Marty Solomon

Keegan Stewart: Hello and welcome. This is the LCU Podcast, a podcast that brings stories, insights, and people from Lubbock Christian University.
I'm your host, Keegan Stewart, and I'm happy to be with you for another episode.
On today's episode, we welcome special guest Marty Solomon to campus.
Marty is the host and the creator of the worldwide famous Bama podcast.
He's also an author and the president of Impact Campus Ministries.
Tim Miller, CFO at LCU, and I got to sit down with him and ask him several questions.
We asked him about trends within modern faith, his advice for college students today,
the latest things he's up to, and much, much more.
I hope you enjoy this conversation with Marty Solomon.
Thrilled to welcome you for another episode of the LCU Podcast.
Joined today by Marty Solomon.
Marty, thank you for being here today.
Marty Solomon: You know, it's good to be back, but the first time I can blame myself.
But the second time, you invited me back.
That's got a shame on you.
What's the saying?
You get it.
Keegan Stewart: No, we're thrilled to have you back doing a lot of cool things on campus this week.
Tim Miller is also here.
He's going to be co-hosting this episode with us.
But Tim, you guys just came from a luncheon.
There's an event tonight and doing chapel tomorrow and some stuff with leadership as well.
Tim Miller: Yeah.
Yeah, I'm really excited to have Marty back.
As you can tell, we came from lunch, and my throat hasn't recovered from it yet,
but hopefully this won't be too scratchy for the podcast.
Keegan Stewart: It'll be great.
Marty, as you know, we visited with you over two years ago, or about two years ago,
and really got to ask you a lot of specified topics around the Bible,
specified topics around what you do, and we just want to do that today.
We want to dig deeper in some areas, and we have some questions.
So I'm going to jump in with the first one.
Marty Solomon: Let's do it.
Keegan Stewart: That asks, what role do you believe Christian higher ed plays in forming faith and even forming a long life of resilient faith?
Marty Solomon: Yeah, I like the last two words, that resilient faith.
I think Christian ed still plays some of the same parts it always has played.
There's value in the ability to be the academic scholastic accountability system for learning new things.
That's beautiful.
But I think some of what's maybe changing about Christian higher ed, and just higher ed in general, the ability to interact with other viewpoints, to hear other voices, to collaborate.
There are other spaces in the world that do that, but the academic institution continues to be one of the places where that's just done in a very unique way.
And I also wonder if there's something that we're learning about, and I don't know if we've learned it yet, but in a world where there's so much information, bad information, disinformation, misinformation, if part of the role of higher ed is going to be teaching us how to relate to, how to vet, how to evaluate, how to validate, how to, just in our academic pursuits, what do we do with all the things that are at our fingertips?
and what does truth mean?
So I wonder if there's not an element there that I'm still wrestling with.
I'm in higher ed right now in my grad work.
So I've kind of gotten back into,
and some of these things are coming from my own firsthand experience
of what I'm appreciating about higher ed even at 42 years old.
Keegan Stewart: What grad work are you working on right now?
Marty Solomon: I'm getting a Master's of Theology in Ethics and Spirituality at Xavier University.
So I swung over to the Catholic Jesuit tradition
to see if I could learn from Ignatian spirituality.
It's been really good.
Keegan Stewart: Fascinating.
Yeah.
Very cool.
Tim Miller: So along those lines, you talked about words or things that are being introduced into just our lexicon.
And a word that I've heard recently, first time I heard it, I thought that kind of makes sense.
It's the word deconstruction.
But then I heard a speaker talking about, you know, if your child comes home from college and says they're deconstructing their faith,
you really need to wrestle them down and wash their mouth out with soap.
And so there's some good connotations, some negative connotations.
Can you kind of talk into that and some of the traps that might come up from?
Marty Solomon: Yeah.
Yeah, I feel like deconstruction, well, A, I can remember deconstruction when I was in college, about the year 2000.
We were talking about deconstruction in a different way.
We were using it in light of post-modernity, and it just meant something a little different.
So the word wasn't some brand new buzzword for me.
So when it came back on the scene, I'm like, okay, yeah, it was similar.
And then it became one of those buzzwords that was making Christians break out in hives.
And I could somewhat appreciate what they were frustrated by.
Sometimes when we were talking about deconstruction, we were experiencing just destruction.
But those are two different words, and they talk about two different things.
But for some, deconstruction was, I'm trying to destroy the faith.
I'm trying to attack the faith.
Deconstruction for me, I've never had a problem with the word.
I think because of how you started your question.
When you first heard it, you thought, well, that's a good thing.
Any vibrant, healthy, alive, developing faith, part of a faith that is vibrant and growing
is a faith that's able to look at what's on the table, realize that anything that we've
put together is going to be finite.
: It's going to b2e fallible.
Marty Solomon: So we're going to constantly want to be taking things apart, putting things back.
And that taking things apart, that word's literally just deconstruction.
So we want to be able to take apart our faith so that we can put the components on the table
and say, oh, there's a couple of things that snuck in here that I actually want to throw away.
There's a couple of things I want to repurpose.
There's a couple of things I need to clean up.
But then there's a whole bunch of pieces that are fine.
: Let me put my faith back together.
Marty Solomon: And that's just, I mean, the Reformation talked about always reforming.
Like even the reformers were people that were going to have to always be doing this dynamic work.
And for me as a college minister, deconstruction is central for young adults.
If you tell them to run away from it, to avoid it, they're only going to double down on it.
So helping them do it well, helping them do it in a way that, and I talked about this in my first book.
And my next book I have coming out, I talk about it in the last chapter too, the value of deconstruction.
because if you believe the Bible and Jesus are big enough to catch you underneath this process,
you don't have to be scared of it. If you're deconstructing Jesus and the Bible away from
everything, well, that would be a different kind of a journey. But I want to pull my faith apart
because I believe that Jesus and the Bible are bigger than my understanding of what faith and theology looks like.
Keegan Stewart: So if you told one of your college students, okay, you need to go about that
in a healthy way, and they ask, what does that look like? What do you tell them?
Marty Solomon: Yeah, we'd probably talk, I'd probably not to sound like a curmudgeon and just a frustrating
old guy, but we'd talk about the value of discipleship and doing this with other people.
And the value of resources we can find online, but the foolishness of letting a TikTok personality
or an Instagram account do the work for me. But being able to use those same resources,
not avoiding them, but use those same resources in relationship with other people to ask those
good questions. And again, I think this circles back to your first question of the value of
Christian higher ed, because there is an academy for a reason. There is an institutional system
of accountability for studying what's real and what isn't real and why certain sources can be
trusted or vetted. And those are all things we get to do together, but we're probably not going to do
on the other side of our smartphone on our own at 10 p.m. while we're doom scrolling.
So sure.
Yeah.
Tim Miller: Yeah.
So you mentioned your grad studies that you're doing right now and you intentionally chose
something that's a little bit different from kind of our we have a common stream that we've
come from.
Marty Solomon: Yes.
Tim Miller: That is emphasized logic and reason.
Talk about the other aspect that you're learning now that you want to incorporate and how that
fits with all of this.
Marty Solomon: Yeah.
I mean, we, yeah, we do come from this, uh, common shared kind of Stone Campbell brotherhood,
which exists within a larger world of the Protestant reformation and the Protestant world.
And Protestants were really good.
It arose in this, the age of reason, it arose classical theology.
It's very reason oriented.
When we talk about things, one of the things I'm passionate about that relates to this
for me is like the study of the theology of work and vocation and what's holy and sacred
about the work that we do.
And on one hand, you have a lot of Protestant work.
Kyperian Reformed Theology talks a lot about the Kyperian Theology of Work.
And it's very logic.
It's very reasoned.
There's this Puritan work ethic.
It's God's given us a job to do.
But then there was this other world.
And the reason I went the direction I went in my grad study was because the Catholic world
had a little bit more, I don't know if this is the right word, a little bit more mysticism,
a little bit more contemplative approach, a little bit less of what is the job we have to do,
what's the reason, and a little bit more of what's the colorful, deep theology of who God is
and how God is working in the world. And that more theological, mystical approach
that comes kind of in the same age as the age of reason, you also have the age of mysticism,
almost rising, almost as a counterbalance. And so I've been raised in Protestantism. I deeply
value that, but there was like another side of the conversation I think I was missing.
And so I went to this side of the Christian stream to study a little bit more of how do I discern
not just what it is that God wants me to do, but who God is, where God's at, and what God's doing.
That's what I was missing. I was missing a discerning piece of what God was up to,
rather than just a theological knowing of what I'm supposed to do.
Keegan Stewart: One of the things that you've, I'll speak personally for me, that you've helped me do
and consistently do since I was introduced to your podcast, was consider how I approach the
Word when I start reading it and asking myself the question, okay, what's my lens as I approach
this text and what's the lens that I should maybe have as I approach this text. But could you speak
to some of that, Marty, and maybe what are some of the biases that we bring in with us as we start
to read God's Word
Marty Solomon: Yeah, I can remember an episode. It wasn't too long ago, but it was a little while ago, where one of our co-hosts, Elle Grover Fricks, she went and studied at Jerusalem
University and just has a wealth of knowledge from her time there and her graduate studies there.
And one of the things that she brought to the table is how we have these two biases of primitivism and presentivism that we bring to the Bible constantly.
And one of those is primitivism, where we think the Bible was just this primitive, barbaric people.
And so we project onto the Bible, well, they were just stupid.
They didn't know any better.
They're basically just theological cavemen and women walking around, which is really not a fair, accurate assessment of really any point in biblical history.
They're not barely knowledgeable. They're very robust theological people.
So we project that. On the flip side, we often, and I think especially our young,
maybe our younger adults and our college students, it's easy to fall into the bias of presentivism,
where we bring the things that we understand in our present world, and then we project it onto a
world. And this, you could take anything like, say, how the Bible views gender, and you can go
either direction with that. You can say, well, they just didn't know anything back then and do
primitivism. Or you can take the things that we value and the things that we assess as ethical
and moral and assume that the Bible shares those same definitions. Both of those would be biases
that would shape the way we read the scripture. So it just requires a little bit of extra work to
say, what did they understand? I think Elle even has a rubric she uses, like a five, six stage
rubric of what are the biases, what are the questions that I'm assuming as I come to the text
to check myself and see if I'm bringing presentivism or primitivism to the way I'm
reading the Bible.
Keegan Stewart: So knowing those things that you just kindly shared, how do you approach it? What is the productive or most fruitful way to approach it, knowing all those things?
Marty Solomon: Yeah, I think just checking yourself with that question of accountability.
And again, I think this is the value of the academy and being in higher education is because
you're in this world all the time.
You're writing a paper every single week and you're having to go, okay, wait a minute.
Am I projecting my presentivism bias into this discussion?
And if I am, I got to walk that back.
And I probably need to even work that out in the paper.
And if I'm not in higher ed, I'm still going to be doing this, but I'm going to be doing
this in my conversations or in my sermon prep or in my own just spiritual reflection, my own quiet
time in my journal? What kind of things am I bringing to the text? Am I assuming that, oh,
they were just dumb back then? Or, okay, let me go study that, which is part of why I try to give
myself to an hour a day. I'm trying to study about the world of the Bible because I have to be so
immersed in that that I don't make assumptions about. And I'm always being challenged by a
by a college text that's saying, well, we think they thought this, but they really didn't. And
here's the evidence to show that they, it's different than we assume. Oh, okay. So it's
just this constant check of accountability and not racing ahead when it's easy to get the slam dunk
on the, and that's not, that's not like us. It's, we want, we want to create the meme.
Like we want the sound bite. We want the Instagram reel. It's flashy. It's catchy,
but it's too easy to find the slam dunks and you have to go, okay, wait a minute. Is that fair?
Is this more nuanced? Is this more complex? Is there more to this? And that also means that
sometimes I'm just going to be sitting there going, I don't know yet. I can't land yet. The
plane's going to have to circle a few more times because I'm just not confident enough that I
have answers to some of these questions.
Keegan Stewart: So you've almost gotten, you've had to learn how to get comfortable in that gray. I'm not sure. Maybe. I'm learning still. Yeah.
Marty Solomon: Yeah. And the more I learn, the less I know, as the whole adage goes. Absolutely.
Tim Miller: That's right. I remember when she said those things, one of them, one of the things she said
was, what harms can I bring from this? Just to be careful of, as I rephrase what I find,
who can be hurt by that?
So how do you balance theological precision with accessibility when you know that your
listeners range along that. And then also there's this aspect of being careful how to say things
that aren't harmful.
Marty Solomon: Yeah. And this is, honestly, I have a load of insecurity when it comes to this question. I continue to be baffled. I think my mind tries to figure out my audience is either one
or the other. Either I'm talking to scholars and people that really want to nerd out, or I'm talking
to seekers who don't know anything. And the audience really is far more wider and complex
than that. And that makes me very, very insecure. I have a friend who's a Princeton grad,
and he has other friends in those similar circles, and they listen to the podcast. And I'm always
like, why are you listening to my podcast? And they tell me, oh, I'm not listening to it because
you add all this academic value, but you're adding a perspective. So I'm constantly having
to remind myself that there's something about, and this is true for any of us and all of us,
podcast aside or anything else, you're going to do something in a unique way. You're going to say
it in a way that hasn't been said before. Even if you're saying something that somebody's already
said, even if you're doing something that somebody's already done, you're going, if you're drawn to do
it, if you're called to do it, if you're pulled to do it, you're going to do
world where you kind of act like a research academic, but you're also like in what they
call the trade space. And so it's weird to write a book in the middle. You want to write one or the
other. And as a podcast host, I kind of love that. I love to sit in that space because I don't have
to decide. As a publisher, you kind of do. But as a podcast creator, I don't have to. And so I love,
and I know that's how I learned. I jumped into a lot of these spaces and I didn't know what half
the words meant. Like I'm listening to all these professors talk about stuff. I'm like, what,
what, what, what is documentary hypothesis? Like, what is that? Like, what, what is that? What is
Q? Q source? What was, he was, is that the Star Trek character? Like what, what is Q source
I'm also not going to let my insecurity produce that I got to be an academic either.
So I always have to remember who I am and let my imposter syndrome
kind of die out in all the appropriate ways.
But yeah.
Keegan Stewart: Building on that, I'm just curious.
When you guys first started Bema, first started recording,
probably before you ever imagined it would have become what it's become,
who was your target audience when you guys first started?
Marty Solomon: Yeah.
When we started the podcast, we were only talking to a group of students
that were, I had a campus ministry on University of Idaho and Washington State University's campuses.
So I had these two groups of students on two different campuses that came to a class.
And the podcast, I was having to travel so much that the podcast was simply me
giving them their, it was a flipped classroom. We were giving them their class content online.
And we knew that other people could listen to it, would listen to it. But it's season three before
we realize we have a lot of people listening to this. So for the first two seasons originally,
before we did the reboot, we were just talking to a group of students that we assume,
go to your church, are a part of a bunch of other events. They are in relationship with
our campus ministers. You're assuming this, and the podcast is just a part of a larger
discipleship experience. And then obviously that starts to shift as we realize that we're trying to steward something other than what we thought we had.
Keegan Stewart: I love the idea of it growing significantly
without y'all even realizing it.
Marty Solomon: And there was a little bit of a freaky accountability of like, if I'm just going to say this to a bunch of college students,
I'm going to be able to get away with all kinds of stuff. Now that there's all these people
listening to it, I can't just get away with saying something that, well, I should probably double
check that, but who cares? All of a sudden I care really. So yeah, it's been weird.
Keegan Stewart: Marty, one of the things that you've often said is the goal in your work or the work of spiritual maturity or transformation is not information.
The goal is transformation.
What new questions are you thinking about or asking yourself these days?
Marty Solomon: Man, new questions.
I think a year or two ago, maybe more, time starts to move faster the older I get.
But it wasn't too long ago where I felt like I started to ask a new set of leadership questions.
I started to realize that my role as a leader was really limited by my gifts and who I am and who I'm not.
And so I was starting to ask a whole bunch of questions of, when you're talking transformation, not just information.
Not just do I know things that are helpful.
But how am I becoming a better kind of person that can lead a team and lead an organization or create content or any of those things?
So they were leadership, self-reflection questions.
Today, just a few weeks ago, my father passed away.
I'm asking like a whole, and I'm assuming this won't last forever.
Right now I'm just asking like a whole slate of like weird, weird reflective questions.
your whole world's a little blurry. You're kind of finding a whole new identity now. You're trying
to figure stuff out, reflect in whole new ways. You have all kinds of different perspective all
of a sudden. So there's that too. Just being human. Just being human. I feel like I become
more and more human every time I step into a new chapter. More normal. More normal like everybody else
Keegan Stewart: So yeah. Has leadership always been at the forefront of your mind?
Marty Solomon: Yes, but probably not in healthy ways. When I was younger, God didn't give me leadership
positions because I should not have been in them. Luckily, God protected me and other people
from letting me have too many of those seats of leadership and influence.
And then probably at the right time of my own growth, God gave me the position that I'm in now.
And I just kind of kept growing.
But the more I've grown, the more I'm, A, the more confident I become in who I am,
my own belovedness and my own, like, I'm enough.
But it's the weirdest paradox where on one hand, I'm like, I'm completely enough.
And on the other hand, I simultaneously at the exact same moment am more aware of everything
that I'm not.
So I am more than enough.
I am also not everything.
and so if I try to be all this stuff that I am not that I am going to hurt other people
I'm going to hurt myself I'm going to hurt my team ultimately I'm going to hurt the organization
and so yeah I think and I and and there might come different chapters where that changes and
shifts but right now I love the word stewardship I think I probably said the word stewardship four
times on this podcast already life and leadership in these roles is something to steward and so
So in order to steward those things well, I have to be in the moment really wrestling with that stuff.
So did I always ask those questions, leadership questions, your original question?
No.
But the more I've been in it, the more I'm drawn to ask those questions so I can be the right kind of leader.
Tim Miller: So along those lines, I mean, you've got a ton of stuff going on.
I just saw your email go out today with all the different things you have.
You're juggling a whole lot of stuff.
That's got to lead sometimes to a sense of drifting from the mission.
How do you draw yourself back?
Is there a particular discipline that you have when you recognize that?
Marty Solomon: Oh, man, that's really good.
Luckily, part of my leadership reflection has changed my relationship with my larger team.
Our team has rhythms.
Our team has practices.
And I do have some spiritual practices, I think, is maybe what you were thinking when you asked that question.
But even before I get to that, our team has found some systems that are helpful for us to build quarterly objectives, one-year visions, three-year visions.
I'm not just talking about goal setting, but ways that help us identify what are we trying to do together and how do we make sure we're moving in a healthy direction.
What that has done is it's enabled me to not, like, I don't have to worry about the drift because it's not, they're all not following me.
They're doing a thing that I'm a part of.
And that's going to hold, there's a center of gravity to that.
That's really, really helpful.
For me personally, I have to stay emotionally healthy.
If I'm going to steward anything and be self-reflective like we were just talking about it all, I have to be spiritually and emotionally healthy.
So that hasn't changed.
There's nothing new.
And that's kind of the secret sauce.
That's the wisdom.
I've been doing the same set of disciplines since 2008.
And it hasn't changed.
It's the same prayer practices.
It's the same recitation of blessings.
It's the same memorization of scripture.
It's the same reading of study.
It's the same sitting in contemplative mindfulness.
There's a little package of about two and a half hours worth of spiritual practice that
I do before my workday starts every day. That just has not changed. And it provides a foundation
that anchors me to who I am so that I don't end up chasing every fear and insecurity and everything else that can pull me off course.
Tim Miller: So you've got this community aspect, but I've also heard you
talk about just working with therapists.
Marty Solomon: Oh gosh, yeah, absolutely. So yeah, some of that practice is intentional relationships. So I have a spiritual director and I have a therapist. Both of them have
value in different ways, but even more important because of the role that I have, it's super
important to make sure that people are in your life that can say, you're saying this, but what
I'm hearing is this, or what I'm seeing is that, or say that again, but pay attention to what you
just said. When you don't have in your life that can have that voice, you become a dangerous person
Keegan Stewart: Last year, Marty, we were thrilled to have Dallas Jenkins on our campus,
and we know that you're a fan of him and The Chosen. You've gotten to speak with him
before. One of the things that he said that stuck with us was this idea that God's math
doesn't make sense. And so could you talk about what that quote means to you or what that looks like within your ministry?
Marty Solomon: Yeah, and he always had some really practical ways to, you know,
he talked about his man a program is how he talked about it on one of our first episodes um and and
i've always i've always loved that for him it was very practical it was about having the money to
produce the show or it was about i don't know there's a whole bunch of different things that
it could be about um and very quantitative things when it comes to producing a show
for me one of the things that we talk about is you can you can measure things and we at the end of
the day, we probably should measure things. Like there's a certain level of accountability for us
to be able to do everything that we can to know that we're doing the right stuff the right way.
But the only measuring sticks we can use, they're not the measuring sticks that God's going to use.
So we can measure this quantitative approach or the amount of people that showed up to this or
the amount of money that's being given for that. But only God can measure. One of my favorite
stories that Ray Vanderlaan taught me was a story about a Turkish vineyard owner. And he had students
in the vineyard. And the vineyard owner comes out and he's super proud of his vineyard. But Ray
doesn't speak Turkish and the vineyard owner doesn't speak English. And so they can't communicate.
And he's trying to talk to him, but nobody can understand anybody. And so finally, the vineyard
owner takes a grape and he squishes the seeds out of the grape into the palm of his hand. And he
looks at Ray and he points to the seeds and he says, "I count seed in grape. Only Allah, God,
count grape in seed." And I've always loved that story. Like there are certain things that we can
see and that we can measure. Only I could tell you there are seven seeds in that grape.
But not only me, we could say that. Only God could say how many grapes will be produced by
seven seeds. And that's so true spiritually, that when I hear Dallas say things like that,
those are the stories I think of. There are things that we can measure, but then there are things
that just don't make any sense because of what God does with what quantitatively doesn't math.
The math isn't mathing, but God's math is mathing. And God just has a different set of math and
formula than we're used to. I take great hope in that because there's all kinds of things that I
think, man, there's something really good there. I just don't know what it is. But it's because God
does. And yeah, that's what I hear when I hear Dallas say things like that.
Tim Miller: So there was a few weeks ago I was listening to one of the podcasts and it was,
you were talking about a student pointing out to you there was a chiasm within a chiasm.
And it was a discovery for you in that moment. Has there been anything else like that in the
middle of a class or in the middle of a podcast where you're like, oh, holy cow, that's a new idea?
Marty Solomon: My favorite episode I've ever recorded on the podcast, I think that's still true.
There's a few new ones that have made it running, but I think it's still my favorite,
is a podcast, an episode not far into session six, season six, and it's called Isaac's Bad Eyes.
And it's still one of my favorite episodes.
And I'm not even going to tell you the story because it's in the episode.
So people can, I'll give you a hall pass if you're not there in season six and you can go listen to that episode.
But that whole episode, which is my favorite I've ever recorded,
And one of my favorite lessons I've ever been a part of came because of exactly what you're
saying.
There was a moment where a student made an observation.
In fact, I'll tell you the observation.
The student said, Marty, why doesn't Isaac come down the mountain with Abraham when Abraham
goes up to sacrifice Isaac at the binding of the Akedah?
I'm like, what?
And we sat there in class.
Yeah, like Abraham and Isaac go to the mountain.
Abraham and Isaac are at the mountain.
Abraham and Isaac go up the mountain.
Abraham and Isaac are at the top of the mountain, but only Abraham comes down the mountain.
And I was like, we opened it up and we checked.
And sure enough, and I was like, that feels far too Jewish to not be a thing.
And so there was actually a daughter of a rabbi in the class.
And I said, there has to be a midrash about this.
Will you ask your dad?
And so she texts her dad and we tell the story in that episode.
But that whole episode came because some student made an observation I had never made.
years and years of studying that story, had never noticed it. Even with the tools that I had to
notice it, I didn't notice that they did. I got an email this morning, this morning that we record
this episode, I got an email in my inbox of somebody that is in season three, and they were
listening to the teaching of the faithful and wise steward, which is where Jesus talks about the
destruction of Jerusalem and or the end times. And then he tells these three parables, the 10
bridesmaids with the lamps and the oil and the 10 talents and the sheep and goats. And in season
three, I'm like, I'm not really sure what the Ramez is. That will probably make sense to people
if they're that far in the podcast. The Ramez would be a hyperlink back to a Hebrew scripture.
I don't really know what Jesus might be referencing in the bridesmaids. Somebody wrote me an email
this morning and said, well, if he's referencing this passage from the Torah, then the priests are
supposed to always have enough oil to last until morning. And you're making the point in your
teaching that the role isn't, like, even if the priests aren't doing it, we have to do the role
that God's given us. So that would make, and I was just like, oh my goodness, that's the best idea.
So that probably doesn't make any sense to a listener unless they were to listen to that
episode, but it's an answer to your question of this stuff happens all the time. Like students
that are given the tools find stuff that I could have never seen or found. And it's just the coolest
stuff. And I never write back emails anymore because I'm just like too busy and I don't want
people to start writing me. But I wrote back to that email. I'm like, that is so amazing. Like,
thank you for sending me that email. That is so great. Absolutely.
Keegan Stewart: A little bit earlier, you mentioned that you've been doing the spiritual practices that you're still doing since 2008.
What was that cornerstone moment in 2008? On this campus, we have a lot of students actively
trying to discover their faith and grow in it. And that sounded like a moment for you where
you found something and grew in it. What happened?
Marty Solomon: Yeah, it started on my first trip to Israel. I had been mentored by a lot of spiritual
mentors who had really just taught me to pray. And they said, you got to pray. You got to pray.
You got to pray. And these mentors never cared about all the things I was learning.
They were like, Jewish rabbis, shmabbis, we don't care. Like, we don't, don't bring us your Jewish
chiasm stuff. We don't care. We want to know what Jesus is telling you, like pray, which I always
deeply appreciated. I just struggled with it. I struggled with prayer. I went to Israel with Ray
on my first trip in 2008. And I remember standing up above on the mountain up above Qumran,
where they found the Dead Sea Scrolls. And Ray did a lesson on the Essenes.
and long story short the lesson was essentially these people gave everything to know the text and
to walk the text out like they had a passion for the bible um and god honored their passion
and ray's big punchline was where are the essenes like i don't see any essenes today
and it doesn't mean that everybody has to be one but i don't know any where are they and he's
screaming at the top of his lungs i won't do that in the podcast but he's just screaming where are
the Essenes. And I'm just weeping. I'm like full on weeping because I'm like, is this prayer?
Can this be prayer for me as a Jewish believer? The text, the Bible? And Ray was like, yes. In
fact, not only that, it is later in our relationship, he would say, that is your special
call as a Jewish follower of Jesus, is to be a person of the Bible and to give that away to the
world. And so I came back in 2008 and said, well, then that's what I'm going to do. I always had a
hard time. I prayed every day. I did. Keegan, I did. I promise I prayed every day. I just struggled.
And it never filled my cup. But I was like, you're telling me I could memorize the Bible,
and that's also a form of prayer? I didn't stop praying. I kept praying. But I also worked in
these disciplines that gave me life. Like I was like, oh, this fills my soul. And, um, and I just
started giving my life to that. And, and, and even that had a capacity, like you can only do so much.
And I found what that ceiling was and I settled in. So since 2008, I've just done that same approach
and I still pray, but I also do these deeply life giving practices. And I'm like this,
this is where life is for me. And I'm assuming, I would assume it's different for all your students
on your campus. It might be the flip-flop. It might be they've been told their whole life to
study the Bible and nobody's taught them how to pray. And when they learn how to pray,
it could be the opposite. But when you find this pursuit of Jesus that feels like it just fills your soul, it'll change stuff.
Keegan Stewart: your soul, it'll change stuff. And you start your day with those practices.
Marty Solomon: Yeah. Yeah. It's important for me. I'm a high anxiety person. I still may end up at a point
in my life. I would probably be medicated for my anxiety, I would assume, had I not, like I'm right
there, but I have to start every day with a very grounding two to three hours of, I do the same
thing every day. It's kind of my obsessive compulsive tendency. And okay, now I'm ready to
let all the chaos come at me, but I have to start my day with something I can control.
Keegan Stewart: So college students, you're a college minister.
We're on a college campus.
What is your advice to the 2025 college freshmen that's in this season of life, in this time that we're in?
How do you encourage them in this?
How do you speak about things like identity, purpose, and faith?
What are some of the things you're telling college students right now?
Marty Solomon: Just get to know Jesus.
Just get to know Jesus.
And the details of the world that they live in are changing radically, and all those details matter.
I'm not discounting those details.
But the thing will never change, and that is to get to know Jesus.
But the anxiety they come with on campus, the technology, the social media, the relationships,
all the unique things and struggles that they bring with them to campus create such a cocktail of
whatever, fears, insecurities, questions. Get to know Jesus. Get to know your beloved identity.
Like you mentioned, identity is one of those things. You are the beloved of God. Nothing could,
we talk about trusting the story on the podcast. That's really just understanding your beloved
identity and getting to know Jesus so that you get to hear that from your beloved all the time.
Everything else will figure itself out. And do all the other stuff because all that stuff matters.
But I mean, that's the thing. If you do all the other stuff and don't ever get to know Jesus,
it'll all be a waste. If you do all the other stuff and still live in fear of how you're not
beloved and you still think that God's just ready to just smash you and smite you because of his
wrath and his indignation, his righteous indignation at your sinful failures, none of that other
stuff will matter.
Knowing Jesus and knowing how he feels about you will absolutely change everything.
It's the gospel.
Keegan Stewart: Thanks for sharing that.
Yeah.
Tim Miller: Yeah, I've heard some students talk about just the, they're constantly reminded, they feel
broken already and they're constantly reminded of being broken and also the feeling that
that just means they're worthless.
And I think that for a big percentage of those students, they don't think they're lovable.
And they've lost the story of you are worth it.
What I created was good, and I just want someone to partner with me to repair it.
Marty Solomon: Yeah.
Yeah, the title of my next book is called The Gospel of Being Human.
And I just ended up, it wasn't the original title I chose, but I've fallen in love with the title
because we have been told that being human is bad news.
We've been told that being human means you're a failure, that you're a big pile of sin and garbage
and just disappointment about being human is actually goodness.
At the beginning of the story, that meant we were made in the image of God.
We had a special part in creation.
And yes, that doesn't do any part of any of our brokenness or our sinfulness,
But being human is good news, not bad news.
And I think we've got to reclaim that.
I think our theology has done us some level of disservice in that regard.
Yeah.
Keegan Stewart: You mentioned the book.
What else is going on with you these days?
What are you working on?
What's the latest with the pod?
Marty Solomon: 2026 is going to be a crazy year, Keegan.
We've got three trips.
We've got, if everything goes as planned, we've got two trips to Israel,
one study tour to Turkey, and then we've got four fundraisers
and a book tour from April to August.
Keegan Stewart: Wow.
Marty Solomon: So all I can see is just a blur, a hazy blur of a 2026 calendar.
So pray that I make it and one piece of my family is intact.
Keegan Stewart: Absolutely.
Marty Solomon: Are you guys still recording?
Keegan Stewart: What's that look like for you in this season?
Marty Solomon: Yep, yep, yep.
We stay.
And the nice thing about expanding our team to have more hosts means I don't have to always
be around recording because they have their own series and they're producing their own
stuff.
But yeah, we'll still record.
We'll still do a session two reboot.
I'll still keep doing my YouTube content.
Brent Billings does have a sabbatical coming up in 2027.
So we're trying to get ready for that,
and we're trying to figure out what that means.
Does it slow down our publication?
We're still trying to figure out what that will look like,
but that's coming.
That's around the corner.
Keegan Stewart: Well, please tell Brent that LCU says hi.
Marty Solomon: All right, we'll do it.
We'll do it.
Keegan Stewart: What else, Tim?
What else do you have for Marty?
Tim Miller: Just thank you for coming.
I've got to tell you that there are a lot of people
that hadn't heard of you before
the last time you were here
and the number of people that got introduced
and now they're like,
this stuff is amazing.
And it makes scripture,
a lot of times,
especially being to Bible college,
you think, well, I've heard all this stuff.
I've read it a thousand times.
And it just opens up new avenues
and then you start to see the layers and layers.
And just like the book of John,
he is brilliant in his,
just the words that he used speaks to everybody.
Marty Solomon: Yeah, absolutely.
Tim Miller: Different stories, but the same story, but different language.
It's crazy.
Marty Solomon: Yeah.
Yeah.
No, I'm glad that it's been a helpful resource for people.
And I'm thrilled that I got to come here a few times and now get to come back yet again
and just keep meeting new faces and new folks that have bumped into it.
So that's great.
Keegan Stewart: Marty, thanks for the time today.
Thanks for all that you're doing on LCU's campus this week.
Marty Solomon: Absolutely.
Thank you guys.
Keegan Stewart: Thank you for listening to the LCU podcast.
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God bless.