Heath Lambert: Our guest on the podcast this week is Dr. Jeremy Pierre. He is the Dean of students and the Associate Professor of Biblical Counseling at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville Kentucky. He is an ACBC-certified counselor and he has a new book out called The Dynamic Heart in Daily Life, connecting Christ to human experience. And we’re here this week to talk about an issue, that is fundamental to humanity. And that is the issue of why do we do what we do. Most of us have had moments in our life, many of them where a thought has gone through our mind or something is come out of our mouths or we’ve done something crazy, and we’ve said, why did I do that? Or what did I say that? Or why in the world would I think that? Why is it so important, Jeremy, for people to understand why they are who they are? Why they do what they do? Why is this something that we, as Christians should be concerned about?
Jeremy Pierre: Well, we should be concerned about understanding ourselves and knowing who we are largely because we were created by God to be stewards of how he made us. So it’s interesting because if you read the Genesis account of creation, God had a conversation with Adam. And the topic of that first conversation was actually not God, it was actually not the world. The topic of that first conversation was Adam himself. So, God told him who he was, how he ought to function in the world that God had created. And so, without that verbal exchange, Adam would not have understood who he was. It’s interesting that God didn’t preload Adam with the knowledge, he needed to understand who he was, he had to hear God’s words in order to understand it. So when we read the Bible, we don’t read it as robots. We don’t read it divorced from the context of who we are. We read it as subjects, subjects to a king, subjects who make decisions, who believe certain things, who want certain things. So, stewarding who I am helps me to see how I ought to conform to what God says about me rather than just conduct my life automatically acting and responding to the things that occur around me.
Heath Lambert: In your book The Dynamic Heart in Daily Life, you talk about the work of some secular thinkers, who explain who we are, what we do, why we do it in terms of nature and nurture. I think most people listening to this, I’ve heard that kind of language nature-nurture. It’s just kind of in our cultural language. We just pick it up by osmosis. What’s going on when we hear that kind of language?
Jeremy Pierre: Well, it’s simply the recognition that we are born with certain characteristics and then those characteristics are shaped by the environment around us. The problem with secular psychotherapies is that they believe that those are the entirety of what a human being is those factors. So, I am the product of either in their mind, the shaping influences of my parents or of my caretakers or I am the product of the genetic predispositions that I have for this or for that. Now the Christian theological, understanding of people can recognize that there are certain features that we are born with. And can also recognize that the way we are, nurtured, does create expectations and beliefs and shapes values and desires for things that have a shaping influence on who we turn out to be. But the difference is this, we view the human person as created in the image of God with certain capacities that are meant to imitate his. And so, when my nurture, influences me and shapes me in certain ways. That’s not a non-moral thing going on. I’m being shaped in some image or in some likeness of my larger culture of the particular family I’m from. And there are things about that family or things about that culture that in God’s common grace conform with a generally true vision of how God created the world. But there are many things that do not. And so I need to constantly reevaluate the way I’m perceiving things, what I believe, what I want, what, what choices I’m making, what my commitments are in light of what the Scriptures say to me. And so that the nature and nurture is helpful for us to recognize as Christians but only insofar as it has shaping influences on our present experience.
Heath Lambert: So, let’s make this really practical and really specific. Okay, let’s say somebody comes to you. A man comes to you, and he says this Dr. Pierre, I lose my temper with my wife. I do it a couple times a week, dinners late, the kids aren’t ready, and I’ll pop off at her and I’ll call her names. It’s quick, but it’s this burst of screaming. I’ve never hurt her, but I scream, I say names and I can see I’m breaking her heart. Last night I heard her crying in bed. I don’t know what to say. I don’t know why I do it. I don’t want to do it, but I don’t know how to stop either. How does what you’re saying line up to help that guy?
Jeremy Pierre: So, what I’m saying is that man needs to, as a steward of the way God made him, he needs to seek out an understanding of why he’s doing what he’s doing. So, you can start with these two very simple questions come to mind that you can ask anyone in any situation of struggle. What am I believing here? And what am I wanting here? Those are two, there’s many other questions we get asked, those are two really helpful ones, because if you say, that husband just blew up at his wife. He said, terrible things to her, she’s crying in the bedroom. And you say, what were you wanting from your wife that you were not getting from your wife, that is why you were angry in that way? And he might say something sort of surface level like, well, I wanted dinner to be ready or I wanted her to just leave me alone. But you can press them a little bit further, okay? Because that’s just a surface version of a deeper desire, a deeper value that he has. Because dinner ready, or her getting off your back is really just your version of what you’re seeing as a respect as wanting to be honored as the world conforming to my particular desires in the moment. And he only gets there, he can only repent at that level if he sees it in himself and is aware of those things in himself. So that’s the what it was I wanting angle you can take. You could also take the angle of what was I believing there and so fundamentally, he believes that his wife ought to conform to his preferences in a way that’s immediate. He believes that his life should generally go his way and he should determine the shape of what his evening looks like when he gets home from work. These are beliefs that need to be challenged by a greater structure of belief from the Word, that has other concerns more core to the center of what he should be thinking about. Like, I believe I’m a husband whose job is to love and serve my wife in a way that reflects the love of Jesus for his church. Or I believe about my life that I live in an Ecclesiastes world, where things are broken and marked with futility, and I can’t possibly expect everything to go the way I want it to go at every given moment. So those are two questions I use frequently. I use them on myself, I use them in counseling, that help me get to the heart of what a person or what I am experiencing in the moment.
Heath Lambert: So same guy and I say, I’m believing things that are corrosive to my marriage. I’m wanting things that are hurting my wife, I believe you, I see that but what do I do the next time I feel that temptation to pop off even though I might know in that moment I’m wanting a wrong thing? What can I do to be different?
Jeremy Pierre: Faith in Jesus in those moments looks like not just identifying the, this is what I was believing, or this is what I was wanting, but actually submitting to them to him in repentance. So, there’s an aspect where when we say the word repentance, it sounds like an old Revival-istic thing where people are repenting of these external terrible things that they were doing. That’s certainly part of repentance. But repentance really, at this level of heart, awareness that we should be going for is Lord, forgive me for wanting this more than I’m wanting what you say, is valuable, forgive me for believing, this more powerfully and more actively than what you say should be motivating me in this moment.
