Welcome to Think Bivocally, Conversations on Faith and Culture, a podcast from

Taub School Theology at Biola University.

I'm your host, Sean McDowell, Professor of Apologetics.

Today we're here with a friend of mine. His name is Mike

Schirard. We had him on the show about three years ago to talk about a book

he's written called Relational Apologetics. But today we've got him on

because Mike you have a book called Why You Matter and we're going to jump

into this book but I really appreciate you coming on. It's my pleasure Sean thanks.

Now we're in a little bit of a unique setting I teach full-time at Talbot at Biola, but also high school part-time at a Bible class.

And we're actually recording this with about, I don't know, 30-plus high school students in the background.

So if you hear laughter or maybe a bell because this

is a school, we're just going to keep on going. But we're glad that you're with us. let me just start you've written this book called

why you matter you gave me the chance to endorse it and it's simple in the sense that you

take these really profound ideas and just kind of break them down for people I think there be a lot of aha moments for people where they say I get it

But tell me the story a little bit behind the book. Why write a book about why you matter.

Yeah, the title makes it almost seem like I wrote it in response to current issues like

Black Lives Matter, the Blue Lives Matter, the All Lives Matter, and though the book is certainly relevant to that, the idea for the book came probably four years ago or so. I was sitting in a Sunday school class with people my own age and I started to notice that from one to every person in the

room they had the very difficult time of thinking outside of the box of I am that which I do as opposed to I who I am is

fundamental to my nature and the fact that I made in the image of God and so I

and these are people that I grew up with in a sense they've been going

to church their entire life yet they had abandoned a biblical understanding of what it is to be

human and where our value and our significance is to be found.

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