#122: Arthur Jones: Solid Souls
Pastor Arthur Jones has a heart for helping people move closer to God and track their soul's trajectory. This is a fascinating idea that as we begin to consider our relationships, practices, and principles will have a profound impact on our daily actions. It's not just about where my soul is today, but where is my soul headed?
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EP. 122
Tony: [00:00:00] Hey everybody! Welcome back to the Reclamation Podcoast, where our goals to help you reclaim good practices for faith and life. I'm Tony. And today is episode 1 22 of the podcast where I sit down with author speaker and pastor Arthur Jones. We talk about his brand new resource, solid souls. And, and really what does it mean to be moving towards a solid life with Christ?
Am I happy enough? Does it align? Are we eternally vision? I love some of the conversations that we get into today. I think you're really going to enjoy this conversation with Arthur. And if you do enjoy it, do me a favor, hit that subscribe button, wherever you listen to podcasts, leave us a rating or review on iTunes.
It helps spread the word about what God is doing through this platform and find them. Share this episode with a friend, that's the best referral. You can [00:01:00] give us sharing an episode. Hey, you guys may not know this, but we're a ministry of spirit and truth. We love being connected to them because they have a kingdom might envision about reviving the local church for more information on spirit and truth.
Check them out, spirit and truth.life. Now without any further ado, here's my conversation. With Arthur Jones. Hey everybody. Welcome back to the podcast. I'm excited today to have a speaker, author and pastor Arthur Jones. Arthur, thank you so much for being with us today.
Arthur: Thanks Tony. Glad to be here. Glad to be here.
Tony: Hey, look, I like to get to hard hitting questions right out of the gate. And so I noticed that you did undergrad at Kansas and your divinity school at duke. So the most controversial question I'm going to ask you all bay duke or Kansas who you taken.
Arthur: Kansas all the way. So it's a very, here's the deal.
If, if I went to duke and [00:02:00] everyone kind of loses their undergraduate affiliation. So if you go to a small little Methodist school and you go to duke, you become a duke fan. If you go to Kansas, you can't, you can't betray. Your school, you came to Trey, Kansas for duke, a blue blood for a blue blood. And so I'm a fourth generation Jayhawk.
And there was no question. I even went to a duke UNC game, wearing a Kansas shirts. Everybody mad. Did you get harassed for group government? UNC, because Roy Williams betrayed us and left. But other than that, I mean, I rooted for duke, but I wore a Kansas. Yeah.
Tony: And how are you feeling about the duke transition?
Arthur: Yeah. You know I think duke is going to be just fine. Yeah,
Tony: I think so, too. So I'm in a small suburb of Dayton. Some of my listeners know Centerville. We have we have a junior point guard who's being recruited by all the big schools. And we're waiting. He just got an [00:03:00] offer from, he just got an offer from Michigan.
He's got Michigan, Ohio, state, Indiana. He's got a couple of SCC schools. He's in, he's in the top 100 and we're waiting on the duke CA we're waiting for that next echelon of schools. Like, is he going to get an offer from duke? Is he getting an offer from Kansas or UNC? And so it's, we I have a 15 year old son and we live, we live in this world pretty readily.
Arthur: Yeah, that top tier, if, if I was in, if Kansas was a middle tier, you could then root for duke. You just can't go from Kansas to duke. When you're in the all-time wins all time, you know, championship kind of battle. You just can't root for the enemy. So
Tony: I respect that. And you said you were the, the fourth generation of your family to go to Kansas, but I have in my notes that you're a fifth generation Methodist pastor.
How does that happen?
Arthur: Each generation had their choice. I really....
Tony: Were you peer pressured in, or was it just something that you felt like you [00:04:00] had to do?
Arthur: Or my older brother's a lawyer. And so he he did that. My SIS twin sister actually runs my family construction company. So my mom. Runs a FA a construction company.
So my sister is going to be the fourth generation owner operator of our family construction company. We just believe in tradition. And honestly, I felt the call to being a pastor when I was very young, three or four, and it stayed rather constant. I debated becoming a politician and I've, I, I tell people, God saved me from that.
And I, and, and sent me to ministry. So really I've, I've known this was my path, my whole life basically but I had a choice, but this was the only one that actually was made my soul sing and made me fulfilled and helped me know that I'm exactly doing what God has asked me to do with my life.
Tony: So th that's a great that's a great point that sometimes we just kind of hear God's voice.
I always love to ask people, what's it like [00:05:00] for you when you feel like God is speaking to you, right? Like how, how do you know when it's the voice of God and not the pizza that you had the other night? How do you know when it's, you know, definitively God.
Arthur: Consistency. Biblical truth, meaning that it aligns with everything that we have, the, the stories that we have, but it's also, it keeps getting affirmed in real and transforming ways. I will say I have heard God's voice speak to me audibly once. And it was on the question of whether or not I was going to be a politician or not.
And I was in a room, but no, I'm not. I'm dead serious about this. This is one of those supernatural moments of my life. My family was heavily involved in Republican politics in Kansas from the real, really the twenties through the last decade. And we, my grandmother was Bob Dole's first campaign [00:06:00] manager.
And so I was at gay. For the Bob Dole Institute of politics, and I'm sitting in a room with some of the most influential leaders of the state of Kansas, and I felt an oppressive weight on me. I don't know how to describe it, besides that and oppressive weight, like, like I was living outside of God's will.
Cause I was imagining when I was in, you know, well maybe I should not call the ministry. Maybe I'm called to politics and it was so Powerful that I prayed in that moment in a room full of people who, if I've had a different career trajectory, this is the room to work. This is the room to make connections and do shake hands and all the rest of that.
And I instead prayed and I heard God audibly say to me, I don't know how audibly it just was like a ringing in my head that just said, you could be good at this, but I've not called you. And I said, okay. And I felt free. And so I think to some extent, there's like the question of how do you [00:07:00] hear God's voice?
Does it align with what you've been told? Does it align with your gifting? Does it align with kind of where God has been in the past? And for me, this was the temptation and there was something, an unholy. There was a holy unrest that was like, this is not okay. This is not where you're supposed to be. And so I took that opportunity and prayed, and God spoke to me.
So, anyway, I don't know, I don't know. That's not happened often in my life. That's really the number one instance of it, but it was so profound that it confirmed what I had previously heard from God in a rather clear.
Tony: I love that. And I think it, it makes a lot of sense when we think about the temptation versus the thriving and where God wants you to be.
And that kind of is a really good segue into this brand new resource that you have coming out solid souls. And the first question I wanted to ask you is what, what drives someone to do a book on such a [00:08:00] Metaphysical topic. I mean, who, who, one day you wake up and you're like, I think I'm going to spend the next couple of years of my life writing about souls, right?
Like how does, how does that come to be?
Arthur: So I started this book about five times and it never quite stuck. I partially, I love CS Lewis. I have read. Almost everything he's written. And my favorite book is the great divorce by CS Lewis, outside of scripture. This is by far the greatest book that I know.
Tony: Now, when you say greatest, is that every year, is that an annual rate for you?
Arthur: Yeah, I mean, I would say probably every year, it's also something I led my small group through like it's the weirdest of CS Lewis has books and that's yeah, I've never read it. Cause it's like CS Lewis has some weird books. And this one is bizarre and yet what it presents.
Is kind of an eternal lens for the daily choices that people make. And I always loved that. [00:09:00] And so it's solid souls is a little metaphysical. It is metaphysical, but it's also practical and day to day. And so what I like doing in my life and preaching is mashing up metaphysics and a community. Or metaphysics.
And how do you lead people in your, you know, at a, at a, at the job you're at, or how do you metaphysics and parenting to me that actually is a place where they're serious is juice. Of course, Christian history, theology, practicality. And I think we're all better if we actually have those conversations.
So that's what I like doing. So I really it's the kind of thing that I've. Talked about for a long time. I tried to write the book multiple times. And finally, last year I wrote 55 single-spaced word pages in five days while I played five rounds of golf. That was my, that was my, the chunk of that book was written where I played five rounds of golf and wrote 55 single space pages.
Because [00:10:00] basically I, I was just putting down 10 years of ministry. In this book because it was just the right time and the right place. And God had a message from.
Tony: So, I mean, take me through that in practice. Did you like wake up golf and then go, right? Or did you write and then go golf?
Arthur: I would I woke up, wrote golfed wrote till I'm couldn't see, straight anymore.
Went to bed, woke up. If I had the ability to write, I would write, then I would go back out and play golf. I was just, it was madness and glorious. And I literally, it was my break. I would use my brain. To write and then I'd play golf and then I'd go back and I'd write. And I loved it. It was my, I can't do that.
Normally that like required another level of like intensity. My wife had kids left for a couple of days so that I can do it.
Tony: That's awesome. How'd you shoot on the golf?
Arthur: Probably not great, but I have, I don't know.[00:11:00]
Tony: It's not around that stands out.
Arthur: There's not a stands out on it. Good, good. But I really, I, I really do believe that.
Metaphysics or which I want to just define that. Cause I don't know if everyone knows what that word means. So physics is the study of our natural world, right? Metaphysics is the larger understanding of who we are and the cosmic stories that are true in the same way that physics is true. And so like Genesis is a great book about metaphysics, right?
Where God creates the heavens and the earth. Well, there are some technical physics questions by which that process happened, but none of the physics. Is relevant to God's creation, right? Like God created it regardless of the mechanism that physics discovers. And so the metaphysics is a true element. And so I think anyway, that's, that's what I've liked doing is talking about those larger frameworks and how.
How they make a difference on the golf course, I [00:12:00] suppose because frankly, if God did create heaven and earth and created you and me, maybe that means we ought to treat people differently on a golf course or, you know, doing literally everything we do in our day to day.
Tony: Well, and so one of the things that you talk about in the book is the difference between a solid soul and a shriveled soul.
And, and that idea, right. I was wondering if you could kind of break that out for our listeners about like, man, if you were going to do a soul assessment right now, how would you know if you were solid or if you were shriveled.
Arthur: So to me it's less important, the precise snapshot. So this is something that I try to get across to people is people often try to do just a single assessment today of where is my soul.
And frankly, that's not actually that helpful. I mean, it is helpful, but you need you need more of a movie than a single. Right. You need numerous ones over time. So when you look at John Wesley, when he asks the question, [00:13:00] how is it with my soul? He actually tracked it day by day. By day by day, you can actually track your soul's trajectory, your kind of, how you felt, how connected you felt to God.
And so what I generally think people ought to do is actually pay attention to the direction of their life. So it's less important to say, okay, so are you shriveled or. That could take you forever to figure out, but if you ended up saying, okay, well today I feel, you know, a five out of 10, I feel, or a six out of 10 or whatever it is, the question is more, where are you headed than where are you right now?
So thinking about this in terms of marriage, every married couple that I know says that they are in love and happy on their wedding day. Yeah. There are probably a handful of exceptions, but very rarely is, are there exceptions to that rule? Basically though, the difficulty with marriages, people just ask, well, am I happy enough today?
And they don't pay attention to, well, where's my marriage headed. Am I [00:14:00] actually going to be happy over the long run. Am I actually serving each other over the long run? Do we have common vision together? And so when you ask about kind of shriveled versus solid, what I wanted to give was people kind of focused on where am I headed?
So am I more loving, more gracious, more kind, more full of self-denial more full of generosity. Am I in that in my life? Or am I actually going the other direction? Am I actually angry to deceive a month than I was last month? Am I actually more selfish? Am I looking for my own needs as opposed to the needs of others?
And so it's way more focused. On what direction are you headed? E heaven or hell yeah. Where, where is your soul headed then? A single moment of a snapshot.
Tony: Now in all of this, you've kind of interwoven this idea about the kingdom of heaven and how it's here. And now I'm wondering if you could give us a cheap version and I hate to use the word cheap, but I don't want to say simple because it's not that [00:15:00] simple either, but give us an understanding of the kingdom of heaven and how it's here and now, and then how that all intertwines with our trajectory.
Arthur: So Jesus. When he preaches into the gospels. I love that in the book of mark, for instance Jesus says the kingdom of God is near in the book of Matthew. He says the kingdom of heaven is near. Those are functionally the same thing. So is it just different ways in which they got translated down? And what I like to help people understand is.
That if we already turtle beings, right? Which is why the trajectory conversation is important is it's not just that we're here temporarily on earth. It's actually that God made us to live eternally. God made us eternal loved creatures. And so the plan for us is to live forever. If you think about, you know, one day in heaven, looking back here CS Lewis has a phrase in the great divorce and the [00:16:00] preface that says that her earth in the end will not be a distinct place, meaning that if we're eternal beings, then our time here is not actually just a truncated bit where you live here and then you die.
And then you go to heaven. It's actually that the kingdom of heaven, according to Jesus, is preaching is actually present. Which means that we are already living eternal lives if we're doing this thing. Right. And so when you think about the trajectory of who we're called to be and where we're called to go, I believe that our goal is to be in heaven with God is to actually live heavenly lives.
And that option is afforded to us literally today. I'll tell you what I do know is, and I've said this a lot is we have a hard time believing that heaven can be lived right. But I promise you we can live hell Ray right now. Yeah. That if hell is choosing something other than God choosing our own pride, our own greed, alcohol lust, selfishness, whatever [00:17:00] it is, man, I, I could be lived out here.
And now today I know I went through a divorce in my twenties, which I talk about in the book. It was, it rocked me. It changed my life. I was went through. And it, and I know hell can be lived here now, but I also believe that God can redeem it and that God can work in it and that we can choose a different pathway.
And so that's really why I like the question not just of where are you solid or shriveled today, but where are you headed? And are you doing the practices that gets you to the place where you're closer to God where the heaven is here now, where you're able to live? As Christ asked us to live. And so that's, that's really the focus that I have is focusing on heaven and hell and helping people understand that that's not just some theoretical thing for the future, but it's also something that we can bring about and, and, and, and do today.
Tony: Yeah. Do you [00:18:00] think people have such a hard time imagining that having can be lived here today? Right. As you say that it feels incredibly. Oh, that logical. Well, that makes perfect sense. If I can go through hell today, I feel like I could go through heaven today, but yet in my mind, as we're recording this, I can't stop thinking about what's happening in Afghanistan, you know, and, and, you know, it feels like heaven going through heaven today, for me, feels incredibly unfair to the rest of the world that I know is in so much pain.
And H how do we, and how do we wrestle with all that tension? Why is that so hard?
Arthur: I think that's a phenomenal question for those of you that are listening to this. We're recording this the Tuesday after Qubole fell in Afghanistan and my wife and I spent some time last night, praying for the Christians who are fleeing for the Hills so that they as they are anticipating execution, frankly, [00:19:00] and.
What I think is so powerful about the idea of living heaven now is you read the scriptures and you recognize that even Paul was living heaven in prison, right. And Philippians, when he writes about rejoicing, even in the tough times, it gives you a sense of power over even the Hells that are on earth, which is the Taliban right now, you can choose heaven.
And you know, even in revelation, the 20th chapter in the fourth verse, it says, and behold, I saw the souls of those who were beheaded for our Lord Jesus Christ, worshiping at the throne of God. And choosing heaven now is not a pop psychology framework of optimism. It is a theological and spiritual framework of choosing God over earth of choosing God over.
Our own selfishness, [00:20:00] pettiness, greed, lust, envy desire, whatever else you have. And so, you know, heaven and it's like Jesus in the beatitudes You know, bless it. Are you happy? Are you when you are persecuted when you are insulted for my namesake? I just think there's a different lens. When you go to heaven, it's not just a happy go.
Lucky Yale psychology course on living a good life. It's an eternal vision that could, that, that actually God has already redeemed death. And that there is hope in all things.
Tony: You mentioned a little bit ago about some of the practices we love to get practical here. What are some of the things that we can do to, to gain those as you, as you call them maternal eyes and kind of begin to think about that trajectory towards heaven on a regular, you know, on a regular Monday or Tuesday or whatever.
How does, how do we make that a part of our normal walk with Christ?[00:21:00]
Arthur: So my focus is on the step that comes right before practice. Okay. Meaning that I've got some practices in here, but my focus is on. How should you think about your day to enable you to do whatever practice you need to do? So for I've got a, I've got a whole section on relationships, for instance. And I think practices are very helpful, right?
Marriage strategies, strategies for parenting. Although I've got a one and a half and a three and a half year old, so I need some additional practices and strategies there. But my focus is typically on what are you thinking about when you're engaging right before you enable whatever practice you do.
So for instance, on kids, one of the most practical things that I can do is to understand that my kids are eternal soul. Is actually the, my children are full-sized souls who are [00:22:00] made in the image of God, which means that my purpose. Right? So the practice element for kids is not for me to have a one day strategy for how I survive my kids tomorrow.
Right. So my wife's going out of town on Thursday. Friday night this week, I've got the kids for 24 hours. Me and me and the two little ones. And you know, my goal, if my goal is to be liked for that 24 hour period. That's not really a great goal, right? Like that's not a great strategy. I hope we have a good day.
My goal in parenting is not simply to survive that day. My goal is actually to see my kids with eternalize and LinkedIn, my view so that my goal for my children is that they might like me and know me and love God and go to church and live a passionate life for Jesus. When they're 25 and 30. And so it's not really that I have the best practice strategy [00:23:00] for, you know, parenting tips, rather.
It is what's the right lens by which you ought to engage with whoever it is you're engaging with. Because if my goal is for today with my kids, well, that that's actually, that's actually a pretty low goal. I can survive that a lot of different ways. If my goal is for them to love God and love their neighbor and be a part of the mission of God and love me in 25 years.
Well, then that's a completely different lens and it allows for a different kind of parenting. Then I know a lot of parents that are looking for, okay, how do I just get them to like me today? Or a lot of parents of teenagers or college kids say, how do I get my kid to church on Sunday? And I think that's the wrong question.
I think the right question is how do I get them to love God in five years? How do I get them actually on a longer trajectory to understand who they are and how, and, and how I love them. So I think the same thing is true for marriage. I think the same thing is true for friendships is that [00:24:00] all of our practices are better when we have the right lens to focus on them.
And so I try to look at my wife and think, okay, I'm having a fight with my wife. I don't quite know exactly how to have this conversation with her, but I'm getting married to her for the next 40 years. How can that shape how I treat her in this particular moment? And so that really is the, is the phrase for me on solid souls is.
It's the moment, right before the practices of how to even think about the person you love. That's really something that I focus on in this book.
Tony: And, and if we get that mindset, right, if we get that lens right, as you say that changes even some of our more menial tasks too, right? Because if we think of everything is as souls colliding, right.
As relationships and that sort of idea, which is kind of what I think I hear you saying then when we go to work, even if that work is that. You know, something that may not be your forever job, then that [00:25:00] will, that should change the way we show up. Right?
Arthur: Absolutely. I think so the last section of my book is about purpose and mission and jobs and It's all about how do you reframe what you do with that lens?
Because there are a million jobs that's right. There are janitors. There are lawyers. There are politicians, there are good. And holy ways to have a solid soul in all of those jobs, even a politician, I'm sure there's a way to do that with a solid soul. But there are also ways to do each of those with a shriveled.
Hmm, where you choose yourself over someone else. And so one of the things that I love about this, this opportunity to have this conversation is because most people don't need to change jobs in order to find fulfillment. There are, I'm sure some of you listening to this or need to change your job in order to find God and do all the rest of that, but not everyone actually has to do that.
You could actually [00:26:00] find in your current job with a different lens. You know, if you've got a job where you face customers all day, think about them, not as facing customers, but it's facing souls. How might that change your day? Or if you manage a lot of people, you're not just managing people. You're managing souls.
How does that change? What you're trying to accomplish with them in your day? And the last chapter is my perhaps my favorite, which is entitled, leave it all out on the field. And it's the one where I actually talk about John Wesley who ended his life. Basically, he, he planned his life. He actually got a lot of money for book publishing over his lifetime and he gave it all away for the moment he died.
He died almost penniless because he wanted to leverage literally every moment that he had on earth for the kingdom of God. And I love that framework in that concept. And so the question is less, you know, what profession are you in? Then if you had the right [00:27:00] lens, Dealing with your boss, your coworkers, your friends, your spouse, your children, whatever it is, if you have the right lens and you believe that heaven is possible now, and you're trying to get there.
Can you leverage everything in your life for the kingdom of heaven and not your kingdom? And I think that might change how we view every job we do. And frankly, as far as practices go, I think the spiritual practice every day is reminding yourself. You're surrounded by souls. You have never met a mere mortal.
And so the practice is less how to accomplish it and more can you think about and pray for everybody? So frankly, in the conversation about Afghanistan and Jesus says, pray for your enemy. How do you pray for the Taliban in this story? How do you imagine that [00:28:00] there are souls all over the place and the God died for them too.
And maybe that would change how we as a church have conversations about literally everything. So that's really more, my, my framework and lens is to say, if we got the lens, right, maybe the practices would come next. Maybe the, what do I do next would actually be much more revealed if we are praying for the souls of even our enemy or our bus, we hate our employees who give us heck or the customers who annoyed us or a three and a half year old.
That believes he's 15. Right. Which is a little more personal, I suppose, of an analogy that was my morning. So we cared for him in that way.
Tony: Well, I was going to say the way I always used to say that we, my wife and I joke that we don't negotiate with toddlers or terrorists as they're basically the same thing.
Arthur: Well, you know, my dad's joke is my dad's joke was always, what's the difference [00:29:00] between a toddler and a terrorist. And the answer is you can negotiate with a terrorist that. You know, you're, you're in it, you're in the throws of it. I mean, we've got a three and a half year old and a one and a half year old, like we're in the throws of parenting of difficult times.
When I tell other people the age of our kids, they go, oh yeah, it gets better. I'm told this and I love them. And actually they're really adorable. And after I left this morning, they apparently turned very kind. But in the moments where you're frustrated. How do you understand that they are full-sized souls, that God has made them wonderful.
And maybe that changes how you parent it changes how I try to think about it. I'm not always great at it, but I'm working on it. Hmm.
Tony: I think that there's probably somebody listening right now who feels like their trajectory might be off a little bit. Maybe there. Pandemic has not been [00:30:00] great to them, or maybe they're in a really difficult season.
How does somebody begin to turn around that trajectory in their life from feeling like they're heading towards a Schriever shriveled soul to, to a solid one, what's kind of the first step that you might challenge someone to do. If they're ready to, to change trajectory.
Arthur: Well, the word, the key word that you said is to turn around, which is the word for repent. Yeah. I mean, the, the key word there is you get to choose that different trajectory today. And that you don't have to be bound by what happened in the past. So if you're there right now and you're in the throws of your own battle and you're in the throws of your own hell and you are living out the consequences of either our broken world or your own broken choices.
Hmm. The first word is to say, this is why Jesus came. [00:31:00] This was his message. The kingdom of heaven is near repent turn find a different path. And so the first word is to say, pray, pray about it. Fall on your knees right now and say, God, I'm sorry. Say God. I want to have a different life. Find a great church that preaches the death and the resurrection of Jesus.
And that talks about that possibility and pray about it. And. Show up. I mean, I, you know John Wesley had three simple rules that were rather important. The first one is to do no harm. The second one is to do good. And the third one, I think is the answer to your question, which is attend upon all the ordinances of God, which means do what God told you to do.
What it means is okay. It's actually, rather than. I know, it seems really hard and it seems like it's not possible, but just do the things that God told you to do. [00:32:00] Pray, find a church, love God, love your neighbor and try to do it again. The next moment, the moment after that, and the moment after that, and if you keep attempting to find the narrow pathway, as Jesus says, the pathway towards heaven, the pathway of rejected.
What you want probably for what God wants, if you do that day by day, bit by bit. It's not a, you know, repentance is often thought of as a Paul on the road, Damascus type deal where, you know, all of a sudden God comes and now you've got a solid soul, but that's not really my experience. My experience is that it's got to be unwelcomed, that you've got to actually turn around and take the steps of repentance.
It's got to take the steps of actually saying to people you've heard. I'm sorry. It's why I love alcoholics anonymous, right? Like this is a [00:33:00] really good analogy for shriveled. Souls is people who choose alcohol over family, and they've got an entire step of process for how you choose. A whole life, how you choose a sober life and it requires repentance.
It requires meetings. It requires just doing the things you're supposed to do. And so it's not like a magic wand. It's more like turning around cause you've been going in the wrong direction. But sometimes that means you've got to follow the same ground that you had previously messed up and do it different.
Tony: Amen. That'll preach any day of the week. I love that. That okay. Pastor, I have one more question for you, but before we do that, I know that my listeners are going to want to connect with you all over the interwebs. Where is the best place they can learn more about you, your ministry, and pick up a copy of solids.
Arthur: Of course, so St. Andrew launched our own publishing house called invite resources. It's invite [00:34:00] resources.com. We did this for a very specific reason. I wanted a new model for publishing. It's not to say other models are bad, but to say I wanted, frankly, this is related to heaven and hell and what we choose.
I wanted a, a world where I didn't get paid for my books. I I've been around Christian publishing for a long time. And I, every dollar that goes towards the book, solid souls goes back to the mission and ministry of my church. And so we designed an entire system of publishing, so that. Everything would be aligned towards the kingdom of heaven and not the kingdom of Arthur.
And so we, we create our own publishing house actually, the day after COVID hit, we said to a guy on staff, we've been trading about this for a while. And March like 13th of 2020, we said, okay, you're no longer in charge of all our communications. Let's, let's actually do this thing. So invite resources.org I think it's dot org, maybe it's dot com.[00:35:00]
Invite resources. Invite re okay. Invite resources.com. We'll definitely get you there. But invite St. Andrew's my church. So it's St. Andrew umc.org is my church. But invite resources is the publishing house we created and we named it that way because Andrew doesn't do anything in the Bible except invite people to Jesus, both his brother, Peter.
And a little boy with fishes and loaves, all he did was invite people to Jesus. And so that's all we're doing. We don't think we're anything special. We think Jesus has something special. And so we're really working to align everything we do for the kingdom of God and not for an earthly kingdom because the earthly kingdom.
Last. So that's where we do things, invite resources. And so we've got other books coming out this next year that are going to be a lot of fun. Actually one that's practical on parenting. We've got a book entitled what Jesus expects of us. We've got like 15 books down the pathway for next year.
We believe that there are a lot of people coming on board [00:36:00] saying, I think Christianity needs an addition. It needs a new way to needs a new way to publish. She needs a new platform and we're working.
Tony: Praise God, praise God. Okay. Last question. I always love to ask people. It's an advice question and you have to give yourself one piece of advice, except I get to take you to a very specific day.
And so in this particular case, I would like to take you back to the day after you graduated duke divinity. And so you're a brand new seminary graduate. You're getting ready to go out into the world. You can go back and talk to that younger version of him. What's the one piece of advice that you'd give yourself.
Arthur: So it's a very specific timeframe for me because I I was about to go through a divorce and I didn't know it, and I would not have given myself a heads up. I would have [00:37:00] simply said. Hell can be redeemed. Hmm. Keep the faith hell can be redeemed. Mm. And I think that's all I would have said because frankly God used that hell for some pretty cool ministry.
And I, my, my my life was about to get really rocked and, you know, it's crazy with. It's crazy when you don't actually wish away the hell you'd already gone through because of the beauty of which God has that, that God has brought from it. And so I wouldn't have taken away my pain. I wouldn't have taken away the difficulty.
I wouldn't even given myself a heads up. I simply would have said, even hell can be rigid.
Tony: Amen. Amen. Thank you so much for being generous with your time today and your commitment to building the kingdom of God [00:38:00] and all the work you put into this resource. I'm just praying for amazing things to happening. I really do.
Arthur: Well, Tony, I've really loved chatting with you and I'm grateful for you and may God bless you as you continue in this podcast and all your other endeavors.
Tony: And I love that conversation. You know, being a fifth generation Methodist pastor Arthur really gives us some things to think about. I also loved the way he looked at trajectory and what makes our souls more solid? I think he's got an incredible word for us. Hey, do me a favor. Hit them up on the socials.
Let them know you heard them on the reclamation podcast, how much you appreciated him being on here. Also, don't forget to hit that subscribe button, leave us a rating or review and share this episode with a friend I'm so thankful for each and every one of you for your ministry, for what you do. And as always, if you want to follow Jesus, you must be willing to move.
