So I imagine if I could get in a time machine and go back to find the 23 or 25 or 26-year-old version of me and take myself out to breakfast.

Back then, I was a young preacher. I... and take myself out to breakfast.

Back then, I was a young preacher.

I had been a college English teacher.

I started teaching while I was in graduate school.

And while I was in graduate school, my wife and I started a little fellowship group,

and one thing led to another, that became a little church.

And eventually, when I was 26, I left teaching to just work with the church full-time.

But if I could go back, knowing what I know now, I imagine what I would tell that version of myself with long brown hair and a black beard, and now the wrinkly bald guy version of me with glasses would be sitting at the breakfast

table and say, listen, man, I got to tell you

something. Every week you prepare a sermon, you get up every Sunday and you try to inspire and

persuade and confront and encourage and challenge a wonderful community of people to become their

best possible selves, to grow into their full potential, to live by

Jesus' core teaching, meaning to love God and their neighbor and themselves.

Every week, you're getting up to do that, but you're working under a false assumption.

Your assumption is that you just have to prove something to them rationally.

You have to show them a Bible passage and logically interpret it.

And then when they see it, when they understand this interpretation, then they'll get it and they'll live in line with it and their

behavior will change. Everything you are doing is appealing to their brain, to their reasoning,

to their logic. And I don't know if the 25 or 26 or 28-year-old me

would have understood this.

I might have said, yeah, of course, that's what I'm doing.

...