This episode is brought to you in part by The Apologetics Guy Show, the podcast that helps you find clear answers to tough questions about Christianity.

Learn to explain your faith with courage and compassion.

Join Moody Bible Institute professor Dr. Mikhail del Rosario at apologeticsky.com.

I started sensing a call to ministry really early on, say about age 12.

Russell Moore is the president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention. He's the author of several books, including most recently the Storm Tossed family.

My home church pastor was someone who said, okay, well, then you're going to preach at a youth

night two weeks from now, and I'll teach you how to do that.

It was awful.

It was awful.

I mean, it was this whole canon, but not the whole canon fitting together. It was just the whole canon scattershot in eight minutes sort of thing. I was so nervous that I vomited before I went out, vomited after in the little room off the baptistery. And if I look back and I look at most of the things that I was worried about in the span of time over, say, junior high, early high school, a lot of it had to do with fear of public speaking.

Would I ever be able to get over that fear? And I could even, I didn't take the Bible I had at the time and just look at the highlights

that I had and see, that's what I was talking about. But I looked around and I just couldn't

see models of people who were, I knew lots of people in ministry, including in my family.

I was nothing like any of them. And so I couldn't find models of people who...

Because of the fearfulness that you weren't like that?

No, no, no, no.

Just because of the...

I was in a tradition of very revivalistic, very emotional to the point of screaming, crying, sort of preaching. And very sloganeering kind of,

really dispensationalist prophecy chart sort of thing. Really, everything is about a mood that is

struck in just a right way at the altar call, all of that sort of thing,

that I just, that wasn't me and I couldn't be, and it was also very anti-intellectual

in a way that I would feel guilty for reading in front of people because it was almost like,

...