Pastor to Pastor

Jim Daly: Live your truth. A lot of people say that, don’t they? But truth isn’t something we decide. God has decided it for us, and it’s our job as believers to share His truth with a world in need. I’ll encourage you to do that through my podcast, Refocus with Jim Daly. I visit with fascinating guests about important topics like gender confusion, cancel culture, and more, while helping you share God’s love with others. Listen at refocuswithjimdaly.com.

Dave Stone: I am proud to be an American. It’s our 250th anniversary. I’m going all in on celebrating America this year. But I’m called to give a higher allegiance, a higher love to the kingdom of Christ where my heavenly citizenship is. But my heavenly citizenship doesn’t eclipse my earthly citizenship; it informs how I live as an earthly citizen.

Hey everybody, welcome to Pastor to Pastor with Dave Stone. I am your host, Dave Stone. Thank you so much for joining us today. If you haven’t already, make sure that you subscribe to Pastor to Pastor wherever you listen to podcasts. We don’t want you to miss any of them.

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Our guest today is Dr. Andrew T. Walker. He is an associate professor of Christian ethics and public theology at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary right here in Louisville, Kentucky, where I am. Andrew is going to share some interesting information today. He is incredibly knowledgeable about Christian morals and shares that wisdom with us. I’m so glad that I got to talk with him because it’s a start of a great friendship.

You’re going to thoroughly enjoy this, especially if you’re a parent or especially if you have a biblical worldview that you feel like is being chipped away at from the world. I know that this is going to be a powerful conversation. You’re going to want to listen to it over and over again. Join me as we interview and have a conversation with Dr. Andrew T. Walker.

Dr. Andrew T. Walker, it is an honor to have you. Here we are in the same city. We have never met, but we’re meeting right now. Great to see you, my friend.

Dr. Andrew T. Walker: Dave, wonderful to meet you. I’ve known of you through Southeast Christian Church for a long time. We’ve never actually met until today, but it’s a real pleasure and thank you for the opportunity to be on.

Dave Stone: For the five minutes that we got talking, we didn't come up for air during our sound check. I think we’re going to be longtime friends. I’m looking forward to our next time. I’ll be taking you to lunch. How does that sound?

Dr. Andrew T. Walker: That sounds wonderful.

Dave Stone: Now I want to hear your story a little bit about how you ended up coming into ministry and a little just a little bit about your upbringing and what led you to be using your gifts for the Lord in such a wide variety of ways.

Dr. Andrew T. Walker: I’m a central Illinois kid. I grew up in a good Baptist church, became a Christian when I was 15, and a really cool part of my testimony is that the girl whose testimony I’m convinced the Lord used to open my heart to salvation, I actually ended up marrying that girl. So it’s just a really sweet story of how the Lord’s providence all comes together in time.

Dave Stone: Was she in high school with you?

Dr. Andrew T. Walker: She was in high school with me, that’s right. It was her testimony. She used the phrase that when she was growing up, she was playing the game, that she really wasn’t a Christian, she was just acting as a Christian. The Lord used that to utterly convict me that I was in the same boat. My youth pastor, I went and talked with him, told him the situation, he called this girl back, and we all prayed together and I received Christ that night.

Then we ended up dating and marrying, and we now have three daughters together. So it’s a really fun story. My journey to ministry was in high school. I had wanted to become an anesthesiologist of all things. I was thinking I would become a medical doctor. My senior year of high school, I felt a call to ministry, and I thought when you feel a call to ministry, that means you just become a pastor.

Now, it definitely includes becoming a pastor, but as was the case, you’re still figuring out and refining your gifts and your actual calling. When I was in undergraduate majoring in theology, I really loved the academic side of studying, knew I was going to go to seminary, thought I would go on to do a PhD and then I would go pastor.

Then while I was in seminary, I started working for a state-based public policy organization here in Kentucky and realized that my lifelong love of politics and culture and my burgeoning Christian faith and how to apply it to the world around me was an area that I really loved, taking what we believe as Christians and then applying that to the public square.

So I worked in Kentucky for a couple of years, worked for the Heritage Foundation in Washington, DC for a little while, and then spent six years with the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission in Nashville, Tennessee. Then in 2019, I got the opportunity to come teach full-time at Southern Seminary. In the fullness of time, I am training pastors.

I actually am doing something directly for churches and serving churches, and that’s what I see myself doing, trying to train and equip pastors to go into their churches to bring the Christian worldview to bear in their ministries and how they talk about our obligations to the public square.

Dave Stone: You’ve got so many different talents and such a wide variety of giftings that it’s really cool to see, in the way I introduced you, all the different ways that God is using you, and He dovetails those things together.

When I was in high school, I had an interest in four different areas, Andrew. It was preaching, politics, radio broadcasting, and comedy. I’ve been in ministry for 40 years, and God has tied all of these things together. So the preaching, the politics, at different times being advisors, spiritual advisors for governors, different people, and then the comedy thing.

I got to kind of cut my teeth. Bob Russell was so kind when I started preaching at Southeast. He let me take one secular event every month. So for probably seven years, I got to do after-dinner banquets and comedy for companies and motivational speaking, and it really helped me figure out ways to work the gospel into different settings. Then radio, I ended up being on the radio every day. So God dovetails these things together.

Dr. Andrew T. Walker: I get asked sometimes, I have students who say, "I want to do what you do." I’m like, well, there’s no really one straight path. I thought I wanted to be a medical doctor, then I thought I wanted to be a pastor, then I thought I wanted to become a professor. Well, then I turned into public policy, and the public policy eventually turned back into becoming a professor serving pastors.

I could never have predicted this in advance. Life only makes sense in the rearview mirror, and that’s where you have to trust in the Lord’s providence who’s guiding our paths.

Dave Stone: You’re exactly right. It never would have, if you said these different areas that you’re in right now if when you were 15 years old or 20 years old you’d say, "Okay, well, I’ll be doing all of this in 20 years," there’s absolutely no way because you wouldn’t be able to draw a dotted line and connect these things because it would be so ludicrous.

That’s why I always tell people when a person’s thinking about succession or retirement, I always say, don’t worry about what you’re going to be doing next because God’s going to build off of your experiences that you’ve had, and He’s going to bring things along in your direction that you don’t even have on your radar screen, but He’s prepared you for it because of the ministry experiences that you’ve had.

Dr. Andrew T. Walker: I cannot affirm that enough. People ask me, "What’s my five-year plan?" It’s like, well, my five-year plan is just to be faithful, and I’m going to see what happens as a result. I’m trusting the Lord that all of the circumstances and events that I find myself involved in, they’re all training me and preparing me for whatever the next station in life is going to look like. That means what tomorrow is going to look like as well.

Dave Stone: There’s somebody listening right now to Dr. Walker and what he just said, and he shared that five-year plan is to be faithful. That’s you. That’s the plan, is to say, how can I walk more closely with God tomorrow than I am today, and more so today than I did yesterday, and saying, "Lord, I just want to be used by You. I just want to be faithful to You." I believe that when we’re faithful, that’s when He opens those doors for us.

Now, I want to dig into, we’re going to eventually talk about parenting and the discipling of kids, but you have this talent. I’ve watched you on YouTube, I’ve watched you on X as you talk about cultural issues. You had a book that came out called Faithful Reason back a couple of years ago, and in that, you really try to articulate Christian truths for people who you come in contact with who might not agree with some of the Christian presuppositions that we build our biblical worldview on.

I find myself constantly on airplanes or talking to people who have a very different worldview, and you can tell by their language. It doesn’t take very long. You don’t have to be super observant in order to notice those things. Give us a synopsis of that book, why you wrote it, and how it is that it could be helpful to us.

Dr. Andrew T. Walker: I’ll try not to be an egghead in offering an explanation. This book is called Faithful Reason: Natural Law Ethics for God’s Glory and Our Good.

Dave Stone: That’s a very large cover. That’s a very large cover on that book.

Dr. Andrew T. Walker: Academic books have long subtitles. So natural law is a theory in the Christian moral tradition that talks about how there is a universal moral order that God has implanted in creation and that He’s implanted it in the hearts and consciences of men. We think about the Apostle Paul in Romans chapter 2. He says there’s a law written on the heart.

You mentioned how you talk to people who don’t share your worldview or who don’t share your biblical presuppositions. Well, they may not, at the exterior level, believe in the Bible, but they all have this voice of conscience in the back of their minds, something telling them on their heart that there are obvious moral wrongs and obvious moral rights.

Now, because of sin, sin has fractured our ability to always follow that law consistently. That’s why we have a doctrine of sin. To me, one of the ways that the Christian tradition can reach into the public square is that when civil society experiences some tragedy, it weighs down heavily on the conscience of individuals, and individuals are weighed down with this reality that something has gone wrong.

They may not be able to explain the source of why they think something has gone wrong, but they feel it at the marrow of their bones that something is not right in the world. That is the voice of conscience that God has placed in their minds for us to obviously honor the Lord, to seek after Him, but then also, when we follow God’s moral law, when we speak the truth, when we uphold our marriage vows, when we treat image bearers with how they’re meant to be treated, something wonderful happens. Human flourishing occurs.

So the natural law tradition in Christian thought is really the application of Christian ethics to society around us in our belief that what we read in Scripture is not just applicable to Christians alone, it’s applicable to everybody because everyone, regardless of whether they’re a Christian or not, is living in a world created and authored by God.

Whether they can explain where those moral intuitions come from, they exist. So to me, this is a massive conversation starter in talking about why people have the intuitions that they do.

Dave Stone: So in your observation, what are some of the areas that you feel like those apart from Christ are actually trying to come up with arguments that are gaining some traction that make them think that a biblical worldview is not for me?

Dr. Andrew T. Walker: To answer that, I want to go back maybe a century or two to think about how society has shifted in its thinking. I think a couple hundred years ago, people would have disbelieved Christianity because they just didn’t want to believe in the core doctrines of Christianity. They found things like the resurrection and the incarnation too hard to believe from a rational standpoint.

If you pivot to today, what you’ll notice is that people tend to have less of a problem with some of the doctrinal components of Christianity. They tend to have more of a problem with the moral components of Christianity. What secular society tends to do today is to argue that the Christian worldview restricts or narrows their ability to live how they want to live. So it’s kind of a moral straitjacket.

The response to that is it’s not a moral straitjacket if the moral guardrails that have been placed on us as Christians are actually there for our flourishing. That’s kind of one of the Faustian bargains that our society tries to trade upon, is that they actually believe that true flourishing is the ability to do whatever you want, to be completely unencumbered, unattached, to live however you want to live.

Well, that may sound appetizing and appealing, but really that reduces down to what the Book of Judges talks about where everyone does what is right in their own eyes. So when you look at what Scripture tells us, Scripture is actually saying, well no, there’s one set pathway that you want to live your life on. It’s handed down in the book of nature and in the book of revelation in Scripture.

Actually, when you conform yourself to that pattern that God has laid down, you’re actually more free. You’re more blessed. One of my favorite passages to demonstrate this is Psalm 119:45. I’ve memorized the King James Version. It says, "For I will walk at liberty, for I know Thy precepts."

What David is getting at is I’m actually more free, I’m more flourishing, I’m happier and blessed not by throwing off God’s law, but by living in conformity with it. So what I think we as Christians have to do is to convince individuals that the moral truths of Christianity are not there to constrain them and hinder them and to keep them from being truly free, it’s actually to experience freedom as you were meant to experience freedom under the lordship of Christ.

Dave Stone: There’s that fulfillment and there is that flourishing that takes place when we do it God’s way because God’s love language is obedience. When we obey Him, we get to reap the benefits of that. The New Testament parallel to that Psalm 119 verse 45 would be John 10:10, "I’ve come that you might have life and have it more abundantly." Jesus saying you will have life to the fullest. That’s the flourishing and that’s what comes when we have freedom in Christ.

Dr. Andrew T. Walker: Absolutely. I mean you think about to go back to this natural law discussion, when individuals do something wrong, their conscience weighs them down, and they feel that moral guilt, that culpability for having done something wrong. The Christian response to that is wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could live with a clear conscience?

Could you imagine waking up every single day, living your life as obediently as you can and to experience the freedom of having a clear conscience? That’s something that as Christians we still wrestle with because we still wrestle with living in earthen vessels that are still tempted to sin.

But every single day we’re trying to structure and order our lives to understand that God’s way is actually more fulfilling, and He gives us the ability to live with a clear, unburdened conscience, which I think is just something that provides massive levels of contentment.

Dave Stone: We had Rebecca St. James on here as a guest a couple of months ago. She said, "I want to live in such a way that I have no secrets from God." I never thought of that phrase before because, yes, we know that God is all-knowing, He knows every thought, but to live in such a way that I have no secrets from God.

That truly is the flourishing piece. That really is when you’ve found the freedom that I find is God, will You love me, warts and all, with my shortcomings, with my impure thoughts, with my motives that are ulterior, can You still love me in spite of those things as I confess those things and repent of those things to You?

As you’re talking, Andrew, I want you to go back because I’m enamored by everything that you’re saying. I want you to go back to 2006 and share with everyone what kind of helped to shape your worldview. I just think this is so cool.

Dr. Andrew T. Walker: I was sharing with you earlier, Dave, that when I was in spring of 2006, I was 20 turning 21, I think I was a sophomore in college, and I spent a full semester at Focus on the Family in Colorado Springs at what was at the time called their Focus on the Family Leadership Institute.

It brought together, I believe the number was 88 college students or recent college graduates, and it gave us kind of a crash course semester in worldview training, in family formation, and it was life in community. So I spent a lot of time walking the campus of Colorado Springs and think back to those memories very fondly, which is one of the reasons I’m a huge fan of Focus on the Family.

I grew up on Dr. Dobson, and then I spent a semester of my college career literally on the campus of Focus. So I feel like I really have so much that I’m indebted to for what Focus has done for me.

Dave Stone: You’re obviously putting this into good use, some of the things that you learned and with the variety of different responsibilities you have, managing editor of World Opinions with World Magazine, all of those different things that now you’re seeing play out, whether it’s dean in the school of theology. Who would have ever thought that you’d be banking on that three-month stint?

Dr. Andrew T. Walker: Can I tell you a really cool story along the lines of this? I’ll never forget, so they had us read How Now Shall We Live? by Chuck Colson. I remember sitting in a coffee shop adjacent to the campus of Focus on the Family. I would go there every Thursday night and try to hammer out all of the reading in that book.

I was 20 at the time, I’m reading this book by Chuck Colson and Nancy Pearcey, and I think back to that time period where there’s just so much formation happening. In the moment, and this is how the Lord works, in the moment you’re kind of thinking, what is this all adding up to? Why am I reading a 700-page book on Christian worldview? Couldn’t I be doing something better with my time?

We didn’t even have Netflix at that time to tell you how far back this was. Now to see how books like that transformed me to the point where eventually I got to meet Chuck Colson in person and to tell him how influential and transformative his works had been on my life, which just goes to show you you never know the type of impression and mark you’re going to leave upon someone.

So again, it’s those Thursday nights in Colorado Springs I look back to so thankful for how the Lord used those ordinary Thursdays to just shape how I see the world and shape how I see the world today and what I’m teaching today in the classroom.

Dave Stone: I have great respect for Chuck Colson. He was friends of my predecessor, Bob Russell. So he got the cassette tapes from our church, and he said to Bob Russell, "This is my church that I listen to." He worshipped somewhere, but he traveled so much, so he listened.

Bob Russell would preach three weekends out of the month, and I would preach the fourth. Andrew, one day I got a phone call from Chuck Colson. My hand was shaking holding the phone. "Hello, Mr. Colson, how are you?" "Dave, want you to know I listen to your sermons too."

I was 31 years old, terrible preacher, trying to learn the craft. He says to me, "I listen to your sermons too." He said, "I’ve got a request of you." My heart is pounding out of my chest. He said, "I’d like to use one of your illustrations in a book that I’m writing." I said, "Oh, yeah, anything."

So it was a personal story, and so I got all the stuff for him. He called me back the next year and said, "Do you mind if I put that same story in Chicken Soup for the Soul?" I said, "Mr. Colson, you can do anything you want with that. I would be honored to have my name associated with yours."

So he put it in Chicken Soup for the Soul. What a godly man, and just brilliant. He was an incredible apologist and just marked my life with his humility and the way he had this burden for those in prison fellowship but everybody he came in contact with.

Dr. Andrew T. Walker: I got to meet him in 2009 at the Southern Baptist Convention, and I had him sign my copy of God and Government. To this day, I teach classes in church world and politics and public theology, and he signed this book, "Dear Andrew, Love your country, but love your God more. Chuck."

People ask me, what is your political theology? That is my go-to response because it just demonstrates that no, you can love your country, and I’m proud to be an American. It’s our 250th anniversary. I’m going all in on celebrating America this year.

But I’m called to give a higher allegiance, a higher love to the kingdom of Christ where my heavenly citizenship is. But my heavenly citizenship doesn’t eclipse my earthly citizenship; it informs how I live as an earthly citizen. But I thought that was just such an apt, concise way to describe what a Christian ought to do in their responsibility to the social order.

Dave Stone: That’s the perfect summation of it in one phrase. Love God and country, but love God more. That’s where we need to be, and that’s a good reminder for every one of us. There’s no political savior who’s going to come in riding on a white horse and that’s going to solve the whole thing. There are so many layers to all this, and yet we’ve got to keep our focus on the true One who has the ability to change lives for all eternity.

I want to spend some time talking about how it is that you wrote this book a couple of years ago. You did it along with Christian.

Dr. Andrew T. Walker: I did, we co-wrote the book.

Dave Stone: It’s all on parenting. What Do I Say When... and then it’s got an ellipsis after that. It’s all about pouring into your children, discipling them. I love to hear that you have a passion for this. We have people listening right now who are in the throes of it. Your kids are ages 7 to 15, if I’m remembering correctly. You’ve got that age span. Talk us through what caused you to write the book and how it is it can be helpful to us as parents.

Dr. Andrew T. Walker: I teach ethics, which is kind of code word for I teach everything controversial. Everything you’re not supposed to talk about at the dinner table are issues that I talk about and teach about for a living. So my job is to study what’s going on in the culture, to know how to respond to that as a Christian.

Then my wife’s background is as an early education specialist, kind of a developmental specialist, and how do you help young kids learn truths at various levels of development as they mature. So what we wanted to do was really something quite simple. We wanted to take 10 of the most controversial issues and then talk about how parents can equip their children with biblical content delivered in age-appropriate ways at various stages in your child’s development.

The first part of every chapter, I kind of lay out here are five or six core biblical truths around things like abortion or transgenderism. Then my wife comes behind me and brilliantly explains how you would talk about these issues with children roughly age 4 to 8, 8 to 12, and 12 to 16.

We refer to that age gradation as different floors in a home. We want to carry that family-home-centric metaphor through the book. Obviously, how you talk about abortion with a 16-year-old is not going to be how you talk about abortion with a 5-year-old.

But here’s one of the things that we are adamant about in the book, and I might even have some listeners who are thinking to themselves, "Why would anyone talk with a 5-year-old about abortion?" Well, here’s why, because if you are not confronting these issues with your children first, the world will get them first.

So one of the things we talk about is if you’re not catechizing your children early and often, the world will do so for you and with great efficiency and great productivity around it. So we’re not saying give the full graphic details around all of these controversial issues to a 5-year-old or a 4-year-old, but what are some age-appropriate ways that we begin inculcating a Christian worldview?

You think about something like abortion. We don’t begin with talking about the procedure that is an abortion. We begin talking about this principle of human dignity, how God is the author of life, He loves His creation, and we as fellow image bearers are to care for all human beings regardless of their size or level of development.

Human dignity is something that is there and present at all stages of a human person’s life, even in the womb or even when they’re 99 years of age. So if you build those baseline foundational moral principles, then you kind of have the presuppositional work built to then begin lightly adding on where the culture goes wrong and then how you can then gently and appropriately communicate that issue with your child.

We have a situation, in fact, you’re in Kentucky, you’ll remember back in 2022, we had an abortion referendum here in the state. Of course, our middle daughter was seven or eight at the time, and she’s reading the yard signs that people are putting out in their yards that are pro-choice. So she’s asking us, "Mom and Dad, why are people talking about a woman’s right to choose?"

I don’t really want to go talking to my 7-year-old about abortion, but guess what? The culture brought that to me. Now I have the obligation as the parent, as the discipler, to talk about that in an age-appropriate way. We did, and we did it gently, and she carried on with her day.

But the biggest thing I just want to communicate to parents is that you cannot take a defensive posture in this culture. You have to play offense, which means you have to be willing to have the conversations that you may not want to have. The types of conversations that I have to have with my children today are really not the conversations that my parents had to have with me back in 1991 or 1992.

So we’re just calling Christian parents to an active, loving engagement with your child’s heart and really to understand for parents that you’re the primary discipler of your children. Dave, you’ve been a pastor for 40 years. I hope I don’t offend you in saying this. You’re there to equip and help parents be the primary discipler of their children. It’s not the job of a children’s pastor to be the primary discipler; it’s the job of the parent.

So what we need to do is to create resources to get these controversial subjects delivered to parents in ways that serve them and serve their children.

Dave Stone: I’ve got two thoughts that pop in my mind on this. One is, by the way, I agree with every single thing you said. Thank you for saying that you are the primary discipler. If right now the average for an involved church member, they consider it like 1.4 or 1.6 times a month to church, which is just ludicrous to think of, but that’s an involved person.

If we look at that and we say there’s 168 hours in a week, you multiply that by four and a half for about 30 days a month, and then you start saying that spiritual discipleship you’re expecting that children’s director or junior church program or middle school ministry to take care of in that child’s life is maybe three hours' time.

Dr. Andrew T. Walker: The math just doesn't add up.

Dave Stone: You have those kids for so many hours, and yet you’re putting this burden as if that’s the church’s responsibility. No, the church is a supplement that comes alongside the parent who is the primary discipler, as Deuteronomy chapter 6 talks about, constantly putting this right there right in front of their face all the time, 24/7, as you flesh out what it means to be a follower of God.

The other thing that popped in my mind as you were talking about that, I loved it when you said this active, loving engagement, and we have to be on the offense. The culture brought that situation when Catherine saw those yard signs. The culture brought that to you.

We’re the ones that are on the offense. Nobody goes into a battle with gates. The gates are the gates of hell because they’re the ones that are on the defense. We’re the ones that are on the offense. I love that picture of your saying we will be active, lovingly engaged as parents with our kids.

Dr. Andrew T. Walker: You think about the word "active." It means you’re not passive. You’re taking active, positive steps to inculcate a biblical worldview in your child and then communicating that it’s done from a posture of charity and love. Now, what we have to be careful about is we can say to our children that you are to encounter the world with a motive of love.

The world may not receive our love as a loving message, which is one of the reasons in the book we have a chapter on how to endure persecution and mockery when it comes. Nonetheless, what are we trying to do as Christians? Well, because we love a world that we believe God loves, that to go back to Psalm 119, as we said earlier, we’re trying to be voices in the wilderness that are saying, here is actually how God has structured the world.

Here actually God does want the best for you. Part of the culture’s deprogramming has to come through them understanding that this idea of being able to do whatever you want, human autonomy, expressive individualism, it’s actually an empty shell. It doesn’t deliver on the promises that it claims to. So Christians to me are the ones in society that are sometimes in the center of society, sometimes on the margins of society, but you know what doesn’t change is the message.

We preach the Word in season and out of season. The credibility of the church doesn’t hinge upon what it's popular in society or not.

Dave Stone: And I love how you said we’re going to be age-appropriate with our kids. I’m fascinated by the genius that you and Christian had on the way you approach that book, and you did it with the differing age groups. I can’t wait to get that book.

Dr. Andrew T. Walker: It was my wife’s idea to be very clear. She was the genius behind that. I was just the egghead who wrote the biblical principle portions of the chapter. So my wife is the one who deserves the credit for that.

Dave Stone: We’ll give Christian that, and I’m going to give you extra points for not taking the credit and for passing it along to her. But I can’t wait to get a copy of that book.

Dr. Andrew T. Walker: Can I tell you a really funny story about the writing of the book? I’m an academic. I write books. That’s what I do for a living. I write all the time. I’ll be downstairs writing for a full day, and I’ll come upstairs, and I’m just emotionally and physically fatigued and exhausted.

My wife will be like, "How on earth can you possibly be tired? You’ve been down in your office listening to music, drinking coffee, and just writing all day. Why on earth are you tired? You have no reason to be tired. I have been corralling these children all day long, carting them all over Louisville."

Finally, we wrote this book together, and it was the first real concentrated writing project that she had done where it required a lot of focused attention all at once. She would kind of come out of her cove from writing, and she would look at me and she’d say, "You know what? I’m so tired. I’m so fatigued."

And I would say, "Welcome to my world." Then she finally got the message. Actually, intellectual work is physically exhausting. So this book actually strengthened our own marriage because it kind of gave some mutual solidarity in both directions.

Dave Stone: So you’re dying to say "I told you so." I’m glad she got to have that epiphany to understand what it was like for you. I’m certain they on the other side, the wives could be saying some things back to us on "You have no clue."

My wife always gives me a hard time with my grandchildren and says, "Okay, so tell me, when was the last time you changed a diaper?" We all have different gifts. I try to get her to buy that. Okay, I want to ask you this. What would you say is the biggest issue in our culture that children right now are going to face or young people are going to face that they could easily fall prey to, and it might be something that by the same token the adult community is falling prey to as well?

What jumps out at you? I’ve got my thoughts, but you’re the expert on these culture issues. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Dr. Andrew T. Walker: I’m going to go to what may be the most obvious and the most central, which is just issues of sexuality. God wired us to be sexual beings, so there’s nothing wrong or embarrassing about that. But when you start reaching into older ages and puberty years, you begin having these desires and these attractions, and the question is what do you do with these desires and attractions?

How do you direct them in a biblical moral way? Our culture over the last roughly 60 to 70 years has programmed what a lot of scholars refer to as the sexual revolution, the idea that to be truly free and truly prosperous is to have access to as much sexual freedom as one could possibly have. That’s what leads to personal satisfaction. This is the faulty trade-off though.

When you actually read the academic literature, there is more and more consensus converging from both the left and the right in our society arguing that this culture of sexual permissiveness has actually not gotten society the gains and the wholeness that it was promised. So what does that mean for children?

Well, it means that first off, you need to talk to your kids about sexuality. You need to talk about how you anchor a biblical vision in sexuality around marriage, that that is what God’s design for our sexuality is. But if there’s a positive design to our sexuality culminating in marriage, it means that us teaching sexual ethics to our children is not simply a list of "nos" and "don'ts" and "don't do that."

I remember having a conversation with my oldest daughter, and I prefaced it by saying, "Caroline, I have to be awkward for a second, but a part of being a father means I have the privilege of being awkward, but I’m going to try to make this as less awkward as possible."

I said, "Caroline, God has made you a particular way as a woman. What I want you to do is not to think about your sexuality primarily as a list of nos and don'ts. What I want you to see is the beauty of a healthy marriage and for you to understand that the powers that God has placed within your body are best directed towards a marriage, not just towards any regular male."

So to me, I don’t want to be too harsh on a previous generation of youth ministry, but I think it was the case a lot of younger Christians of my generation were kind of taught sexual ethics by simply "no," "don’t do that." A "no" is a part of the discussion, but it’s a truncated discussion because you have to inform that with a positive vision of a biblical moral good around sexuality existing within the context of marriage.

So I’m talking to my daughter and saying, listen, this gift that God has given you, it’s so powerful and it’s so good that it needs to be stewarded properly in the right context. Notice what we’re doing. We’re not beginning with "no." We’re not talking about shame and embarrassment about the way that God has made our body. We’re trying to begin with a positive formulation and understand that people are motivated by a positive good more than they are motivated by a list of "nos."

Dave Stone: That’s so well put. I did a sermon series years ago called "Just Say Yes." You remember years before that there was Ronald Reagan’s "Just Say No" campaign on drugs, and the reason it failed was because it was all from that negative context.

The context and the idea of the sermon series was it’s easier to say no to something if you have a stronger burning "yes" within you. That’s what you just painted that picture for Caroline, is that these sexual urges and desires are not bad, they just need to be channeled and saved for when you are married.

Dr. Andrew T. Walker: And then to think about that in the human flourishing category, is that when you actually pursue God’s design for you sexually within marriage, what are you doing? You’re safeguarding yourself from a lot of negative consequences, heartbreak, disease, unplanned pregnancy.

All of these things are off the table if you have a positive understanding for what God has in store for you when you order your sexuality how He wants you to order it.

Dave Stone: I love your digging in from how it is that you pour into your kids with these age-appropriate ways. The book is called What Do I Say When... and it’s by Andrew and Christian Walker. I can’t wait to check that book out, and I know that all of you listeners are going to be interested in it as well.

I have grandkids, so I’m going to look at it from a grandkid perspective, and it will probably be a book that I pass on to each of my three adult children who are in the throes of parenting right now.

Dr. Andrew T. Walker: It sounds like you need to buy a whole case of them.

Dave Stone: Well, I might need to do that. Do you want me to add marketing to your long introduction that I have of you? We can add marketing genius as well. I do want you to tell me about the podcast that you co-host, The Bully Pulpit. Tell me a little bit about that. It’s a weekly podcast.

Dr. Andrew T. Walker: Three friends and I in 2024 started a podcast called The Bully Pulpit, and the tagline is: two pastors, an ethics professor, and a political operative discuss news and politics from a Christian and conservative perspective.

What we noticed leading up to the 2024 election is that there are a lot of Christian podcasts and there are a lot of conservative podcasts. We were all friends and we all have our little text chain and we’re all Christian conservatives, and we’re not embarrassed by that.

We try to properly order those hierarchies well, as we talked about earlier with "love your country but love your God more." We thought there might be somewhat of a constituency who is Christian, who is conservative, and we talk about both of those in kind of dual tracks and where they intermix.

So we’ve been doing it for two years, and it continues to grow. It’s my friend Dean Inserra, he’s a pastor, Erik Reed who’s a pastor, and then my good friend Eric Teetsel, who’s a longtime political operative in DC. We’re just having a lot of fun doing it. Episodes typically drop on Friday.

Dave Stone: That’s awesome. Listeners, check that out. I want to have you back on, and we’ll dig in next year to talking about some more with the cultural issues and Christian ethics. But before I have you back on, I’m taking you to lunch. Thank you so much for your time, Andrew.

Dr. Andrew T. Walker: Dave, thank you so much, and thank you to Focus on the Family. It’s an honor, and I’m just so privileged to be able to be on this platform.

Dave Stone: Well, I told you you were going to enjoy that. I certainly enjoyed my conversation with Andrew, and I look forward to learning more, and I know that you’re going to want to check out that book, What Do I Say When.... He’s going to go through all of those different things that as parents that we struggle with, and he’ll talk about the age-appropriate ways that we can talk about those different subjects.

Thanks to the way that Andrew and Christian both approached this, he and his wife did a great job with that book and can't wait for you to get to see it. I loved when he said the five-year plan of being faithful. I just don't want that to get lost in the shuffle.

He had so many good things just talking about the Christian worldview, and I loved how he talked about how we are more free when we are conforming to the pattern that God has laid out for us rather than what the world has for us.

And right now, with this celebrating the 250th anniversary of our country, that was a powerful reminder when Chuck Colson said to him, "Love your country, but love God more." And that's something we need to hold on to. But the whole concept that he shared with discipling our kids. I hope that's not a foreign concept to you.

I hope that you realize when if God has blessed you with children that you are the chief discipler. You are the one who's going to be pouring into them. Let me say it this way: if people don't catechize their children, the world will do it for them with efficiency and productivity. There, I said it. Catechize their children with Christian principles. Boy, that was fun just to say.

So thank you for that lesson, Andrew. That leads into the story that I want to share with you all. This is something that happened to my dad when my brother and I were just little kids, and I'll never forget this because it was one of my dad's favorite stories to tell.

But he had gone to a get-together with a Sunday school class, and they had then left there, my mom and dad had left, they had gone to a gas station, got gas, headed home. The next morning, Dad could not find his wallet anywhere. And it really threw him off, and didn't know what he was going to do.

And he had checked to call the gas station to see if anybody had turned one in. No one had turned one in. He didn't know what to do. Had a credit card in it, had some money in it, had his driver's license in it. It was Sunday afternoon when someone came to the door, rang our doorbell, and Dad went to the door, and sure enough, there was a guy standing there and he was holding Dad's wallet.

And he had a young boy standing there beside him. And Dad looked at him and said, "Oh, I can't believe this, you found my wallet!" He said, "Well, where was it?" He said, "Well, it was laying there on the ground at the gas station." And he said, "Well, I called the gas station and no one had turned one in."

And the guy said, "You know, I didn't trust the people at the gas station, didn't know whether they would get it to you, and so I found your address on your driver's license and just thought that I would bring it by today. I'm sorry I didn't get the chance to do it earlier." Dad said, "No, no, no, this is great."

He said, "I want to go get you some type of reward." And Dad started to leave the front door to go get him some money and to bring it back to him. And the guy stopped him and said, "No, no," he said, "I don't want any reward." He looked down at his son, he said, "I just want my boy to grow up and be honest."

And my dad says, "I have a strange suspicion that that boy grew up to be honest because he saw something in his dad that he couldn't deny." And that was integrity. It was honesty. Albert Schweitzer is the one who said, "Example is not the best way of teaching, it is the only way of teaching."

So I want to challenge you all as parents, just as Andrew did. I just want to challenge you to be a person of integrity because there are people who are watching you, and they're younger than you, and they have you on a pedestal. They will do as you do, and they will follow in your footsteps.

So remember the important task that you have of discipling them in integrity, in honesty, in love and joy and peace, and a variety of other things that Christ challenges us to possess in our own lives.

Well, I really enjoyed my conversation with Andrew today. He had so many good things to say about parenting and this cultural climate. If you would like more information on parenting, check out Age and Stage from Focus on the Family.

Age and Stage is a wonderful resource that helps parents navigate the unique challenges that come with each stage of their child’s life. I think it can be a good companion to Andrew’s book. So click the link below in the show notes and check out Age and Stage. I know it will be helpful to you in your parenting.

Well, as always, thanks so much for listening to Pastor to Pastor. We drop a brand-new episode every Tuesday. It’s designed to encourage, inspire, and to challenge you because we know that leadership can be lonely, and that’s why we call this Pastor to Pastor. It’s to remind you you’re not alone. So until next time, I’m Dave Stone saying God bless.

Jim Daly: Live your truth. A lot of people say that, don’t they? But truth isn’t something we decide. God has decided it for us, and it’s our job as believers to share His truth with a world in need. I’ll encourage you to do that through my podcast, Refocus with Jim Daly. I visit with fascinating guests about important topics like gender confusion, cancel culture, and more, while helping you share God’s love with others. Listen at refocuswithjimdaly.com.