Just Like Us: Digging Deep into Biblical Characters

Just Like Us: Digging Deep into Biblical Characters

Dec. 17, 2024

Host: Dr. Jamie Mitchell

Guest: Phil Tuttle

Note: This transcript is taken from a Stand in the Gap Today program aired on 12/17/24. To listen to the podcast, click HERE.

Disclaimer: While reasonable efforts have been made to provide an accurate transcription, the following is a representation of a mechanical transcription and as such, may not be a word for word transcript. Please listen to the audio version for any questions concerning the following dialogue. 

Jamie Mitchell:

Welcome again, friends to another Stand in the Gap. Today I’m your host, Jamie Mitchell, director of church culture for the American Pastors Network. I know that we’re about a week or so from Christmas, and I would guess that many of our listening pastors are working overtime, cranking out their Christmas messages. I know at this time of the year I put forth an extra effort to be creative and comprehensive to share the amazing message that God left heaven put on flesh to come and rescue us from eternal wrath. What a great privilege, an awesome responsibility is. One of my favorite types of preaching to employ during the Christmas season is biblical character studies within the Christmas narrative. You have Mary, Joseph, Herod, Elizabeth, Anna, Simeon, the Magi, Shepherds, and of course the baby Jesus. And over the years teaching on real Live people of Christmas made it relatable, personal for our listeners, but why stop at Christmas?

The Bible is packed with some amazing figures to teach on. Some are heroic, some are villains, some scandalous others peculiar. And with all due respect, some are downright weird, but it is not just the preacher that can benefit from doing a character study. It should be a regular part of all Christ followers scriptural diet. And today I want to discuss the importance value and the powerful impact of lifting people out of the biblical text and applying it to our lives. The title for today is just like us digging deep into biblical characters and to help us today is someone who, well, in my point of view, has mastered the art of teaching and presenting biblical characters. He’s my friend, the president of Walkthru the Bible Ministries and return guest here on Stand in the Gap. Phil Tuttle. Phil, welcome back, and an early Merry Christmas, my friend.

Phil Tuttle:

Hey Jamie, Merry Christmas to you and Chris, as well as all the team there at American Pastors Network. Hope you have a very meaningful celebration this year.

Jamie Mitchell:

Well, thanks Phil. And same to all the walkthrough the Bible team. Probably many of our listeners don’t know this, but over the past 10 years or so, Phil, you’ve made it a practice of every year researching, developing and producing a major work, a part of your ministry at Walk Through the Bible on a biblical character. Phil, how did this become a major focus of your teaching ministry and why do you think it’s so important for believers to consider character studies?

Phil Tuttle:

That’s a great question. There’s a near term answer to that, which I’ll give you in a minute. The long-term answer is I have always loved biographies. We found a note somewhere in going through my parents’ stuff after they both went on to heaven and it was the librarian from sixth grade rebuking my parents for letting me obsess over Dewey Decimal system 9 21. That’s biographies. And they’re like your child. This is all he wants to read. He has no creativity for fiction, no patience for it. I mean, if we don’t stop him, he will only check out 9 21 biographies. So long before I felt any sense of call to ministry, I’ve just always learned so much from the men and women of history. And then when I became a Bible teacher that transferred over pretty quickly. When I became president of walkthrough the Bible 17 years ago, I started getting input.

We have 10 regional directors around the world who lead our work in about 140 countries. And I said, what other resources would you like? And Jamie, they split down the middle 50 50, half of them wanted just good discipleship tools. The other half wanted something for leadership development. And I thought, great. This is why neither president in the past asked these people what they wanted because they want different things. And then gradually, I think the Lord showed me that you can both do both leadership development and overall discipleship. One of the best ways to do it is through the characters of scripture. So we tried the first one and it just took off. So we did another and another and didn’t really ever mean for this to become a series, but I think now there’s 10, maybe close to 12 of these, and they’ve got a list of who they’d like next. So I think we’re just going to continue this for a while more.

Jamie Mitchell:

And Phil, it’s really interesting. It’s really true that a person’s story, when you tell something about a real person, it connects with people. I was just speaking here at the Christmas time, I was speaking about the 400 years of silence when Paul writes about and the fullness of time and explaining that, and I was telling people about Alexander the Great and how he cared for the Jewish people and all that. And of all the stuff I talked about, people came up to me and said, I never knew that about Alexander the Great. It’s really interesting, isn’t it? How when we tell people’s stories, people’s ears perk up, isn’t it?

Phil Tuttle:

Yeah. We know that as pastors and Sunday school teachers and Bible study leaders because whenever you use an illustration, maybe it’s an athlete and what they’re going through right now, maybe it’s somebody who’s famous in the news, you watch people perk up. Well, that’s exactly what happens when we preach on a character. Only the whole message makes people perk up because there’s a person to person life on life connection, and all of a sudden the centuries in between melt away and we go, I’m a whole lot more like this person, whether it’s a man or a woman than I ever knew. I see strengths that we have in common. Ooh, there’s that fatal flaw. I’m, I’m struggling with that thing too. So I just think it’s the easiest way of all to show, not to make the Bible relevant, the Bible is relevant, but to demonstrate the relevance of scripture by getting it off the page and into our lives, through the pathway of somebody else’s life.

Jamie Mitchell:

Fact of the matter is that God has chosen to place these stories and particularly these people’s stories in God’s word. There were myriads of people who lived throughout the centuries myriads of people who God could have highlighted and put their stories in the Bible, but he has chosen these people in particular and has illustrated or at least amplified their stories enough that we can understand them. And so it is worth our while not just to read the Bible for information, but read the Bible and lift out of the pages these people and begin to fully understand their story. Friends, I think this is going to be a fantastic program for us today. As we break for a few moments, you need to message your pastor or your Sunday school teacher or another believer and tell them to start listening today because you’re going to learn something today that I think is really going to help you.

Now when we return, Phil is going to take us through his process for selecting and considering these biblical characters to study. Don’t go away, stay right where you are, stay listening and be back in just a moment for the next segment of Stand In the Gap today. Well welcome back to Stand in the Gap. Our focus today is studying and teaching the scriptures and specifically biblical characters. Phil Tuttle from Walkthru the Bible Ministries is our guest and Phil has produced a series of amazing teaching on various characters in the scriptures, and we’re going to talk about them. Phil, I want to examine how you find a character to study and some basic steps that we could take into our own personal study. First, how does a character get your attention and what drives you to become interested in that certain person in the Bible?

Phil Tuttle:

Great question. Even before that, Jamie, I think it’s important to know I don’t do these series and we should not do series like this just because they work well, Paul, in one Corinthians 10, starting in verse 11 says, now these things happen to them as an example. They were written down for our instruction on whom the end of the ages has come. And a couple verses later as that familiar verse that says, no temptation has overtaken you except as is common to man, but God is faithful will provide the way of escape that you may be able to endure it. And so their Paul is really building the case for teaching on Bible characters, not primarily as a history lesson, but as a mirror that the Holy Spirit holds up in front of our own faces and lives. So I just think that’s the place to start.

In terms of individual characters, this has really changed during the decade or so that I’ve been developing this series. The first one or two were just because they were characters I loved, and there’s nothing wrong with that. The very first series we did was called Crucible, the Choices that Changed your life forever and it focused on the life of King David. David has always been one of my favorite characters. I mean, he’s a hero, and yet he also made some major mistakes. I mean, not only was there adultery with Bathsheba, but then his trying to hide his sin, he conspired to have Uriah killed. There were other collateral innocent victims in that his humility, his teachable spirit, we look at six forks in the road, you’re going to be a man of image like Saul or a man of character like David. You’re going to face your Goliath with fear or with faith.

Anyway, there’s six of those forks and I just thought, this is going to really be good for leadership development, but every Christian also needs to learn from the life of David. So it just started with what are some of my favorite characters. After that, we did Joseph, old Testament, Joseph, a course called Detour Finding Purpose When Life Doesn’t Make Sense. We looked at Joseph and his family, Joseph and his work, Joseph and his choices, Joseph and his nation, Joseph in his heart, Joseph and his legacy. And at that point, that’s pretty much all I was doing was thinking, who am I most excited about? Who’s taught me the most? Over time though this has developed, that there’s another layer in that process to not just say, well, we better balance old and new. We want to get some women in there as well as the men of scripture.

Try to come up with the right proportion of that. But I think about halfway through this series, a whole other component came in, which is to say, what is going on in our world right now that a lot of people are struggling with? And one of the things I learned from Chip Ingram, the previous president that walked through the Bible, is he would play what he called Bible jeopardy. Jeopardy is a weird game. My daughter and I watch it almost every night if I’m home and in jeopardy, they give you the answer and you have to figure out what is the question. That’s why all your answers have to be phrased as questions. And Chip would say, you know what? Galatians is still the answer, but people are not asking the same question as they were when Galatians written. It’s the same principle but not the same question.

We’re not debating meat sacrifice to idols like in one Corinthians 13 or one Corinthians, the whole book, but we are asking related questions to that of how do we live distinctively as Christians but also function in the world around us? So anyway, applying that same kind of logic, one of the things we run into all over the world is a split between Orthodox believers and evangelicals between Catholics and Protestants. And we wanted to do something that began to build a bridge with that. And so that was one of the motivations behind chosen when God calls your name about the life of Mary. And the surprise of that was how well it’s been received really across all denominations. And I’ve had Catholics, even priests and nuns say, we don’t learn from Mary’s example because we adore her and she’s so different than we are, that we forget that she actually probably struggled with doubt and confusion, and you’ve opened up her life in a fresh way.

And to most Protestants or evangelicals is like, well, we don’t adore her, we ignore her. We just kind of awkwardly mention her as part of the Christmas story. But you don’t want to elevate her too much. And whether we adore her or ignore her, we miss the point that scripture says you should just explore her, learn from her example. And so that got us started on asking different questions. We did revolution on King Josiah because there’s great division across generations, and that one is subtitle, how millennials Can Change the World. We need to do an updated version of that about Gen Z now. But the truth of the matter is God has huge plans for younger generations, and that was in fact what turned the whole nation back to himself. So when we started asking that question, I think Jamie, that led us to some different Bible characters that aren’t on the top 10 or top 25 list of our awareness, but have huge lessons to teach to the church right now in our generation.

Jamie Mitchell:

Phil, I love that because that’s how we should look at the scriptures, but also we can ask that in our own lives, God, what is happening in my life right now and was there a Bible character who was grappling with the same things or facing the same challenges? And what can I learn from them? Phil, let me take a little deeper on this deeper. Once you decide on a character, are there any insights that you have gleaned by doing all these different characters over the years of some best Bible study practices? Do you study a biblical character different than you would study any other passage of scripture?

Phil Tuttle:

In some ways, yes, and in some ways, no. My mentor, Dr. Howard Hendricks used to always say, it’s just impossible to become a Bible teacher without first becoming a Bible reader. And with all narrative passages, this is true, but especially I think with Bible characters, I read their stories over and over and over before I ever start outlining, before I ever start trying to figure out how am I going to teach this to somebody else. Lots of times I’ll use different versions of the Bible so that it stays fresh. There’s sometimes when we did a series on the book of Ruth, well there the universe is pretty clearly defined, right? It’s four chapters in the Book of Ruth. There’s other characters like Joseph. I mean that’s like Genesis, what, 37 through 50. It’s a massive amount of content, let alone somebody like Moses who there you’re dealing with Exodus, Leviticus, numbers, Deuteronomy Plus all the other times he is mentioned even in the New Testament.

So I’ll start with a concordance or thankfully now we’ve got Bible software for free. You can do this online. Just put in the person’s name and find all the references where he or she is described. You got to be careful with people like Joseph because there’s more than one of them. Same with Mary as well as other characters. But define the universe and read the verses around it, read the chapters and just start scribbling all over the place on a piece of paper. We did a series a few years ago on Catalyst, which was about Barnabas. It’s all about encouragement and the subtitle of helping others pursue their purpose. You have to look for Barnabas. He’s just hidden in the cracks of scripture in the book of Acts tucked in there between Simon Peter and Paul and the other characters that we talk about more so isolating reading over and over and over.

And then I just start jotting down impressions of what were their strengths, what were their weaknesses, what does God say about them? Don’t ever skip Hebrews 11, the Hall of Faith, because how God summarizes that individual’s life ought to guide us in what we emphasize when we teach on them. Yeah, they were people of faith, but how did they demonstrate their faith? So that would be the starting point is to just read scribble, scribble. What that means is you sure can’t be starting this like I used to some Sundays. These are not Saturday night specials. You got to get out ahead of this, especially if you’re planning a whole series, not just one message, you got to work several months ahead. But it’s a joyful thing to study these characters. And then don’t be surprised, especially if you ask them if the Holy Spirit doesn’t start letting you see things on TV or in magazines on the news where you’re like, oh man, that is like this character or that person is ignoring everything we’re talking about. And then of course along the way, the spirit of God will go, let’s not talk about somebody in the news. Let’s talk about you, Phil.

Jamie Mitchell:

Hey, Phil, hang on to that thought. We’re going to get back to some of these characters, but Phil’s also going to share with you a great opportunity you’re going to get from walkthrough the Bible. Come back in just a moment. Well, we’re talking with Phil Tuttle, the president of Walks through the Bible Ministries and Teacher on a video series that they have produced on the biblical characters. Now, Phil, before we slip away here, I want you to tell our people more about how they can get their hands on these series and the products and things about walkthrough the Bible, but also before we went on the air here today, you shared with me about an amazing offer that walkthrough wants to give to our listeners today.

Phil Tuttle:

Yeah, great. So by the way, Jamie, feel free to interrupt me anytime because I get fired up about this because most people want to just know, tell me about the next series, and they don’t give me a chance to talk about how to do this themselves. So I’m sorry if I got a little bit long-winded in that last section. I just love sharing this with other pastors, teachers, communicators. You can get any of these biblical character courses through our website, which is just walkthrough.org, W-A-L-K-T-H-R-U, spelled the short way walkthru.org. And then you just look in resources or small group curriculum. We have the DVD or you can stream them through our app. That’s probably the easiest way to get them is just go to the app store and look for walkthrough the Bible. And there you can stream them. We also have the PowerPoint available if that can help you. I don’t think that’s listed in our website, but if you, you know somebody at walkthrough like me, I can hook you up with the PowerPoint too, which will streamline your prep.

Each of these courses are four to six lessons, so they make nice little miniseries, pretty easy to hold an audiences attention for six Sundays or six Wednesdays or whenever you want to do it, you can stream them through our app. We’re a generation behind on our website, but we’re getting there. You can order the DVDs through our website and soon you’ll be able to stream there. But right now you can stream every one of them in this series through our app and they’re real affordable. But here’s the deal. For the A PM listeners today, if you will email me, I will send you a QR code that then works where you can stream any one of the courses that you want for absolutely $0. And I just believe if you give one of these a try, you’ll probably fall in love with this methodology and you’ll come back and you’ll purchase, and that’ll keep our ministry going here and around the world.

But I want to give you the first one for free. So if you’ll email me your contact information, just Phil PHIL at Walkthru W-A-L-K-T-H-R u.org, phil@walkthru.org and say, please send me the code for one of the biblical character series. If you’ve got a specific one in mind, that’s fine, but the code will work for any one of them that you choose through our app. So, download the app, but send me that email to phil@walkthru.org and you can test drive the first one for absolutely free. And I hope this unlocks a new joy in your teaching and your preaching and even just sharing with your neighbors. These are great conversation starters.

Jamie Mitchell:

Well, Phil, that is such a gracious and amazing offer, and I need to make a disclosure, and that is I’m one of your loyal customers. I’m not only a former walk through the Bible instructor and your personal friend, but every year I purchase these character studies for my own edification, but I also use them with the people I minister to on a regular basis. And with that in mind, I want to maybe salty Oats a little bit of one of the series that I want to encourage your people to consider, and they probably wouldn’t have considered it. But here’s what I want you to talk about, Phil. A few years ago, you put a character series together on the person of Ruth, the Old Testament character. And I got to be honest, I wasn’t really too hyped up. I wasn’t excited. I said, man, of all the Bible characters. And then I got it and I started watching it and I was totally overwhelmed and it was just an amazing story and study. And though I knew the story, the applications that you brought out were amazing. And what I found Phil in talking about it is that it impacted both young and old. How did you come up with Ruth and tell us the little backstory behind that and some of the things you learned from her life?

Phil Tuttle:

Oh man, Jamie, I’m so glad you asked me about that one because I was thinking before when we were talking about how do we choose these? Oh man, I wanted to talk about Ruth and I didn’t, so I’m glad I’m getting two now. This is one of those series that grew out of current events. If you look at the world around us, there are more displaced people right now in our generation than at any time in history. Those can be technical refugees, those can also be people who aren’t classed as refugees because maybe they haven’t left their own border. It can be Ukrainians who’ve had to move from the east part of the country to somewhere in the west. They don’t always show up in the statistics, but there are more displaced people than ever, ever, ever in history. And some of this is just the mobility of our society.

I mean, if there’s a divorce, all of a sudden one of you is displaced. You’ve got to find a new group of friends. If you go to college in another part of the country. I mean, my kids both went up north from Atlanta up to Illinois, and I mean, they’re like, dad, they drink Pepsi-Cola up here, not Coca-Cola, and it’s cold outside. What is the deal? It was cross-cultural for them. Displacement, a job can displace you. So I thought, who in the scripture was displaced? And there’s actually bunches of people, but I settled on Ruth, and you’ve got the double, you’ve got Ruth and her family leave Bethlehem, though it means house of Bread. The famine hits there and they go to Moab and they’re displaced. And then when the famine ends, Ruth returns home now as a widow, she’s a single mom. By the time she goes home, she’s lost both of her sons.

She’s got two daughters-in-law, one of them, Ruth goes with Naomi. I said, Ruth earlier, I meant Naomi. But Ruth goes home with Naomi. And the fact that the book is named after Ruth rather than Naomi just shows God has always had all cultures on his heart. And we just traced through that book. I mean, how did Naomi lose home? How did she lose hope? How did she start to find favor and then finding hope simultaneously as Naomi’s having the cold coals of her faith be reignited by God’s spirit? God is also drawing Ruth to himself for the first time. This isn’t the God of her people, but she’s finding faith. They’re both finding home, and this is a nonpolitical look. The minute you say immigration, you can get blocked on social media for even that word. Some of our ads didn’t even go through because it looked like it was going to be too political.

It’s not political to say, what does God say our responsibility is to those that he brings to our shores, to our countries? How should we think about them? And oh, by the way, scripture describes each of us as refugees, and we’re not just beggars who found food when we evangelizing, telling others where to find food. We’re also displaced. People alienated from God who found home, and we’re sharing that message of how to find your forever home. So I’ve been shocked. This is translated into Russian, it’s taught throughout Ukraine. It’s taught in the surrounding countries that are just being overwhelmed by refugees because of that conflict. It’s translated, it’s taught live all over the Middle East in Arabic. And again, I didn’t know, we think we know how God’s going to use these series when they develop them. This one we called it way far short of the plans that God actually had. So Jamie, I’m glad you’re a fan of that particular series because that was just a labor of love. I probably learned more about that. I had no idea how current that book is.

Jamie Mitchell:

I think Phil it is both. When I got it, I handed it to some youth pastor friends of mine, and I said, you need to teach this to your young people. I said, well, why is that? I said, here is a woman who made a commitment to God and she said, I’m going to follow through. Your young people need that. And this, I showed it to some seniors who I work with, and I showed them and their application was totally different. They saw somebody who was losing things left and right, and they were relating to that as somebody who had lost a spouse or had lost their home or now had been told they needed to move to a senior citizen facility by their kids because they needed to be closer and that they were somewhat of a problem in their life. And so what was really interesting from my use of this material is that it didn’t really matter who listened to it.

God, by his Holy Spirit took these teachings on biblical characters and applied it right to their life and right to their heart and friends. That’s the power of biblical character teaching, and I hope you investigated take advantage of this opportunity that Phil has giving you. Now, when we finish up in our last segment, we’re going to look at some New Testament characters. We’ve been talking about the old and maybe Phil will reveal who the 2025 character might be. I don’t know if we can get it out of them, but you come back for our last segment as we continue our focus on learning from biblical characters here at Stand in the Gap Today. Well, I hope you’re excited about the importance of Bible study, but also to push you to start looking at biblical characters and gaining insights. I once heard this that a biography is the story of what you did with your life.

A testimony is the story of what God did in your life. That’s what we’re looking at. We’re not just looking at biographies, we’re looking at testimonies of God working in people’s lives, and Phil Tuttle has helped us. Phil, in our final minutes here, I want you to look at another character quickly, and that is a New Testament person, somebody who, well, when you came out with this, I needed this series myself, and that was Peter. How was the Apostle Peter? How did people respond to it and why did you do it and what did you learn from it?

Phil Tuttle:

Yeah, most people can tell you one or two things about Simon Peter’s life. They can tell you that he walked on the water, but then he took his eyes off Jesus and start to sink, and they can tell you about his denials. The truth of the matter is those fit in the overall arc of his life. They’re not the beginning and they’re sure not the end of it. And so it’s a six part series called Chiseled. Subtitle is Becoming the Masterpiece God created you to be. I’m not a big art person, but my wife and I a few years ago, got to see Michelangelo’s David in Florence, Italy. And Jamie, I stood there for an hour, maybe closer to two hours. I can begin to imagine drawing or painting maybe, but how do you sculpt something out of a huge piece of stone? And that just became the metaphor in my mind for what God was doing, not only in Simon Peter’s life, but in each of our lives.

And so we just trace his life from their first meeting, a lesson called to follow, and then we look at willing to risk. He did. He was the one who got out of the boat. He’s challenged to grow. He has some failures along the way. God is chipping off the rough edges to reveal the beauty on the inside of his character to accentuate the strengths motivated to serve. He’s really confused. I mean the whole who’s going to be the greatest thing? Simon Peter is right in there in that discussion. He probably spoke first loudest and longest most times, and then he’s allowed to fail. He does deny three times. Everybody else may deny you. They may choke during prime time, but I never will Lord. Well, he did not once or twice, but three times. And then thankfully the last session restored to lead that three times, just like the denial three times, Jesus says, Hey, do you love me?

Well, you know that I love you, then feed my sheep. I still have a plan for you. The cool part though is the setting of that is almost identical to their first meeting with a supernatural ketchup of fish. Jesus is cooking fish on a fire. He doesn’t need what we bring, but he invites us to participate. There’s so many lessons for men and women in the life of Simon Peter, and this one may be more than anyone else. God just turned me inside out during the preparation for it. And after we videoed it, I don’t even remember what I said until I watched it later. It was that just much of just flow from God’s internal working in my life. And I think we captured something really special when we recorded it.

Jamie Mitchell:

Again, these are on DVDs. You teach for about 25, 30 minutes. There are booklets that you can use for discussion. You could just take the material yourself and allow it to speak to your life and then be able to teach on that character. But certainly there’s just powerful lessons. And again, especially that Peter Phil, that came out right in a place and a time in my life that I needed it and God used it. Now, I’m not sure if this is going to be an exclusive APN reveal today, but we are really interested. You crank out one of these characters every year. Who are you going to do this coming year and why did you choose this person?

Phil Tuttle:

Yeah, there’s one just about ready to be released any day now, actually. We’ve already shot it, and the workbook is under production now. It’s on Elijah. We realized we had not done a prophet yet, and prophets are really big in God’s plan. If there’s ever a generation where we need a clear word from God, it’s now. And Elijah in a lot of ways is the Prince of the Prophets, and specifically though chose Elijah. The subtitle is Choosing Faith when you want to give up. And again, this was requested by our global leaders. A lot of them are living in such tough situations. India is our largest field of all. We teach face-to-face, not me, but the people who we train, who train others, who train others, teach well over a million people a year in India. And India is now in the top 10 most difficult lands to be a Christ follower.

And so we wanted to bring a message of encouragement when we want to quit, how do we keep going? And that’s the story of Elijah again, many Christ followers. When they hear Elijah, they can only tell you that. Yeah, he fought the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel and he won. It’s awesome. He’s a victor. Well, the same guy in the next session that we look at is spiraling into deep depression and the path that he takes. I mean his isolation, his distorted perspective, his just physical and emotional and spiritual exhaustion. I mean, that comes right out of my biography, not just Elijah’s. And so we’re already, I’ve taught it live, I don’t know, probably half dozen times. I’m blown away by the response, especially the next lesson where God restores Elijah and still has a ministry for him. Kind of parallels what you were saying about Simon Peter and then the last session where he anoints Elijah as his successor.

I’m almost 67 now. We’re talking about succession planning that walked through the Bible. It’s not just me. It’s true with a lot of our board members, our regional directors, our global partners. This is an inevitable part of life, more certain than taxes is death. And so preparing us to transition, well, I think that’s a big theme in the scripture. So yeah, that course is called courageous, and the subtitle is Choosing Faith When You Want to Give Up, and that can be one of your choices to stream it when you email me at phil@walkthru.org. If you want that course, we can surely get that one to you or any of the other ones. And Jamie, I’m glad you explained, you’ve got the option. You can either take what I taught and then make it your own and teach it, or you can show me teaching it on the video. You can use the workbook. Those are real affordable for small groups, so you can either deliver the content yourself or let me do it. But the workbook is loaded with great discussion questions because that’s really how people get it off the page and into their lives. So please email me at phil@walkthru.org and just give me your contact information and I’ll shoot you out a QR code and you can download any one of these that you want for free off of our app. I hope a lot of you will do that.

Jamie Mitchell:

I can’t wait to get my copy. I can’t wait to share it with many pastors. 3000 pastors in the last couple of years have left the ministry. They are living Elijah’s. Listen, friends, you want a great way to start the new year, dig into a biblical character, maybe like Elijah. That’s why we did this today, to encourage you in your personal walk with God and to build up the courage that is so needed today and we see in these biblical characters. Till next time, live and lead with courage.