confused as an architectural style or a period of time in history, but our public testimony of belonging to Jesus Christ, who is our shepherd. And so we are, as of January 1, the Shepherds Church.

Now, let me add this. The Shepherds Church and Wisdom are two entirely separate identities. We're joined at the heart.

You hear my messages that I preach from the pulpit. But our budget, our board of directors is entirely separate. We are entirely listener supported, listener funded. And Shepherds Theological Seminary is a separate identity, although it meets on the campus of the church, a separate board of directors, a separate budget. So these three separate ministries are joined at the heart, we like to say, but they're directed separately as unique 501c3 ministries. We have people that assume our radio ministry is funded by our church, and it is not.

Not one penny is in the budget. We are entirely listener supported. And it is a good partnership that we enjoy with the church. We here at Wisdom for the Heart, we provide all of the audio for the audio broadcasts, the podcasts that the church has, and of course our own content.

We publish all of your books, Stephen, through Charity House Publishing. We do that here at Wisdom. It's a great partnership that we have with both the church and the seminary. In fact, many of our seminary students learned about the school by listening to us talk about it on the radio broadcast and are now here studying with us. Yeah, I think it's somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of our student body found out about it through Wisdom International. And so, Scott, another change that might be apparent to listeners is our use of the word Wisdom International.

That's another change. We were originally Wisdom for the Heart, and that's the name of the radio program you're listening to right now. But we are beginning the production, and we're probably a year or so out, of a brand new program taking listeners through the Bible in weekday programs, 15 minutes a day, through the Bible in three years, from Genesis 1 to Revelation chapter 22. And it's going to take 780 programs.

That's three years. And we've got a lot more to do, but we're so excited about that. So as a result of that, our ministry name needed to be a little broader. So Wisdom International is our ministry name, and underneath that umbrella are these different spokes, I guess you could say, on the wheel.

That's right. We have Wisdom for the Heart, as you just mentioned, which is our daily, approximately 30-minute broadcast, the one that you're listening to right now, Wisdom for the Heart. The Wisdom Journey, we hope that that'll launch maybe in 2021, probably 2022. We'll see, whatever the Lord does.

We're working hard at getting that ready. But that's going to be a shorter program, 15 minutes a day, taking you entirely through the Bible in three years. It's going to be a wonderful resource, the Wisdom Journey. You know, Scott, the interesting thing about this that people might want to know is that you've even put up on our website right now a couple of the early editions of Genesis, just so people could get a look at what this is all about.

Yeah, that's right. And what's different about the Wisdom Journey compared to Wisdom for the Heart is that we're videotaping it as well. It will be a radio broadcast, but it's also going to be available for you to watch. Now, it's Steven here in our recording studio.

We're filming him as he records. But if you go to our website, and by the way, there's one website for all of our ministries. Wisdom for the Heart, the Wisdom Journey, all of that is found at wisdomonline.org. You only have to go to one place.

But at the top, you'll see the two different major broadcasts there as tabs across the top of that web page. You'll see Wisdom for the Heart and you'll see the Wisdom Journey. So if you go there today, you'll be able to watch a couple of these initial programs of the Wisdom Journey.

Go there today. Well, wait till we're done talking and then go there. And we would like to get some feedback from you, friends, as you go there and you watch.

You know, click on the response and send us a note, tell us what you think. It's really a challenge when you consider the fact that we're dividing the Bible into 780 sections. Especially for you, Stephen. That's a fast pace for you to teach through the Bible.

Well, sure. One program might cover a chapter or two, depending on the narrative, because there are over a thousand chapters in the Bible, about 1,100 plus. And so that's a program per chapter. Well, when I preach through a book of the Bible, I'll preach a message on a verse or two. So yes, this is a very fast paced, 30,000 view, but we're touching down at all of the major issues. And we are covering every chapter so that you can get a handle on the entire Word of God, God's infallible, inspired Word that is to direct our lives. And you can cover that with me in three years in 780 programs.

That's five weekdays, 15 minutes a day. And we're really excited about that video version. I'm not, by the way, excited about the video version, because you're looking at me. I'd really rather be behind a curtain.

But I'm not even looking at the camera. It's just recording me so that people can use it for Bible study groups in their homes. And we are going to have transcripts of every program, all printed out and available for you. You can download it for free, just like we do my sermon transcripts now with Wisdom for the Hearts program.

You can download those transcripts. It'll have study questions, and it's just an outstanding resource. We want people to understand the Word of God. The Word of God is timeless, and it is timely. It's what we need today, especially in what we're facing as a culture today. Well, Stephen, during the year 2020, one of the things that marked our nation was racial tension. The colonial period, the founding fathers, all of that has come under attack. And some of our listeners might be wondering if part of changing the name away from colonial is a reaction to what's been happening in our society.

Yeah, and we have been asked that. In fact, I anticipated hearing even more than I did, because it does seem like a reaction. I'm very grateful that I can tell folks that our elder team and we had changed this name and decided to bring it to the congregation last spring.

Unfortunately, with COVID, that scuttled everything and put everything on hold. And so now when we announce it, it sounds like it's a reaction. But we have, in fact, I have wanted to change the name and have wanted to talk to others about it for many years, and just felt like the timing of the Lord was that we would do this last year, and so I presented it to our elder team. Our church is led by elders. We have 28 elders. That includes our pastors. We have 16 pastors on our staff, and we have about 72 deacons. And so our deacons and our elders were aware of all of this. Of course, the elders were unanimous in the recommendation, and it was overwhelmingly approved by our congregation, for which I thank God.

Well, Steven, we've covered a lot of ground. We talked about some things that God accomplished in our ministry during 2020. We've talked about this exciting news regarding the church. Before we end this program, what are a couple of things that you would like our listening audience to be praying about when they think about Wisdom International? Well, I think I could prioritize the top one or two, and that would be pray for us, friends, as we continue to be in heavy production mode of outlining the Bible, researching each section, writing transcripts that could be handed to translators, and then recording each 15-minute program so that we can begin to get this on the air and take people through the Bible with the wisdom journey.

So that would be a key priority. And then secondly, for God to continue to move in the hearts of people to become partners with us as we are listener-supported. And so, in fact, I think, Scott, why don't we just pray right now, shall we?

Friends, join me if you can. Father, thank you for your grace and your goodness. It is your mercy that uses us for your glory's sake.

There isn't anything about us that merits your grace and goodness. It is all of Christ. And so, Lord Jesus, we thank you for saving us by virtue of the sacrifice you made on the cross. Thank you for your blood shed for us. Thank you, Jesus, that you indeed paid it all. Thank you for giving us the privilege as a wisdom team and our partners to deal with eternal things, to expose our world to the truth of your word. Thank you for that. Thank you for our partner ministries like the Bible Broadcasting Network.

Thank you for an opportunity to partner with them in this Chinese language and Portuguese and Spanish and so many other ways. Continue to bless every ministry that honors and upholds your word, we pray, in 2021. In Jesus' name we pray it. Amen.

Amen. Thank you, Stephen. Friends, before we go, let me give you some contact information one more time. If you'd like to reach out to us, our website is wisdomonline.org. That's wisdomonline.org. You can write to us at info at wisdomonline.org. You can use that if you have just a general inquiry about our ministry. But that's also the email address that you can now use if you'd like to ask Stephen a question about the Bible or the Christian faith. Info at wisdomonline.org. Stephen will be answering those questions and we'll be posting that to the website and printing them in our magazine. Our mailing address is Wisdom International, P.O.

Box 37297, Raleigh, North Carolina, 27627. Again, thank you so much for listening today. When we come back on Monday, Stephen will continue his Bible teaching, so join us right here on Wisdom for the Heart. We'll be right back.