The Dr. Jeff Show Ep. 87 – Dr. Jeff and Gary Schneeberger Part 1.

Episode 87: Summary & Transcript

Disclaimer: Please note that this is an automatically generated transcript. Although the transcription is largely accurate, it may be incomplete or inaccurate in some cases due to inaudible passages or transcription errors.

Episode Summary

In this unique episode of the Dr. Jeff Show, host Dr. Jeff Myers is interviewed by journalist Gary Schneeberger about his new book Truth Changes Everything: How People of Faith Can Transform the World in Times of Crisis. Dr. Jeff reveals that he wrote this book while battling cancer, viewing it as potentially his final work and describing it as his “manifesto” – similar to Paul’s last letter to Timothy. The discussion centers on defining truth as a person (Jesus) rather than just intellectual propositions, and explores why truth is under attack in modern culture, particularly among young people where 75% avoid discussing their beliefs to prevent offense.

A shocking statistic emerges: only 9% of churchgoing, born-again Christians now hold a biblical worldview (down from 19% just one year prior), highlighting the urgent need for believers to not just know truth intellectually but to act on it. Dr. Jeff emphasizes that throughout history, Christians who believed Jesus is truth have transformed the world through their faithful actions, especially during times of crisis, and calls for believers today to do the same by living out their faith authentically rather than keeping it private.

Episode Transcript

Dr. Jeff Myers (00:02):
Welcome to the Dr. Jeff Show podcast. This show’s available on Apple, Google, Spotify, Edifi, Liftable, wherever you get your podcasts, and I know I asked this every week, please don’t be upset with me for asking it once again, but please go to wherever you get your podcasts and give a good rating for the show if you like it, because those ratings then work into the algorithms for each one of those companies pushing the show higher and higher in the number of people who can hear it, and we want more people to hear the truth. This is the show where I’m interviewing thought leaders to show that worldview changes everything.

Today’s show is going to be a little bit different. I’ve invited my friend who’s a journalist, Gary Schneeberger, to interview me about my new book, Truth Changes Everything, because I’m super excited to share with you the insights and the stories that I learned as I wrote about how to stand for truth in a time when truth seems to be coming a part at the seams. Welcome to the show.

Gary Schneeberger (01:05):
These are going to be the best words I say all day. I’ve been waiting to say these words. Dr. Jeff Myers, welcome to the Dr. Jeff Show.

Dr. Jeff Myers (01:20):
Gary, it’s a fun turnaround.

Gary Schneeberger (01:24):
Yeah.

Dr. Jeff Myers (01:24):
Turnabout is fair play, as they say. But you get to guest host my show today because we’re going to talk about a new book.

Gary Schneeberger (01:32):
Yep, your new book, and let’s start at the beginning there, because this is not your first book. It’s not your first exploration of theology and how it impacts life, but there’s something special about this one. Your motivation for writing this one is different than your other books. Talk about that.

Dr. Jeff Myers (01:52):
Yeah. Well, this book is called Truth Changes Everything: How People of Faith Can Transform the World Even in Times of Crisis. And I wrote it as I was going through a battle with cancer and I’ve shared that with the people who are listening to this program or watching it. I’ve shared about that experience.

But if you’ve been in a life changing situation like that, your timeframe becomes very compressed. Wow. I may not be able to do those road trips that I want to do with my wife. I pictured us in this sprinter van going down the road with the windows down and the music blaring. I might not ever be able to hold my grand babies. Everything changes in those moments when you realize what I write now might be the last thing I ever get to write. So what will I write about? And this topic for this book came out of that.

Gary Schneeberger (02:55):
And I’ve read it and it seems like it’s not so much a call to action, there’s a part of that, but it seems almost like it’s your efforts, your exclamation point on your life and career and ministry, right? I mean, it’s a manifesto of sorts that if things had turned a different way, this would be right. What’s in the Dr. Jeff Myer’s time capsule?

Dr. Jeff Myers (03:23):
I’ve been doing scripture memory and recently memorized 2 Timothy. I’ve just been so compelled by it because it’s the last letter of Paul to his protege Timothy. They might not ever see one another again. Paul knows that he’s going to be executed in Rome. He’s gotten a reprieve and has been able to fully preach the gospel, but he knows his time is drawing close. In this situation, the Lord has given me healing. I am now one year in remission from cancer.

Gary Schneeberger (03:57):
Praise God.

Dr. Jeff Myers (03:57):
But the motivation stayed. It didn’t fade away. I want to recognize that every day is a gift and that standing for truth is the most important thing that we need to be focused on at this moment.

Gary Schneeberger (04:14):
Before we can explore how truth changes everything, we have to understand what truth is and that’s where your book starts. But before we get to the definition you lay out in the book though, we have to understand that truth is in peril. We have to understand that it can change everything, but we have to fight for it.

Dr. Jeff Myers (04:35):
I do think truth needs to be fought for. Now in the book I talk about truth, capital T, which is the idea that truth exists and can be known. It’s not easy, it’s not always apparent, all of the truth, but it can be known by us through reason and through revelation.

Gary Schneeberger (04:54):
And one of the things you say is that it can be known but not fully.

Dr. Jeff Myers (04:59):
Not exhaustively.

Gary Schneeberger (05:00):
But you say it can be known truly, correct, which is great.

Dr. Jeff Myers (05:04):
That’s really important to understand because especially postmodern critics say, well, nobody can know truth exhaustively, therefore it can’t be known at all. That’s not accurate. You can know things without knowing them fully. We do that every single day of our lives. We don’t know everything about the traffic situation, but we know what it’s like in our particular part of the highway.

So it’s contrasted with the idea of truths, small-t, the idea that truth cannot be known by us. So all we have are our social constructions that resolve through our own experiences. So it’s truth versus truth. Capital-T truth versus small-t truth, that’s the core battle of our time. And the reason I say it’s a battle is because the balance is now tipped. More people in America now believe that truth is up to the individual, then believe that truth exists objectively and can be discovered.

Gary Schneeberger (06:04):
Right. It’s an internal thing rather than an external thing. Right?

Dr. Jeff Myers (06:09):
Right.

Gary Schneeberger (06:09):
It’s their view.

Dr. Jeff Myers (06:10):
This few truth capital-T says, seek the truth. The truth, small-t viewpoint says, speak your truth. And that’s what we hear people talking about all the time.

Gary Schneeberger (06:22):
All the, yeah, absolutely. All the time you write, not only that truth can be known, but you write that truth isn’t just thoughts or facts. Truth is a person which really adds to the level of depth of understanding and the things that you talk about in the book. Who’s that person that represents truth?

Dr. Jeff Myers (06:47):
Gary, you’ve hit on what I think what I thought when I wrote the book would be the single most controversial claim that I make. And it turns out that people really resonate with it. But I state it this way. Truth exists and it’s not merely a set of logical propositions.

(07:06):
Although it can be propositionally stated. It’s not merely a mathematical model of reality, although we can model things in such a way as to reflect what actually exists truth as a person, it’s Jesus. Jesus said in John 8:32, if you follow my teachings, you will know the truth and the truth will set you free.

And there are two really preachable things about that passage at least. The first one is what truth is there in the Greek, it’s the word aletheia. It means reality. So Jesus is saying, you will know the truth. You will know reality, not if you follow my teachings, then your truth will become clearer to you.

(07:49):
It is, you’ll know reality. And the second thing is knowing reality sets you free. Now, just pause on that for a second. Anyone who has struggled with anxiety or depression or addiction knows the very first step to getting healing is knowing reality. You have to stop pretending that the fantasy world you’ve created for yourself is the real one. That’s the only path to healing and that comes directly from Jesus. The truth. The truth will set you free.

Gary Schneeberger (08:24):
And because that is a difficult concept for people to deal with, it’s hard to get them over that hurdle. I mean, we run into that all the time with people who believe the truth. Small-t, S on the end version of truth. It’s hard to engage with some of these folks sometimes. And your book does, I mean one of the things that you focus on is helping people navigate through that, right?

Dr. Jeff Myers (08:54):
Yeah. Well, I’ve written several books. I’ve got a lot of books, as you can tell just by, this is actually room number two. There are two rooms in my office. The other room has even two or three times as many books as this.

So I’ve read a lot and studied a lot, and I had to make a decision as I was writing, do I just write another book blasting relativism? Do I write another book giving the propositions for why truth claims are valid? And I thought, nope. I’m going to go back. If truth is a person, if it’s Jesus, I’m going to go back and ask what kind of world would emerge if people who believe that Jesus is the truth really lived that way? And it turns out that changed for the whole course of history.

So most of the book is just telling stories, largely stories that have not been told about people who were Jesus followers, who believed that Jesus is the truth and they never knew they were going to change the world, but they did through their faithfulness even in times of great crisis, especially in times of great crisis.

Gary Schneeberger (09:58):
And that’s an important point to emphasize about the book is that, it’s not knowing the truth intellectually, even in your heart isn’t enough, right? Acting on it being truth doers, not just truth knowers. That’s really the key. Those are the folks who you talk about in 75% of the book and those are the people that you would like to exhort who read this book. How important is it to not just let it sit in your head or your heart, but to walk it out?

Dr. Jeff Myers (10:29):
Yeah.

Gary Schneeberger (10:30):
Yeah.

Dr. Jeff Myers (10:32):
That’s everything. Yeah. That if you say that, I know something intellectually, but it doesn’t affect my life. You can’t really say that, it’s got to somehow work its way out. It can’t just be, I want a little more Jesus in my life. It’s got to be, Jesus at the center of everything makes sense of everything else.

Gary Schneeberger (10:57):
Even people who do know capital-T truth, even Christians who are there, they find it hard to act on that. They find it hard to talk about that. You have a statistic in the book where you talk about, I think it’s 75% of young people don’t want to talk about what they truly believe if they think it’s going to hurt or offend or upset others. Why is that such a pernicious lie? This idea that in order to talk about truth, you have to sacrifice being kind to people?

Dr. Jeff Myers (11:30):
Well, we do know that if we talk about truth, it can lead to difficult situations. The apostle Paul assured his protege, Timothy, all who want to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted. So we know that that’s coming and wow, just don’t want to really go there. But what ends up happening is we somehow think that we can form a better life by refusing to say anything at all, and it’s the vast majority of Gen Z who will tell us in these studies, oh, I don’t say anything at all so as not to offend anyone.

In fact, if you do offend someone, that’s what’s wrong. The wrong is not the wrong. The wrong is that you offend somebody by telling them that what they say or think is wrong. And it is in the larger population, I’d say two thirds of people in this country are basically common sense, straightforward, good people who they’re not radicalized, but half of them say they don’t say anything so as not to offend anyone, that’s their regular approach just to be quiet, right? Truth has to be articulated to be understood as truth.

Gary Schneeberger (12:49):
Right. You quote a lot of statistics, not a lot, but really relevant resonant statistics in the book, some of which Summit has commissioned. When you see some of that, what you just talked about, these sort of alarming trends, does it frighten you? Does it sadden you? Does it motivate you? How do you react to that when you see things that say people don’t want to speak what they know to be true because they’re worried about hurting someone’s feelings, there’s only one way to do it.

Dr. Jeff Myers (13:28):
Gary, I think all of us are narcissists in relation to time that we assume that our age is the only one that has ever experienced anything like what we’re going through. Writing this book and looking back at history helped me gain a larger perspective because I’ve found myself thinking, is this really the end of time? Surely things are worse than they’ve ever been, and the truth is they’re not.

(14:01):
Nor is it true that individual people like us make no difference at all. We do make a difference. We can make a difference. Truth matters most in times of crisis speaking, it matters most when things are the roughest. I don’t know if that really answers your question, but it feels to me, we sometimes get.

It’s like we’re squirrels in the middle of the road. A squirrel runs out in the middle of the road, there’s a car coming both directions. What do they do? They freeze. Their subcortical signal system shuts down, and that feels like what’s happening in the age that we’re living in now, that we kind of found ourselves in the middle of the road, we’re completely shut down. We can’t go this way or that way without getting run over. So we just freeze, right?

(14:52):
Falling out from that sense of being frozen, moving past the sense that there’s nothing that we can do is going to be crucial toward moving forward. Psychologists actually have a term for this. They call it psychic and numbing. If people get so scared, they get so scared that they can’t figure out what to do, they won’t do anything at all.

And I think the church sometimes contributes to this and how so? I don’t need to just be critical of the church, but when you are in church and you hear people talk about this is the worst thing that’s ever happened, surely we must live in the end times right now because things have never been this bad on the whole history of the world and they can’t possibly get any better.

Christians tend to shut down in that situation and just say, well, we might as well just go out for, we might as well just go out for brunch afterward and have a good time and maybe we’ll try to be nicer to people and maybe they’ll figure out possibly that we’re spiritual as a result of our being nicer, but we don’t have any sense that we could really do anything that would make a difference.

I want this book to help us locate our age in the context of all of history. We are in tough times, no question about it, but we are not in the toughest times that have ever existed in the history of the planet. And people in those times acted decisively to know the truth and to speak up for it and it changed everything.

Gary Schneeberger (16:29):
Fascinating point. And it offers hope to people who are listening to this right now who maybe feel that way, who feel like taking action, trying to do something as like rearranging deck chairs on the Queen Mary. It’s not going to make any difference. How is it that things, why do people think this is the worst it’s ever been and is this unique to our age or have ages before us? It’s just like every generation thinks this is the worst it’s ever been. I think that may be part of it.

Dr. Jeff Myers (17:06):
I wonder if every generation has thought that the apostle Paul said make the most of every opportunity because the days are evil. He didn’t say, because you might live in evil days. He said, because the days are evil. What’s the one thing we can know as the constant? The days are evil. What’s the variable whether we will make the most of every opportunity? That’s the thought of the people in the early church. That’s the thought of the people in the middle ages. That’s the thought of people. Now, we don’t live in any other time and none of us know the future.

(17:45):
So we tend to assume that things are as bad as they’ve ever been, and it’s hard to imagine that they could possibly get any worse. So that’s what I mean by sort of the narcissism of time that we all tend to embrace. So what’s the antidote? The antidote is to go back, look at history and ask what were things like in the past? How do we locate ourselves not just in our own cultural moment, but in all of history?

So let me just give you a quick example of this. Sure. When I went through cancer and I went through, I guess I was 54 or 55, 55 years of age, I thought, this is not fair. I had a grandparent who lived a horrible lifestyle and didn’t die until age 91. If all that exists is the physical world, then your birth to your death is the only timeframe you can possibly have. So I felt then I’ve been ripped off for 35 years of life at least.

Gary Schneeberger (18:56):
Wow.

Dr. Jeff Myers (18:58):
But if you take an eternal perspective that starting with my birth for all of eternity, this life is so minuscule. We can do the same thing but sort of in reverse. We can look at our lives and say there are thousands of years of human history that we can look back at and locate our lives and our age in the longer scope of things. It gives us a clearer perspective.

Gary Schneeberger (19:26):
Someone like you podcast listeners know your story, they know your wisdom, the things that you’ve shared, the guests you’ve had on the questions you’ve asked, all of that stuff. I imagine there’s a bit of hope that comes to them and knowing that Dr. Jeff Myers feels the same way that they feel, right? I’m not trying to put you on a pedestal, I’m just saying this can hit anybody. This idea that life isn’t fair, this, I mean, those kinds of things that can freeze some people, like the squirrels crossing the road, that is extraordinarily common, even among those of us who know truth, the capital T, right?

Dr. Jeff Myers (20:04):
Yeah, I think so. I hope so. I hope that this show, the Dr. Jeff Show podcast, has been helpful to people in grappling with those realities. We’ve had a lot of guests who talk about very intellectual things, a lot of guests who talk about very personal things, but one of the themes I hope runs through the whole thing is we’re being vulnerable. We’re going to talk about the things that we really think and feel, the things that we struggle with because that’s how we’ll relate to each other. But that’s also the reality. If I only talk about my great ideas and never talk about the reality of the situation, I’m not giving the whole truth.

Gary Schneeberger (20:49):
With a capital T.

Dr. Jeff Myers (20:50):
With a capital T.

Gary Schneeberger (20:52):
We are talking about the book truth changes everything, and we’re spending a lot of time talking about just what is truth, what is the concept of truth? Is it knowable? What does that mean if it is knowable? Why do you think people default to the truth’s perspective that you described this idea that my truth is the rule of the day. Does culture influence that? Does our personalities influence that as a mixture? Why is it that the truth’s perspective is so prevalent and growing?

Dr. Jeff Myers (21:30):
The answer I want to give is my answer as an American. So I want to clarify that right up front. I know we’ve got a lot of people who watch or listen to this show in Hong Kong and Singapore and Malaysia all over the world, but as an American, my sense is that people like the idea that truth is up to the individual because we’re individualistic. Well, that’s an American value. I am sovereign over myself, man, you can’t tell me what to do. This is my life. You do you, I’ll do me. It’s sort of the American mindset.

But what’s happened is that that sense of individual liberty, which hopefully also is paired with a sense of individual responsibility, has now bled into the rest of the culture saying, well, if I decide what is true for me, then we can’t really know anything to be true about science or math or anything else. There’s actually a math curriculum that has come out now that says that insisting on knowing the right answer is racist, really an imperialist, yes. You can’t know the right answer because everything is culturally situated. There is no truth that exists out there to be discovered, kind of where we find ourselves at this point in time.

Gary Schneeberger (22:56):
And the thing I love about, and you do this a couple of times in the book, which I love, you just made a statement that people say there is no truth out there, it’s not discoverable, and then you make the same point in your book sometimes where you say that in itself is a truth statement to say that you have to believe the truth exists or you wouldn’t say there is no truth, right?

Dr. Jeff Myers (23:18):
There’s a famous British philosopher named Roger Scruton, and he kind of phrased it this way, and again, I’m paraphrasing, but it’s people who say there is no that morals are relative, are asking you not to believe them. So if somebody says, well, you have your truth, I have my truth, your response to them should be, well then why are you telling me what’s true for me? Right?

(23:49):
If somebody says there is no such thing as truth, they’re claiming at least one thing to be true, that there is no such thing as truth. So there are probably at least five ways that we can get a really good sense that truth actually exists, and that’s the first one of them that truth rises. You can’t even talk about truth without realizing the words we’re using unless I’m assuming that they’re as meaningful to you as they are to me. There’s no point in even having the conversation.

Gary Schneeberger (24:16):
Right.

Dr. Jeff Myers (24:18):
I’ll test you.

Gary Schneeberger (24:19):
What are the other ones that you talk about in the book? So it’s, truth rises. What are the others?

Dr. Jeff Myers (24:23):
Well, the second one is that words have meaning, that words are meaningful. If we talk about justice, I hear people all the time say morality is relative. Then they’ll say, but such and such is unjust. What do you mean by justice? We have to assume that the words we’re using bear a strong relationship to the thing we’re talking about. Now. The words are not the same thing as the things they refer to, right? The word table is not the same thing as this piece of wood that is sitting in front of us.

Gary Schneeberger (24:55):
Yeah, I can’t put my cup on the word.

Dr. Jeff Myers (24:57):
On the word, right? Yes. And some people might use a different word. If I use, we talk about a chair. If you were in France, they wouldn’t say chair, they would say then you would, but we still know we’re talking about a physical object that exists. We assume that the relationship between words and the things to which they refer are meaningful. That’s the second thing. The third thing is that things and ideas have essences.

(25:26):
So there is an essential aspect to this table that we understand what it is, how it fits into our existence, what it is to be used for. We might have some sense of how it was made, but it presents itself in a similar way to everybody, no matter what culture they are a part of, no matter what their historical experience in life has been.

So things and ideas have essences. Justice is an idea, and it’s weird in the philosophy classes that I took going through all the way from the bachelor’s degree, master’s degree, doctoral degree, the philosophy classes I took, it was interesting when we were trying to develop proofs to explain the existence of things, it’s actually is harder to prove the existence of a thing than it is to prove the existence of an idea. But ideas, justice, liberty, truth, all of these kinds of things, they have essences. They reveal themselves in a similar way to all people, which is an indictment of the idea that the only interpretation is what we have, that our perceptions are all that we have.

Another one is that there is a knowable difference between facts and opinions. Now, if I were to say water boils at 212 degrees Fahrenheit at sea level, somebody might say, depends on the atmospheric conditions, whatever. But it wouldn’t be appropriate for the person to say, look, you beg it. Keep your opinions to yourself. That’s not a reasonable response because I’ve named a scientific fact. We do know that there are opinions as well, but we sometimes believe that everything that isn’t a historical or scientific fact is therefore an opinion.

(27:21):
But that’s incorrect and we know it if we just thought about it briefly. So here are two statements, statement A, it is good to care for abandoned puppies, statement B, it is good to torture abandoned puppies. We know there is a knowable difference between those two statements, which means that moral facts we suspect then actually exist. So those are some of them.

I think the idea that we can make rational arguments is another aspect of this. We can know certain things to be true. Your teachers expect this of you. If you were to be asked on a chemistry test, explain the chemical processes of combustion, and you said, well, I don’t know. I guess God does it. You would not get a very good grade and you shouldn’t because you need to make rational arguments in order to support the viewpoint. You can’t just say, well, it’s magic, or the spirits did it, or whatever.

You need to be able to make rational arguments, but the fact that we can and that our rational arguments then makes sense to other people when we frame them in words because they produce essences that are consistently observable. All of those things back up to the idea that we should have a very strong suspicion that truth actually exists.

Gary Schneeberger (28:46):
What you’ve just said there in that last point, I think is especially instructive to Christians who, because as you define it truth, I mean Jesus is truth, and there can be right from the Christian perspective, well, God’s ways are unknowable, so that’s true because God made it true, and that in the marketplace of ideas doesn’t necessarily wash, and you make that point in the book what you just said, truth is knowable. It’s also explainable in most cases. In many cases. Again, maybe not completely but truly.

Dr. Jeff Myers (29:23):
That’s right, and we use language to make sense of that, but other things demonstrate that truth as well. If you look in the history of nations, and again, sometimes you have to take the long sweep of things, don’t just look over the past five years or the past 50 years, look over the past thousand years, then you could see the long flow of things. If you look at nations where the word of Christ was more welcomed and accepted and freely communicated, those nations were among the first to develop the idea of religious liberty.

(30:00):
There hasn’t been a lot of religious liberty in the history of the world. There have always been nations where people of one religion would persecute people of another religion, but in the United States of America as an example, religious liberty developed as a core principle. What a lot of people call the first freedom, because it is the first of the ones mentioned in the Bill of Rights, which were the first amendments to the Constitution.

But countries that have religious freedom also have greater levels of political freedom. If you are willing to give people the freedom to believe what they want and you’re willing to give them the freedom to express their political viewpoints, then you create a freer society in every other area. Countries that have religious freedom are more likely to have political freedom, are more likely to have economic freedom, and you can map this out.

You can literally look at this as a factual aspect of the world that we live in, which it’s interesting. If the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed. There’s a whole lot to that idea of freedom, but you’ve got to look backwards in history to be able to see how ideas flow. Who were those people who made that difference? That allowed us to think differently about the world, to bring more freedom and create a self-healing government in the process?

Gary Schneeberger (31:30):
And listener, don’t worry. We’re going to get into who some of those people were. We’re kind of doing this in two parts, right? We’re talking about what truth is, and then we’re going to talk about in the second half of this discussion, those very people that you talked about, and this is another chance for me right now to say something that’s going to be really fun. You are listening to the Dr. Jeff Show. I’m Gary Schneeberger, the guest host, and our guest is Dr. Jeff himself, Dr. Jeff Myers.

Dr. Jeff Myers (31:57):
Thanks for having me on your show today, Gary. I really appreciate it.

Gary Schneeberger (31:58):
It’s great to have you here. Dr. Jeff, you wrap up the what is truth section of the book, which is about its first quarter, it’s first 25% with a shocking statistic as it pertains to truth. Now, this is in the book pollster. George Barna found that 19% of churchgoing born again Christians hold a biblical worldview in the context of our discussion. That means they hold fast to the truth of Jesus. Barna does that study every year, and 19% was when you wrote the book, which it takes a while to get a book written and get it published and all of that. It was 19% since then new data came out. It’s now 9%.

(32:41):
Continues to drop, right? That speaks to just how precipitously and perilously, how important this book is to change the things that need changing because we are slipping fast to lose 10% in one year. Shocked me when I saw it in the book. I actually thought it was a mistake until I realized, no, that’s how long it takes to write a book and things have changed. It is going down. We as Christians, it’s our responsibility. It’s our opportunity, and we’ll talk about that as we talk about the individuals that you cite in the book who have done that throughout history. But it’s our, I mean, we can’t shirk our duty in that area, can we?

Dr. Jeff Myers (33:20):
No, we can’t. Well, people go to church or don’t go to church for a variety of reasons. Some people who do show up at church and say, I’m a Christian, what else would I be? I’m not Muslim, I’m not Buddhist, I’m a Christian, but I go to church. Why? Well, because my friends were there or because I feel like it’s something I ought to do, or I was just raised that way. Or, hey, everybody who’s a leader in my community goes to church.

You get all these kinds of reasons, and some people will say, I need more God in my life. I need some spiritual motivation and this helps me. It makes me feel better about my life, helps me maybe serve other people a little bit better. None of those are bad reasons for going to church, but at the core is this problem.

You imagine 10 people in the pew, nine of them are there asking, well, one of them is there asking, what does God reveal through his word? Through the words of the pastor? That must change my life this week. The other nine are asking, how is the pastor telling his story in a way that informs me about how to better live my story? That’s a huge difference from the way Barna is framing that it used to be.

(34:40):
Where more people would say this thing about sin is real, and it’s not just other people. It’s me. Good and evil as Snits and said, cuts through every human heart. So I need to be humble, but I need to repent and I need to be taught. I need to be rebuked. I need to be corrected. I need to be trained in righteousness if I am going to be complete and equipped for every good work.

Gary Schneeberger (35:05):
Now, I know some of the folks at Summit besides you, and I mean you have a strong team here. You have a wise team here. Your book comes out and around the same time that your book comes out, Summit releases Now We Live, a small group or individual study curriculum designed to change that number. That’s not a coincidence.

I don’t know that you guys planned it that way, but the fact that both of those resources come out at once, I think one, it’s hand in glove, one helps the other. Talk a little bit about now we live as we sort of get close to wrapping up this section of what we’re talking about.

Dr. Jeff Myers (35:46):
So we have the book Truth Changes Everything. Then we have this new course, Now We Live. And people can go to nowwelive.com and find out more about it. People asked us, how can my church help people grapple with what a biblical worldview is and how it relates to everything, worldview, truth, reality, Jesus society. So we put together this course.

I involved a lot of my friends who people would be familiar with. Kurt Cameron is involved in it. John and Corey Cooper from the band Skillet are involved in it. Lee Strobel, who’s the Christian apologist and the author of the bestselling book, The Case for Christ, Alisa Childers, and Christopher Brooks, who’s an urban pastor from Detroit, many, many others, the 12 of us all got together, filmed interviews, and those interviews have been compressed into 13 minute segments. They’re so compelling. In fact, it turned out to be beautifully evangelistic.

Gary Schneeberger (36:48):
How so?

Dr. Jeff Myers (36:49):
It just makes you want to know more about the Lord. Even if you’re a skeptic or a seeker, you realize, wow, the way these people talk about their faith is not abrasive in your face, punch you in the nose kind of thing. But it’s so compelling that it just makes you want to know more. So a lot of churches, thousands of them already, this product is brand new and it’s just getting a huge launch. Thousands of churches have already decided, we’re going to do this with our small groups. It’s hard to get small group curriculum.

Gary Schneeberger (37:23):
Absolutely.

Dr. Jeff Myers (37:23):
And churches are saying, we want.

Gary Schneeberger (37:25):
For free.

Dr. Jeff Myers (37:25):
For free, and we want people to have a biblical worldview. So here’s how we can do this. Every week you would watch this 10 to 13 minute video and then have a discussion. The discussion questions are all provided for you. Then you just begin this whole process.

Well, does a biblical worldview actually exist? It’s Jesus really who he said he was. How do we know that truth is really real? What about reality? And if all of this is true, does it actually affect the way I live in society? Those are the sorts of questions that come up in this course, and the goal is to double the percentage of people who attend church who have a biblical worldview.

Gary Schneeberger (38:04):
And the great thing about that is the goal is to double. The scary thing about that is that if it doubles from what it is now, it goes back to what it was last year. So I mean, there’s a lot of work to be done in the churches and among Christians to dive in into these kinds of resources in order to understand Jesus and his ways and the truth that he represents that we’ve been talking about for the balance of what our conversation here.

Dr. Jeff Myers (38:33):
It’s the obligation of every generation to refresh people’s ability and desire to seek truth.

Gary Schneeberger (38:42):
Explain that a little more. I mean, how does that play out for what you do at Summit, let’s say that?

Dr. Jeff Myers (38:48):
Well, we realized that this is now since I attended Summit Ministries, we’re on our third generation, so I’m Generation X. Then you have the millennial generation. Now we have Gen Z. With each generation, we have to make the compelling case for a biblical worldview in a way that makes sense to people in that generation. You can’t say, oh, well everybody born before this date is this generation. Everybody, it bleeds over.

But there are absolutely differences. The way we use technology in our society changes the way we think. So what makes sense in the language of Gen Z that allows us to take God’s truth, which is always stable and unchanging, but communicate it in a way that makes sense to them. It’s like a linguistic problem.

If I went off to another country, let’s say I went to Korea, the Korean language is very different from the English language. If I want to communicate something, I have to either learn Korean or find somebody who knows Korean and English both very well and can help me translate. That’s the job. Every generation has to do that. We cannot assume that because people 150 years ago really grasp the truth that therefore it’s still just as obvious to people today.

Gary Schneeberger (40:11):
And that’s one of the things I find so compelling about the book is that you talk about historically how Christians have changed everything, changed the world, and it goes back to the 13 hundreds, and yet at the end of each chapter, you offer insights and wisdom for people to do it now, today. So it is bearing out exactly what you just said in the book.

So that said, we’ve covered what truth is here in our conversation and why it’s falling out of favor, if you will, but that’s not the end of the story as I just sort of intimated. Truth changes everything. Spotlights, believers throughout history who have done that very thing, who have changed everything, who, believing that truth could be known, acted on that truth to change the course of history, and now we can do the same thing today.

Dr. Jeff Myers (41:03):
Wow. So we get to tell stories.

Gary Schneeberger (41:06):
The next go around, we get to tell stories, and that will be the next episode of the show. But as we close this initial discussion, we have to know what truth is before we can talk about how truth changes everything. That’s just a logical thing. Even I know that, and I’m not very logical. One final thought on this part of the discussion, on this idea of what truth is, who truth is, how it can be known, what’s a final thought that you want to leave with listeners?

Dr. Jeff Myers (41:36):
Well, if it’s correct that truth exists and that truth is a person, then how we communicate about truth is one of the essences of truth itself. So truth in the context of relationship becomes super important. That’s why it’s really important to understand the stories of people, real people, quirky people, weird people, sometimes cranky and grumpy people. All of that, just real people making a real difference becomes super important. And then it also becomes really important how we communicate about truth in our own time.

Gary Schneeberger (42:17):
Right? And that will be what we talk about the next time. Strange for me to say this with you here on the Dr. Jeff Show.

Dr. Jeff Myers (42:25):
It’s been fun to be with you, Gary, on this show. Thank you. Alright. I want to thank my friend, journalist Gary Schneeberger, for coming to the Dr. Jeff Show today and co-hosting or hosting or guest hosting or whatever it’s called. I hope you enjoy the conversation about the book, Truth Changes Everything, and I hope you’ll take a look at it, get copies for yourself and for your friends. This is an opportunity for us to share the message of truth in a way that makes sense to people, that produces the facts and the stories so that people’s lives will really change. Thanks so much. We’ll see you next week.

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