Let’s Talk: Our Spiritual Heroes | Word First

[Music] welcome to season two of let's talk a podcast for women from the gospel coalition podcast network my name is jackie hill perry and i am here uh with my friends who are also saints jasmine holmes and melissa krueger to talk about how to apply biblical wisdom to everyday life this season we're going to be talking about people pleasing the holiness of god my goodness fighting fear and anxiety and a whole bunch of other topics before we start today's topic however i'm going to let you each introduce yourselves so melissa uh tell us about you um my name is melissa and i'm married to mike and i have we have three kids um emma john and kate who range in age from 14 to 20. so there i've got i've got i graduated one teenager got two teenagers and a college student and i work for the gospel coalition and women's initiatives fancy that's me awesome what about you jasmine i am jasmine um i'm married to philip we have two boys walter nguyen and ezra langston they are four and almost two and i am a writer and a teacher and an all-around busy person sounds fun my name is jackie as i've already said last name hill perry without the hyphen uh i am married to a guy named preston from chicago we have two children eden who's five autumn who is two and another baby who should be here in three weeks and so uh yeah i'm doing this very very very pregnant uh i i would love to go into labor at any point during this podcast take it to the hospital i mean that would be we can help you breathe that would be amazing to just go in now anywho jasmine what are we going to talk about today today we are going to be talking about our own spiritual heroes and i am really excited about this topic because i love to talk about spiritual heroes i think ever since i was a little girl when i was um i read the hiding place when i was 11 and corey ten boom became my all-time spiritual hero which is common so how would you define spiritual hero like a person who helped you spiritually yes the way that so the way that i related to corey in particular was her personality resonated with me which then made her acts of spiritual like her her life as a spiritual giant felt more accessible to me because her life story and personality resonated with me so somebody who has done amazing things for christ somebody who has led um an exemplary life but i think also somebody who you relate to in some kind of way as well so cory's like just the fact that she did all of these and for anybody who doesn't know who cory tin boom is woman from the netherlands during world war ii ended up hiding um jewish people in her home and being sent to a concentration first prison for a long term then to a concentration camp with her sister betsy ended up getting out living a long fruitful life if ministry died on her birthday in her 80s and so never got married never had kids and i loved her story and i loved her because i related to just the constant grappling that she did with faith her sister betsy was the quote-unquote more faithful one the one who was like thanking god for fleas in that switch because the fleas let them you know the guards were afraid to come into the barracks because they were so dirty so then the women were able to like worship god and do bible study so betsy's like thank god for these fleas and cory is more like i just hate the fleas and so i related a lot more to her in the story and yeah just ended up reading a lot of her a lot of her books a lot of her things couldn't get enough of her and she really inspired me in my own walk from a really young age um so first question is who is someone from history who inspires you guys i just read a new biography called becoming elizabeth elliott and i have to say she was kind of the first christian biography i ever read was through the gates of splendor and i don't think personality wise she and i would be alike but what i really respect about her um is just her willingness to look at life not for self-fulfillment but almost for self-death and she lived it and so i think she's a much more direct person than i would ever be but i kind of i like direct people even though i'm not always one of them but i kind of respect him like she tells it like it is she comes at you she'll say it and whether you agree with her you don't at least you know where she stands and to me she wrote a lot about womanhood but she was a really tough woman i mean she went into the jungle after her husband had been killed and she shared the gospel with the exact people who had killed her husband i mean that's so brave she took her two-year-old daughter into this tribe who is known for being a pretty murderous tribe and she for the sake of the gospel and i'm like wow you know it's kind of that but yet at the same time what i loved about this biography is it really brought out the real side of her the angsty side of her the things she was struggling with i like portrayals of heroes where they're really human and i love that about corey ten boone too you she told her her weaknesses and i find that encouraging in the sense of god can use me in spite of my weaknesses too so the fact that we're all mixed bags rather than no one here's perfect but what i also love about heroes i can look back and say she ran the race she finished it well you know and she went through a lot of different struggles like elizabeth didn't just lose her first husband she lost her second husband and then she stayed married to her third husband but then she suffered from dementia later in life and you know you see a whole life and you say okay the goal is not to do these amazing things for god but just to live faithfully and so i love that like cory tim boone didn't she would have just been a watchmaker yep in um holland holland yes i was like amsterdam somewhere she would have just been a watchmaker but when life came to a head she made the faithful choice to you know as daniel said display strength and take action yeah she made the godly choice in the life circumstances that were given to her it wasn't something she chased but when life happened she rose because of what god was doing in her to help people i just love that definitely i was thinking why y'all were talking because a lot of the people that i consider to be a hero are people i know you know um and have been able to like observe their life up close but the the main person that keeps coming to mind honestly is martin luther king and i i wouldn't have said that a decade ago i've said it as i've began to investigate him outside of what school taught me and reading his books reading beyond the you know i have a dream speech and paying attention to the things he said and seeing how much his faith and what he knew about god and the scriptures fueled his his zeal of justice and olivia alleviating oppression as much as he could because if you imagine this dude's life he was under immense stress at all times you know but he just kept moving because he knew it was the right thing to do um but he was also brilliant to do was smart he got a phd in his 20s how can that not be heroic so i just even think when you read his stuff and listen to him speak you hear someone who is highly highly educated but also humble enough to work for the least of these so yeah i think that also brings up a really good point that like representation matters with heroes i growing up my heroes were all white evangelical women i read elizabeth elliott loved cory 10 boom mary slessor another missionary amy carmichael another missionary like all of the names that i knew were names of white women who had done incredible things for god and in that i kind of grew up thinking that as a black woman who loved god i was an exception to the role and so only now as an adult have i been able to really seek out and find heroes who look like me heroes who show me that god has been working in the lives of people of every ethnicity every tribe tongue nation across time for millennia just some of their stories have been lost yep i think that's what's going to be so wonderful about heaven there are so many stories we haven't heard and we'll be recounting let me tell you what was happening here that you didn't know was happening and actually that's why i'm excited are you willing to share a little bit about what you're working on yeah i'm working on a book about black women in christian history whose names i did not know before i started researching them and who i'm really excited to introduce to other people and it's been interesting work because the things about these women are not super accessible like a lot of times people will be like can you just give me like an amazon list or can't you just i'm like no because it's going to be an 85 rare book or 250 rare book or it's gonna be read a dissertation and then find something in the footnotes and then go hunt that down somewhere else so it's it's been a treasure hunt for sure because these stories have not been told on a popular popular level i think a lot of academics know the names of these women um and that's great and academics are awesome and i'm grateful for them but bringing them to a more popular level is something that i'm really excited about i'm excited too i mean i i love reading stories and learning from people's lives and i just i find more and more especially i mean i think the reality for all of us is women is stories are less told i mean it's just the reality all the presidents are men so they everybody does a biography about a president yeah you know i mean it just happens it's not it's not like anyone is necessarily even doing anything malicious it's just hard sometimes to find people who look like you or you know whatever especially in different contexts i mean i've never read a history about black women and i'm thinking that might be why i i'm lost for words even when it comes to having spiritual heroes just because there aren't many that i know about or even knew about that whose life looked like mine for me to say oh i want to be like that that isn't to say that someone has to look like me and be like me and act like me to inspire me because obviously i have a ton of inspiration from different places yet at the same time there is a different kind of motivation you receive when you can read a book uh with someone that sounds like your grandma and say man i want to be like that when i grow up you know so i think what jasmine is creating obviously will be very helpful for the saints yeah they know hopefully it will we need them we i mean i i think there can be in our generation a little bit of a there's no heroes out there everybody's equal everybody's just messed up or whatever but i need to be spurred on hebrews 11 when there's this cloud of witnesses cheering us on in the race there's something for me looking to what someone else has withstood to say i can i can withstand too yeah we all need we need them i mean the scriptures are filled full of narratives and stories of people who have gone through all types of craziness and still love jesus despite that helps us to endure you know to look at even jesus jesus is a spiritual hero he's our god he's our savior he's our lord but he's also a hero you know and so how do you guys define hero because jackie you know that i'm always thinking for the devil's advocate listeners who are going to be like mlk really no when i said it i was like somebody tuned out of this podcast already yep yep it's like don't you unsubscribing now xyz about his life even elizabeth elliot i read some things about elizabeth elliott and jim elliott where people are like uh actually they're not heroes because xyz abc how do we respond to people who say your hero can't be insert person because whatever sin disqualifies them this is complicated and it's complicated because yes you have someone like martin luther king who made statements about the trinity uh and god while in school that are problematic right you have the reality that he was a man who stepped out on his wife you do have those realities and part of me does want to say all of our heroes are broken which is true yet at the same time i'm equally triggered when someone highlights and exalts a jonathan edwards whose past is full of you know slavery or or what he he had slaves right he had one yeah he had a slave and then he like had like a bill of sale on the back of a sermon outlined so there's this tension where it's like yeah heroes really are broken and is there a standard or is there a line to draw in the sand for what should make one hero worth following and another hero worth denying does that make sense because sometimes you do learn about things that discount the person's contribution yeah so i think about george whitfield and you know we look at into the second great awakening and we're like man george dude there's actually some real evangelical baggage that you brought into the second grade awakening it wasn't just about people being saved and also you made you like petitioned to make georgia a slave state when it wasn't a slave state before and also so then you start i think there's there's two different ways there's there's the one where it's like me and i learned this about i learned this thing about this person that doesn't directly impact the contribution that i was grateful for and so i can still be grateful for that contribution or you learn things that do impact the contribution that you thought that you were grateful for that people to grapple with because even looking into these women that i've been looking into like they're amazing and then they'll say something that's just you know you're like okay i i see that the society's thoughts about black people impacted you even though you're a black person that's crazy you know or you'll look into somebody's life and you'll see unsafely or you're looking you'll look deeper into somebody's life and you'll see unkindness so it is it's one of those which aren't yeah yeah and i also wonder what am i completely being shaped by my culture that i'm totally blind to yeah that will all look back and they'll be like oh they watched reality tv can you believe that they watch or whatever it might be i don't know you know i mean i think there are certain when i look back in history people just accepted certain things that wouldn't be acceptable today yeah and it's hard to even know how to interpret some of those things but my greater fear is what am i completely blind to today right um i just wonder you know what is culturally so blinding to me that i'm living in a sinful way that i'm so seeped in my culture i don't even know how sinful it is because we just accept it which to me adds another level of complication because is it i can accept you as a hero if there is evidence of repentance or evidence of change in thought because i think even when you read martin luther king you see there was a change in thought patterns jonathan edwards hmm yeah i mean david right like yeah right bathsheba hot mess but he came back and he was like lord against you and you only advice like moses yes peter everybody melissa could you um turn to hebrews what is it eleven is that the cloud princesses i'm trying to think of some of the names we have that are mentioned here yeah rahab's in there there's a mess um noah's in there yeah and he was drunk abraham abraham gave his wife to the king twice let me i'm like really two times father abraham i'm like i've been reading the bible through this year and i'm just like seeing all this stuff jump out and i'm like hey baby why are we doing this and then it talks about like sarah and the way that she treated hagar was bogus awful because it was her idea and then she was like mean towards her later mm-hmm and then moses killed a man yes he did yeah there's just i'm like i'm just looking at these names rahabs in here jacob esau isaac yeah jacob jacob he played i mean his brother playing yeah playing his like tricks his blind dad into giving him a blood like that's just cold blooded and they're they're called the hall of fame of faith we're not in the way and it's interesting the way that hebrews paints them because hebrews doesn't mention any of that stuff like it's just like these are the things that you did that were faithful these are the things that have stood like these are the things the stuff that melted away is dross that's not here what's here is the the gold the stuff that remained the stuff that can be attributed only to the presence of the spirit in your life and not to you is the stuff that's left over which is like that's such a hopeful picture it's incredible that's why that's what we'll be telling each other like the gold and the other will be washed yeah fully and even yeah i think about first corinthians where it talks about those stories have been included so we wouldn't set our hearts on evil as they did yeah and that's when it says no temptation has seized you except what's common to man but i do think it's helpful even to look at our heroes so to speak and learn from their failings yeah and say i don't want to be like that like there's a good lesson and even paul said follow me as much as i'm following christ or something that's my paraphrase i think it's in there somewhere but there's this sense i think with all of our heroes we follow them as they're following christ yeah but when we see them stepping outside of that yeah we we don't say i don't justify well so and so thinks this is okay so therefore i think it right right you know but i think i i do think a lot of these people that i call my heroes it is their faith like i'm looking at their faith and what it propels them to do in a world and that i can seek to emulate like following god clinging to him you know but i think with all of them we're going to have to say there are parts of their life we want to be warned by yeah yeah a hero is not a person who we're giving a wholesale stamp of approval to i love this person because everything that they did was right and amazing and wonderful i remember i um since you since you added yourself with mlk jackie i will go one step further okay um i have a malcolm x poster in my office and i had a friend who was like [Laughter] why do you have that heated man hanging up in your office but i was just explaining to my friend the reasons why i enjoyed the autobiography of malcolm x he's not a spiritual hero at all because we don't even have the same religion right um but that doesn't mean that i couldn't appreciate his thoughts couldn't appreciate his integrity in certain areas couldn't appreciate things about him so i do feel like sometimes as believers we get a little bit too caught up in wanting to have perfect pristine heroes but on our own terms so it is okay for one believer to like thomas jefferson because he was a really great thinker and he was a wordsmith and he was just a fascinating man who had an incredibly interesting life and it's okay for them to overlook certain things about him like sally hemings or his other slaves but then it's not okay for another christian to like mlk because of the inconsistency inconsistencies in his life so they do think that we tend to pick and choose the things that we accept from heroes based on what we're most comfortable with and sins that we're able to kind of look over a little bit more easily um but that's just a theory that's a great theory that i'm working on i think it's a right one um but there's more than heroes from history what are some heroes that you guys have or who are some heroes you guys have who you actually know in person someone in your life or in your past who has been a hero to you someone i would say has been a hero in my own life was actually someone i met in high school she was a teacher at public school and she ran an fca at my high school and that's really how i heard the gospel but now what i'll say she's still doing she still works in public school and one reason i consider her such a hero is because she is doing things in the public school that i think is really changing lives in tremendous ways no one would know her she's not famous she's not christian famous but she's faithful and i think that's what i look at her life she she runs this whole program for kids many of whom have no one in their family who's ever gone to college and a lot of these kids so you know they're in high school and they see no nothing in the future for education and so what she does is she has this whole system where she takes a whole group of kids to college visits um because a lot of their parents wouldn't know what to do because they didn't go to college themselves so they don't know where to take them but you have to earn the trip and the way she gets you to earn the trip is by doing your homework coming to class every day not skipping yeah she has this whole system worked out so one of the kids in the program had a 0.7 gpa just by doing the program and getting his homework done he went up to a 3.2 he had no college aspirations got a scholarship to college you know and some of it is just creating a vision it's amazing that you can do this and you can go and so i when she tells me the stories i'm like you're my hero because you're doing it quietly you're doing it within the system that you're in you're not saying public schools have to change we have to do this she just she's working within the system she has and she's making a difference yeah and i think that's kind of a hero it's like corey tim moon was in the system she was in it wasn't right it wasn't good and she rose in that moment to do what needed to be done so sometimes i think we think we have to change everything before we can do anything and for me a hero is someone who says i'm here in this moment and i'm going to do what's right yeah yeah i don't know for sure i think i figured it out so it's not an individual per se but so i have two friends uh and both of their grandmothers are super similar and i don't even know their grandmothers but i'm inspired by them and i say that because they both talk about how their grandmothers were the most faithful people that they knew and how um growing up obviously in a jim crow south and not having the same access to education uh in the same way or the same freedoms and privileges but how they were still very literate and uh what's the word were able to handle the scriptures um without even being taught the scriptures just really dependent on the holy spirit for context and for interpretation but even what they read was true to them in every single way and how they prayed all the time and how there was always a scripture on their tongue and how they always wanted their children to follow in the way of jesus and how they trusted jesus to be everything that jesus promised and how they lived this life until they died 70s 80s i guess any time i hear a story about a saint being faithful in the day-to-day that extends into the end of their days it makes me feel like that's what i want to be like i don't want to be this person who just has all these like you know books and clever phrases i just i just want my children and my grandchildren to be able to say i know jesus because i watched my grandmother and she loved him until the day that she left to me those are the heroes that like exemplify everything that i want to be i love that so and there's that integrity yeah like they're they're who they are not because they're up in front of ten thousand people but they're in the closet praying like to me that's that's a hero i mean like you can't always see that because you don't know because they don't talk about themselves and it's simple but it's powerful even when i think about my aunt who i think was a super important figure as to like the reason i know jesus like i would walk past her room i'm sure i said this before and she would be singing the psalms to herself she's not trying to impress nobody twitter wasn't no thing she had no instagram like look at me singing psalm 27. like she and she was singing it back to god those simple just worshipful acts of faithfulness are the things that stick with you absolutely absolutely i think about philip's grandmother um i don't have a super close relationship with either one of my grandmothers but phillip loves loves love loves lydia mae jones oh my god i love her name she sounds like she can cook goodness and she can and raised so many children and grew up sharecropping and all of her kids went to college and have had really successful lives i mean she just is a hard working wonderful woman without whom my husband would not be who he is today and he is a fantastic mother fantastic i mean it's it's so interesting because i grew up in an intact upper middle class family and i have a great dad i have a great mom i just i'm really blessed but when i looked at when i would have looked at all of the ingredients to my husband's household i may have thought like oh that's subpar like is he gonna be okay he's gonna make it out all right very matriarchal family you know and they just surround each other with so much love and so much support and one of the major reasons like any time anybody asks us are y'all ever gonna move out of mississippi we can't like we have too much family we have too much support and that's the kind of woman like i want to be the kind of woman who is like a magnet to her family because she's such a support structure and that really is how phillips family from his grandmother on down has always been which is something that i admire as someone who had a really intact nuclear family like the mom dad you know but as far as extended family goes didn't have that huge communal family structure so i love that the women in his family have been able to craft that and that's something that's really grown more important to me through knowing them i love that hero family heroes mm-hmm is that the way you say it familiar familial that's the better word i'm trying girl i'm next to these teachers you know trying to pull out my thesaurus uh is there a common denominator in the people who've shaped your lives like when you think about the things that stand out to you as heroes i think for me when i started working on the book um about the black women eighty percent of them ended up being teachers interesting hmm i kind of felt like bible teachers or just teachers in general teachers in general and most of them were both um like missionaries who came back home and became teachers or teachers who were sent by the american missionary association to be teachers or like mariah fearing was a teacher in the congo so like it's but a lot of them are teachers which i don't think is a coincidence and that's just the kind of person that i um gravitate towards i mean even corey ten boom had an element of like sunday school teaching you know there's just that element in the people that i that i gravitate towards i think i gravitate towards uh resolve like when you see people who are committed to loving jesus no matter how difficult it gets and that might be because i see following jesus really as a legitimate cross to bear you know it really is hard to to just keep going you know and i think as the culture progresses and degenerates that it's going to be continually harder to not only stay faithful privately but to communicate faithfulness and to exhort people to be faithful and obedient to jesus and so that i think that's what i connect with and is when i see people just unwilling to waver it's just like no i'm i'm gonna be with him you can you can throw me in the lion's den you can throw me uh in the fire but we're not gonna bow down to you sir that yeah that gets me going every time yeah i for me i think it's that it's they suffered and yet they stood firm there's something about watching someone who's walking through the fire and saying jesus is enough the waves are not going to overcome the fire will not burn and seeing it lived out and you say oh wow you know i want to be like that mm-hmm you know i i want to be you know i think of joni erickson tada oh yeah just mm-hmm and yet she was so real i mean clearly she didn't want to be paralyzed at age 17 and spend her life you know as a quadriplegic but she has lived a life saying my goal is to honor and glorify god in what he's given me and so i just i think there are certain lessons um that we learn best from people who have suffered because we know it's real there's no oh yeah i'm saying jesus is great and all this stuff yeah it's coming from a depth of experience that i can just listen to and say jesus make me more like that because i feel so soft and so weak and the one good thing i think that i look at them and i think they would all say i was soft and weak too he was strong and so that's hopeful to me yeah because i think i'm sure what's consistent in all of the people that we would call heroes is there not even necessarily knowledge of scripture but commitment to scripture yeah you know because what else will keep anybody going or have a resolve or a desire to go out and teach um and serve in a variety of ways if it isn't what i know about god via the scriptures that he's provided for me i think that's a i don't think you can separate the two you know and so maybe that's another thing that like uh connects me with them it's like oh y'all were in your bible yes yeah you you were there you weren't just looking at these little devotionals for 17 seconds and calling it a day i was showing melissa um sarah g stanley's letters last night she was a teacher sent by the american missionary association right after the civil war ended and there's not even any pictures of this woman nobody knows you know what she'll look like but her level of conviction of like i truly believe that god has called me to this hard place and not only will it be good for the people who i'm ministering to but it'll be good for me because i'll grow by being challenged and i'll grow by being in it and it's so different from the success driven ways that we normally look at christianity that we've sometimes been taught to look at christianity through um certain influencers of like come over here so that you can have my curated life and it'll be wonderful and you know this woman was like actually i'm a black woman in the north who's literally going to go to the war-torn south to be a teacher and it's going to be really dangerous and i hope that i learn a lot and that is an attitude that i don't know that i would have been able to have i i hope that i would have been able to have but goodness just being yeah being open to god's call even in hard things yeah that's good what i love about that she was kind of doing this missionary work but she viewed what it would do to change her she was humble maybe that's a key ingredient to you yeah so just a real humility that the work i'm going to do yes she was hopeful that it would save lives and that people would come to the lord through the work she was doing but she also recognized it would save her life in a way like that she would be changed by the work she was doing not just i'm coming in as the hero she didn't view herself as a hero she viewed herself as someone who needed to be changed by the gospel that she was giving to people that's a beautiful yeah it sounds like we're describing people that just live like jesus yeah look like jesus the more you look like jesus the more you're one of our spiritual hello yeah yeah [Music] all right so every week on let's talk before we go we talk about one of our favorite things this week i want to know what is your favorite genre of movie probably documentary or historical drama honestly i thought you're good i was gonna be like horror it's horror film right no i used to i used to love uh scary movies until um i got older and they started to scare me differently and i said to myself why am i doing this like what what value is there for me to go home and want all the lights on and now my bill is high that's just that don't make sense um but yeah i just enjoy learning and so i think any any documentary or movie that offers like some history and not even history like you know 1600s it could be like me and melissa were talking about earlier the documentary on netflix about the challenger like that's enjoyable for me um to just find out about stuff that's done well yes if it's raggedy i don't want to watch it that's my exact same month so that's why i was like man i'm sorry mine's definitely historical though i love watching something that tells me something i didn't know like apollo 13. i loved that movie because i'm like oh my goodness these guys make at home or october sky but i also love hidden figures when you're watching hidden figures it brings this image of you couldn't use the bathroom you had to walk like a mile to go to the bathroom yeah i mean it helps you experience it in a different way or schindler's list yeah like when you know it's black and white i don't know if you've seen it in the little girl in the pa we had to in high school yeah in the pink dress that's the only color or the red coat yes the red coat you know and it just it makes you feel history in a way that a textbook can't so i'm a i'm a huge fan fan of historical what do you think history teachers i'm gonna say hamilton here i go um i like romantic comedies historical romance anything that's like i love you i've always loved you i'm like yeah so notebook-ish yup or jane austen yeah i don't like i haven't seen notebook in years but like um yeah the new little women that just came out totally pride and prejudice mr darcy which one do you like best which i like the new one better and here's my justification because everybody who's ever disagreed with me has never read the book before watching the movies and i did the bbc version i read the book first i don't know so my opinion gets to be right because i read the book first okay i don't know what to say but i do like the bbc version but yeah like emma all those like they're great just yeah the cornier the better one of my ninth graders is like mrs holmes i'm so glad that you recommended the faults in our stars i cried so hard it's just like why am i doing this children precious it's so bad but that's what i like sorry it's okay god made us all different well thanks for listening to this episode of let's talk on our next episode we'll be talking about the holiness of god uh we hope you'll listen and subscribe through apple podcast through spotify or wherever you like to get your podcast you can check out other shows from the gospel coalition podcast network at tgc.org forward slash podcast the gospel coalition supports the church in making disciples of all nations by providing resources that are trusted and timely winsome and wise and centered on the gospel of jesus christ [Music] you