Steve Brown, Etc.

Steve Brown: Life is short, but life is good, and it's high time we enjoyed it. Let's talk about it with Ray Ortlund on Steve Brown, Etc. Hey, we're so glad you're here. You give us a gift of your time, and we give you a gift of our time. So, we're about even. If you're wondering, I'm Steve, the aforementioned old white guy.

Matthew Borders, executive producer, he's here. Matthew's kids are into theater and flag football. So, sometimes he tells them, "Break a leg." Other nights, he says, "Please don't break a leg."

Matthew Borders: True.

Steve Brown: And our producer Jeremy is in the little glass booth. He just got back from a band gig in Rancho Mirage, California. So, Jeremy...

Jeremy: Yes, sir.

Steve Brown: I don't know if you know that, but that's where a lot of presidents like Ford, Reagan, and Nixon used to play golf. And by the way, I knew Nixon.

Jeremy: You knew Nixon?

Steve Brown: Yeah, I did. He owes me 50 bucks.

Jeremy: Not as much as it used to be.

Steve Brown: Our one-man IT department John Myers is in the tech bunker. John, a happy May the 4th to you and to all those who celebrate.

John Myers: Very nice.

Steve Brown: I had no idea what that line meant.

John Myers: But you're a Star Trek guy.

Steve Brown: Matthew is always doing this to me, and I have to sit down with him and ask him to explain it. So, if you're in Star Wars, you can celebrate. If you're into Star Trek, your taste is better. Dr. George Beaham is the president of Key Life. George says if you're driving to church behind a bad driver, don't be ugly to them. If you make an obscene gesture, there's a chance that they'll park right next to you in the church parking lot.

And Kathy Wyatt is the soft feminine side of the program. Today we're talking about a book titled *Eat, Drink, and Be Merry*. And somehow, it wasn't written by Kathy. We've been looking forward to this. I love this book. Ray Ortlund, by the way, is our guest. He's my friend and his ministry has made a difference in my life and for a long time.

He's president of Renewal Ministries, the pastor to pastors at Emmanuel Church in Nashville. He's the founding pastor, and they just couldn't stand him anymore. And he's Canon Theologian with the Anglican Church in North America. He's authored several books and he's a contributor to the ESV Study Bible. And his latest book, which I hold in my nicotine-stained fingers, is called *Eat, Drink, and Be Merry: A Gospel Call to Bold Enjoyment*.

Publishers are always looking for something that's new, something that nobody else has written on, something that you won't find in the canon of Christian books. This is it. And the reason this is it and is singular in what it teaches is kind of sad. It really is. I just love this.

And one of the great joys of this book is that it's not long. So, not only did you write about it, you made it possible for us to read it once a day as kind of our morning devotions to remind us of what this thing is all about.

Ray Ortlund: More time for eating and drinking and being merry.

Steve Brown: There you go. Always thinking. It's a great book, you guys. And seriously, you guys, Ecclesiastes is one of my three favorite books in the Bible. But not for the reasons you talked about. It's because, as I've said a thousand times, I'm a cynical old preacher and Ecclesiastes affirms that cynicism about almost everything.

And it kind of reminds me when people are always criticizing me that I'm right and they're wrong. And that leads to self-righteousness and self-righteousness is addictive. But you go in a different direction, and you ruined that for me. Thank you a lot. A gospel call to enjoyment, bold enjoyment. You've got my attention. What does that mean?

Ray Ortlund: First of all, Steve, thanks for letting me onto your program. And on behalf of all your listeners and friends, we love you. And I get to say that to you right now on behalf of everybody else who's listening in.

And here's why we love you, Steve. Your ministry, if I could sum it up in one word, as I see it, your ministry brings hope. Bob Dylan was right, everything is broken, including us. And here you are, you're a voice for Christ bringing hope into a world where everything is broken, hope premised on the grace of God in Christ. And man, we just can't get enough of that. So, thank you for being my friend and I love you and we all love you, man.

Steve Brown: Thank you. I'll live on that for a long time. Now, what got into you about this book? We're not here to talk about me. We're here to talk about your book.

Ray Ortlund: Here's why I wrote this. I mean, I know the title is crazy, *Eat, Drink, and Be Merry*, but it's crazy in a wonderfully provocative way, obviously. And I mean it. I don't take back with my left hand what I gave with my right hand.

Here's our problem: we are not having nearly enough fun, Steve. We're living in this train wreck world, in these dark days, everything is crazy, feels like the world's falling apart. How are we going to get through this?

One way to respond to the madness of our times is just to get angry. And that's a powerful drug, but it's unsustainable. And the book of James puts a warning label on our anger. It's a dangerous substance. Another way to respond to our dark days is just the opposite. And that is what I call cheerful defiance.

Enjoying the enjoyable. We put our foot down and say no to the darkness of our times by looking around, opening our eyes, looking around. What has God given to us today that we can truly with a whole heart just relish and savor and praise God for and sink our teeth into and enjoy?

For example, I'm looking around in my study right now. And I've got these deer mounts up behind me. And each one represents an incredibly fun memory out in the woods. I'm looking at these books I have...

Steve Brown: Not for the deer. And you seem like such a nice person. You're dangerous with a gun.

Ray Ortlund: Look, I'm just obeying the Bible. Because it says in the book of Acts, "Rise, Peter, kill and eat." And it is so, just being out in the woods and fields, I come back feeling like a new man. I have learned to notice, for example, the sky and trees and grass and the breeze in my face.

I didn't cause all of that. I don't deserve all of that. I walk up, I go outside away from my phone, and I notice this simple, glorious reality that God has parachuted into by God's grace. I look around and just, wow.

If I wait, Steve, until I finally have my ideal designer life, if I wait till then to allow myself to enjoy life, I'll wait forever. The question is not what hasn't God given me yet. The question is what has God given me right now today?

So, like right now, I get to be with friends new and old, with thousands of people listening into the conversation and stopping long enough to ponder the goodness of God in our simple, ordinary everyday lives, and how He has immersed us in enjoyments galore. And His wisdom to us in the book of Ecclesiastes is: go for it.

Steve Brown: So good. Listen, if you've heard preachers tell you to get serious, that it doesn't hurt a lot and you're not depressed over it a lot, you're not godly. If they tell you to quit laughing and quit eating and quit drinking, go to another church.

Find a preacher like Ray and listen to what he says, because it's from the throne. The book is *Eat, Drink, and Be Merry: A Gospel Call to Bold Enjoyment*. We're going to back out for a little bit, eat, drink, and be merry, and like Jesus, return.

Hey, thanks for joining us. We're talking with author and speaker Ray Ortlund and his latest book is called *Eat, Drink, and Be Merry: A Gospel Call to Bold Enjoyment*. I was suggesting that we give this to a lot of our friends and Matthew, who always has an insightful comment, suggested that I get a stack of them and every time somebody criticizes me for smoking my pipe, give them a copy of this book. I'm going to do that. I really am.

Kathy Wyatt: Ray, right before the break, you were talking about getting out in nature and the grass and the trees and when you were out hunting and all that kind of stuff. And just a quick comment, followed by not a theological question, but hopefully a funny question.

In the chapter on vexation, you talk about when you bought your respectable pastor's car, your Pontiac Bonneville. And then you wham, hit a deer. So, my first question is: is that one of them that's up there on the wall?

Steve Brown: It's the one that has a black eye.

Kathy Wyatt: We would be looking for something that has a dent in his jaw or something. But anyway, and then you said that you went out with Jani's blessing and bought yourself a hot rod, a Chevy Camaro.

One of my pastors at my church has had a really souped-up, you can hear it coming down the street, Mustang for years and years and years. And a couple of weeks ago, I was leaving church and going to the ancillary parking and he was parked out there and he has traded in his Mustang for a Tesla. And I just want to know if there's some kind of spiritual application there, I mean...

Steve Brown: He's lost his salvation. That's what it is.

Kathy Wyatt: He traded in his Mustang. It's a beautiful car and bought a Tesla.

Steve Brown: Poor man.

Ray Ortlund: Look at the look on his face.

Steve Brown: He didn't find enjoyment in driving anymore, so he got a Tesla so it would drive for itself. Anyway, so it's not the Bonneville deer up there on the wall?

Ray Ortlund: No. I was trying so hard to be a good, respectable pastor, and so I bought this used car and it was boring and quite suitable. And as I say in the book, this poor deer gave her all to set me free from that boring car.

Where did we even get this crazy idea: if you're a serious Christian, you have to diminish all the spikes of enjoyment that you're prompted by God to feel and experience and relish in life? Where did we get that crazy idea? We didn't get it from the Bible. It's just our own intuitive moralism.

If I'm driving a fire-engine-red 305-horsepower Camaro Z28, which I did, just for example, at the top of your head, is that what a serious Christian would do? And I think I mentioned this in the book, I drove down to the airport in that car and I picked up a preacher from Scotland.

Yeah, he's a serious, robust, theoretically legit Bible preacher from Scotland. And we walked out of the terminal into the parking lot, we walked up to my car and he looks at it and says, "Raymond, this car is very reformed."

What was he saying? He was saying serious theology, true to Scripture, Reformed theology, robust, well-thought-through doctrine, just explodes with the grace of God. And so that ridiculous car was sort of a manifestation for me of my belief in the grace of God, my belief in Reformed theology.

And I gave myself permission to believe the gospel and therefore enjoy the enjoyable. And my serious preacher Scottish friend in effect high-fived me. And I really appreciated that encouragement. It was a hard time in my life. So, that's the backstory.

Matthew Borders: I love the phrase that you use, cheerful defiance. I was reading Viktor Frankl's book, and he was talking about surviving the concentration camps. And there's a moment where this group of men, it looks like they're going to die but then they don't.

But then the Nazi soldiers make them strip naked. And they find themselves laughing at just the silliness of their and it's one of the most deeply human things to laugh or to hold on to joy. I can't back this up theologically, but holding on to joy feels like an obscene gesture to Satan.

Like you can take all of this, but I choose to hold on to the joy that God has given me. And you can take my life possibly, but that's it. That's the only way you could take my joy. It's defiance.

Ray Ortlund: You know what one thing I want to do every single day? I want to love Jesus, worship Him. And secondly, I want to poke the devil right in the eye.

Steve Brown: This is the way you do it.

Ray Ortlund: That's right.

Matthew Borders: Not anger at him.

Ray Ortlund: Oh, no. I'm winning. I'm totally winning. And he really doesn't want me to know that. And so I'm going to prove it to him every day. I belong to Jesus Christ. I believe His gospel. I'm going to be loved by Him forever. You lose, He wins, I win, and here I go.

Steve Brown: That's so free.

Jeremy: Ray, one of the things that came to mind in talking about being in a position to just be free with enjoyment, I was remembering a story that Steve's mentor Fred Smith used to use as an illustration visiting the top of the Empire State Building.

And he said, "What do you do when you get out of the elevator? You go right up to the fence and look over." And he said, "What would it be like if you didn't have that fence there?" And he said, "Well, you'd be standing on my toes right up against the back wall of the back elevator, afraid to go anywhere near it."

So, talk some about the, and especially that it comes from wisdom literature, that we've got this bounded playground, but it is a playground.

Steve Brown: Ray, you're not going to have time to answer that question because we've got to do commercials and stuff. And that makes me sad.

Ray Ortlund: I'd love to answer that, though.

Steve Brown: Well, listen, I'm going to give you a chance. Just hold your horses on the other side of the break. After we sell products and pray and fast and do the serious stuff that is necessary if you're a Christian. We'll come back and you can comment on that comment. And in the break after that, we'll party.

The name of the book is called *Eat, Drink, and Be Merry: A Gospel Call to Bold Enjoyment*. If you're shocked, if you are irritated, if this makes you mad, you're probably not a Christian. You're going to hell.

Hey, thanks for spending time with us. By the way, I'd like you to boldly enjoy *Key Life Connection*. It's our free weekly email. It's free and easily worth three or four times that amount. You can go to KeyLife.org/subscribe. And if you're a Pharisee, don't send us letters. We're giving it to you free, so you can't complain.

Matthew Borders: Ray, what we're talking about here feels very relevant. Just this weekend, our oldest two kids were in a production, a high school theater production of *Sound of Music*. They had worked on it for three months, like really, really intensely.

And after the first performance, our oldest said, "I'm so happy, this is so good, but I know it's going to be gone so fast." And it just put me on my heels of, kiddo, you are right and that is but that's how life works is the good times don't last forever, the bad times don't last forever, but you do yourself a disservice by thinking ahead to how it's not going to you just got to.

So, all of the things we're talking about, how can we go about putting it into action? Is it just pausing and just soaking in all the details of the good moments and is it not shying away from the hard times? What does it look like fleshed out?

Ray Ortlund: Wow, that was such an insightful remark from your child. It's so consistent with the teaching of Ecclesiastes. Life just slips through our fingers, a breath. And we can't control it, we can't hang on to it forever.

Now, we can respond to that loss in one of two ways. Either we can say this moment is good but it won't last, therefore I'm going to sneer at it. This is a scam. Or we can look at this good moment and think it's not going to last, so I'm going to enjoy this to the hilt right now while God is giving it to me.

The latter response is what Ecclesiastes says: that's wisdom. And so we receive God's kindnesses moment by moment with our open hands, the empty hands of faith. That's why we keep our hands open, because the enjoyments of everyday life do slip through our fingers, but God has more for us.

Matthew Borders: Is that it? Is it just the surrender? Is it just saying, "This is what you've brought me, God, okay"? Is it just saying okay? Just like, all right, I'm not going to shake my little man-fist at You, just like, "Okay, thank you for this, and I'll go through this hard time, too."

Steve Brown: You know, if you've talked about, I'm sorry, go ahead.

Ray Ortlund: No, you go ahead, Steve.

Steve Brown: Listen, we're here to ask you questions, not for me to make a commentary. We're just expressing how we're polite to each other.

I have, what I was going to say is that I'm not big on eating. It doesn't show all the time, but the only reason I eat is so I won't be hungry. If they gave me a pill for dinner and it worked, I'd take that. I don't like just and as you have talked, I mean, you do this to me anyway, but I felt convicted. The food that God has created and allowed us to enjoy, I've got a new attitude to it. We'll see how that works at dinner tonight.

Ray Ortlund: Look, God could just give us this like toothpaste tube of colorless, odorless, tasteless goo and we squeeze some out and swallow it and it's all the nutrients, all the calories we need.

But instead, I'm thinking of in my refrigerator downstairs, there are green grapes, these great big fat juicy green grapes, and I put one in my mouth and I bite into it and it squirts this yummy juice all over the inside of my mouth. What?

God didn't have to give us that. And then I've got orange juice. I love orange juice in the morning. And I've got apples. An apple? What a crazy, how kind God is to not just create the universe and not just create planet Earth, but to create apple groves that grow these red and green round things, and then one of them ends up in my fridge and this afternoon I take a great big bite out of it and I love it.

Steve Brown: That's so good. That really is.

Kathy Wyatt: Steve, I reach for the toothpaste. But for you it would be ice cream.

Steve Brown: Well, yeah, that's the one exception. I would change the... yeah.

Kathy Wyatt: Well, and you've even talked about ordering dessert first.

Steve Brown: That's true. Because of Ecclesiastes.

Ray Ortlund: There you go.

Steve Brown: This is the way. Now, I've got a biblical reason for it. Well, and one of the things too that you talk about is, when you're visiting and preaching somewhere, that an indication of if Jesus is in the building is the laughter, how easily the congregation laughs.

That's true. And I'm going to perhaps get myself in trouble with my lack of knowledge here, but isn't it right that when the Old Testament demands offerings and the people of God bring in offerings that's for the appropriate day, that's used as a feast for a party? So, it's in a sense God's just what He's given us has set us up to have a party.

Ray Ortlund: Yes. And the Christian faith does not insult physicality. It consecrates our physicality. Remember that the TD that the gospel scores is not the immortality of the soul. The TD is the resurrection of the body.

And back in the time of the apostle Paul, for example, when he was teaching about the resurrection, the Stoic philosophers were saying, "Your whole problem, you people, is that you just pay too much attention to your bodies. You've got to let your mind go up to these ideals that will finally humanize you."

And Paul is saying, "Actually, no. Jesus rose physically from the dead because where He's taking us is the resurrection of our very bodies into a renewed creation that's going to sparkle forever. We're going to get our bodies back, we are going to have a blast forever in the presence of the risen Christ. Let's get ready."

Steve Brown: Ray, this has been so good. We're out of time. We could talk to you for hours. And just this hour of conversation is going to affect me when I walk out of this studio.

I don't drink adult beverages, but I'm going to buy some. I think I can handle this thing better drunk. Ray, you're such a gift. Thank you for spending the time with us.

Ray Ortlund: Thank you, Steve. We love you.

Steve Brown: Guys, we'll tell you who we're going to do it unto in a little bit. Next week is going to be so unique and different. Our guest's name is Chad Robichaux and his book is *Riptide*. And it's a novel. But get this, this guy is a former Force Recon Marine and DOD contractor.

He had eight deployments to Afghanistan as part of a joint special operations command task force. I had to write all that down. I knew I'd never remember it. And so what does he do when he comes home from all of that? He writes a novel. So, we're going to have to be careful about what we ask him, right?

Matthew Borders: Yeah.

Steve Brown: And we can't offend him. That would be really important. A novel. What's it about? Death and war and dying? It's about all that kind of stuff that he did. All right.

You join us and we'll find out together how to survive with a gun or whatever. Same time, same place next week. Hope you'll join us. In between now and then, don't do anything we wouldn't. And that gives you a wide, wide range.