JY: Welcome to GearTalk, a podcast on Biblical theology. Today, Tom and Jason talk about Jason’s story. This should be encouraging for followers of Christ in all stages of life.

TK: Good morning, Jason.

JD: Good morning, Tom. Welcome back to GearTalk.

TK: Yeah, this will be really fun. I think for a lot of us, something that has shaped my life has been reading Christian autobiography and biography, probably biography more than autobiography. Just because a lot of times you don’t get to hear about somebody’s life as they’re living it. But I know that’s been huge for you. You’re reading a missions book right now, I think, aren’t you?

JD: I just finished it and I’ve moved now on to a new volume that you passed my way, but I’m going to be going back to more mission biographies shortly I anticipate. Yes, they’ve been very significant in my life.

TK: And it’s one of the things you learn is just how God moves and it builds your faith. And so with all that, I thought it would be really great, Jason, to hear your story of how the Lord brought you to where you are today. As we think about somebody who’s given his life to study and for the church, how did you end up here? Because I obviously know a lot about your story. But this isn’t the trajectory you would have imagined if somebody would have asked you when you were 10 years old, “Wow, I imagine this is where I’ll be at this age.” Correct?

JD: I thought I would probably be a retired musician at this stage at 10. But yes, God had other plans.

TK: Nice. I was going to be a pro hockey player, except I just wasn’t very good. So there was that part.

JD: Yes. So I’m honored that you even asked me about this and excited to share the story of God’s grace. It really is telling his story. A lot of beauty, through trial and delight to a growing delight in him and his purpose in the world.

I was born into a broken context, but by 5 years old, God had saved both my parents and it was that very year, at age 5—now 45 years ago, because I’m 50—that I grew to realize that I was a sinner and that Jesus was the only savior. It was a simple faith, but I trusted in Christ alone for the forgiveness of my sins, for the fulfillment of all of His promises, even eternal life at age 5.

At age 12, moving into 7th grade, I already had a sense of calling to vocational ministry. Really already then I thought—but at that time I thought it would be in music. DC Talk, Decent Christian Talk, where TobyMac started, was on the rise, maybe beginning right around that stage. Petra was a leading Christian rock band. And I envisioned that I was going to do that scene, and it carried me really from 7th grade all the way to 12th grade. I was thinking Christian rock and roll, Christian hip hop. I had my MC Hammer pants, growing out my long hair. And it was something.

TK: That’s not the picture we have on our website at the present moment. But we’re going to get that one.

JD: That’s right. This also—I would just tag all these early years from my birth up through early college as preservation. God, in His kindness, let me get connected to a solid youth pastor and a math teacher who was also my basketball and soccer coach in a small Christian school. And these two men poured into my life. They showed me what Christian marriage was. They showed me what it meant to pursue Jesus.

The church I was in was not one that developed my theology. They were faithful. They believed the Bible was God’s Word. They called us to live in Christian ways, but there wasn’t much clarity as to why.

TK: Although you probably wouldn’t have known that at that time, I’m imagining.

JD: No, no, there was—I had no idea. I knew that I needed to preserve my virginity because the Bible called for it until marriage, and I had directives. But I didn’t have the whys. I didn’t understand, for example, that the one flesh relationship was designed to magnify the intimacy between Christ and His church—that the glory of Christ was at stake in how I handled such things as purity.

I was one that would be like 1 Corinthians 1:26-31. “Consider your calling. Not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many powerful, not many of noble birth.” I was born into a blue-collar family and none of my own pastors had graduated with a 4-year college degree that I recall. And it was just a hard-working community that loved Jesus. And yet I didn’t have very much broad perspective.

But God in His kindness preserved me from a lot of messes that high schoolers can get in—seeing things, touching things, tasting things that are so destructive for so many. Because it’s either the wrong object or the wrong timing. God just freed me from having to be involved in any of that, and He preserved me in healthy contexts. My parents tell me that I just worked hard in my studies. I studied a lot and then I had these healthy communities and God preserved me. I headed off to college as a music major, got my life rocked.

TK: And where did you go to college?

JD: I went to Taylor University, a Christian school in Indiana. I went in as a music education major. It was not very long before I realized this is a different world. It was a classical music program and all I had ever done was sing Christian rock and rap. And at one point, early in my time in the music department, my choir teacher just looked at me and he said, “Jason, why are you here?” And at that time, I was feeling like, “I don’t know.”

TK: Was he not wearing the MC Hammer pants?

JD: No, he really wasn’t. I met Teresa and fell in love. She was my first girlfriend, I her first boyfriend. God had preserved us for one another. She loved Jesus. But again our development of our own theology was quite thin. We had simple faith. We just wanted to love Jesus. But we didn’t have a grounding in solid doctrine. I didn’t know how to study the Bible. My junior year, I went off to Israel to study for a semester. I put a ring on my girl’s finger and then headed off for 4 and a half months. And it was there in Israel studying the historical geography that God awakened me to see—this is what I want to do for my life. I want to study the scriptures for the sake of the Church. And I came back, got out of the music program and got into the Bible program.

We got married the summer before my senior year and it really shifted from the first stage into the second stage, I would say, of my life and ministry training. It was preparation and protection from late college all the way up through my doctoral studies. The first 11 years of my marriage, I was a full-time student. We and it was—

TK: That’s how you recommend everybody begin their marriage, right?

JD: Yeah, if Teresa knew that it was going to take 11 years, she says, “I don’t know if I would have said, ‘Let’s go for it.'” It took a lot.

JD: And yet it was such a shaping time. I graduated from Taylor with a biblical studies degree, and we began our graduate level training at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, which was at the peak of its existence at that time, I would say. There was a solid, broad faculty. It was solidly evangelical, holding to inerrancy, and yet the theological spectrum beyond holding high the authority of God’s word, the theological spectrum was very broad. So there were those that baptized babies and those that only baptized believers. There were…

TK: And do you—did you appreciate that?

JD: At that time, the spectrum—I actually did and I think it helped me because of who I was. I didn’t want to just accept one position and run with it. I didn’t have a denomination that I was already bound to. For me it was a matter of going classroom to classroom, hearing a dispensationalist, then hearing a classic covenant theologian, hearing a historic premillennialist balanced by an amillennialist. And egalitarian with respect to understanding male and female relationships, and then hearing complementarians, hearing Arminians, and then those—a Calvinist with a massive view of God’s sovereignty. And it was forcing me at every turn to say, “God, what does your Word say?” And I began to dig deep into God’s word during my four year M.Div., and then an extra year of graduate level study to prepare me.

During this time, I focused on academic ministry for my job. I trained students with dyslexia in Greek and in Hebrew, and then I got to teach in a large classroom setting first-year Greek all during my Masters preparation. And it was such a solid time for me to gain clarity that what Teresa and I realized is that God was leading me more toward academic ministry than local church ministry, at least at the beginning of my life. And yet I loved the church and I wanted to do what I do for the sake of the church.

But it became clear that I needed more training, and my professors—a key mentor was pushing me toward going to a large state school, a secular school, to get further training in what was called Hebrew Bible Studies, that is, Old Testament studies. And searched around for different programs. We—God had given us our first daughter and we wanted to be a little closer—moving out of Boston a little closer back to the Midwest to be near grandparents. And so the schools—there was a handful of them that were potential, but I had a former professor down at Southern Seminary saying you need to come down and meet a certain individual, spend time with Daniel Block.

And so I said well, OK, I’ll come. I’ll—during my tour of schools, I’ll go down there. But it’s a Christian seminary and I don’t think that’s where I would do my PhD. But I met this man and he was all about the glory of God and committed to doing what he did in the academy for the sake of the church. And it resonated with something deep in my soul. Teresa said I came back that day after spending time with him and she said I was glowing. My—I had found someone like whom I wanted to become. He had proven to me that I would get pushed further than I had been if I went to Southern Seminary, studying with people like him and Peter Gentry and Tom Schreiner. And so I went and we spent the next five years at Southern Seminary. And they were sweet years for academic training.

All the while, God—I mean, I was seeing friends that I had done my masters work with go off to other secular—to go to secular schools. And I began to see one after another drop off, losing their evangelical convictions, losing their moorings, their purpose, their conservative theology. And I just praise the Lord that God was protecting me and allowing me to prepare in a context where God was held high, where his Word was elevated and where I had these men who were at the highest level of evangelical scholarship engaging the broad Guild, both conservative Christian and non-Christian Guild, and yet doing so with faithfulness, holding fast their convictions and modeling for me what that should look like. It was a sweet season to grow.

On the flip side, I was also pastoring now a Southern Baptist church in southern Indiana, while I’m doing my PhD. And when we started at that church, it was a very hard place. I was an associate pastor and the lead pastor and myself—he was the 4th pastor in 10 years and three of the previous pastors had engaged in various immoral activity. And the church was broken and they weren’t ready to follow a leader. And those early years of pastoral ministry, my first taste of it, were—they were very hard years. In fact, my wife and I pled with God that He would allow us to leave and He wouldn’t free us from this church. And I am confident it was because by the time 2005 came and I was finishing my PhD and being ready to be launched to train future ministers, God had wanted to do something in my own heart to teach me how much He loved His church, how much He loved His bride.

And it was during that season that after two years within this hard, hard context, God completely turned the church around. An individual died and this couple held a certain negative influence within the body and within a month it was diffused. The spouse that was left, left the church. The spouse that remained left the church and it was like God—despite me, I hadn’t done anything. All the work that I’d been trying to do, it didn’t move ahead and yet within a month, hearts began to soften. People began to recognize their need to repent. Their hunger and thirst for righteousness was growing, and I and the lead pastor were watching it happen. And it didn’t have anything to do with us. God was meeting us within that context.

And I just praise the Lord for that season, that church in Indiana that started out hard and ended in 2005 with an entire congregation of 250 or 300 people gathered around us, who had grown to love us and whom we had grown to love. And with tears in my eyes, they prayed over us and launched us to our—to my first post in academic ministry. And those were beautiful years where God helped me, like Ezra, learn to set my heart to study the law of the Lord and to practice it, and to teach both statute and rule in Israel. That firm commitment grounded me, a process of carefully observing what was there so that I could understand it rightly and evaluate fairly. And so that in turn, I could feel appropriately about what I had observed and understood and evaluated, so that then I could act faithfully and proclaim in wise and convictional ways. It had just been a sweet season of preparation and protection.

TK: Someone might hear this, Jason, and say, well, that’s all fine for you. I’m thinking of people in their studies right now thinking, well, it all came really easy for you and you didn’t struggle like so many of us have struggled. Can you give us just a short response to that, even talking about the one particular chapter in your dissertation that you know took so long.

JD: The doctoral study years, as beautiful as they were, were also really shaping and hard. It was hard. We lost our first baby during that window, so there was that personal suffering that we were journeying with. There was the challenge of all that we were facing within the local church that my wife and I went to bed for—I think for six months straight, night after night it was just a deep grief that often led us to tears as we just were pleading with God. Let us leave. Let us leave. These people are so hard to love.

And then with that on the academic side, I had thought that I would write a certain dissertation. And when it was time to write, I worked 40 hours a week for nine months on a certain topic. And all the while, we—and you have to think my wife is investing, committing time. She’s raising our daughter, and then we had another child and then we had another child. And it’s during that third child that I am now just giving myself to this rigorous study, trying to write my first book. And trying to figure out where I’m supposed to go. For nine months, I worked on a topic only to come to Christmas time…

TK: And she’s imagining she’s imagining it’s going to come to an end sometimes.

JD: She—well, she’s imagining that yes, we’re moving ahead and after 9 months, I had to say, “Honey, I think I—I don’t know where to move ahead on this dissertation topic. I need to set this whole study aside.” And to this day it’s still sitting aside. All that work I did 40 hours a week for nine months and I started over again. I started writing on a brand new topic and I gave myself two months at 40 hours a week to write each chapter. And I got the first chapter done and I got the second chapter done. But when it came to the third chapter, that two months spread out to 3, 4, 5—I’m still on the 3rd chapter. 6, 7, 8—still on the 3rd chapter. 9, 10—it took me 11 months to write the third chapter of the dissertation because it was all the methodology trying to understand how does Hebrew grammar work.

Just shorthand, my dissertation looked at the sermons in Deuteronomy, and for most of my dissertation I was looking at those sermons to understand how Hebrew grammar worked and how to track the flow of thought of Moses. But then in the last chapter I took all that understanding of grammar and turned it around so that now I could seek to understand the message. And that journey was so shaping and so challenging, and it was hard for my family. The extended family—I’ve got in-laws and parents saying, “You need to get this done,” and I’m just feeling the weight. I can’t go any faster. I don’t—I don’t have these questions answered.

So on the personal front through the miscarriage, on the local church front through just the hard, hard church situation, through just the season of trial of trying to learn how to write on a topic that had never been written on from the particular angle I was taking and facing questions that I could not find anyone having answered—it was shaping me. It was shaping character. It was shaping dependence.

There’s different kinds of worship, Tom, and I try to help my students see this and I want them to be worshippers at every stage of their academic wrestling, their study, their preparation. But sometimes worship is worship of awe. And other times worship is worship of dependence, and so much of those years were worship of dependence. Where I wasn’t—I wasn’t having aha moments over the word of God at every turn. That did come, and I celebrate that they came, but so much of it early on was worship of dependence, just having to surrender: “God, this is Your word. Spirit, You’re the one who wrote this text and I need You because You’re in me now to give me clarity, to see what I’m supposed to see. To understand what I’m supposed to understand.” It was that stripping away of self-reliance and nurturing a humble heart that was truly willing to follow wherever the word led. And all the while gaining skill to wrestle with the text and to track Moses’s flow of thought in very distinctive, careful ways. And so it was a very shaping time. Calling it preparation and protection really, I think, captures that extended season of ministry training.

TK: That’s really helpful. I think so many of us have felt that in so many different walks of life, but a period of really grinding, grinding it out, not going quickly and easily. But being able to celebrate that as the Lord was doing something and it was necessary. That’s right. So what’s your kind of—you had preservation at first phase from birth to early college, preparation and protection late college through doctoral studies. And now we’re moving into your post-doctoral study. So a third phase here.

JD: Yes, and I call it perspective, pleasure and proclamation. This is my time—first four years of academic ministry at University of Northwestern at Saint Paul, where I was instructor of Old Testament and Christian worldview, and then the 10 years I spent at Bethlehem College and Seminary, and all fourteen of those years involved at Bethlehem Baptist Church. This stage, this major shift in my life was marked not only by a movement from schooling to academic ministry, and I will say that the very first exam I gave students that I wasn’t taking, but I was giving, I let them know how much delight I was having in giving them this test because it wasn’t mine.

TK: So funny—one of my—one of our friends from the home church I’m part of was in your first year of teaching and she just feels like, wow, you were so hard.

JD: That is often the case when you’re coming off your PhD and you’re like everybody needs to know what I know and they’ve got to read what I read. And then it took time for me to learn what it meant to meet my students where they were at and then take them far further.

TK: She’s a missionary now and you were one of her favorite profs, so I need to say that.

JD: Well, praise the Lord for that. This season really was marked by 4 things: A worldview shift. A treasuring of the gospel. An increasing love for Christ’s bride, the church. And an awakening to global Christianity. That’s four—I mean I should have had five—and training leaders. So it really began that very first summer. Two definitive things happened.

I was teaching my very first class in Christian worldview to adults in an evening program at Northwestern. And the Lord had awakened me already to His greatness, to the glory of God, to His bigness. I wanted to be an Old Testament professor who magnified God’s glory, and I was teaching in this classroom a group of adult students who had come back to school after they had already started their careers as moms, as educators, as blue collar workers in the trades. And yet now they were wanting to come back and they were seeing it as a new season for them and they were gaining new training. And there was a man who had grown up Catholic. He was not a believer who was in the classroom and Jesus met him during that first class and saved him. And it was such an amazing privilege to lead him to the Lord out in a parking lot during that class period.

Class got done and three weeks later he was dead. And he had been a sheriff, an officer. And there was a situation that had gone down in Minneapolis and he was in charge. It was a man fleeing in a car and he was in charge of putting—they shut down the highway, putting things out on the highway to puncture this man’s tires. And this man instead chose to run into this officer and it killed him immediately. And the wife invited me to participate in that funeral. And he died as a believer, and she even in those three weeks had seen a change in her husband. He had met Jesus.

So that was something that happened to me. It was like—this matters. What I’m doing matters. The doctrine changed this man’s life. The word of God moved in and awakened new life within his soul and this is what I want to be about.

The second thing that happened was one of my former mentors, Dr. Tom Schreiner at Southern Seminary—he had been part of Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis for years, and he said, “I bet John Piper would love to meet you.” And he set up a meeting with this man who would become my pastor and mentor and friend for years and years. He set up a meeting with John Piper and my wife and I had been highly influenced by his ministry, by the associated ministry of Desiring God. I had been awakened to biblical complementarity, to big God theology through John Piper. And I longed to meet him and I shared with him and his assistant, Justin Taylor—whom we are all three having lunch—just how much I desired to be an Old Testament professor who magnified God’s glory.

And I was just grateful for his ministry and influence on my life throughout my dissertation. His book “Brothers, We Are Not Professionals”—I had read a chapter morning after morning as I was working through my dissertation parts of chapters and it had just carried me through much of my dissertation writing. And I just—when I read Piper, my heart was moved to worship and dependence, to repentance and to treasuring God’s glory. And I shared this with him and he turned and said to Justin, “What do you hear?” And Justin Taylor said a single phrase that changed the course of my life and it set me on a trajectory that 19 years later, I am still on. But it was a single phrase, single statement rather—he said: “I hear a lot about God’s glory. I hear very little about Jesus.” 19 years ago, that single statement reshaped the course of my life.

TK: What did you do with that? What did you do at that lunch, like when that was said, how did that hit you at that moment?

JD: It really rocked my soul. There was something deep within me that said—he’s right. And in the weeks and months that follow, it moved to tears. It moved to humiliation before the Lord, humbling myself and crying out: “Lord”—something that was modeled for me during my Masters work by people like Scott Hafemann or Greg Beale. They taught me—Gordon Hugenberger—to read the Old Testament and see Jesus. And yet during my very focused intensive years of my PhD studies, I had somehow lost this and become someone who thought I was supposed to read the Old Testament apart from Christ before I get to Christ.

And so it just sent me on a journey of wrestling and saying: “Lord, I think this statement is true. I haven’t loved Jesus like You would have me love. When I’ve looked at Abraham, I didn’t understand how it said ‘he saw my day and rejoiced and was glad’—that Jesus could say that about Abraham. Or that ‘Moses wrote of me.’ Or with Peter to say ‘All the prophets spoke of the sufferings of Christ and the glories that would follow.’ I didn’t know how to read the Bible that way. I didn’t see that in Luke 24 when Jesus said He had come to fulfill the law of Moses and the prophets and the Psalms, that then He said He opened their minds to understand the scriptures. And what was His Bible? To understand His Bible meant we would see a story of a suffering Messiah who would triumph through His resurrection and whose message of forgiveness and hope would be proclaimed in His name, beginning from Jerusalem to the ends of the earth.” Luke 24—I hadn’t seen that.

And yet I began to see these testimonies in the New Testament, giving clarity to how the New Testament authors—what they saw when they read the Old Testament. And I began to just pray: “Jesus, make me that kind of a man. Show me how to faithfully—not in a twisted way, not in a forceful way that was pushing something in the Old Testament that wasn’t there, but actually seeing what was there. The mystery that had been kept secret for long ages, but that had now been revealed and was disclosed through the very sacred writings that the Jews had been reading for years and yet didn’t see Jesus.” Yet this secret, this mystery of the gospel, was there. And as Paul said in Romans 1, it was those very prophets—he was proclaiming the Gospel of God, which was promised beforehand by the prophets in the sacred writings concerning the Son. The very gospel that we’re celebrating was promised back then, not realized yet, but it was promised back then, and I wanted to find it. I wanted to see it.

And that was potentially one of the greatest trajectory-setting moments of my life that has reshaped who I am today. And so it was a beautiful moment and that began a season of perspective reshaping. Heightened pleasure in the gospel and the glory of Jesus, and then with that matched by an extended season of proclaiming the beauties that I was now seeing that I had never relished in for myself.

TK: It makes you—those moments to be able to receive them with humility on the one side, but also those moments when you think “I am seeing something here in a brother or sister” and being willing to say something that’s hard for the sake of Christ and the church, that will—that really is love of a brother or sister to say it. But it doesn’t maybe feel like love at the moment. I’m so thankful things like that happen.

JD: Yes, praise the Lord. So my wife and I began to see our entire worldviews reshaped. Not only from my own time in the word and the teaching I began to do at a Sunday school at Bethlehem Baptist Church, where I taught the same class for 13 years. It was this reshaping that was happening in this context under John Piper’s preaching. We were in the latter half of the Book of Romans and we began to encounter the beauty of Christ and the centrality of the gospel. We were in a context where missionaries were celebrated, where they would come back, and we would hear their stories of surrender and sacrifice of commitment. And it began to do something in our souls. It moved us into international adoption. And God expanded our family of five into a family of eight.

And it led us to begin working with Hands to the Plow in 2008 to begin to serve rural pastors in northwest Wisconsin. It led us after four years of teaching undergrad at Northwestern to now as new people with new perspective—God had readied me to become one of the founding professors at Bethlehem College and Seminary to join this team of others that had already had such a profound influence on me, seeing my heart soar and be awakened for the nations and to see Jesus as a treasure.

So our hearts were changing, our understanding of the gospel. We’re now in a new context. I’m specifically in an elder training program where I am equipping 15 men per year to handle God’s word, teaching them Old Testament, teaching them intermediate Hebrew, teaching them Hebrew exegesis, teaching them biblical theology. And the Lord let me take my first research sabbatical. And in 2015—I mean, after God had already brought home our youngest 3 from Ethiopia—put it on my wife’s heart and then my heart that our care for the orphan and the widow was not done. And we began to research and take counsel with many as to how we might engage in orphan and widow care in increasing ways. And within a year I was taking—I took my first trip to help train church leaders in Ethiopia while remembering the poor.

God let us find a boy that we had been matched with that we were never able to bring home from Ethiopia. And it really started an annual cycle of leadership training originally with Training Leaders International. Now it continues with Hands to the Plow. This extended pattern of developing leaders where I take my Western students over into places like Ethiopia and let them train church leaders who are under-resourced and who’ve never had any formal theological training but who love Jesus and want His word to be guiding their ministries. And so to be able to engage in that context and in time what we—after leading the students through three years of course work with Training Leaders, we were able to restart the system and now have some of those who went through the 1st curriculum teaching alongside my seminary students. So now I’ve got Ethiopian students and American students who are training side by side other leaders.

It really was such a profound moment to see, realize Paul saying to Timothy “What you’ve heard from me in the presence of many witnesses, entrust to faithful men who will be able to teach others also.” Paul taught Timothy, who’s able to teach faithful men who can then train others. And I was seeing it play out in my life. It was such a privilege those years, and God was awakening us to global Christianity, to treasuring His word, building within us deep conviction.

A key verse that became central to who I am today is 2 Corinthians 2:2, where Paul says “I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified.” And what’s amazing—he could say that to the Corinthians, to whom he talked about all kinds of things. He talked to them about finances, he talked to them about sexual purity. He talked to them about legal proceedings, spiritual gifts, the doctrine of God. And I think his point is I can’t talk about any of these matters without showing how they connect to Jesus. And I want everything governed by the work of Christ, and I want to be that kind of Old Testament preacher like Paul.

TK: Everything is governed by the gospel.

JD: Paul was an Old Testament preacher. I want to be one who is able to faithfully show how everything is related to Jesus. I have to be connected to Him in order to read the text rightly because only spiritual people can read a spiritual book, and I want to in my reading, read it in ways that God intended, such that I will ultimately be glorifying the Son. God is working for the glory of His Son.

So that awakening to the nations—“Let the peoples praise You, O God, let the peoples praise You. Let the nations be glad and sing for joy.” It just burned within our souls. And what happened was we began to see this growing—growing desire to not only be senders and equippers, but be goers. That truly in our soul, we wanted to be among those who were spreading a passion for God’s supremacy in all things for the joy of all peoples through Jesus Christ. And while we could have stayed at Bethlehem—a place that we love with doctrine that we cherish among people that we celebrate, deep friendships, deep partnerships, deep respect, serving in the Elder Council, the deep groundedness that we had as a team, the relational support and love—my wife and I began to feel that God was leading us to be goers. And it was—are we going to go to southern Ethiopia or are we going to answer this call that had been made to us, even though we weren’t seeking it, to go to Midwestern Seminary? And it really moved us, I believe, from this season of perspective and pleasure and proclamation to where we are now—living with purpose, enjoying perseverance, and again, a season of proclamation.

TK: OK.

JD: So in 2019, God led us to answer a call to pick up a baton that was being passed, as I saw it, as I envisioned it, from numerous evangelical leaders that had shaped me—major figures like Don Carson, Greg Beale, Tom Schreiner, Peter Gentry, Doug Moo, Daniel Block, Duane Garrett. Individuals that had had a massive impact on shaping my life and ministry, Gary Pratico—and all of them either have retired or are nearing retirement. And yet they had shaped a generation of men and women to love God and His word, and many of them had been doing it at the doctoral level.

And I answered a call, and after 14 years of academic ministry, it was the one thing I wasn’t sure—am I ready to train future doctors? But there was this inner sense in my soul that God was calling me to train church leaders at the highest level. And so we answered this call to come to Southern Seminary to help be a part of a growing culture of treasuring Jesus and awakening for the nations in a high level academic context, that is equipping men and women who can proclaim faithfully and truly guard the sacred deposit that has been given us in this new generation.

And so I’m at 50 now, four years in. God led us to become official partners with Hands to the Plow ministries. In 2016, we had joined the board and but then in 2020, it seemed right to all of us that I would become content developer and global trainer with our ministry that GearTalk is associated with. And we’ve seen God moving—mid-career really rocked our lives in many ways. In some ways, we’re still trying to figure out this transition five years in now, but we’re here with purpose with increasing conviction. A sense that God is even raising me up to confront certain spheres within the evangelical world that are, I believe, off center. A conviction for leadership, for training leaders and even a rising—a rising desire to see churches planted and the gospel spreading in God’s world. So healthy churches, gospel-spreading Kingdom advance for the sake of Christ’s name among all the nations.

TK: It is really good, Jason. Just hearing the story—it makes me think of so many of our stories. There’s so many twists and turns and becoming the family that you are—you and Teresa. If the thought was at the beginning, what is the very straight path to this, to where you are today, the answer has to be there is no straight path to that. The Lord has all sorts of twists and turns that are necessary in order to get to this spot.

JD: Yes, seasons—so many seasons of shaping. Of suffering that I didn’t even talk about, but of amazing faithfulness. We JD: We have a faithful God whose promises are trustworthy, whose steadfast love is fresh morning after morning. He doesn’t take pleasure in the strength of the horse or in the legs of a man. He takes pleasure in those who fear Him and those who hope in His steadfast love. And I pray that God in His mercy would keep me faithful, keep us faithful, Tom, that God would help us be instruments as long as He chooses to use us. He doesn’t need us. We’re only clay pots and by His mercy He’s chosen to use us for honorable use. But we are still clay in order to show that the surpassing power comes not from us, but from Him. And He has placed in us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ. And I pray that He is the one who would be exalted.

And I just challenge those who may be training for academic ministry or who are filling pulpits or who are leading ladies Bible studies—2 Corinthians 4:2, I didn’t bring this up, but it was a foundational moment during my doctoral studies where I just committed myself to this truth: “We have renounced disgraceful, underhanded ways. We refuse to practice cunning or to tamper with God’s word, but by the open statement of the truth, we would commend ourselves to everyone’s conscience in the sight of God.” I think Paul is saying he commends himself—he proclaims the truth for an audience of one. He proclaims the truth in order to please God, and it’s the only authority that we have as ministers of God’s word is to say what He has already said, to declare in fresh, faithful yet true ways…

TK: That’s really good.

JD: …what He has already proclaimed. And I want to be that kind of a man. I know you want to be that kind of a man, Tom. And may God even use a podcast like this to help ready more men and women to be those kind of people for the glory of Christ and the good…

TK: Amen. Amen. It’s fun. I’m looking at the seasons of life and thinking like you just prayed—the Lord has not done yet. And to pray that the Lord, I think—I think something Paul says frequently is that God would give him courage to walk out what is put before him. And may that happen in your life, Jason, just as we hear your story. And for the rest of us, may we have courage to live the life that God has for us.

JD: Amen. Amen. Thanks, Tom.

TK: Alright, blessings Jason. Bye bye.

JY: Thank you for joining us for GearTalk. For more information about Hands to the Plow, the work we do and the resources we offer for the church, go to handstotheplow.org. Also make sure you sign up for our newsletter. You’ll find a link in our show notes.

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