This Way Network: Nina & Jefferson Drexler

Mike:
You don’t have to vamp for me today. I’m here.

Joel:
Okay. All right.

Mike:
I almost wasn’t here, but I made it.

Joel:
I was talking to Matt, your guy there wearing the Superman shirt. So apparently, flies for truth, justice, and the American way, and then he also make sure that you’re taken care of. That’s pretty good.

Mike:
It’s really nice to have a team like this. It’s happened organically.

Joel:
That’s cool.

Mike:
How do you know the will of God, right? How does a person determine the will of God? Joel, you’re a Christian. It’s like, we should be somehow determining the will of God for our lives. How do we do that?

Joel:
Well, I was always taught that-

Mike:
It’s a deep question, right?

Joel:
Yeah, 95% of God’s will for you is spelled out in his word. It’s not all about how special you’re going to be. It’s pretty clear that, 95% of it, this is what I want you to do. I want you to be obedient in these different things and different ways to live for him. And then the other 5% should take care of itself one way or another.

Mike:
Right.

Joel:
Right.

Mike:
The Bible very clearly lays out how to live. Purity. In one of the passages I was doing today in the earlier show, Bible Every Morning, I guess everybody knows that I do Bible Every Morning, but it was talking about … I wrote it down. Where is it? Bring holiness to completion. Bringing holiness to completion. What does that mean? Like purity, right? Living pure and loving others. Being good and clean in your personal life and then sacrificially looking around and seeing how to bless others. That’s the will of God for your life.

Mike:
But then we are all called to something specific. And how do you determine that? And the way I think about it, at least if young people come up to me that want to work in the business that I work in or get advice or whatever, I’ll say look at what you like to do. And maybe it’s the thing you do when time passes and you don’t notice time passing. You really enjoy doing something and you look up and it’s hours and hours have gone by. That could be related to what you are designed for and if there’s a career associated with the thing that you get fixated on and it doesn’t feel like a job. Sometimes it’s God just putting in you the desire of your heart. He created you with a desire, follow that.

Joel:
Right.

Mike:
So I don’t even remember why I went on that tangent. But how are you?

Joel:
Doing good. Doing well. How are you?

Mike:
I like that you look way more professional than I do when you have your setup.

Joel:
Oh, well.

Mike:
You have that nice microphone in front of you. You’re not with cans on your head. You sound good.

Joel:
Well, it’s funny. It’s one of the things we do around here in our studio, that’s kind of what we sell and it causes great consternation to the video professionals around me that these days people are fine with either a Skype interview with horrible sound and looking up some of the…

Mike:
Or low quality.

Joel:
Or low quality. And they’re like, “What did I study? What did I work all these years for?” But at the same time, we do have a certain clientele that wants a good look. I’m not a good looking Hollywood type guy like you, Mike. I’ve got to have all the good lighting and the …

Mike:
You don’t want a baseball cap backwards.

Joel:
I’m a little shiny. I need all the help I can get. You can just throw on a hat backwards and you’ll have …

Mike:
Well, true. That’s the only prep I do. I put on a black shirt. I almost always wear a black shirt and then just a hat if I have to, if I get lazy and can’t do my hair. Actually note to Matt, producer Matt, for some reason, I always end up on this side of the screen, but I’m supposed to be on that side. Yeah.

Joel:
Oh, wow.

Mike:
This is what it’s supposed to be.

Joel:
Hey, what is this voodoo you’re doing? I just switched.

Mike:
You know what, I wave my hand and things happen.

Joel:
That’s right. That’s true.

Mike:
We were talking about that, the team, the group of people that are part of this network that, I mean, you know what, it’s like to have a team and I’m so grateful that Christian Podcast Central and you at your studio, those are separate kind of things. They’re individual, but they work perfectly together and they work perfectly with what we’re doing here. So I’m glad I get to hang out with you every other week for a half an hour and get updates on what’s going on in your life.

Joel:
That’s cool.

Mike:
But do you want to talk about any current events or we could go in any direction you want to go this morning,.

Joel:
Current events. Well, I didn’t clear anything with our Ministry of Truth, so I’m not sure what I’m allowed to say. I don’t know anything, other you want to talk about. It’s been kind of a boring week, hasn’t it?

Mike:
Well, did you see what happened in Ohio and Indiana yesterday or the day before.

Joel:
I was in Indiana last week. What happened?

Mike:
They had a bunch of primaries.

Joel:
Oh yeah. I did hear that. Yeah.

Mike:
There was like a 22 and 0 number is what I heard. Have you heard that number, what I’m referring to? 22 to zero.

Joel:
I did. I heard that.

Mike:
That’s two states. That’s just two states, right?

Joel:
Yeah.

Mike:
And so multiply that by, well, not multiply, add 48 more. And that’s happening in a lot of those other 48 states as well. We’re in the midst of this radical paradigm shift, right? A dramatic paradigm shift, I guess.

Joel:
Yes. Both ways. It’s funny, I’m of the generation, I’m a little bit older than you and Jefferson and guys your age, and I don’t know if your generation did this or not, but for mine, it was big to say … We were Cold War babies. We grew up in this very well defined two world, the First and Second World Conflict. And the question was you hear all the stories from the big, bad Soviet Union or China or whatever.

Joel:
The big story was people are worshiping in a church and in comes men with guns and saying, “Anybody here who doesn’t want to die for worshiping God, get out.” And then the people who are afraid leave and then the men put their guns down and they worship with the people who stayed and weren’t afraid to die. And the thing is if your faith was tested if we had some kind of authoritarian communist thing, would you die for your faith? Would you be one of the ones that ran out of the church or would you be one of the ones that stayed? And my parents’ generation, World War II generation, that could never happen in America. Never happen.

Mike:
Right.

Joel:
Why not? Because we would see it. Everybody would see that kind of authoritarianism, that kind of thing happening. And no one would put up with it because we are Americans, we believe in freedom and our principles. But this is what my generation always talked about.

Mike:
Well, it’s uncanny. Yeah. I mean, I came in at the tail end. I was alive when the Berlin Wall came down. I’m like, “What’s going on? What’s all this stuff?” And aware of those landmark moments in history. But the thing I’ve been developing, right behind me, the project that took place in the Ottoman Empire, the story that happened in the Ottoman Empire. When I study what the government did, because it was a constitutional Republic. The Ottoman Empire in 1908 decided to abide by a constitution that had been written 70 years earlier, or not 70, maybe it’s 40 years earlier. A constitution that was written about 42 years prior in 1876. And they ignored it. The Sultan had it written just so that the West would get off his case. He didn’t abide by the constitution.

Mike:
But in 1908 political factions within that government said, “We need a constitutional Republic.” In 1908 constitutional Republic with laws and order and minorities that have rights or that are oppressed. That was the case and there was an oppressed minority that there’s a long history of the animosity and fake news and accusing this and that, that was a heated hotbed of political discord in that constitutional Republic. And then when World War I, the war end to all wars broke out, those in power who were on one side of the political argument took all their power and took those guns. One of the laws that they had already passed was it was illegal for that minority to own guns.

Mike:
Now I shouldn’t say that word here on YouTube, but the there’s other YouTubers that don’t even use that word but the parallels between making it illegal or difficult to have something that you can defend yourself with. And that happened and that made it easy for the government like you say, to come in and say. And it was a religious and ethnic cleansing that happened in World War I. It was at the time, the most modern culture. It was Istanbul and all the big cities. Buildings that are still standing today were built in that time. So it’s not way back in the past. How could such a thing happen? Well, you got to pay attention to prevent it from happening. I think more and more people are paying attention and that’s the whole.

Joel:
Yeah. And you know, my thing is on my podcast or whatever, I don’t talk a lot about pure politics. I think we discussed this before. I am interested in that statistic that you said 22 out of 22, but I don’t get into that. I feel like my calling is, or my perspective is how do we, as a church respond to this? And the thing I always say to anybody that complains, if the church gets two into politics or two into one side or another that person responsible for that statistic is not the person I would choose as my pastor or as whatever head of the local seminary or whatever it is. But with the state of evangelical leadership these days and church leadership when we see someone like that fighting what is so obviously evil. And we see our leaders caving to that and not fighting anybody that complains. Any pastor, I hear complain about that. I say, “Well, what are you doing? What leadership are you doing?” I only see caving and compromising with what is so obviously evil.

Mike:
The path of least resistance is this frustrating thing. It is see the path of least resistance.

Joel:
But the opportunity, and I’ve said this on Podcasts before, there is a ripe, ripe harvest field for the church and for Christians. Though, the people that are pushing for this worldview that we’ve seen being so destructive in the past and that my generation warned about. People can see how, obviously, first of all how crazy it is, disassociated with reality. That people who aren’t Christians, non-religious people can see how crazy that is.

Mike:
It’s evident, impossible to conceal.

Joel:
If they have any sense at all this whatever political affiliation they had, it’s breaking through that, it’s breaking down that. People are saying, wait a minute, these people are nuts.

Mike:
Yeah. Nuts. Wait, established science, settled science is like, what?

Joel:
No. And they’re in power and they see where they’re taking our country. If the church, and if Christians could just minimally oppose that and just offer up saying, “This is what we’ve been telling you for all these years. This is what us, mean ugly, conservative, Christian types, the stereotype, this is what we’ve been telling you all along. See?” And that’s all we have to do is stand for that-

Mike:
Yeah. Just point them to it.

Joel:
… people will see us as people with potentially with answers to this, or I’ve heard people say there’s even atheists now are saying, or people that on the far left of the spectrum are saying, this is what, all those crazy people in the eighties and nineties, all their slippery slope arguments are coming true. I didn’t think that, I thought these people were nuts way back for people who remember, people who have memories, but we don’t have memories in our society today, right?

Mike:
Like, oh, I’ll never go that far. It’ll never go that far. Are you kidding? You can get up to eight and a half months in now. That’s not a human.

Joel:
Not only it could never get that far. It’s gone beyond the limit that we ever imagined. I never imagined some of the things that are coming. I used to be a public school teacher. I’ve been in the belly of the beast. I’ve know what a lot of these people believe in. I didn’t see something of these things coming. So that’s more my perspective. People wonder why people are being too caught up in politics or we can’t… No that’s kind of what we have to do. We have to have an answer to what’s going on and we can’t give into it. We can’t put the square peg in the round hole, square peg Christianity in the round hole of that worldview. We have to stand against it and say, “No, this is,” we have to be the ones standing in the face of the insanity.

Mike:
It’s a mean fact.

Joel:
It’s good soil. It’s a ripe harvest here, whatever you would want to call it.

Mike:
What’s a little bit curious is because obviously I work in an industry that is completely to the left, right? Like I work around people and there I have godly and politically some middle and right leaning people that I… A few that I know about, but I don’t know how many, because you’re not open about those things. But then also at my church, there’s one pastor, one of the two. There’s one main pastor and there’s another pastor there that has political views that are like, “How can you hold that view?” And I’m like, “When something like this draft opinion from the Supreme Court comes out or is leaked out. And in that’s like answer to prayer.” Right. That’s what it feels like to me. Right. It’s like, oh, oh, oh, oh, like answer prayer.

Mike:
That’s something that I’m saying, that’s a good thing. Right? It’s like the good thing, that decision is a good thing, but it’s this divisive hotbed issue. And in my church, we should all be rejoicing now that things are moving in a good direction. But even among Christians, I’ve heard people say, “Well that’s a choice. That’s a decision, a private decision.” It’s like, that the terminology has seeped so in that the church is being affected by the culture of the world, rather than pushing back exactly on the world.

Joel:
The world has salted the church instead of assaulting the world.

Mike:
Yeah. Right. But when things go bad, like the economy that affects everyone, people start waking up more and more. And I think we’re on the verge of just real, incredible revival. Like you’re saying, it’s like, well, here’s an anecdotal example of what you’re talking about. This group, we have multiple volunteers that are part of this launch of this way network. And I’d say at least half of them, those that I’ve talked to in depth are either recent converts to Christianity or recently rededicated their lives and are start taking it seriously. And it was also November 3rd, 2020 right? So a lot of them they took… started taking their faith more seriously after that moment as well. It’s like, they’re intertwined right? Jesus when he was talking to Sadducees and Pharisees was talking to governors and congressmen, or he was talking to police officers, like the Sadducees, the Pharisees, those were the leadership, political leadership, they were to uphold the laws. They were the scribes. They were the lawyers, et cetera. So he’s talking to them, it’s like talking politics.

Mike:
He was trending. Jesus was trending for the three years that he was around. He was an influencer and he was bigger than them. He was getting bigger than them fast. His followers were ticking up really, really fast. And their followers were ticking down. People are unsubscribing to the Pharisees.

Joel:
Can you use any more modern-

Mike:
I’m going to keep going.

Joel:
… analogies right there.

Mike:
But to put it in perspective, right.

Joel:
Right.

Mike:
He was talking politically he’s threshing money changers is cleaning out the government essentially.

Joel:
Right. Yeah. No it’s but like I said, it goes back a long ways, but I mean, just recently with the whole lockdowns and everything like that for that thing, and-

Mike:
It’s weird, you’re doing really good. You’re really

Joel:
Well you, I was going say-

Mike:
… to dance around it. I can’t.

Joel:
Every other time on your show, you’ve gone, “Oh no, Joel, you can’t say that, don’t.” And I’m like, “Okay, I’m not going to say anything. I’m not supposed to on Mike’s show today.”

Mike:
I don’t even know what words you can and can’t say anymore.

Joel:
Well, I don’t, you know-

Mike:
Like woman is that hate speech, if you say the word woman?

Joel:
If you have a Y in it? I don’t think so.

Mike:
Womixing, woo, woo womixing. I don’t know.

Joel:
Hey, I think that’s going viral right now. There it goes.

Mike:
Geez. Came up with a new word, womixing.

Joel:
Hey, don’t laugh. Anything you laughed at they go, “Oh, come on, that’s ridiculous. Ah, that’s funny.” Next week, it’ll be out there. It’ll be out

Mike:
Well on that note. And it’s like, I don’t even know, like, is it this Ministry of Truth, as you mentioned. I’m not the first to say this, but I heard somebody say it, “It’s written as a caution, not as a business plan or not as a guide. It’s a warning, not a guide.” I think somebody said, “That the book 1984 is a warning. Not a guide.” You don’t want to follow. You don’t want to create a… Whoa man. Yeah. I’m on the DGB right? The DGB the Disinformation Governance Board. The DGB the Ministry of Truth. You don’t want one of those. That was the ultimate. Do you think that’s ever going to have any teeth or any legs?

Joel:
Do I think? Well, it’s funny how things work now, one of the things I said, “We didn’t think.” The government scares me, big government, that kind of thing scares me to a certain extent. But if anything else, big federal government, it always proves itself to be just clumsy and inefficient and ineffective. The thing that worries me the most now is that kind of thing will come through corporations and banks. And it will be, it’s kind of like how cancel culture is. We talked about the film, I was part of the No Safe Spaces with Dennis Prager and Adam Carroll. And when we first started talking about that film seven years ago, cancel culture was all the rage on college campuses, but it hadn’t reached into the world yet or to the larger culture. And I just remember everyone saying, “Oh, these kids, when they get into the real world, they’ll find out that stuff just won’t fly.” But I was like, “I don’t think so. I think these kids are going to take it and this is going to be our culture.”

Joel:
I thought, again, it’s one of these things where you couldn’t… Even I was like, “That can’t possibly happen that quickly.” But within two or three years, it has spread the entire culture. And by the time that movie came out, we were late, honestly, with our warning. It was meant to be a warning, not a guide, like I said, but it turned out to be a guide. So I don’t know, Jefferson and I were talking the other day. How do you think this, everybody talks about coming world war, whatever, or civil war, excuse me at world war II, but a civil war. How do you think it’ll manifest itself? And I just went “Well, I have no idea.” But I think it’s now different than just an oppressive government authoritarian government system. It’s now gotten into the culture and gotten into all our institutions, that’s how these things will be implemented. It won’t come through a government bureaucrat pounding on your door, it’ll come through your bank. It’ll be your bank account or your credit, or your insurance company not wanting to insure you because you don’t have-

Mike:
Institutions. Like institutions deciding what you should believe, outside of… The freedom that we’re supposed to be able, it’s not just freedom of speech. It’s freedom of assembly, freedom of worship, freedom, freedom. There’s like five freedoms in the first amendment or whatever.

Joel:
Right.

Mike:
And it’s these institutions teaming up together because they are threatened of the bottom line. Their bottom line is threatened. They’re like, “Oh, we’re not going to do this based on a moral decision. It’s our economic best interest because these other influential institutions are making threats or veiled threats or whatever.” And that’s what’s happening. Like Elon Musk, everybody like those institutions are now trying to put pressure like George Soros and the Clinton foundation and they’re financing or pressuring, or getting a cabal together of these institutions you’re talking about. To try and boycott Twitter or trying something like don’t advertise on Twitter or don’t… It’s like they’re trying to use any leverage they have to undo something that’s inevitable. They’re fighting, kicking against the gods really.

Mike:
I think Elon Musk being the richest man in the world and being just, it was like one of those, it’s a one time event. The guy is actually able to purchase the public square. That festering pool, Twitter, where all this insane insanity, percolates. That’s where all that side of the aisle, it all percolates there. And the richest man in the world goes, “Hmm, let’s change that.” In all these other institutions suddenly it’s like a huge leg taken out from under the table. It’s like that was holding this table up and now that table is collapsing. They’re flailing. I just see good. I see good in it all.

Joel:
Well, yeah. These are small victories. I mean, like I said, you talked about the Supreme Court decision. That’s a small victory, but think of the can of worms, that’s going to open up. Think of now that side of the spectrum is energized.

Mike:
They’re animated there.

Joel:
What’s ahead? It certainly doesn’t mean that issue is over or the fight is over. It’s just now started really. So it’s a small victory, but at the same time, we have to be for thinking and we need to start thinking two steps ahead rather than just in the moment. And also like I said, we talk about all those institutions that are being weaponized against us. What will the institution of the church do? How will the church in all this authoritarian type, these draconian things administered through different institutions, in our society, what will the church be doing? And there will be something-

Mike:
Who you going to side with? Yeah.

Joel:
Yeah. Everybody talks about it coming civil war. Well, it’s not going to be one state’s militia against another state’s militia. It’s going to be-

Mike:
Civil war’s brother against brother.

Joel:
It’s going to be brother against brother in the family sense and in the spiritual sense and in everything. So that’s why I say, I mean, I don’t… Like I said, the lines were pretty well drawn, I think during the lockdowns and everything. You could tell which people within the Christian community were going to be more susceptible to media and all these pressures from the government and which ones weren’t. And we have basically, a lot of churches basically told the government, you don’t have to come in and shut us down. If you scare us enough, we’ll shut ourselves down. We’ll do anything you want as long as you… So I don’t know. And I don’t know how many churches learned their lesson from that. I don’t know how many Christians learned their lesson from that. It’s going to be interesting, but we are at this point in history and at this point of the history of the church and of our country, where we have these challenges, and I’m not confident in how we’re being led, put it that way. If that’s fair enough?

Mike:
Mm-hmm. Joel, you’re making me nervous. Just kidding.

Joel:
Well-

Mike:
No.

Joel:
… it’s also, there’s the whole thing where you may you be cursed to live in interesting times. But it-

Mike:
That’s a good line.

Joel:
You know, as Dennis Prager said, “If life’s not for horrific, things are terrific.” The general state of things, this is the general state of things. This is what we were promised. You know, we’re not promised. My generation, I always talk about my generation. I’ve lived in the most charmed time. I’ve lived in the most charmed existence in the world in the last, to be alive last 62 years. Be free in America and free to worship and prosperous and all these things. That’s not normal. So these things that are coming at us are kind of what were put here to be-

Mike:
The normal.

Joel:
… normal life in the midst of.

Mike:
Yeah. Suffering is the norm, right? Suffering is… I mean, we are having the least amount of suffering today than ever before. It doesn’t feel that way, but we literally, the human species, the entire human species is suffering less now at corporately than it ever has in the past. Yet there’s this craziness going on and there are pockets of abject suffering. And what is our duty as the body of Christ? Well, we’re to unite. We are to be United and how will that happen? Right. And so is that going to happen? Well, Jesus wants it to happen. I don’t think things that Jesus wants to happen. Don’t happen. It just, there’s a gradual process. And man, yeah. We just get warmed up and it’s already time to cut. Huh?

Joel:
Right. But I’ll just say it to wrap it up, we’re on the winning team. I have-

Mike:
Exactly.

Joel:
… the confidence that if we stay faithful to the word, stay faithful to Jesus. We’ll be okay. He promises us that, but it’s, it might not be the most comfortable thing, but it’s also it’s

Mike:
Keep your eyes on him, right? Eyes on him, you see all kinds of crazy stuff. Stay focused on him.

Joel:
The joys of considering yourself worthy to suffer for the name. That’s what, if it comes to.

Mike:
See you Joel.

Joel:
Love you too Mike.

Mike:
See you!