What Joe Rogan taught me about me.

We need to be honest with ourselves; our faith problem isn't what we say it is.

Two things changed for me when Joe Rogan interviewed Donald Trump.

1. That was the moment I knew President Trump would eventually win the election.

2. That was the moment I realized we had been lying about our faith issues.

This post isn’t about the first thing I realized, though if you want to know what I mean, I’ve included an explanation in the footnotes.¹

This post is about the second thing I realized. Let’s take a look at the numbers for a second. There were 38 million views on YouTube alone within the first three days. That doesn’t include Spotify or Apple Podcasts, where there were likely millions more. And this isn’t a 4-minute song that was played on repeat. This was a three-hour show.²

38 million people prioritized listening to a three-hour conversation within the first 72 hours of it dropping.

If anything, this moment opened my eyes to the other areas of life we do the same thing.

We prioritize scrolling on social media over other things.
We prioritize going to see a new movie over other things.
We prioritize hanging out with friends over other things.

Now, I’m not here to knock those things.³ They’re great. Needed even, at times.

But do we prioritize spending time with Jesus over other things?

The most common excuse I hear and have given for not spending time with Jesus is, “I didn’t have time.”

That’s a flat-out lie.

I had time for everything else. I had time for social media. I had time for listening to music. I had time to sleep, eat, and watch my favorite TV show.

And so did all those other folks.

We all have time. We all have 24 hours in a day. The idea of not having time for something is a complete lie that we’ve bought into. Even for things not pertaining to Jesus. If we say we don’t have time to do something, it’s not because of a lack of time. It’s because we’ve prioritized other ways to use our time. And listen, that’s totally fine. We don’t have to, and we shouldn’t, all prioritize the same things. But to say we don’t have time to do something is a lie. We can have time if we want to have time. A more accurate statement would be, “I don’t want to use my time that way.”

And that’s where we need to start being honest with ourselves.

If we “do not have time” to spend with Jesus, it actually means we’re unwilling to prioritize Him over other things.

Put simply: we love other stuff more than we love Jesus.

We love to scroll social media more than we love to spend time with Jesus.
We love to watch tv more than we love to spend time with Jesus.
We love to sleep more than we love to spend time with Jesus.

John Piper has a quote that I used to think was pretty ridiculous but now I’m starting to understand.⁴

Read your Bible every day of your life. If you have time for breakfast, never say that you don’t have time for God’s word.

—John Piper

It’s not that breakfast isn’t important, of course. It’s simply to say we have more time than we’re honest about, most days.

Let’s think about this scenario.

Imagine someone asks you if you spent time with Jesus today, and you, knowing you have not, need to give them an answer.

One option: I didn’t have time this morning.

This gives you the freedom to think you were the victim this morning. That for circumstances outside of your control, you could not spend time with the Lord. It gives you the freedom to think that perhaps tomorrow will be different—that those circumstances won’t present themselves again and you’ll have the time necessary to spend time with Jesus.

When we see ourselves as the victim, we’ll never change. This is why morning after morning we “don’t have time.” Because we’re the victim of our circumstances and our “lack of time.”

Second answer option: I chose not to spend my time that way this morning.

This requires us to face the consequences of our decisions. We are no longer the victim. We’re the one who has chosen to do something, or not do something. Which means we’re forced to decide again: is this who I want to be? Do I want to be someone who chooses not to spend time with Jesus? Most of us would answer, “No.” to that question. We want to be people who spend time with Jesus.

When we say, “I chose not to spend my time that way this morning” we’re given the freedom to say, “But I will chose to spend my time that way tonight or tomorrow morning.”

When we see ourselves as the person in control of our time, we can change quickly. This is the only way repentance will happen for us.

How would we change if we were finally honest with ourselves?

“I chose not to spend time with Jesus today because I chose to hit the snooze button.”

“I chose not to spend time praying this morning because I wanted to listen to Joe Rogan.”

“I chose not to spend time reflecting with the Holy Spirit because I chose to scroll on social media.”

Simply being honest with statements like that pushes us into further honesty. Why would we choose the snooze button, Joe Rogan, or social media over communion with the Trinity? What’s wrong with us?

Well, what’s wrong with us is that we don’t really love God as much as we think we do.

When we repeatedly choose to prioritize lesser things over Jesus, it means we love those lesser things more than we love Jesus.

We will make time for the things we love.
We will sacrifice what we perceive to be less important things for the more important things.
We will decide to focus on what brings us the most satisfaction.

We can try to argue and defend ourselves all we want to, but this is true. We spend our time on the things we love.

So, what do we do? Two things.

1. We commit to radical, ongoing honesty with God.

We love because he first loved us.
—1 John 4:19

Perhaps part of the reason we don’t love God the way we think or say we do is because all our lives we’ve tried to love God in our own strength. We do all the “right things” to “prove” to God, ourselves, and others that we love God. But that’s not how this works.

We love because God has loved us first. So any love you have for God is going to need to be initiated by God. This is where radical honesty with Him comes in. What if you prayed this:

“God, I don’t love you the way I want or need to love you. Holy Spirit, will you cause my heart to love You, the Father, and Jesus more?”

And what if you prayed that every morning? My bet is your heart will grow to love Him more because you’re being honest about your depravity and your need for God to intervene in your life. He moves toward the humble and contrite in heart. (Psalm 51:17)

2. We commit to cultivating a greater love for God.

Love is a cycle. We love a thing, so we spend time with that thing, which causes us to love that thing more. This is how people fall in love (and, unfortunately, fall out of love). We start to love a guy or girl, so we want to spend more time with them, and, in doing so, we fall deeper in love.

It works the same way with social media, the snooze button, and Joe Rogan. We will always get a temporary satisfaction out of these three that make us love them more. We long for more social media because of the dopamine. We love the snooze button because the bed is way more comfortable in the morning than at night. We long for more Joe Rogan because he’s always going to have interesting conversations.

What would happen if we started to meditate on God’s Word and in His presence? If God is love and we love because He first loved us, there is absolutely no way that sitting in His presence with His Word won’t change us. This is how we change. We fall in love with Him by spending time with Him. This requires a choice.

What if we woke up and said, “I’m going to choose to spend time with God right now because I want to love Him more than I love anything else.”

What if we put our phone down and said, “I’m going to choose to reflect on God’s presence with me because I want to be more sensitive to His voice.”

Or if we said, “Instead of the next three hours on Joe Rogan or a movie, I’m going to read God’s Word.”

This sounds radical, but embedded in this documentary about the underground church in Iran, there’s a story about a man who had never heard the Gospel before but knew the Book of John word for word because, as he says, “A man wearing white shows up to my house every night and tells me what to write down.”⁵

I’m learning that what looks radical to us is actually barely scratching the surface of normal in God’s Kingdom. I don’t want to settle. I don’t want normal. I want abundant life with Jesus.

To get there, I know I need to be honest with myself and with God.

Perhaps you do, too.

If so, don’t hesitate. It’s worth it.

See you next week.

—Brandon

1. I didn’t even watch the interview. I don’t know what President Trump talked about or how the conversation developed. I knew that Joe Rogan’s influence meant that President Trump would lock up many votes, which happened. President Trump did an excellent job capitalizing on the YouTube world of young men and women—a move that (in my completely uneducated political science opinion) won him this election.

2. https://thehill.com/homenews/media/4959974-joe-rogan-trump-interview/

3. I promise one day I’ll expand my vocabulary beyond the word “things.”

4. https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/if-i-were-22-again#:~:text=television%20or%20videos.-,I%20have%20read%20my%20Bible%20on%20more%20of%20those%20days,this%20encounter%20with%20God's%20word.

5. The documentary is Sheep Among Wolves. It’s fantastic but gruesome at times when they discuss the persecution and treatment of people.

Photo by Aron Visuals on Unsplash