(upbeat music) - Pastor John, you have a new book out, a little 50 page book titled Risk is Right, Better to Lose Your Life Than to Waste It. And one of the more profound points you make in the book, I think, is the idea that safety is a myth.

I would love for you to unpack this little phrase for us in this podcast. What do you mean when you say that safety is a myth? - Well, it's a myth both as experience teaches us and as the Bible teaches us. So go with experience first and then the Bible.

You can't put enough padlocks on your door and enough bars on your window to keep a heart attack from happening. There is no guarantee that anybody is going to live another breath. And therefore all the efforts that we make to keep ourselves safe are ultimately an illusion in terms of absolute security.

Our life is in God's hands. Come now you who say, let's go up to such and such a city and spend a year there and trade and get gain. You do not know your life. It's like a vapor. You are arrogant. You ought to say, if the Lord wills, we will live and do this and that.

So there's no safety in the car to get you there. There's no safety in the building while you're there. There is no guarantees that you're gonna live. So that's what experience teaches us. Safety is an illusion in terms of its guarantee. The Bible makes it worse for us. Jesus said, if they called the master of the house, Beelzebul, how much more are they gonna malign those of his own household?

If they persecuted me, they'll persecute you. Paul said, through many afflictions, you must enter the kingdom. Peter said, don't think it's strange. If when the fiery ordeal comes upon you. In other words, it's not strange. It's normal to suffer in this world. And Paul says in 2 Timothy 3, verse 12, everybody who desires to live a godly life will be persecuted.

So the New Testament is just replete with promises. You're not going to be safe. You're going to suffer. Take up your cross and follow me. Anybody who belongs to a people movement that has a crucified Savior and Lord at the head of it can count on a Calvary road themselves.

And so my argument is you cannot avoid risk and therefore embrace it for kingdom purposes. - Yeah, that's a great point. So this illusion of safety then is holding a Christian back from taking a risk. And what are the risks that you are specifically addressing in this book? - Anything that would deter you from doing the will of God because it's negative and it might happen to you.

Risk is a peculiar thing. In order for there to be risk, there has to be ignorance. So God can't risk. I hear people say God took a big risk in creating humankind. He did not. Or God took a big risk in sending his son into the world. Absolutely, he did not.

He knew exactly what would happen to his son. He knew exactly that we would fall because he was planning redemption long before he created the world. The Bible is crystal clear on that. God was never and can never take a risk because risk demands ignorance. That is, if you know that you're gonna be shot when you stand in front of your wife, you don't risk being shot.

You sacrifice yourself, period. That's not a risk, that's a sacrifice. And so you give your life for her. And that's what Jesus did. But most of us live every day not at all sure what will happen to us. If we write this letter to our son or daughter to try to witness to them, we don't know if it will backfire.

When we try to witness to somebody at work, we don't know how it will go or whether they'll criticize it or whether we'll lose our job. When a person goes over the field in the missions field, he doesn't know whether he's gonna be arrested. There's just a thousand things that we don't know might happen to us.

And my point in this book is we choose to risk. We embrace risk. We don't minimize risk. We walk into risk. And the way we decide what's right risk and what's wrong risk is that the greater the outcome that we hope for, the greater the risk it's right to take.

And the greater the likelihood of harm, the greater the outcome you better be aiming at. Which is why I think a lot of risk that people take is just dead wrong. I mean, I'll give you my own personal bias. I think taking life-threatening risks for sheer pleasure is wrong.

So I wouldn't, it's gonna really offend some people, I wouldn't skydive and I wouldn't hang glide for just sheer pleasure. Simple reason, one simple malfunction, you're dead. For what reason? Fun, that's a bad idea. Whereas I would support skydiving and hang gliding in order to accomplish some great goal for another person, some sacrificial goal.

Everybody knows that driving a car down the road is taking a risk, but we do it because number one, getting somewhere is valuable and the risk is small. Same thing with getting on an airplane. You risk your life getting on an airplane. I think getting on an airplane just for fun would probably be foolish.

But getting on an airplane to go somewhere at a certain amount of time with minimal risk and high payoff, that would be right. - Okay, so it seems for you then, Pastor John, that risk-taking is quite directly tied to faith. - Yes, I think there's a way to take risk as a arrogant and proud glory seeker.

So I'm not saying that only believers take risk. I'm saying the only way to rightly take a risk, the taking of a risk that honors Christ is to say, I love you, I trust you, I believe you're in control. Only you can provide the strength to do this and only you will govern the outcome and I am willing to walk into this risk for kingdom purposes and for your glory because I'm trusting you.

And the reason I can trust you is because you died for me and you rose for me. So the gospel is underneath my readiness to risk by faith. - Excellent, thank you, Pastor John. You will find his new book, "Risk is Right" at DesiringGod.org. There you can download the entire book as a free PDF and find links to buy printed copies if you wish.

And if you have a question for Pastor John about his other books, please email them to us at AskPastorJohn@DesiringGod.org. Please include your first name and your hometown in that email. I'm your host, Tony Reinke. Thanks for listening. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)