Krisan Marotta, host of Wednesday in the Word podcast, joins Rob Schilling on AM 1070 WINA’s The Schilling Show to discuss her book Start Strong: A New Believer’s Guide to Christianity. Instead of talking about why she wrote the book, they dive straight into the theology, covering what new believers need to understand and why it matters.
Key takeaways:
- Repentance is more than saying sorry. It’s a complete change of direction and the first step of saving faith.
- Sin has both short-term consequences (bitterness, frustration, tragedy) and long-term consequences (standing before God).
- Finding the right church means looking for one that teaches the Bible in a real way, not just political agendas.
- Biblical worldview divides people into sinners who have found forgiveness through Jesus and those who haven’t, not oppressors and oppressed.
- Fellowship with other believers is essential for encouragement and growth.
- Fearing God means making what He thinks more important than anything else.
Transcript:
Growing Biblical Illiteracy
Krisan: I started podcasting back in 2011. There were 300 podcasts in the world at the time. So it’s been a while. And I put out a Bible study basically every week, and I now the podcast has grown so that I reach like 50,000 listeners a year in over 150 countries.
Rob: That’s absolutely remarkable. And this is such a good reason to be talking to people. There are so many questions that people have when they’re familiarizing themselves with Christianity, and you’ve addressed a good number of these in the book. Tell us who your target audience was in this book. Did you have somebody in mind? I know it’s a new believer, but sometimes people are just not open to someone else telling them, or they just want to kind of find out on their own. So who was the target for this book?
Krisan: Over the years, as I’ve taught Bible studies, I’ve noticed that there’s been there’s a growing illiteracy. People just don’t know anything about the Bible anymore. And the questions people were asking were more and more basic and more and more like, who was Paul and who was Noah? And I realized there’s just a real need for explaining what the Bible is all about because we don’t get taught it at all in our culture anymore.
Repentance: The First Step
Rob: Repentance, the first step. This is a tough one for people to repent and admit that they were wrong. And it’s a very overt process. Tell us about it.
Krisan: Well, a lot of people think repentance is just saying you’re sorry and apologizing and moving on. But repentance is really a change of direction. It’s saying, I was wrong and I want to change and do something completely different. And it is the first step of saving faith.
Rob: That is a tough first step. When you work with women or have talked to women before, how do you get them past the initial, you know, the I don’t know if you want to use the word pride or or maybe it’s embarrassment to look at your life, a self-evaluation of your life and to put the stuff on the table because it could be, in a way, embarrassing even to the person who has that experience in their life. So how do you encourage that?
Krisan: I think you have to understand the problem before you can understand the solution. So all of us at some point come face to face with our sin in one way or another. We either hurt someone when we didn’t intend to, or say something we wish we hadn’t, or something we run into it. And at that point you reach out with grace that yes, we are all like that. We all do things we shouldn’t and say things we shouldn’t and are thoughtless and neglect people. But there’s an answer. And the answer isn’t try harder. The answer is there is a rescue, there’s a savior.
Understanding Sin and Its Consequences
Rob: Something that you touch on in the book, and you mentioned the word sin, and we don’t hear that very much in the popular vernacular. It used to be a lot more common, but there are consequences of sin, even if you’re not quote unquote found out or exposed for whatever sins you’re dealing with on a personal basis. Tell us about the importance of consequences of sin.
Krisan: Well, there’s short-term consequences, and there’s a really big long-term consequence. The short-term consequence is when we sin, we experience all kinds of death in the form of bitterness, frustration, anger, tragedy, all the negative things that ruin this life. But the bigger consequences is one day we all we’ll all face our Creator, and we need to be able to stand before him. And the Bible’s pretty clear we’re sinners, and when we stand before him, the answer is going to be you’re guilty. But God is so loving and merciful, he created a way of escape. And that way of escape is open now.
Finding the Right Church
Rob: It’s so important to really contemplate this, and you’ve laid it out so well in the book in a step-by-step basis for stepping through these various challenges and things that you need to do. One of them that’s super important, and I want to spend a little time on finding a church. There are a lot of confused, I’ll put church in air quotes in Charlottesville who have all sorts of political agendas or things that are contrary to what the Bible says. So how does somebody go about finding the right church?
Krisan: Oh, I agree. It’s hard. And it’s scary because you feel like, oh, I have to get my act together before I can walk in the door. And that’s not true. You don’t have to get your act together. Church is filled with other confused sinners just like you.
Rob: Yeah.
Krisan: But in our day and age, it’s easier because before you walk in the doors, you can get on and read their websites and listen to a few sermons and see are is this church really teaching the Bible or not? And that’s what you want to look for, a church that is going through the Bible in a very real way and teaching you to understand it.
Biblical Worldview vs. Cultural Worldview
Rob: Another issue that comes up in the book that people maybe don’t think about in advance, but this is really something important for people new to Christianity, is your world view. And it’s hard to have a worldly worldview and be a Christian. I mean, there’s so many things that change when your eyes are open to Christianity.
Krisan: That’s true. And we’re taught right now that the worldview is you have oppressors and then you have the oppressed. And that’s not a biblical worldview. The worldview is there are those, we are all sinners, but some people have found forgiveness through Jesus Christ and some haven’t.
The Importance of Fellowship
Rob: You mentioned also finding your people, and fellowship is a huge component of Christianity. I mean, we have a lot of places that are doing Sunday services online, but that doesn’t really put you into God’s house. Tell us about fellowship and finding your people.
Krisan: Well, I think it is in many ways, it’s harder with everybody working from home and being on their phone so much, or even when you’re out in public, you don’t have those five second conversations with the grocery clerk because everybody’s too busy looking at their phones. But I think it is important to find other people to encourage you along the way and that you can encourage. And God, it’s very clear that part of the reason he calls us is not just to a relationship with him, but to a relationship with his people where we can serve each other and grow together and encourage each other. And someone’s there when you fall down to give you a hand up.
What It Means to Fear God
Rob: We’ve got about a minute left, Krisan to talk about the concept of fearing God, because you have a section of the book about that, and people generally don’t understand or don’t have a good understanding of what that means.
Krisan: So right, I used to think fearing God may somehow you had to be afraid of him.
Rob: Yes.
Krisan: But basically the idea is just make what he thinks more important than anything else. Fear is something that motivates you. The thing you are most afraid of is what determines your choices. And we want, as Christians, for God to be the thing we most fear in the sense that what he says is the thing that’s going to guide us and affect our choices.
Where to Find More
Rob: Krisan Marotta, if people, I’m going to ask you for two things. If people want to check out Wednesday in the Word Podcast, or if they’d like to get a copy of Start Strong, A New Believer’s Guide to Christianity, tell us how we can do those things.
Krisan: You can find the book wherever books are sold, or you can go to startstrongbook.org. And the Wednesday in the Word podcast is at Wednesdayintheword.com. And wherever you listen to podcasts, you can find it.
Rob: It’s a wonderful, thoughtful book, Start Strong, A New Believer’s Guide to Christianity. Krisan Marotta, thank you for joining us today on the Schilling Show.
Krisan: Well, thank you so much for having me. Great questions.
Page Views: 37
Photo by Matt Botsford on Unsplash