J. Warner Wallace (Homicide Detective)

Today's episode will begin in three minutes. But first I want to tell you about something crazy I'm doing for my new book, five Mere Christians. I've never seen an author do this before, but I'm giving a money back.

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Two reasons.

One, this is a different book for me, right. I know this is a very different biography. What is Jordan Rayner doing? And I know it's risky, so I'm going to de risk it for you. Because listen, in my other books, Redeeming youg Time, the Sacredness of Secular Work, Master of One, etc, etc, I am telling you and me how we can glorify God in our work, but in five Mere Christians, I'm doing something very different. I'm showing you what that looks like practically through these unforgettable life stories of five Mere Christians from history. These are the top men and women that I would love to have on this podcast today if, you know, they weren't dead, right?

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A risk and I'm gonna de risk.

This book for you.

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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.

And 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.

The I think you guys are going to love this conversation with my new friend Jim Wallace. J. Warner Wallace, welcome to the Mere Christians Podcast. Can I call you Jim?

Of course. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

What made you want to be a homicide detective?

I didn't think I was going to be. I was not quite sure where. Like 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 have a police explorer program. I did well in it in terms of through the academy, but it just wasn't like 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 Cal State Long beach. And then I went on from that and did a master's in architecture at ucla and I was in my graduate work which there, you know 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. And I was about a year into that when I just, I was working in a firm in Santa Monica, a good firm. That was my dream, my dream job because I really, I went to UCLA because of this master architect who was there and I really thought that this was going to be his name was Charles Moore and he had a firm in Santa Monica called Moro Udell M R Y. And so I was working there and looked around the office, just didn't see anybody who looked like Susie and I. And 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 kind of 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, you can go home now, or you can spend another 10 hours and make this project which has, 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. So I just knew I'd be consumed by it. So I kind of returned to the profession of my father. And for a lot of years I felt frustrated that there was no, like, 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.

So you were the sketch guy?

Yeah, I got called out on every homicide to, to draw the scene. So even before I was working homicides, I was present as a patrol officer because they would want me to come out and make an accurate drawing. And then, you know, I got called down on all the officer involved shootings to locate every casing and every, you know, bullet hole and make drawings of those. And so that kind of satisfied that. But then when I got into, you know, you progress along as a cop, you work patrol. Then I worked gangs, then I worked in the back room, which is our undercover position. And then I was assigned a robbery homicide. And it was there that I really got to figure out, like, what is this art thing going to do for me? Like, what can I do with it? And we started making presentations for juries. And when we started, and 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. So 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 kind of the way Jesus uses parables, this is to this as this is to this. And you could find a visual way to do that. Anyway, long story short, short, that's how I ended up just really kind of. 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 drugged back into little cases here or there, you 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.

That's fascinating. I got to 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 that's a pretty creative art.

No, it is. And sometimes the creative aspect of it is like thinking of it in terms of. Well, I didn't. Everyone comes into this position differently. So 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 crimes Persons. You find your way in different way. And 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. So 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 written another book for next year. And 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. And 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. And 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. And the audience is new, but there's nothing innately creative about presenting the same thing 100 times. You know what I mean? So a lot of it for me is like, how do I scratch that creative itch.

Yeah, that's so interesting. Yes. You alluded to this before. I want our audience to hear this story. You'll get. God brought you to Faith in Christ largely through the skill set he gave you as a detective. What's the story there?

I was not assigned to a cold case unit at that time because I was doing these things collaterally. Most of us who worked cold cases nationally are not assigned officially to a cold case unit. We're assigned as detectives somewhere, and someone says, hey, take a look at this case. And then you end up working it collaterally, and you might spend a decade just tinkering. That's why you need really to have assigned, fully dedicated, assigned cold case detectives to make any progress. But I was looking at my dad's old cases, and I was assigned to an undercover unit at the time, which we had to kind of make cases and file the cases with the da and so I was in that position when my wife finally got me to go to church. And her interest, I think, in going to church was that she felt like it was a good kind of character developer for our kids. And our kids had been in preschool before they were in elementary school. And that preschool was. One was Baptist, one was, I think, a Catholic preschool. I mean, these are like places locally that had preschools, and they were all affiliated to some house of worship. And although I was not in it, never attended any of the services or never attended anything at those houses of worship. Our kids did go to preschool there. And then once they were old enough to go to school, I think she was kind of thinking like, well, now what do we do? Do we continue this? And so. And I just thought, well, I was not raised that way, so no, but I'm like my dad, who's a very committed atheist who'd be happy to go to church with you because he thinks it's a useful delusion. He thinks it's something that is. Is not true, but it might help you.

Whatever works for you works even though it's not true. Right?

Whatever works for you works. Right. And he'll even celebrate it because he thinks that's better than doing something bad.

At least it's not destructive.

Right, Exactly. So I would have gone the same. And I. I actually did go the same way, thinking, hey, it doesn't have to be true for me to go with my wife and want to do what? But. But again, it was three years of her kind of occasionally suggesting we should probably find a church. We could see what it's like. And I finally went, and as I walked in, that pastor, he was gifted at presenting the gospel in a way that somebo who is not a believer would. Might find something interesting about the way he presented Jesus. And that was exactly what happened to me. I found something interesting about Jesus in 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, and wasn't sure if that was true, but I bought a Bible to find out. And what he had said, that was so smart. And 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 kind of 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. And what you're looking for there is the stuff that's kind of. You're trying to read between the lines, and there's a number of principles you're looking at, but that's basically, in essence, what you're trying to do. And it is creative. There's no science of forensic statement analysis. This is an art, and some are better at it. And this is why we don't present experts in forensic statement analysis in criminal trials. There are. It's an art, it's not a science. So I was applying this to the Gospels to see what they could tell me. And as I did that, I became more and more convinced that the resurrection was true. And 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. So I didn't believe there was a God. So I had to really kind of 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. And as I'm simultaneously reading through the Gospels and trying to figure out how well supported the Gospels were. And so that really is the journey I was on. And I wasn't trying to disprove the Gospels because I just felt like, you know, 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 matter? I mean, what are you reading it for? I mean, why would you. No one's testing Lord of the the Rings, but this is a different kind of claim. And it's. As I read it initially, I was just reading it like you might read Lord of the Rings. And then I began to. To see the truth in it. It changed everything for me.

Yeah, I love it. I've worked alongside a lot of people who. They're kind of the default position is assuming that Christianity lacks intellectual rigor. Right. But you of all people know that our faith is far from a blind one. Right. You wrote a whole book on this called Christianity. It's built on heaps and heaps of historical evidence.

But man, if we can't artic, articulate.

That evidence to the lost people we work with, we're gonna have a hard time leading those co workers 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?

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, so if you don't trust it, if it's not reliable, walk away. If it's reliable, deal with it. And so 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? And then second of all, if they are, are they reliable? Because some eyewitnesses will tell you things aren't true, they'll change things. So 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. So those 13 questions, 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 accurate and consistent? Fourth, do they possess a bias that would cause them to lie? Is there a motive for them to kind of lie? To me, those four criteria are what we test in criminal trials. I simply applied those four, and I can tell you that in terms of, were they written early enough? I think they're 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 till everyone knows the truth is dead and you can say anything you want about him. So I had to kind of 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? Are they 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 corroborating? Corroboration either through external. Other witnesses, other people who saw something or recorded something in antiquity, or even archaeology, 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? I was like, is there an early version of Jesus that then morphs over the years? So I had to figure out, how do we trace that? And then finally, it's only three reasons why anyone lies. They're always the same. It's either financial greed, sexual lust, or the pursuit of power. So 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. And 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. So you have to navigate the difference. And 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 dismiss jurors. 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'm going 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. There's. It points right to Jesus and his resurrection, 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, and you're going to have to step across your unanswered questions to render a verdict. And that's true of everything you do in life. You get in your car without any idea of how it works. And so many unanswered questions. If I sat down, even asked you, what's the leader size of your engine? You know, there are people who are driving cars, they don't know how many cylinders the thing has.

Hand raised.

Yes. Yeah. So you, 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. But 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. And that's true also for Christianity. So I think that once I realized I 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 and. But still it is that step that saves you.

Otherwise it's not.

Faith saves you. Right. Otherwise it's not faith. That's right.

So 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 co workers about Christ?

Well, yeah, I mean, that's true for all of us. Right. So if, if we were going to say that, all of us should be able to say that, yes, we are. We are using our work, always be used as a platform from which to preach the gospel. So that's. That's true. So 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 and it has always been a calling. And it's not. I'm not a pacifist. I'm not a Christian pacifist. Although I understand a ton. I understand that's your position. I just don't get supported 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. 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 mischief locally. It says, for 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 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 it is right, and 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 weapons you could use than this sword. So it's like the equivalent of deadly force. So he's saying basically, 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. So think about that for a second. So there's a sense in which we must feel as though we're called. To this, I will say one more practical thing, and 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. But 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 robbed. Patients, you need to establish order first. That's why you'll 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, and 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. So I think that we need to take that more seriously as police officers. And I didn't even know that right when I first got hired because I wasn't a Christian.

I love this so much. And it reminds me of First Peter 2, where Peter's talking about the priesthood of all believers. Right. It's not just priests and pastors and religious professionals who are priests. All of us are in the royal priesthood, right. Placed in the police force, placed in the fire department, placed in the local school, place in the local coffee shop to be ambassadors of God's goodness and grace and love. And I, I just love you kind.

Of intuitively understood that when you came to faith in Christ that you did.

Not change your work post conversion.

But I would love to hear about.

What changed about how you did the work post conversion.

You know what, 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?

Well, a couple of things, you're right. I mean, because this is the one necessary profession. This changes things, means that the level of which you execute the job that you, you perform has to be spotless. The bar has to be super high. That's why, 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, their shirt buttoned down pretty tight. And 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 can't be. They must be as close to perfect as you can get. Now, of course, remember, we're still hiring humans and that's part. And although I think our hiring process is pretty stringent, I don't think 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 it. It started to explain human behavior in a way that made sense. Like the Bible describes the world the way it really is. And so if you want to know what to expect from people, even from people you might have thought of, these are good people, Right? Well, the biblical anthropology helps you to recognize that there are no good people.

No such thing.

Yeah. And so I used to do cases, like I've done cold cases where I've gone into trial and I get to know the defense attorneys pretty well. And some of them are paid defense attorneys. Some of them are just public defenders. And there's been a couple of who I've been close to. You know, I really enjoyed their company. Like, we could hang out together even though we're on the opposite side of this particular trial. But they would. I remember a couple of 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. And if you work cold case murderers, what you recognize is that these folks spend the next 30 years as perfect citizens and sometimes even as better citizens than 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. But of course he was and he did. And 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. So I think that one of the things that did for me, me really quickly was give me a sense of, well, I understand now the nature of humans a little more clearly. And then, of course, that opens the door to conversations with people who don't. And so 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, and 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. So we needed. It was testable if he really did it. And this, it was shocking to the defense attorney. I mean, it 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. So 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.

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. And after the war, the man was in the room of this court proceeding of one of the Nazi soldiers who tortured him. And the victim is sitting there, and the former Nazi soldier walks in the room, and the victim just crumbles to the floor, crying, weeping, and they have to take him outside. They take the. They take the defendant outside, and they asked the victim, like, what happened? Are you okay? Was it just. Were you 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, and 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, so your conversion gave you a more accurate view of humanity and the grace you've been shown. How else did your family shape your work post conversion, Jim?

Well, I mean, there's all kinds of little, simple, like X's and O stuff, right? Like some. 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. And it's hard, I'm going to tell you. This is a battle. And I often think about this and wonder because let's face it, most of the guys you, you work with are going to use a lot of profanity. And it might just be that they are in an environment where some of the bad guys we work with, they're using a lot of profanity. But, you know, we're gangs for two years. I'll tell you that part of it is that if you look at the kind of force, escalation, right, that 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. And that's why you don't want to walk in looking like you're going to get your. 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, and 130. This is just the nature of it. So 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. So 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. It's very unruly. And the people you're dealing with, they don't respect just your polite command. They just think, I can take this guy. And so you have to kind of 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's serious. So I can tell you that for me, personally, I remember I was on training one time and I was very polite on training, and I got myself and my training officer in a bit of a jam. And afterwards he wrote me up and he said, dude, you need to take. And so I'll show you the next time we go on a call what this is going to sound like. And of course, it was a bit vile, but, boy, it sure went easy.

Yeah.

So how'd you wrestle with that as a Jesus? This is real. This is where the rubber meets the road.

Here it is where the rubber meets the road. So I think the first few years, I just. Well, I was lucky number one. I was not working patrol when I became a police. I was working in investigations. So I didn't have to. To navigate that on the next shift. And I just did. I just didn't. So it was pretty easy for me to. Now, a lot of times what we do is we substitute words that we used to use. So this guy's a stinking piece of dog snot.

It's not going to get the same.

Reaction, but yeah, okay, so. So 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 cussing. You're just using different words to cuss. So 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. So 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. And I see that 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. And when they're shooting back at you, your accuracy decreases. You have to take deep breaths. You might. To shoot through an injury. It's different. I mean, I could. You're gonna 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. And the question we have 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 gonna have to change the entire industry and probably change our culture to go along with it. So we got to make this decision. Meanwhile, police are stuck in the middle ground trying to figure out this. 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. And so there's no easy answer here, but what? Hey, 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 with the greater good? So 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 is it, Are we doing something that prevents an even greater sin that's about to occur?

As you're wrestling through this stuff, especially right after conversion, I'm sure people are noticing like man, Jim's not cursing as much, Jim's not drinking as 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 co workers on the force.

What did that look like?

Do you remember? And obviously it's not a one time thing, right? But how did you do that in a non awkward, winsome way?

Well, I was on a team. It's a, it was a small team, five officers and a sergeant working undercover. Occasionally we were in the field doing surveillance. So I didn't out, 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. So 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 so I didn't have the eye. There's a guy basically in 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. So he was basically sitting in his house. And so we have one guy who's on the eye and the rest of us are in the perimeter of that neighborhood somewhere waiting for this guy to move, move. So I had some time to kill. This is back before on the cell phones. So I'm reading my Bible and I had a commentary with me. You know, I'm trying to figure this, a couple of things, theological principles out. And I'd already become a Christian, but I wasn't a Christian very long, like 10 minutes. And this guy who had seen the change in me, he Snuck up on my car and caught me reading the Bible. And then he basically ratted me out to everybody else, you know, because. Because I was a very vocal atheist. I was. I'd always been that way. And you would know that about me because so many of the people we take to jail are outspoken Christians. So it provides opportunity for people like me to mock them publicly and in a group, which we did, so they knew where I stood. Well, then I became the person because. Because I'd been the mocker, then I became an easy target of their mocking. So. But these are all, like, friends of mine. I mean, 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. So if you continue to do. Do the job well, people will. I've been on this guy, this particular guy. I had been on the SWAT team with him prior. He knew my work. We had all the same friends who we deeply respected. And I loved this guy. I still love this guy. And he's a great guy. But he never became a Christian. And, you know, right away then I had to deal with everyone making fun of me for a while. But.

But.

But then, you know, 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 what it is God mad at me? Is there a God? And is God mad at me? I had a lot that happened a lot. Really? Oh, yeah, because, you know, people knew.

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. And they inevitably, by you being good at what you did and being a good friend, they inevitably came to you with those hard questions.

My position's always been, well, why are you a Christian now? As Adam? And this guy knew it, who first caught me, he says, you've been so on the other side of this that I bet you'll end up being a pastor. And that was true because, I mean, I thought, whatever extreme I'm going to be at, I'm going to be at that extreme. And so he kind of predicted that. And so 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. And of course, that is resisted by a lot of people that, you know, it's one thing. He could probably have lived a bit 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.

This is fact.

Right. And 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. And so I got a lot of that initially. But 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. And so like, they, they said I got dirt on you from before I knew what you were like before. And they would like tease me about it. But look, this is what you would expect, if this is true, is you'd expect some level of transformation just in terms of your language, like in your character, what it is you would say about people or not say about people. Your level of shut your mouth, you know, like, there's a lot of times when I'm still thinking it, that's bad enough, but I'm not going to open my mouth and let. Let you know what a jerk I still am. So. So there's part of that process of sanctification that takes years. So people saw that and then we didn't allow. I actually at some point 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. And 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 just didn't work out that way.

Yeah, but you know what?

I think there is even more power in you doing it unofficially. Listen, I got, I got friends who run Corporate Chaplains of America in these groups, and 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, but man, they just want to talk to their peers. And 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 card. And it sounds like that's what you experienced, right? People were coming to you with this stuff because they could relate to you.

That's absolutely true. And I think that that's why peer support groups and law enforcement really started to emerge around that time, and because they just knew that people weren't. And this may not be true for everyone. Yes, it's nice. If you're working in some corporation and you've got a certain position, if you've 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. So I feel like that's part of it. Is so. And 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 them, but they think he might, like, kind of like when I was. 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 chop saw, with a miter saw, then, okay, I might go to him to see, well, how do I. How did you do it? They people knew this is what I was interested in and who I was about. And so they went to me to say, well, how would you do it? It. That was basically it.

Yeah, that's exactly right. I love it. Publishing this book in January called the Sacredness of Secular Work. And I'm going deep on what scripture says about the work we're going to do on the new Earth. And I point 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?

Oh, really? Good question. So I think, well, there won't be any evangelists either, or Christian apologists. So 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. Everything is an identity issue. And for men, it's all an identity issue. Our work is absolutely. It forms around identity. And when we. When our identity is challenged or abruptly changes, that's a point of trauma for almost everyone. And if you look back at the own. Your own points of trauma in your life, you'll find that there is some challenge to your identity involved in that trauma. So 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 your doing to your identity. There's a friend of mine who's done some work on this, and 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 and we communicate to each other is we want to know what is your occupation? The Asian is occupation. And then of course, once we hear that, the first thing we're thinking is, well, how much does he make? It's about compensation. And 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, our occupation and our education. Or is it your reputation? And finally he says, this is so true for 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 like the alpha dog just arrived. It's an identity issue. So when you ask me, like, what are we going to do in the next thing? 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. Got two other triplets, he's got two other sisters, and they're called purpose and value. One is not separable from the other. And because of that, part of it is like, will I be valuable? What will 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? And who will you be then? So I think as men, we really struggle with that.

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 will be free from that.

And I, I think that's. 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.

Well, what you just said is so interesting because it's so revealing, right? It's that we can't even imagine. And 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. And that's why it's so hard to imagine. Have you ever heard somebody who would say something akin to, oh, gosh, I don't know, heaven kind of sounds like, why would I want to be there? And 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. Another saint in heaven? You know, I'm not going to be the thing all this all. Do I. Do I get to carry over all the credit I get on this side of the grave for a career, Well, a reputation well earned, or am I going to have to abandon that? That's how sad it is that we place. All right, 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 cops go, we're far more likely to hire a linebacker than we are, you know, a philosopher, because the work is so linebacker ish. Right? So, 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, talk them through, and you see that they're still struggling, especially when you get to your 40s, because suddenly you realize, like athletes, that you're no longer the guy you were physically in your 20s, and 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. But I'll tell you, once you get to a point where you're like, hey, I could work out all day long, but now at this age, I can't maintain it. This is an age issue. Like, suddenly you're. You get, okay, I can let go of that. There's a certain rest in realizing that that's not who you really are. And 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.

Yeah, it's good.

It's hard.

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, over and over again?

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 from. You mentioned Tim Keller. I think anything from Keller. You probably read the book he does on. On work as well as you were researching your own. It's a great book, and his sermons are great deal. By the way, the podcast is, I think, in some ways even better than the books.

But he would tell you that, too. He would tell you he was a much better preacher than he was writer. I disagree, but.

And he's a great writer. I think he is. Listen, I think that Lewis is still somebody who is worth the investigation, because Louis C.S. lewis was a very careful thinker. And so when 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 Pearcy. If it's a common theological or just kind of pastoral issue that they're navigating, it's probably going to be Keller. If it's something that is a classic overarching, like the Problem of Pain is a great book, that's going to be Lewis. So it'd be one of those three.

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?

That's a really, really good question. And I just don't know. There's lots of. I I would love to. I do a lot of work with public interviewers. Like I've done work with Keith, a lot of work with Keith Morrison on Dateline. And these people are not believers, but they are aware, like they have a view on the role of faith. So I think that the public folks who have to. It's either people. It's going to be somebody without the name popping into 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, and so you can't do that and be a Christian. So it'd be someone like that or somebody who 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 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?

Well, it's 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, and it's grounded on this thing we kind of already touched on a little bit. It's the secret sauce. I've been writing about it in, 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, 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, more generous. I Mean, all the metrics of human flourishing, it turns out, are grounded in something that is very obvious. But it seems like 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. And that is this attribute that is described as humility. If you embrace humility, every other metric goes up, every other metric goes up. And 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 that, you know, he wrote this book, How I Learned to Be humb humble and 10 how to become humble in 10 easy steps and how I made it in eight. That was his book, and I thought that was hilarious, right? Because this is the nature of pursuing humility, is that you eventually take a prideful pursuit of humility. So 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, and this guy's standing next to me hasn't. It leads to pride. And this is why the one worldview that says, no, it's not about anything you do, you. 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, and 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. You 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.

Yeah, it's really good. What is one thing you're doing to practice humility right now?

You can't practice it. It's not pursued or earned. So humility is a realization. It's what you arrive at that 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. And it's an assessment that you make. I think Spurgeon put it that way. Humility is the pro is a product of assessment that you you simply have to know you have to be so close to in your relationship to God that you never forget who he is.

Yeah, that's the practice I was looking for though it is maintaining your all of God's holiness.

Yes, how do you maintain that realization? And it'll look different for each person, but it but whatever it is that keeps you remembering who you are compared to the infinite perfect God of the universe.

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. And 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 called 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.

I'm so glad to be with you. It was an honor. I appreciate it.

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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