The priesthood of mere Christians
The significance of Scripture calling government officials “ministers,” how the fruit of the Spirit outed Jim as a Christian on the police force, and what a California jury proceeding can teach you about the veracity of the resurrection.
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[0:00:04] JR: Hey, friend. Welcome to the Mere Christians Podcast. I'm Jordan Raynor. How does the gospel influence the work of Mere Christians, those of us who aren't pastors or religious professionals, but who work as cops and floor layers and auditors? That's the question we explore every week.
Today, I'm posing it to J. Warner Wallace. He's a cold case Homicide Detective, frequently featured on Dateline, and the author of some big books such as, Cold-Case Christianity, chronicling how God used his skills as a detective to come to faith in Jesus Christ. Jim and I recently sat down to talk about the significance of God's word calling government officials “ministers”, how the fruit of the spirit outed Jim as a Christian on the police force, and what a California jury proceeding can teach you about the veracity of the resurrection. I think you guys are going to love this conversation with my new friend Jim Wallace.
[EPISODE]
[0:01:15] JR: J. Warner Wallace, welcome to the Mere Christians Podcast. Can I call you Jim?
[0:01:18] JWW: Of course. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
[0:01:21] JR: What made you want to be a homicide detective?
[0:01:24] JWW: I did think I was going to be. I was not quite sure where – look, I was raised by a cop who worked homicide for years. So, I was familiar with it, and when I was a high schooler, I dabbled in it, they had a police explorer program. I did well in it in terms of like into the academy, but it just wasn't who I was shaped to be, I didn't think. I was more creative, and when I discovered that early on, I pursued a degree in the arts, so I got a bachelor's degree in design out of a Cal State Long Beach, and then I went on from that and did a master's in architecture at UCLA.
I was in my graduate work, which there, to get a master's in architecture, if you don't have an undergraduate in architecture, that's a three-year, 128-unit course, so you're going to be there a while, and it's full-time. I was about a year into that when I was working in a firm in Santa Monica, a good firm. That’s my dream job, because I went to UCLA, because of this master architect who was there. I really thought that this was going to be – his name was Charles Moore, and he had a firm in Santa Monica called Moore Ruble Yudell, MRY.
I was working there and looked around the office. I just didn't see anybody who looked like Susie and I. I was not a believer. It would be another 10 years before I'd be a believer, 11 years, but I just didn't see anybody who had the commitment to marriage that I thought I just knew I'd be working my – I worked myself to death in that position, because if you think about it, creatives, we typically, if someone told us, “Oh, you can go home now, or we could spend another 10 hours and make this project, which bears your name, or might bear your name, we can make it better.” Well, you're going to stay the extra 10 hours. You’re not going to get paid for that.
I just knew I'd be consumed by it. I returned to the profession of my father, and for a lot of years, I felt frustrated that there was no way to scratch that creative itch in law enforcement the way you might scratch it in architecture. I mean, I did a lot of drawings early on. They knew I could draw.
[0:03:23] JR: You were the sketch guy?
[0:03:24] JWW: Yeah. I got called out on every homicide to draw the scene, so even before I was working on homicides, I was present as a patrol officer, because they would want me to come out and make an accurate drawing. Then I got called out on all the officer involved shootings to locate every casing and every bullet hole and make drawings of those, that kind of satisfied that, but then when I got into – you progress along as a cop, you were patrolled, and I worked gangs, and I worked in the back room, which was under cover position.
Then I was assigned a robbery homicide, and it was there that I really got to figure out what is this art thing going to do for me? Like what can I do with it? We started making presentations for juries. When we started, I had a DA who was initially hesitant, but then became very – embraced, the idea that we could visualize this for a jury in a way that's so powerful even to use visual analogy. It's not just that we're showing the images of the scene or the people involved in the scene, but we could actually, recreate – I kind of believe Jesus uses parables. This is to this as this is to this. You could find a visual way to do that.
Anyway, long story short. That's how I ended up, just really, this is when you look back at it, you said, does God have a plan in it? I think so, because in the end, when I came out of law enforcement and retired, even though I still get dragged back into little cases here or there, it really, this was the skill set that we used to write the first books to make the case that we experienced ourselves as we made the case for ourselves, which was many years after I became a police officer.
[0:04:56] JR: That's fascinating. I can’t imagine that the work of a detective is an immensely creative work, not in the artistic sense, right? But you are taking these raw materials of inputs of data and rearranging them by God's grace to spit out some hypothesis, right? That's a pretty creative art.
[0:05:14] JWW: No, it is. Sometimes the creative aspect of it is, like thinking of it in terms of, well, I didn't – everyone comes into this position differently. You might come in and maybe you worked a number of years where you worked in patrol and they'll send you to a homicide school or maybe you came in, because you worked property crimes for 15 years and you finally got bumped up to crime as persons. You find your way in different ways. So, for me, I got in there and I thought, okay, especially when you work in cold cases, somebody who's really good at this, probably better than you are. He's already looked at this, or she's already looked at this.
Now, you're looking at the leftovers and thinking, “Okay, whatever approach we might have taken ordinarily, it didn't work. We need to be creative here.” So, you're right. But it's not creative in the way I needed an artistic expression. I needed some way, like right now, I've written another book for next year. So, this is going to create, in essence, 15 New Talks. Well, those 15 new talks are just a series of visual sequences that I'm going to navigate in front of an audience.
So, I have the most fun either writing the book, because that's creative, or visualizing the book for the presentations you're going to give to audiences. Then once we've done that and we're now giving the presentations regularly, I'm not as thrilled about that, because it's a performance in a sense of something you created visually. The audiences knew, but there's nothing innately creative about presenting the same thing a hundred times. You know what I mean? A lot of it for me is like how do I scratch that creative itch?
[0:06:42] JR: Yeah, that's so interesting. Yes, you alluded to this before. I want our audience to hear the story. God brought you to faith in Christ largely through the skill set he gave you as a detective. What's the story there?
[0:06:55] JWW: I was not assigned to a cold case unit at that time, because I was doing these things collaterally. Most of us who work cold cases nationally are not assigned officially to a cold case unit. We're assigned as detectives somewhere. Someone says, “Hey, take a look at this case.” Then you end up working it collaterally and you might spend a decade just tinkering. That's why you need really to have a sign of fully dedicated assigned cold case detectives to make any progress.
I was looking at my dad's old cases. I was assigned to an undercover unit at the time, which we had to make cases and file the cases with the DA. I was in that position when my wife finally got me to go to church. In her interest, I think in going to church was that she felt like it was a good character developer for our kids. Our kids had been in preschool before they were in elementary school. That preschool was one was Baptist, one was I think a Catholic priest. I mean, these are places locally that had preschools and they were all affiliated to some house of worship.
Although, I was not never attended any of the services or never attended anything at those houses of worship, our kids did go to preschool there. Then once they were old enough to go to school, I think she was thinking like, “Well, now what do we do? Do we continue this and so on?” I just thought, well, I was not raised that way. No. But unlike my dad, who is a very committed atheist, who'd be happy to go to church with you, because he thinks it's a useful delusion. He thinks that something that is not true, but it might help you.
[0:08:21] JR: Whatever works for you works, even though it's not true. Right.
[0:08:25] JWW: Whatever works for you works. Right. He'll even celebrate it, because he thinks it's better than doing something bad.
[0:08:29] JR: At least it's not destructive. Right.
[0:08:31] JWW: Exactly. I would have gone the same, and I actually did go the same way, thinking, it doesn't have to be true for me to go with my wife and want to do what, but again, it was three years of her occasionally suggesting we should probably find a church. We could see what it's like. I finally went. As I walked in, that pastor, he was gifted at presenting the gospel in a way that somebody who is not a believer would, might find something interesting about the way he presented Jesus. That was exactly what happened to me.
I found something interesting about Jesus and that I found that he pitched Jesus as the smartest guy who ever lived, the most important person who ever lived, the biggest blah, blah, blah. I wasn't sure if that was true, but I bought a Bible to find out. What he had said that was so smart. That's what started the journey for me, because as you're reading through the gospels, you will see little attributes of eyewitness testimony that you'll think, “Oh, that's testable. This is a statement that we could test. This is a statement that gives away something that's hidden. This is a statement.”
A lot of the stuff that we were doing at the time I had been trained in forensic statement analysis. There, what you're looking for there is the stuff that's – you're trying to read between the lines. There's a number of principles you're looking at, but that's basically an essence, which you're trying to do. It is creative. There's no science of forensic statement analysis. This is an art and some are better at it. That's why we don't present experts in forensic statement analysis in criminal trials. It's an art. It's not a science.
I was applying this to the gospels to see what it could tell me. As I did that, I became more and more convinced that the resurrection was true. It took a long time, because that journey for me was on several legs. In other words, if there is no God, then there's no Christian God. I didn't believe there was a God. I had to really go back and examine my core beliefs about how I could explain the nature of the universe without God or with God and which makes better sense. As I'm simultaneously reading through the gospels and trying to figure out how well supported the gospels were. So, that really is the journey that was on.
I wasn't trying to disprove the gospels, because I just felt like no one reads. Because honestly, if there was something you could learn from Lord of the Rings, character development stuff, good quotes from the lead characters in Lord of the Rings, does it really – I mean, what are you reading it for? I mean, why would you – no one's testing Lord of the Rings, but this is a different claim. As I read it, initially, I was just reading it like you might read Lord of the Rings. Then I began to see the truth in it. It changed everything for me.
[0:11:06] JR: Yeah. I love it. I've worked alongside a lot of people who, the default position is assuming that Christianity lacks intellectual rigor, right? But you have a lot of people know that our faith is far from a blind one. You wrote a whole book on this called, Cold-Case Christianity. It's built on keeps and keeps of historical evidence. Man, if we can't articulate that evidence to the lost people we work with, we're going to have a hard time leading those coworkers to Christ. What's the tightest summary that you can give our listeners of the evidence for Christ? Can you give our listeners three to five pieces of evidence to write down right now and better prepare them to give a reason for the hope that's within them, as Peter says?
[0:11:48] JWW: Well, I think it all comes down to, do you trust the manuscript evidence we have recording this event known as the resurrection? It all comes down to that. So, if you don't trust it, if it's not reliable, walk away. If it's reliable, deal with it. How do you know if it's reliable? This comes down to a test of eyewitness reliability. Now, first of all, are the eyewitness accounts? Do you have any good reason to believe they are? Then second of all, if they are, are they reliable? Because some eyewitnesses will tell you things aren't true. They'll change things. There's a test that we offer in criminal trials. It's on four legs.
There's actually 13 questions that California jurors can assess. They can think about these questions in their mind when they're listening to juries to witnesses on the stand. Those 13 questions come down to four major categories. Number one, were they really there to see what they said they saw? Two, can they be corroborated in some way? Even though we know that most corroboration is just touch point corroboration. I mean, my cold cases don't have video evidence. They're just too old.
Third, have they changed their story over time or they’ve been accurately consistent? Fourth, do they possess a bias that would cause them to lie or motive for them to lie to me? Those four criteria are what we test in criminal trials. I simply applied those four. I can tell you that in terms of where they written early enough, I think there's good evidence to suggest that these are written not only early, but early enough to have been written in the lifetime of potential eyewitnesses, which makes it hard to lie. Because if you want to lie about Jesus, just wait until everyone knows the truth is dead and you can say anything you want about them.
I had to figure out ,is there a good case for the early dating of the Gospels? Two, can they be corroborated through both internal evidence and external evidence or the internally consistent? Do they say things that when you piece it together, you go, wow, the odds of this being a fabrication are just not good given the way it's pieced, or is there some corroboration either through external other witnesses, other people who saw something or real court or something in antiquity, or even archeology, things like those?
Third, do they change over time? Has the story of Jesus, was there a Jesus of Nazareth who is somehow less ambitious, less supernatural than the Christ of Christianity? Is there an early version of Jesus that the morphs over the years? I had to figure out, how do we trace that? Then finally, there’s only three reasons why anyone lies. They're always the same. It's either financial greed, sexual lust, or the pursuit of power. I had to examine the lives of the disciples and the authors in scripture to see if they actually had a motive in any of those areas. That was a process I took.
Now, look, in the end, here's what I tell juries. I can tell you everything that needs to be known, that you need to know, but I don't, I can't tell you everything that could be known. You have to navigate the difference. The difference is typically your unanswered questions. They span the gap between everything that you need to know and everything that could be known. I've never – I dismissed juries when we asked this question. Are you somebody who can render a verdict, even though we're going to have some unanswered questions?
If they say they can't render a verdict, then we're just going to dismiss them, because I've never had a case without some unanswered, significant questions. But what we're going to do is give you an evidence trail that leads right to that defendant sitting at the end of the table over there. It doesn't lead to a foot to his left or a foot to his right, but it's going to stop short of the defendant, because that's the gap known as your unanswered questions. I want to ask you to follow the evidence trail and then step across your unanswered questions to render a verdict.
We're doing the same thing here with Christianity. It points right to Jesus in his resurrection. It doesn't point a foot to the left or a foot to the right, but there's a gap. There's an end of the evidence trail. You're going to have to step across your unanswered questions to render a verdict. That's true of everything you do in life. You get in your car without any idea of how it works. So many unanswered questions. If I sat down and even asked you, what's the leader size of your engine? There are people who are driving cars, they don't know how many cylinders the thing has.
[0:15:41] JR: Hand raised. Yes.
[0:15:42] JWW: Yeah. You get in these. Everyone does this with every single – you think you know your kids? You don't know everything about your kids. You think you know your spouse? Well, of course, you don't know everything about your spouse. There's all kinds of unanswered questions that you think are not significant enough to prevent you from stepping across the end of the evidence trail. That's true also for Christianity. I think once I realized that was, this is why, yes. We hold an evidential faith. It requires a step of faith, but it's not a blind step, because it comes at the end of an evidence trail. But still, it is that step that saves you.
[0:16:16] JR: Otherwise, it's not faith.
[0:16:18] JWW: Right. Otherwise, it's not faith. That's right.
[0:16:20] JR: You made that leap of faith when you were 35, you continued to work in the police force after your conversion to Christ, which I love. Talk about why though. How do you see this work of solving crimes and working in police force to keep the public safe, how do you see that work connecting to God's work in the world beyond the obvious of using your work to tell other coworkers about Christ?
[0:16:44] JWW: Well, yeah. I mean, that's true for all of us, right? If we were going to say that, but all of us should be able to say that, “Yes, we are using our work.” It can always be used as a platform from which we preach the gospel. That's true. The question then becomes, well, what is the role that we play as police officers? Well, there's a couple of things. This is a calling. It has always been a calling. I'm not a – I'm not a Christian pacifist. Oh, I understand that’s your position. I just don't get separated by scripture, especially when it comes to this job that we hold as police officers.
You see it in Romans 13, the very first verse of that chapter. Paul says, “Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities.” Well, that governing authority he's talking to, is not just the, like the mayor of your town or the Roman Emperor. Of course, it does include him, but also includes those who ruled and handled the mischief locally. It says, “There's no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. Consequently, whoever rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves. For rulers hold no terror for those who do right, but for those who do wrong.”
Do you want to be free from fear of the one in authority? Then do what is right. You'll be commended. For the one in authority is God's servant for your good as many translations will use the word minister instead of servant, but if you do wrong, be afraid. For rulers do not bear the sword for no reason. The sword was the equivalent of a handgun in ancient Rome. There was no more deadly killing weapon you could use than this sword. It's like the equivalent of deadly force. He's saying basically, that they are God's servants, it says again. Agents of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer.
Yes, ministers in many translations. By the way, that word is only used by Paul to describe ministers of the gospel and in this passage. Think about that for a second. There's a sense in which we must feel as though we're called to this. I will say one more practical thing. If you haven't thought about it, people should, is that law enforcement is the one necessary profession upon which every other profession is contingent. If we're professional authors, well, we have to have an environment in which people aren't stealing from you or threatening your livelihood in every single town in the West.
The first, I noticed this when I was doing a training for ethics in my police agency, many years ago. It turns out that our Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department was established in 1850. If you research every other sheriff's agency in the state, they were all established in 1850. Why? Because the state was established in 1850. The very first foundational profession you must establish in any new territory is law enforcement. You can't have a doctor in your town if he's afraid of being harassed by patients.
You need to establish order first. That's why you have a paid sheriff before you have a fire department. I hate to say it, but once there's a crack, well, now suddenly the walls are cracking and everyone's paying attention. We are the one foundational. I think scripture recognizes that in the sense that you must, then this is an authority that's been given to us by God. We are called ministers, servants in the same way that Paul calls other servants of the gospel servants. I think that we need to take that more seriously. As police officers, I didn't even know that when I first got hired, because I wasn't a Christian.
[0:20:09] JR: I love this so much. It reminds me of 1 Peter 2, where Peter's talking about the priesthood of all believers, right? It's not just priests and pastors and religious professors who are priests. All of us are on the royal priesthood, right? Placed in the police force, placed in the fire department, placed in the local school, placed in the local coffee shop, to be ambassadors of God's goodness and grace and love. I just love that you intuitively understood that when you came to faith in Christ, that you did not change your work post conversion.
I would love to hear about what changed about how you did the work post conversion. What is distinct or should be distinct about a Christ follower on the police force versus the non-Christ follower on the police force? Because by God's common grace, there's going to be a lot of overlap in how they do their jobs, right? But how do you solve crimes in a distinctly Christ-honoring way?
[0:21:05] JWW: Well, a couple of things. You're right. I mean, because this is the one necessary profession, this changes things. I mean, is that the level of which you execute the job that you perform has to be spotless. The bar has to be super high. This is why, by the way, you so despise when you see police corruption, because it seems like of all people, this group needs to have their shirt button down pretty tight. When you don't see it, you're frustrated or when you see police, if you see any cowardice, you will also say, “Well, no, this is the group that can't be cowards and they must be as close to perfect as you can get.”
Now, of course, remember, we're still hiring humans. That's part, and although I think our hiring process is pretty stringent, I don't think it's it weeds out. Clearly, it doesn't weed out anyone who might do something stupid, because we're all people who might do something stupid, but what it did for me was it started to explain human behavior in a way that made sense, like the Bible describes the world the way it really is. If you want to know what to expect from people, even from people you might have thought of, but these are good people, right? Well, the Biblical anthropology helps you to recognize that there are no good people.
[0:22:13] JR: There's no such thing.
[0:22:14] JWW: Yeah. I used to do cases, like I've done cold cases where I've gone into trial and I get to know that defense attorneys pretty well. Some of them are paid defense attorneys, some of them are public defenders. There's been a couple of who I've been close to. I really enjoyed their company, like we get hanging out together, even though we're on the opposite side of this particular trial. But they would – I remember a couple cases where the defense attorney would in the hallway during the breaks, he'd be going, “Dude, I'm telling you. This guy's not guilty. I've defended a lot of guilty people. I know what they're like. Okay. This dude is not guilty. He is just the nicest guy you've ever met.”
Now, he's describing a guy who's been accused of a cold case murder. If you work cold case murderers, which you recognize is that these folks spend the next 30 years as perfect citizens. Sometimes even as better citizens, you would possibly imagine, if you were to examine their last 30 years, you'd say there's no way that guy is capable of murder. Of course, he was, and he did. This is true for all of us who don't appear to be capable of murder. We're all the same guy or the same gal, but for the grace of God, our buttons haven't been pushed. The way that his buttons were pushed.
I think that one of the things to do for me really quickly was give me a sense of, well, I understand now that nature of humans a little more clearly. Then of course, that opens the door to conversations with people who don't. When you're in a conversation like that and someone's just incredulous, and in that particular case, he was so committed to his, that he was shocked when at the sentencing hearing, his defendant leaned over and said, “I want to confess to this.” He'd already been convicted. Now he was about to be, and in order to confess, he'd have to give us the location of his dead wife's body, because we didn't have it. We needed it. It was testable, if he really did it.
This was shocking to the defense attorney. I mean, I blew him away. It didn't blow me away, not just because I had a good evidence that he was guilty, but because I just know the nature of humans as they're described in scripture. I think one thing it does is it opens your eyes to the kinds of things you see people do, and it gives you some grace, because you know that that guy who was being convicted of a murder is me. I'm him. We're all the same.
[0:24:22] JR: I think about this story a lot. I can't remember which Tim Keller book it was in, but he told the story of this man who was tortured by the Nazis during the war. After the war, the man was in the room of this court proceeding of one of the Nazi soldiers who tortured him. The victim is sitting there, and the former Nazi soldier walks in the room, and the victim just crumbles to the floor crying, weeping. They have to take him outside. They take the defendant outside. They ask the victim like, “What happened? Are you okay? Was it just, you’re overwhelmed at the fear of seeing this man?” He's like, “No, I realized when he walked in the room that he was a man just like me. I was perfectly capable of doing the exact same thing to others that he did to me.” Like dang, man. That'll preach. All right. Your conversion gave you a more accurate view of humanity in the grace you've been shown. How else did your faith shape your work post conversion, Jim?
[0:25:16] JWW: Well, I mean, there's all kinds of little simple Xs and O stuff, right, like if you're somebody who's a cop and you're a Christian, you're going to have to start to think really deeply about your use of language, because it's hard. I'm going to say this is a battle. I often think about this in wonder, because let's face it, most of the guys you work with are going to use a lot of profanity. It might just be that they're in an environment where some of the bad guys we work with, they're using a lot of profanity. But we're gangs for two years. I'll tell you that part of it is that if you look at the force escalation, right, that occurs in any given setting, nobody wants to escalate it all the way to deadly force, of course.
The first in that continuum, that force continuum, the first step in that force continuum is simply your physical presence. That's why you don't want to walk in looking like you're going to get yourself beat up, because the reality of it is, is that, for example, if you're walking into a scene that's dangerous, and you're 6’8, 300. You're probably going to walk in a little bit differently than if you're 5’6,130, this is just the nature of it. Your physical presence can – you can walk in and people are like, “Oh, I'm going to have to listen to what this guy says, because he's big, he's big, and he's probably strong.” That physical presence is the first step in that in that continuum.
The second one is your voice. It's your command presence. It's what would I say? Now, I want to believe that I could clean up my language and still control a setting in which I can express that I'm serious about this request. Okay. I'm serious about this command, because it's not like listen, trust me, you get into some of these settings, and it's very unruly. The people you're dealing with, they don't respect just your polite command. They just think I can take this guy. So, you have to come at them the way they're coming at you, at least verbally. Now we're on now, everything's on camera, everything's on tape.
I don't think the world realizes that that's the way we do our job, because that initial physical presence and use of command like, “This guy is serious.” I can tell you that for me personally, I remember I was on training one time, and I was very polite on training. I got myself in my training officer and a bit of a jam. Afterwards, he wrote me up and he said, “Dude, you got to, you need to take.” So, I'll show you the next time we go out and call what this is going to sound like. Of course, it was a bit vile that boy, it sure went easy.
[0:27:39] JR: Yes. How do you wrestle with that as a Jesus part? This is real. This is where the rubber meets the road here.
[0:27:44] JWW: It is where the rubber meets the road. I think the first few years, I just – well, I was lucky. Number one, I was not working in patrol when I became a police, I was working in investigations. I didn't have to navigate that on the next shift. I just didn't. it was pretty easy for me to, now a lot of times what we do is we substitute words that we used to use. This guy is a stinking piece of dog's knot.
[0:28:09] JR: It's not going to get the same reaction, but yeah.
[0:28:12] JWW: Okay. What you've done, basically, is you eliminated all the profanity, but you included all the profanity, because I think God already knows your heart on this. You're still cursing. You just use any different words to curse. I think that, so then I realized, “Okay, well, how do I even go further than that?” But I will tell you, that's going to be one of as stupid and as silly as that sounds, that little decision about how you operate in any given scene.
Now, here's what I would say, because I believe that at times, force is justified. This is true in the Old Testament, as well. Right. You can use any force necessary up to and including deadly force to stop somebody who's trying to attack you, trying to kill you. This is an Old Testament principle. You can also use whatever force is necessary up to and including deadly force to stop the killing of an innocent. If there is a shooter in a schoolyard, although I may as a Christian say, “I don't like having to, I know that this is something I'm going to have to answer to God for, depending on how I do this, I still can stop the death of another 20 students, if I simply will take the guy out.”
I see and hear this all the time. Why don't you just shoot him in the hand? Why don't you just – look, that's not the way gunfights go, because you're not shooting a target. I'm not a sniper. I've probably got a handgun in my hand, and I'm now going to engage somebody in a gun battle. When they're shooting back at you, your accuracy decreases. You have to take deep breaths. You might have to shoot through an injury. It's different. I mean, I could, you're going to probably shoot a bunch of rounds until he stops moving, because you're trying to eliminate the threat. You're trying to keep him from killing you and anyone else.
The question we had to ask ourselves as a culture, is that okay? Is it okay for me to have to use this level of force? Because if it isn't, we're going to have to change the entire industry and probably change our culture to go along with it. We got to make this decision. Meanwhile, police are stuck in the middle ground trying to figure out these two competing interests. One, I want to serve my community, and I'm willing to lay down my life to serve my community. Two, I want to go home and see my kids tonight. Those are the two competing interests. There's no easy answer here, but how about this? What if I could use a certain set of words that might sound vile on a recording, but would get him to do what I asked him to do? Would that be okay?
[0:30:24] JR: That's the greater good.
[0:30:24] JWW: You're arguing. Hey, so you're arguing, is that use of vile force that you might in isolation consider an absolute sin in front of God? Would that be justified in this one situation to overcome a greater sin in the eyes of God? That's the question we're talking about with any use of force. It's not, yes, we know what we're about to do in isolation is not in what God wants, but are we doing something that prevents an even greater sin that's about to occur?
[0:30:55] JR: As you're wrestling through this stuff, especially right after conversion, I'm sure people are noticing like, “Man, Jim's not a cursing as much. Jim's not drinking this much. Jim's doing XYZ differently.” These actions you're taking that show that something has changed, but I'm assuming that at some point you raised your hand and outed yourself as a Christian to your coworkers on the force. What did that look like? Do you remember? Obviously, it's not a one-time thing, right? But how did you do that in a non-awkward, win some way?
[0:31:25] JWW: Well, I was on a team. It was a small team, five officers in a sergeant working undercover. Occasionally, we were in the field doing surveillance. I got outed, because I had a partner who had seen some changes in me and wondered what the changes were, what was causing the change. He snuck up on me one day when I was parked in a parking lot reading my Bible. I was actually on the perimeter of a surveillance. I didn't have the eye.
There's a guy basically, and a five-man team, maybe two, depending on the location that have to keep an eye on the suspect when he stops at his house for some reason. This guy was doing dope all day, so he was high and he wasn't going to do anything. He was basically sitting in his house he had one guy who was on the eye and the rest of us are in the perimeter of that neighborhood somewhere waiting for this guy to move. I had some time to go. This is back before the cell phones. I'm reading my Bible and I had a commentary with me. I'm trying to figure this a couple of things theological for instance, and I had already become a Christian, but I wasn't a Christian very long, like 10 minutes.
This guy, who had seen the change in me, he snuck up on my car and caught me reading the Bible. Then he basically ratted me out to everybody else, because I was a very vocal atheist. I had always been that way. You would know that about me, because so many of the people we take to jail are outspoken Christians. It provides opportunity for people like me to mock them publicly and in a group, which we did. They knew where I stood.
Well, then I became the first, because I'd been the mocker, then I became an easy target of their mocking, but these are all like friends of mine. I still was, look, in the end, in that team, my job was to perform with excellence, excellence that everyone would respect regardless of my worldview. If you continue to do the job well, people will, I've been on this guy, this particular guy, I've been on the SWAT team with him prior. He knew my work. We had all the same friends who we deeply respected. I love this guy. I still love this guy. He a great guy, but he never became a Christian.
Right away, then I had to deal with everyone making fun of me for a while, but then before within five years, people were coming to me when they had problems, especially if they got involved in shootings and they're trying to reconcile. Is God mad at me? Is there a God? Is God mad at me? I had a lot – that happened a lot.
[0:33:40] JR: Really?
[0:33:40] JWW: Oh, yeah. Because people knew.
[0:33:42] JR: Just because you were – and you weren't, I mean, you weren't shoving the gospel down people's throats. You just raised your hand and said, “Hey, I'm a follower of Jesus.” They inevitably, by you being good at what you did and being a good friend, they inevitably came to you with those hard questions.
[0:33:55] JWW: My position has always been, “Well, why are you a Christian now?” This guy, this guy knew it, who first caught me, he says, “You've been so on the other side of this that I'll bet you'll end up being a pastor.” That was true. Because I mean, whatever extreme I'm going to be at, I'm going to be at that extreme. He predicted that. I always, my position was always that this is true. I found out it was true. What am I going to do? It's true. Of course, that is resisted by a lot of people that it's one thing that could probably have lived a little more comfortably with me if it just became my personal preference, but because I said, “No, it's not my preference.” This is, I mean, I discovered it's true.
[0:34:29] JR: This is fact.
[0:34:30] JWW: Right. Then, of course, that's going to meet with resistance, because that means it might actually apply to him, not just to me. Well, that's where you're going to meet resistance. So, I got a lot of that initially. I mean, I had friends who teased me all the way until I retired, because they would say not so much that they didn't, they would say, I remember you before, so like they said, “I got dirt on you from before. I knew what you were like before.” They would, like tease me about it.
Look, this is what you would expect. If this is true, as you'd expect some level of transformation, just in terms of your language, in your character, what it is you would say about people or not say about people, your level of shut your mouth. There's a lot of times when I'm still thinking it, that's bad enough. I'm not going to hold my mouth and let you know what a jerk I still am. So, there's part of that process of sanctification that takes years.
People saw that. Then we didn't allow, actually, at some point, I went to my chief and said, “Hey, you've got chaplains on this agency, but none of them have been police officers. They're all pastors. Let me be a chaplain.” We just didn't have a policy to deal with active-duty police officers in the chaplain role. So, I didn't become a chaplain until after I retired, because it just wasn't any position like that, but people were coming to me all the time and I thought, “Well, look, if they're coming to me, wouldn't you want me to be in this position officially?” But this didn't work out that way.
[0:35:49] JR: Yeah. But you know what? I think there's even more power in you doing it unofficially. Listen, I got friends who run corporate chaplains of America and these groups, I think these groups are fine, but people that we're working with, I think increasingly in this post Christian culture, I think there's certainly a place for chaplains. I think that's irrelevant in a lot of businesses. But man, they just want to talk to their peers. If you can be a Mere Christian, who's excellent at what they do working alongside of them, a lot of times they're going to open up to you and not somebody who has chaplain or pastor or religious professional on their business garden. It sounds like that's what you experienced, right? People are coming to you with this stuff, because they can relate to you.
[0:36:29] JWW: That's absolutely true. I think that that's why peer support groups in law enforcement really started to emerge around that time, because they just knew that people weren't and this is made up be true for everyone. Yes, it's nice. If you're working in some corporation and you've got a certain position, if you got somebody who you're working with, who knows is going through life the way you are, well, then yeah, I think that would be really powerful, but cops are worse, because we don't trust anybody, especially if you're not a cop. Because let's face it, there's nobody who understands what we're doing.
I feel like that's part of it. So, from a cop perspective, yes, if you're a chaplain who's been there, like especially, if you're just a guy who's doing the job with him, but they think he might, it’s like if I was somebody who said, “Hey, I'm getting ready to install crown molding in my house and I got a guy I know who's really has done it before and is really good with the chops are, with a miter saw, then okay, I might go to him to see, well, how do you do it?” People knew this is what I was interested in and who I was about. So, they went to me to say, “Well, how would you do it?” That was basically it.
[0:37:32] JR: Yeah. That's exactly right. I love it. Publishing this book in January called, The Sacredness of Secular Work. I'm going deep on what scripture says about the work we're going to do on the new earth. I pointed out that obviously, some of us are going to be finding new jobs, including homicide detectives. What do you want to be doing forever on the New Earth, Jim?
[0:37:51] JWW: Oh, really good question. I think, look, there won't be any evangelists either, or Christian apologists. Basically, but this is true for so many of us who work in the world in different ways. I think that as I get older, and now I'm in my 60s, that it's an identity issue, that everything is an identity issue. For men, it's all an identity issue. Our work is absolutely, it forms around identity. When our identity is challenged, or abruptly changes, that's a point of trauma for almost everyone.
If you look back at the own your own points of trauma in your life, you'll find that there was some challenge to your identity involved in that trauma. I think, because so much rests on this issue of identity, that's at the core of everything we do, that's why you see that there are people who struggle like, “What am I going to do?” Well, it's because you've attached what you’re doing to your identity. There's a friend of mine who's done some work on this. He always, he puts it in a way that I think is really powerful. He talks about for men anyway. He says, it's about Asians. We are all about Asians. The first thing we do when we walk in a room, when we communicate to each other is we want to know what is your occupation. The Asian is occupation.
Then, of course, once we hear that, the first thing we're thinking is, “Well, how much does he make?” It's about compensation. Then, of course, once you hear that, you're like, well, how – it's about education, like we're measuring each other. We form our identity around our compensation or occupation and our education or is it your reputation? Finally, he says, as a soldier or cops. For men, a lot of it is your level of intimidation. If you're a big cop and walks in the room, all the cops who are smaller, we all are like, “Hey, the alpha dog just arrived.” It's an identity issue.
When you ask me like, “What are we going to do?” The next thing was, well, it's not really what am I going to do? It's who am I going to be? Because the doing here is just connected to that thing about identity is got two other triplets. It's got two other sisters. They're called purpose and value. One is not separable from the other, because of that, part of it is like, will I be valuable? What my purpose be? Well, it's all tied to your identity. In my 60s. I'm trying to figure out how do I slowly strip the temporal identities I've applied to myself and settle in, in Christ and put my identity in Christ? Because if I can learn to do that on this side of the grave, there will be no change on the other side, because this has never been about doing and what are you doing next. It's always been about identity. Who are you now? Who will you be then? I think as men, we really struggle with that.
[0:40:27] JR: I think so, too. I think one of the things I'm most excited about when Isaiah 65 talks about us long enjoying the work of our hands on the New Earth, is that there will be no using of the work for posturing and for trying to secure identity that is found in Christ alone, like that will be perfectly secure. There's no temptation to get something from the work that the work was never designed to give us. We'll be free from that. I think that's hard to even imagine what that's going to be like, just to engage in the work with Christ for what it was always meant to be in Genesis 1, as an expression of worship rather than this wild goose chase to find our identity in success.
[0:41:11] JWW: Well, what you just said is so interesting, because it's so revealing, right? It's that we can't even imagine. The reason why we can't even imagine is because we don't really, even though we say we're Christ followers, we don't really live as though our identity is in Christ now. That's why it's so hard to imagine. Have you ever heard somebody who would say something akin to, “Well, gosh, I don't know, heaven kind of sounds, like why would I want to be there.” It's because they still think that they're shaping their own identity.
They still think that they like, “Why would I want to go there and just be another saint in heaven?” I'm not going to be the thing all this – do I get to carry over all the credit I get on this side of the grave for a career, a reputation well-earned or am I going to have to abandon that? That's how sad it is that we place our – so, the question I have for myself is, “Well, okay, so how do I” – by the way, there is such great rest. If you're a guy who your value and your identity has always been that you're like the biggest, strongest, fittest guy in the room, as far as just cops go, we're far more likely to hire a linebacker than we are a philosopher, because the work is so linebacker-ish, right?
Okay, so if that's your identity, and I've seen this when I do marriage resiliency retreats. We've been doing these for the last three years with police officers. Then we just see cops come in with their broken marriages, and we talk them through. You see that they're still, especially, when you get to your 40s, because suddenly you realize, like athletes, that you're no longer the cop, the guy you were physically in your 20s. Now you're like starting to wonder, am I a different person, am I losing my identity? Because your identity has always been in that.
I'll tell you, once you get to a point where you're like, “Hey, I could work out all day long, but now in this age, I can't maintain it. This is an age issue.” Like suddenly you get, “Okay, I can let go of that.” There's a certain rest in realizing that that's not who you really are. There's a rest waiting for every one of us, if we can simply like recognize that that's really not who we ever were to begin with, but we have to recognize it and let go of it.
[0:43:11] JR: Yeah. It's good.
[0:43:12] JWW: It's hard.
[0:43:13] JR: Yeah. Jim, three questions we wrap up every episode with. Number one, which books do you find yourself recommending or gifting to others most frequently? Like if we opened your Amazon order history, what are we going to see popping up over and over again?
[0:43:26] JWW: Well, I mean, this is hard for people who write books, right? Because we read a lot of things in preparation for writing another book. Anything you mentioned, Tim Keller, I think anything from Keller, you probably read the book he does on work as well, as you were researching your own. It's a great book. His sermons are great too, by the way, the podcast is I think in some ways even better than the books, but –
[0:43:45] JR: He would tell you that too. He would tell you he was a much better preacher than he was a writer. I disagree.
[0:43:50] JWW: He's a great writer. I think he is. Listen, I think that Lewis is still somebody who is worth the investigation, because Lewis, because C.S. Lewis was a very careful thinker. So, what I'm talking to people who are struggling is probably going to be something from, if it's a common cultural issue that they're navigating, it's going to be someone like Nancy Pearcey. If it's a common theological or just pastoral issue that they're navigating, it's probably going to be Keller. If it's something that is a classic overarching, The Problem of Pain is a great book that's going to be Lewis. It'd be one of those three.
[0:44:21] JR: Those are three killer names. I like it. Jim, who would you want to hear on this show talking about how their faith influences their work? Maybe a fellow cop or somebody else in law enforcement? Who comes to mind?
[0:44:33] JWW: That's a really, really good question. I just don't know. There's lots of, I would love to, I do a lot of work with public interviewers. I've done work with Keith, a lot of work with Keith Morrison on Dateline. These people are not believers, but they are aware, like they have a view on the role of faith. I think that the public folks who have to, it's either – it's going to be somebody, the name popping in my mind.
It's going to be somebody who's either working in a profession that people think is antithetical to law and to faith or to Christianity, like a lot of people think that law enforcement is just supposed to be, you can't use force and be a cop, because you can't do that and be a Christian. It’ll be someone like that or somebody who's famous and is trying to navigate what do you do with – how do you navigate humility in a profession that requires you to always be at the center of everything? It'd be someone in one of those two fields, I think.
[0:45:23] JR: That's good. I really like that. Hey, Jim, you're talking to this global audience of Mere Christians who are very diverse vocationally, right? A lot of them in law enforcement, but a lot of them working in Silicon Valley, a lot of them working as teachers and as baristas. What's one thing you want to leave that audience with before we sign off?
[0:45:43] JWW: Well, a couple of things. I think that there's a secret sauce, especially if you're a Christian, right? This whole worldview we have is so unique from other worldviews. It's grounded on this thing. We already touched on a little bit. It's the secret sauce. I've been writing about it in the next book when it comes out. I just learned it working on the job, but it's definitely something you'll find in Scripture.
You'll also find it in surveys and studies and scientific, both psychological, psychologists and psychoanalysts and psychiatrists and researchers have been studying this for about 35 years. What is the one secret sauce, the one attribute of human nature that if you embrace it, every metric of human flourishing will improve. You'll have less distress, less mental illness. You'll have less depression. You'll have greater, better grades. You'll make more money. You'll learn better. You'll be open to learning. You'll be a better leader. You'll actually be a better employee, because you'll be led better. You'll have deeper, more significant relationships. You'll be kinder and more generous.
I mean, all the metrics of human flourishing, it turns out, are grounded in something that is very obvious, but it seems we're discovering it secularly in the last three decades when it's actually an ancient principle, and it's found in one view of theism above all others. That is this attribute that is described as humility. If you embrace humility, every other metric goes up. Every other metric goes up. Of all the theistic worldviews, only one is grounded. Others might preach humility, but they're not grounded in humility. Here's why. You cannot pursue humility. You cannot earn it because the very act of pursuing it will lead you to a prideful, just the opposite of humility.
I had a friend, Mike Adams, who's passed away several years ago, and he used to always tease at me with this book, How to Become Humble in 10 Easy Steps. How I Made it in Eight. That was his book. I thought that was hilarious, right? Because this is nature of pursuing humility is that you eventually take a prideful pursuit of humility. Any worldview that says, do this, do this, do this, do this, do this, do this, eventually leads to people who will look and say, “You know what? I've done all those things. This guy standing next to me hasn't.” It leads to pride.
This is why the one worldview that says, no, it's not about anything you do. It's about what's been done for you is the antithesis of this. It begins with an act of humility. That's how you enter. You got to bend your knee. There is a God and I'm not him. You got to enter through humility. It's by the grace of God that you are saved, so that no one can do, what? Boast. So, that I can take pride out of it and that you then have to be in a position of humility. This is what is so powerful about the Christian worldview and why it alone in terms of theistic worldviews is grounded in the one attribute that we're discovering through the sciences leads to human flourishing. Oh, what a coincidence. The Bible describes the world the way it really is.
[0:48:34] JR: Yeah. It's really good. What is one thing you're doing to practice humility right now?
[0:48:41] JWW: You can't practice it. It's not pursued or earned. Humility is a realization. It's what you arrive at. It's Isaiah. Standing in front of the throne of God and realizing, “Oh, I am not who I thought I was. Instead, I am this mess.” It's an assessment that you make. I think Spurgeon, put at that way. Humility is a product of assessment that you simply have to know, you have to be so close to your relationship to God that you never forget who he is.
[0:49:11] JR: Yeah. That's the practice I was looking for, though. It is maintaining your all of God's holiness.
[0:49:17] JWW: Yes. How do you maintain that realization? It looks different for each person, but whatever it is that keeps you remembering who you are compared to the infinite perfect God of the universe.
[0:49:28] JR: Amen. Well said. Jim, I want to commend you for the exceptional work you do for the glory of God and the good of others, for partnering with God to weed out evil that has no place in a world where Christ is king. Thank you for better preparing the Mere Christians listening by giving their co-workers compelling reasons and evidence for the hope that's within them.
Guys, if you haven't read Jim's book, Cold-Case Christianity, I would encourage you to do so, but he's written a lot of other great books that you should check out as well. Jim, thank you so much for hanging out with us today.
[0:49:57] JWW: I'm so glad to be with you. An honor. I appreciate it.
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[0:50:00] JR: I hope you guys enjoyed that conversation. If you did, do me a favor and go leave a review of the podcast on Apple, Spotify, wherever you listen to the show. Thank you, guys so much for tuning in. I'll see you next week.
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