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Hey friends, welcome back to Honest Christian Conversations.
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This is the second week of my tribute to masculinity.
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This guest is an awesome guy.
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I love what he does.
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This is right up my alley.
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I enjoy history and I don't know if you enjoy history, but if you don't, you certainly will after you listen to what it is my guest does.
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Today.
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I have Craig DeHutt on with me.
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He is the co-founder, ceo and videographer for Appian Media.
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Him and his business partner, stuart Peck, go to Egypt, israel, turkey and they search for biblical accounts of the Bible.
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They'll go to those places.
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They will take you on a video journey.
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You get to see how they interact with the culture, the people and guess what?
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They do it for free.
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Everything they've ever made is on YouTube or their website.
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I really enjoyed talking with Craig, such a man after God's own heart.
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I really enjoyed talking with Craig, such a man after God's own heart and has such a rich desire to help others enjoy the Bible in a new way.
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So this is definitely going to change what you think about the Bible and the history.
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It will definitely help you in your Bible study journey as well, so there's no excuse not to check it out.
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After this interview.
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Let's get into it Before the episode starts.
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Make sure you follow the show so you never miss another episode.
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Craig, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.
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I'm very excited to talk to you.
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I'm always looking for exciting biblical content that I don't have to worry about or that it's not cheesy, or you know what I'm talking about.
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There's a lot of great Bible movies out there, but there's a lot of cheesy stuff as well, and I like the fact that you and your company focus on biblical areas, the history.
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I watched a little bit of your content from your video on Petra, which I found very interesting, and I loved how just the interactions you were able to have with the locals and it was just really historically exciting for me because I do like learning about history.
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So why don't you tell us how you got into this business?
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But start from the beginning?
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How did you find God?
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but start from the beginning.
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How did you find God?
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Certainly, Starting from the beginning, I was introduced to God and to the Bible.
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I grew up in a Christian home, my father is an evangelist and we were up on the West Coast in Oregon, so I was familiar with it from a very early age.
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But I decided to make that my own and to respond to that when I was 12 years old pretty young, but there were things happening in my life that sobered me up and helped me consider my eternal destiny.
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It sounds a little cliche perhaps, but at 10 years old I was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, and so, as a young child, I'm asking some of those hard questions that every human should ask.
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You know, what happens to us after we die?
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Is there a life after this one?
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Why do bad things happen to people?
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How could a loving God let something like this happen?
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All of those questions that everyone should ask and find scriptural answers for.
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But I was asking them at 10, 11, 12 years old and thankfully I didn't have to look far.
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They aren't easy answers, but I was asking them at 10, 11, 12 years old and thankfully I didn't have to look far.
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They aren't easy answers, but there are answers and God is a loving God.
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We live in a broken world, a world that sin has turned into something that is not God's intention, and so, at 12 years old, I was baptized into Christ and began my journey.
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I'm now 40 years old, and so it's been a few years, and through the years I've just been able to see God work.
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He has not removed every obstacle, he has not eliminated all hardship that's not a promise that he makes in this lifetime but he has been there with me every step and helped me learn important things every step and helped me learn important things.
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I'm excited to be able to use my talents in this particular industry film and video to further that faith and hopefully encourage that in other people.
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So it was in my teenage years that I was first introduced to photography and video production.
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I am old enough to say that when I first picked up a camcorder.
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You know we were shooting on tape.
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Yes, I'm familiar.
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You and I are the same age and we even came to Christ at the same age too, although I was scared into it because we watched that old 70s Left Behind movie and I was terrified there's a cinematic masterpiece right there I'm not joking, it was a good one.
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I mean no disrespect to those filmmakers no, completely that's all they could do back there, really and it scared the pants off me.
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It still scares me to this day.
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I don't yeah and there's a.
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You know there's a healthy place for that.
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God has at times used fear as a motivating factor.
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You think about what he did there on Sinai.
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The people were terrified of what they were seeing, but that is not God's principal avenue of bringing people to him.
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He wants them to respect and understand his great power and holiness, and that terrifies unholy mortal people like us and holiness, and that terrifies unholy mortal people like us.
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And so the hope is that over time, our love for God prompts us to action more than our fear of him.
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But I would shoot these videos and I'm trying to think left behind.
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Yeah, that's about all we had at the time.
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If you thought about Christian movies, it was kind of a joke.
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People didn't do that and I was editing my videos with two VCRs.
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You know I had to explain to my kids what those are.
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You know pause and record and you know rewinding the tape and hoping that it doesn't get caught up, you don't get to skip on a VCR, yep.
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But I loved it.
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I love the technology of it, I love the art of it and I was determined to go to film school and make films that were religious in nature not necessarily inherently Christian films, where there's Bible movies necessarily but I wanted there to be a Christian worldview in everything that I was making and I didn't want them to be cheesy, and so I knew I had to go to school and learn that.
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You know again, the show's my age.
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There was no YouTube back then.
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I couldn't learn those things by watching influencers and YouTubers.
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So I did go to film school in Atlanta and could only stomach about two years of that.
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The worldview that they were approaching this craft was so anti-Christian and many of them were actively trying to rip the faith out of me, and so I learned what I could from them and took the skills and the connections and the networking that I acquired there and have been learning ever since.
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So that was about 20 years ago and I am glad to say the industry has been shifting over this time.
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Access to the right gear and the right talent and the skills have now become more widely available and Christian films and TV shows have gotten quite good the skill that they're bringing to that craft is inspiring and I'm thankful for that, and that has then created more opportunities for people like us.
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So when Appian Media was created about 10 years ago still fairly new there weren't a lot of people doing exactly what we intended to do, but there were enough examples and there were enough filmmakers that we could talk to that helped us on this path.
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So what is it exactly that Appian Media does?
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What type of Christian content do you produce?
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Because I've seen it and I think it's amazing, because I love history and for anyone else who loves history, you better listen up.
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Well, it's funny because I went to film school.
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The original intent was to write and direct, you know, narrative feature films, and so I have training in script writing and working with actors and that type of filmmaking.
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That's what I thought I was going to be doing.
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Appian Media primarily produces documentary film short, either docu-series or even feature length documentaries and the intention was to create a resource that we were seeing.
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There was a lack of Myself and our co-founder, stuart Peck.
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Both of us teach Bible classes on occasion and we work with young people and we were like we're not able to find what we're looking for to get these kids interested in the lands of the Bible and in the Bible itself.
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We were either finding video that was accurate, that had the right messaging, but it was so poorly produced like the kids couldn't get past it, or it was really polished, it was really nice.
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I mean, it's the kind of stuff that you'd see on the History Channel or Travel Channel.
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But we had to give all these caveats Look, they're not coming at this from a Christian worldview.
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They're critical of the Bible, or their history is just not accurate.
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Or maybe it was historically accurate.
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It was professionally produced, but it was too expensive for us to just use in a Bible class, and so Appian Media was created to accomplish those three things.
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We wanted it accurate, we wanted it engaging and well-produced and we wanted it free.
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And so for the last 10 years, we've been able to travel over to the lands of the Bible.
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We've been to Israel and Turkey and Egypt and Jordan, and, with plans for much more, to produce content that is free.
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People can go to our website and watch it and use it and share it in their classes or use it at home, in the hopes of deepening their faith and helping them understand and appreciate the biblical text again.
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Yeah, All my homeschooling moms.
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This is some great history content right here.
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I have watched many of the videos.
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They are very well done and very engaging.
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Like he said, docu-series.
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Some of them are shorter, some of them are longer.
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You can find what you want and it's free.
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What person doesn't love that four-letter word free?
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It is such an easy pitch and it's funny because I grew up in a homeschool family.
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My wife and I are currently homeschooling our three kiddos.
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We didn't actually create it with homeschoolers top of mind, but you better believe they found this very early on and now we make it a pretty regular habit to visit homeschool conventions.
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In fact, I'm going to be going to at least two of those this year to have a booth there and do some workshops, because it's all the things that homeschoolers love, right, it's engaging, the kids enjoy it, the parents appreciate it and it's free.
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And so homeschoolers love, right, it's engaging, the kids enjoy it, the parents appreciate it and it's free.
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And so, yeah, we've seen a great response from the homeschool community.
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Awesome.
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Yeah, it's so important to have such a deep love for God and if you love history, I feel like that's going to help even more.
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It's going to give you the biblical context you need when you're reading, especially the Old Testament, because a lot of times the Old Testament just feels difficult to understand the names you don't understand because we have never been there, don't know these things.
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But if you get to see it, you start understanding it better and I think that's a good Bible studying tool that will help you, especially if you're a visual person.
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I'm very visual.
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I can think of things in my head.
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If I've seen a movie so many times, I could lay in bed, close my eyes and I can watch the whole movie in my head.
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I've done that before to try to fall asleep.
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So it would definitely benefit me because then, when I read over it again, I'm like aha, I know where this was.
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I understand, I know why there's holes in the limestone in Petra.
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It just gives more context and gives you a deeper appreciation for the Bible and gives you a deeper appreciation for the Bible.
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That is not just stories in a book.
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This is reality.
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This is real.
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So I am so grateful that you guys went on this journey and it's so like God, we think we have one plan.
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You thought you were going to make feature films and be like I'm going to be the person who makes them exciting again, and he's like no, we're going to be the person who makes them exciting again and he's like no, we're going to make documentaries exciting to watch.
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I know, and it is so interesting 20 years ago you would never hear of a documentary having a theatrical run.
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People did not go to the theaters to watch documentaries.
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And then Netflix came along and made some and still does made some very well done documentaries.
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That got people interested in that format again.
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And I do understand you say I make biblical documentaries and some people go.
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Oh you know, because we know what that typically means and we have tried very hard.
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We don't simply want to take you to the general area that these places were, but, as you mentioned earlier, we want to take you in.
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So we want to talk to the people who are there.
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We want to oftentimes interview or talk with experts, archaeologists or historians that are either there or travel there frequently.
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We want to talk to the locals.
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We want to eat the food and experience the culture there.
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We commonly say one of the tasks of Appian Media really is that we're trying to catch up modern readers of scripture, catch them up to where the original recipients already were.
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So when the gospels were first written, people understood where Jerusalem was in relation to Jericho.
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They understood what the wilderness looked like.
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They understood what a storm on the Sea of Galilee would have been like, and I'm a 21st century American Christian.
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Prior to doing this work, I had never traveled overseas, and so we're trying to give people an understanding, catch them up so that we've got the right geographical information, historical information, even linguistic information, so that when we read the text again, we go ah, I see it.
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Now I understand the parable of the good Samaritan traveling between Jerusalem and Jericho.
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I know what that place looks like.
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It is desolate and dangerous and it is absolutely not somewhere you want to be left on the side of the road.
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Now I see it.
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The original hearers of that parable would have immediately gone oh they left him there to die on that road.
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Yeah, and so we all, to some degree, are visual learners.
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Our brains do engage when we read text and we fill in visuals.
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The job of Appian Media is we're just trying to help you fill in the right kind of visuals of the Petra video, but as soon as I saw him talking right outside of a building I recognize from I think it's Raiders of the Lost.
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Ark, I believe I was like, oh, I should show my son this because he's seen the Indiana Jones movies and he might find that interesting.
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And we're like, hey, look, see, it was a real thing.
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Come to think of it.
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Now that I think of it, I think that was actually the Last Crusade.
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Yes, yes, that's the one with Sean Connery, right, I knew I was wrong.
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That's where they find the the Raiders with the.
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Lost Ark is when the guy smelt.
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It's not supposed to be funny, but it's funny but it is.
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And they're in Egypt, you know, and they're talking about Moses and the Ark and all of that.
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I love those movies.
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because of that, we visited some of those places as well, although we weren't specifically trying to track Indiana Jones steps.
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That just kind of happened.
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But it is fun to go.
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I've seen this before.
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This isn't a movie, yeah.
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And then he went and he ate falafels with somebody who was in one of those, absolutely yeah, and I thought that was so cool and he just had a conversation with them.
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I'm like, oh, is he going to tell him he's a Christian?
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How is that going to go?
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You know, because he said he was Muslim and I don't know if I was waiting for it, I was just like, oh, I hope he doesn't, because I don't know how he would react.
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But because I don't know how he would react.
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But it's just like a tension there and it was really exciting to just see that you can have a conversation with someone who may not agree with you, and maybe he already knew that he was a Christian and he doesn't have a problem with it, because not all Muslims are that hostile that we always hear about and everything.
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But yeah, it's really cool to see that that scene was completely unscripted.
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You know, we were kind of in between shots and Justin, the host for that video, had been to that tent before and so the guy was like come back in.
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You know they already had had a relationship but yeah, they understood why we were there.
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They understood what we were shooting and we have found in the variety of places that we have traveled.
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You know, a lot of these countries are predominantly Muslim countries and even when we explain to them what we're doing, we have not received any kind of hostility or pushback.
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They aren't going to necessarily agree with what we're doing, but I'll tell you this about Justin it was not uncommon for us to look around and be like where is Justin?
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And he's off talking to somebody, absolutely 100%, giving him the message of Jesus and having not a debate per se but having a friendly conversation, and it's like we could probably leave him here and he would be completely content.
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But we've got to keep going and that's part of the work that we do is we try to take Christ into these places.
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They understood why we're there.
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There have been a few times where we've not been allowed to shoot or had to find different avenues to do the things we needed to do, any opposition or anything.
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Just a little, but especially when we have traveled to Israel, film crews like ours are in there all the time and we have just found people incredibly accommodating and we've been very blessed.
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Yeah, that's awesome.
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Have you had any spiritual opposition while filming, Like maybe a camera was recording and then all of a sudden it just kind of stopped and you're like that makes no sense.
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Why did it just stop.
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Satan doesn't want this content out there.
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He doesn't want people to have a deep understanding and a rich desire and love for historical biblical facts.
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He doesn't want people to realize this is all real.
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It's not just a book of fairy tales, like some people think.
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So he's going to mess with you guys.
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It's true we have experienced difficulties from the beginning.
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Part of that is just the nature of the work that we do.
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It's not easy to make these things, and there are times where we have plans, we have things that we would like to happen.
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How do we give these things away for free?
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It's because through donations we raise a lot of money.
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It's necessary to raise a lot of money to pay for these trips and film permits and production, and sometimes that goes smoothly and oftentimes it's a struggle, and I wholeheartedly agree with you.
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This is not something that Satan would want done.
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But we also understand that we pray regularly as our team.
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We pray, lord, if this is something that you want to succeed, that you would allow it to succeed, and if this particular thing is not what you want right now, we pray that you shut it down quickly, divert our attention, put us on a different path, and so we're always trying to be aware of you know, maybe this is not Satan trying to shut this thing down.
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Maybe this is God trying to turn us in a different direction or consider a different avenue.
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It's not easy and that's true for anyone who's trying to share the gospel with other people If we stopped at the first sign of opposition.
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The gospel never.
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We certainly wouldn't be talking about it 2000 years after the events of Jesus.
00:20:31.872 --> 00:20:46.278
But when we read things like the book of Acts where, even in the midst of the greatest persecution in that time, the gospel actually spread further and faster than it typically has, that should motivate us to go.
00:20:46.278 --> 00:20:49.695
Okay, I'm experiencing some opposition to this.
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This does not seem to be something that the enemy wants done, but it's the right thing to do.
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It's what God commissions us to do.
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Let's put forth even and a time where people can receive so much falsehood and lies, especially about God and about the Bible.
00:21:12.432 --> 00:21:18.932
We want to speak truth and we should be willing to put forth the great effort necessary in order to get that done.
00:21:25.839 --> 00:21:30.865
Hey friends, have you joined the Honest Christian Conversations online group yet?
00:21:30.865 --> 00:21:39.713
If you haven't, you're missing out on a perfect opportunity to grow your relationship with Jesus Christ.
00:21:39.713 --> 00:21:42.640
This is a community for those who want to go deeper in their relationship.
00:21:42.640 --> 00:21:54.518
You can do Bible studies together, ask the questions you have biblically and get the answers that you might need or maybe you're somebody who has answers to somebody else's questions.
00:21:54.518 --> 00:21:56.616
You can leave your prayer requests.
00:21:56.616 --> 00:21:58.576
You can leave your praise reports.
00:21:58.576 --> 00:22:01.199
This is a community.
00:22:01.199 --> 00:22:11.118
This is what church is supposed to be, and I am so glad that I finally took that step to make this group so that people's lives can flourish in Jesus' name.
00:22:11.118 --> 00:22:18.000
Also, if you haven't signed up for the mailing list, you're missing out on an opportunity there as well.
00:22:18.000 --> 00:22:26.190
I send out a weekly email chocked full of so much awesome content that I don't have time right now to share it all with you.
00:22:26.190 --> 00:22:35.597
But when you do sign up for that mailing list, you get my seven-day free devotional that I created just for those who sign up for the mailing list.
00:22:35.597 --> 00:22:44.022
If you haven't joined either of these, you can go to my website honestchristianconversationscom and sign up there.
00:22:44.022 --> 00:22:49.175
Website honestchristianconversationscom and sign up there, or you can use the links for it in the show notes.
00:22:49.175 --> 00:22:58.585
Very smart that you guys are praying over this thing from beginning to end the whole process and making sure that you're doing it the way God wants.
00:22:58.924 --> 00:23:06.182
Because there's many times I've tried to write stories and I've always said that I want God to be the actual writer.
00:23:06.182 --> 00:23:07.936
I'm just the one he's using.
00:23:07.936 --> 00:23:14.801
And there's been times where I've come up on writer's block and I don't understand how I can't get past it.
00:23:14.801 --> 00:23:29.375
No matter what I do, I always end up being stopped at that specific point and it was really irritating for a while until I realized I'm trying to run the show again and I need to let this go and do it the way that God wants.
00:23:29.375 --> 00:23:31.681
And it was a hard lesson that I had to learn.
00:23:31.681 --> 00:23:45.923
But once I did, I started understanding that if I'm going through another season of having my writer's block, I need to step back from that and figure out why am I trying to take it in the direction I want to go?
00:23:45.923 --> 00:23:50.461
And sometimes I'll go a while without writing.
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I mean, during Christmas of 2024, I didn't do any writing and I didn't start writing again until almost, I think, a week before March.
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I just I didn't feel a desire to write.
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I didn't know what to write for my book that I was trying to write.
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I just I didn't feel a desire to write.
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I didn't know what to write for my book that I was trying to write.
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I just nothing, I just was.
