INTERVIEW Promise Keepers CEO Ken Harrison
Summary
➡ The text discusses the importance of sincere repentance, truthful witnessing in Christianity, and transformation through faith. It raises concerns about the societal disapproval of men upholding their roles as responsible husbands and fathers. The writer advocates for Christian institutions that value teaching biblical doctrines and building relationships. The text also sheds light on the significance of Promise Keepers rallies, which aim to address real issues that men face, inspire spiritual growth and promote authentic friendships among men.
➡ The speaker mentions upcoming events, the possible cancellations and adversities they face due to different beliefs, and touches upon societal issues while encouraging Christians to be proactive with their faith. He discusses his books, both advocating for steadfast, bold faith and the importance of ‘good works’ after being saved, blending grace and actions. He further emphasizes the necessity of using our God-given abilities for good, challenging complacency in Christian life.
➡ The text discusses the concept of wasting life and not fully embracing one’s faith, utilizing the metaphor of being excluded from the wedding feast of the Lamb. The speaker uses this metaphor to encourage listeners to boldly and actively live their Christian faith in order to participate in the greater heavenly reward, saying that courage and character, not performance, define a man’s integrity and faithfulness. They also stress the importance of authentic male relationships, shaped through shared experiences and mutual support, and criticize the impersonal and isolating impact social media and technology can have on these bonds. The speaker concludes by advocating for Promise Keepers, a revitalized initiative that fosters these types of brotherhoods through shared activities, underpinned by a foundation of scripture and prayer.
➡ The text discusses the importance of a healthy perspective towards money, describing it as a tool for freedom if used correctly but likewise a curse if mishandled, leading to greed or debt bondage. It explores how one’s approach to money reflects personal values and attitudes. Furthermore, it dissects the inherent expectations and obsessions about wealth within society, using examples from the church and elsewhere. Other topics include discussions on the dangers of debt, especially high-interest credit card debt, and the necessity of being guided by one’s conviction when making financial decisions. The passage also analyzes the meaning of ‘honoring God,’ emphasizing its misuse in society and church settings.
➡ The text discusses the misrepresentation of spiritual beliefs for personal gain, underlining the importance of personal authenticity in faith. It explores the significance of brotherhood and male gathering spaces, emphasizing the need for empathy and mutual understanding. It highlights the importance of integrity and courage, defining them in the context of unwavering truthfulness and perseverance. It underscores the promise of family, the profound role of exemplary parenthood, and nurturing godly offspring. Also states that the most loving thing a man could do for his children is to love their mother.
➡ The text emphasizes the importance of a strong and godly family and relates it to the strength of a community. It addresses common issues in a marriage and provides advice on achieving godly unity and how serving others plays a key part in becoming godly. It talks about theological and doctrinal differences and how having dialogues without anger leads to better understanding. The text ends with an emphasis on obedience as the foundation of a Christian life.
➡ The individual, an experienced CEO and former Marine police officer, is appreciated for their current work with Promise Keepers. The David Knight Show is a praise-worthy show that encourages critical thinking and urges listeners to trust science, wear masks, take vaccines, and support the show financially or by spreading the word.
Transcript
Was hit by a jet ski. And I was told by a doctor that I may have only 5 hours to live if my liver had been totally destroyed. And I was faced with all of a sudden this idea that in 5 hours I might be standing before the judgment seat of Christ. I was 30 years old. I knew the Bible very well. I was happily married. I had two kids.
I was very much the epitome of a good American Christian. And I realized at that moment when it was real and I was laying on a gurney, I’m going to get before Christ, and this is going to be inadequate. I will not go in with my head held high. What have I done to help all the hurting people out there? Not much. And I realized at that moment I never wanted to be in that situation again.
Theology in books is one thing. Theology when you’re laying on a gurney realizing I might be seeing Christ in the next couple of hours is another. When I was on the Los Angeles Police Department and I saw brutal, awful crime in a really horrific crime area. And then as I got into international business, I got to see that Depravity is in $5,000 suits just like it’s in Durags and running around with AK 47s.
We see over here on the nice Americanized Christianity that we have that some people do seem totally transformed and some not. Lots of people claim to be Christians. Lots of people believe in Christ, but they don’t seem that much different than some of the stuff I saw in the streets of Los Angeles. What’s the difference? Jesus has given us the formula for that difference in the Sermon on the Mount.
Jesus has this list of intense demands that he’s put upon us. Those are the things that are the requirements for living out this life with great joy and power in him. Well, Christ has said, you can be my salt. You can be my light. You can be the changemaker in this world, if you follow me. Deny yourself, pick up your cross daily. And by the way, when you’re that person, I will shower you with great rewards in eternity when you get there, and a content and joyful life here in this world where you’re seeing change and transformation around you as people see you, this great light of the Holy Spirit.
Have you ever seen how some Christians are so filled with great joy because they have lived up to the Sermon on the Mount that Christ demands not for salvation, but for all the promises after salvation. And so we want to walk through that in a daring faith in a cowardly world, realizing that the world is counting on us to carry out the good works that Jesus laid down at the beginning of time for you and I to accomplish.
And if we do that, we will reap great rewards from our Master when we get to heaven and say, lord Jesus, I live for you, I gave all for you. And have him say, well done, my good and faithful servant. Okay. And that’s our guest, Ken Harrison. And you saw the book there. This is his newest book, a Daring Faith in a Cowardly World. And so joining us now is Ken Harrison.
He is volunteer chairman and CEO of Promise Keepers. And he’s done a great deal of things in his life. But thank you for joining us, sir. Thanks, David. I appreciate it. It’s really important for us to I think Promise Keepers has a very important message, especially for these times that we live in. And it is very important for men to understand what their role is. And you put that out there in a very positive way.
Tell us a little bit about the organization Promise Keepers. Well, Promise Keepers was the biggest men’s movement in the history of the church back in the 90s under Coach Bill McCartney. So they were getting together men, filling up NFL Stadium, 60, 70,000 men at a time. I remember that. Yeah. And they actually had a gathering in Washington DC. In 97 called Stand in the Gap. Most people think it was called the Million Man March.
It was called stand in the gap. And they had 1. 4 million men together to worship Christ for the day. And it’s the biggest gathering in the history of Washington DC. So it was a pretty impactful organization. It sort of faded out of relevance for a while. But we’ve been coming back for the last few years. Well, that’s yet, you know, as we see so many times in the cancel culture, what is surprising is to see that Christian venues are now canceling Promise Keepers because they don’t like anything that is masculine, anything that talks to men about keeping their promises that they make.
Tell us a little bit about that and what’s been happening with that. It is truly amazing. I saw that and I just was really astounded. Because as you point out, Promise Keepers was so big 2030 years ago, and now we got liberal churches. Churches have gone so far to the left that they want to ban Promise Keepers for what they call what is their gender ideology. Yeah, and I would have been as shocked as you have.
We went to Dallas Cowboy Stadium two years ago. We had 30,000 men there. It was a huge event. And then we thought, well, let’s do a bigger tour. We get letters from all over the world saying, could you come here? And we thought, well, instead of doing one huge event in one location, which takes so much just a lot of stuff, let’s just go to churches. Wouldn’t that be great? And we’ll go all over.
We have found we’ve been canceled and canceled. And a lot of times, David, it’s not about ideology. A lot of times it’s playing about cowardice. So we had one church come to us. We met with the elders, and they said, listen, we agree with you on everything. We’re so sorry. We just don’t want any protesters. We don’t need anybody to think badly of us. We don’t want to be ostracized from our community.
Right? If you’ve read the Gospels, if you read the words of Our Lord, you think, how in the world could you, as an elder of a church, literally say, I don’t want to be unpopular. They need it worse than anybody at that church. That’s absolutely amazing. And that’s what’s happened. That’s what we see everywhere. That’s why the church is just disappearing, is because nobody will stand for the truth.
And you look at that and you say, well, then maybe you don’t really believe it. So why am I coming to your church? AO. Bernard is on our board. People think he’s I don’t know if you know who AO. Bernard is. He has a huge church in New York City, and a lot of people say, oh, he’s woke. He’s not woke. He’s an incredibly brilliant man. Huge church in New York City with 40,000 people.
And he said something to me that I thought was so profound. He said, Ken, do you know what the difference between a strong preference and a conviction is? No. When you think about that, everybody at home listen. What is the difference between a strong preference and a conviction? A conviction is not negotiable. Yes. That struck me as so profound, because when we see St. Jerome being barbecued face down in Rome, and after 15 minutes of him singing songs and laughing, he finally yells out, I’m done on this side.
You could turn me over. Now, that’s a guy with convictions. Right now we have churches saying, well, we don’t want protesters. That might make us uncomfortable. And the ironic thing about it is our tour is called Daring Faith, because what we’re saying to men is, you started this with at the beginning, what is our identity? Who are we? And as a church, we’ve gotten this wrong. And the greatest lie is the one that’s closest to the truth that brings you to the wrong conclusion.
And the lie that’s been seeded throughout the Evangelical Church is that we’re all sinners saved by grace. Well, that’s true, but it’s only half true, because when you think you’re a sinner saved by grace and you stop there, that becomes your identity. I guess I’m a sinner. Instead, we’re sinners saved by grace, made into new creations in Christ Jesus for good works, which were prepared beforehand that we should walk in the Ephesians 210, we’ve been made new creatures, that the Spirit of God has been deposited in each person who’s put their faith in Christ.
Now, we’re sons and daughters of the Most High God, and we need to act like it. So the identity is a problem because when men see well, I’m just a sinner. Then suddenly we see what we have today, which is, well, I struggle with porn, but I’m trying to do better. No, you’re a new creature, you shouldn’t be struggling with porn. What did John say when everyone showed up on the launch of Jesus’s ministry? Jesus comes to get baptized.
John looks up and looks at everybody and says, repent, you brute of vipers. Who told you to repent from the coming of the Lord? Repent. And so deed consistent with your repentance. Yes. That’s something we hear in the church a lot today. And that was the beginning of Jesus’s ministry. That’s right, yeah. It’s like, you know, if we’re going to be witnesses to people, we got to tell the truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth.
Right. I had George Barnet and he was talking about how people know. It’s like it’s like a smorgasborg. We’ll bring a little bit of this thing over there and a little bit of that thing over there. So we had some things that aren’t true to know. But then the other part of it is that you’re talking about is that we don’t have the whole know. Jesus would constantly heal somebody, say, now go your way and sin no more.
You’ve been changed. And if we haven’t been changed and if we don’t have that sense of transformation that changes, then we need to go back and we need to say, well, have I really been changed? Have I been saved? Is that something there? Because if you have, it’s going to work itself out. And so we need to look at that and say, does my life really reflect what I say that it does? Am I really living that? And of course, today we’re seeing this more and more.
That’s why talking about Promise Keepers, you were kicked out of a private Christian university in Nashville, out of a church in Cordova, Tennessee, out of a big church in Houston, and on and on. And I just looked at this, I was astounded it’s like, what is wrong with telling people to keep their promises and be a good husband and a good father and that type of thing, that you’re encouraging men to take that role.
What have we gotten to in a society where that is something that people hate in churches or Christian universities or as you pointed out, they’re afraid of the criticism that’s going to come their way. Yeah. I mean, the Bible says that in the last days, love of many will grow cold because of a lack of teaching. You know, when people listen to this, I think they is that am I getting the whole story? I mean, maybe this Ken Harrison guy’s a real jerk or maybe Promise Has a Bunch.
I mean, we’re taught to think that way. Yeah. And then everybody I’m not a jerk. And we really have gone with the grace of the Lord. We just teach god’s word. One of the criticisms we get from people, because when you have people who want to spread hatred, they’re not bogged down by truth. They say, whatever. And one of them is, well, we want to subjugate women. And I’m quoted all over the place as saying, my role is not to tell women how to behave.
I stay out of that. I’m not a pastor. I run Promise Keepers. It’s here to tell men how to behave. So I’m here to tell men how to be humble, gracious leaders in their home, biblically understood, so they can raise their kids. We don’t ever mention anything about women or anything like that. So it’s all about humility. Who wouldn’t want a husband who’s humble and gracious and knows the Bible and raises his kids? Right? So really, it’s unbelievable when you look at the fact that churches are walking away from this, and it’s terrifying.
And I will say, I think that there is a welcome change in the church coming in that I think COVID changed a lot of things when people realized that they could sit in the robe and watch Francis Chan on the YouTube instead of going to church. Right? Yeah. The megachurch movement has taken over starting in the 80s, where a really good speaker with good music ended up with this massive campus, and people all went there and it was nameless and faceless, and they did their church thing and they went home.
Well, culture no longer values going to church. And now I don’t need to go to church and be nameless and faceless because I can watch it on YouTube. So I think what’s church about? Church is about lifting brothers and sisters up in Christ and sharpening each other. So church is about relationship and teaching biblical doctrine. So for those churches that are teaching biblical doctrine and there’s relationships, and I’m telling you, it starts with the men, because women naturally make relationships, but men don’t.
Those churches are going to be the ones who flourish. And I think we’re going to go back more to a local church where people really know each other. They raise each other’s kids instead of this nameless, faceless, megachurch. And I tell you, that’s going to be a welcome time. I agree. I’ve seen this in terms of silver linings and what happened in 2020 from the standpoint, I’ve talked for the longest time to people about schools, and it’s like, be careful about what the institution is.
Oh, it’s not my school, or it’s not our school here, and even if it is our school, it’s not my classroom. And then they were able to see what was actually being taught in the classroom. And so that was a real wake up moment for people. Just like a lot of the Zoom Church stuff was a wake up. And churches that said, well, you know what? They’ve said that there’s a sickness going around, so maybe it’s not important enough for us to get together.
So you see some things like this, and it’s been really kind of an opportunity for people to reevaluate the sincerity of the institutions and to reevaluate what is actually happening in their lives. And so I do agree with you. I think it’s not going to be everybody, but it’s going to be certainly a lot of people have awakened to what was going on in their schools, what was going on in their churches as they saw this stuff being locked down.
And so that’s the unintended positive consequences, I think, that God is using. Give us an idea. You mentioned a little bit of this, but tell us a little bit about what a Promise Keepers rally is about. So this is men talking to men like so, you know, when you look at a marriage, you need to have a mother and a father for an optimal raising of a kid.
It’s not always possible. But when little Johnny skins his knee, he needs mom there to say, johnny, it’s okay. Let me put a Band Aid on. Let me kiss it, make it better. But every once in a while, Johnny needs dad to go, you’re not that hurt. Get up and get going. Right? That’s right. Yeah. In our society, we’re lucky dads. And so what we have is so many victims running around.
Well, my dad was mean, and so now I’m screwed up and my coach didn’t play me and excuses. And so what we’re here to say is, look, that may be true. You may have had a bad father or no father or maybe a lot of things. Now what are you going to do about it? It’s time to stand up and be countered as a man of God, because your wife, your kids are counting on you to be a man, exercise self control.
So that’s what this is really about. So these are many events. They’re Friday night only. They go from depending on the city, like six to nine. The first one will be New York City on December 1, and it’s going to be actually globally simulcast for free to the whole world. So anybody who’s not near New York City can just go sign up@promisekeepers. org and get the simulcast. We’re trying to do that through churches because, again, we want to drive relationship amongst men.
We don’t want sitting at home in their robe. We want them out with other men. But we’re going to take on real issues. We’re going to have Becca Cook there, who was a major Hollywood presence, homosexual who got saved. It completely changed his life. Went to Talbot seminary. So Beckett, tell us we’re going to have an interview. Tell us, how do you witness to homosexuals? How should we approach them? How did you get saved? And what if our kid comes to us and says that they’re struggling with this issue, like real issues? We’re going to deal with depression, 80% of suicides in America are for middle aged men.
So we’re going to deal with mental health, but it’s all wrapped around Christ because that’s all that really matters. How can we live our lives for Jesus Christ? Abandon him. So it’s going to be very interesting. This is not celebrity driven. This is not come see the big speaker or the big singer. None of that. This is 3 hours of sober worship, sharpening each other and real information that you just can’t get anywhere else.
Because we’re not going to screw around. We’re not going to tell you, you’re just so fine and everything is just so great. We’re going to deal with the real issues as Christ did. Repent. The kingdom of God is at hand, right? That’s right. Way. Well, that’s good. So promisekeepers. org the first event is going to be December the first, in case your church is not telling you about it.
But people can find the live stream there. And then you’ve got events that are scheduled throughout the next year, I guess, as well. Right. We should have a lot of them. I can’t announce any of them yet because we have a whole bunch that are almost solidified. And to be honest with you, I’ve learned that I have to make sure that everything is solid before I announce. Unless we get canceled.
Yeah, well, it’s what we’re seeing with the libraries. Libraries have been taking over the drag queen storytime hours. And so you have I can’t think of his name, the actor who started yes, yeah, kurt Cameron. As he started going around doing that, they started canceling them left and right. And then if they couldn’t cancel it, they created disturbances there and everything. I mean, it truly is know the other people have beliefs that they hold very dear and they will fight against those.
I mean, we’re even seeing now for the third time this woman who quietly goes to abortion clinic and prays silently for the third time she’s been arrested. It’s just amazing to see that level of persecution all over the place. But as you point out, it is everywhere we turn, men are being mocked as Homer Simpsons with nothing at all to contribute, even to the extent they’re replacing the caveman with a cave woman.
It’s kind of ridiculous. But tell us a little bit about your books. Your first book was Rise of the Servant King where the Bible says about being a man. Tell us a little bit about that. We’ll get into the newer book after that. But tell us first about the Rise of the Servant Kings. Yeah, that one is a really no nonsense approach on being a godly man. And it’s full of La cop stories because I was an La policeman, as you said, I’ve done a lot of.
And so there’s some stories in there that the publisher was like, whoa, you don’t see these in Christian books. And gotten a lot of real positive feedback. In fact, I’ve gotten hundreds of letters from women who have read it and been blessed because it’s really a discipleship book dressed up then being a man, because you got to learn how to be a disciple of Jesus Christ, to learn how to be a real man.
So there’s that one and then the next one that came out recently is Daring Faith in a Cowardly World, which I love that title and I didn’t come up with it, the publisher did, Thomas Nelson. But it basically says that again, we talk about identity. People think that you said the prayer you’re saved and now you just have yours and it’s time. There’s nothing left to do. Instead, actually when you read what Christ said over and over, in fact, his final words in Revelation 22, he says, behold, I’m coming quickly and my reward is with me to give to each person according to what he has done.
Yes. That means Christians. So the idea here is there will be a judgment seat of Christ, two Corinthians 510, that we’ll all stand before. Jesus Christ doesn’t care what we did before we were saved. We were dead in our sins. We’re saved by grace through faith alone. However, after we were saved, our lives do matter and we will be judged. And Jesus says, Behold, of the person who perseveres doing good works, I will pull him up onto my throne to sit it with me at my Father’s right hand.
At the end of Matthew 24, he says that the servant I come to find serving me will be put in charge of many things. And so the idea here is there’s a reason to have daring faith because it will matter for an entire eternity. We’ll be rewarded those who really walk with Christ and those who didn’t, and just to put a cherry on know, because of Promise Keepers, I get to talk to all these famous pastors and be friends and everything and famous theologian who called me out and said, hey man, I got to tell you I read your book.
I heard about it being about good works for Christians. And he goes, I sat down with a pen to shred it and I was going to go on my radio show and tear you to pieces. And he goes, When I got done with your book, I was completely convinced and now I can’t unsee it every time I open my Bible. It’s good works rewards. Good works rewards. He goes, how did I miss this all these years? Yeah, that’s what that book is about and that’s this challenge of this tourist men.
Your lives matter greatly and because we think our lives don’t matter is why we’re dropping the ball. Because David and I know you talk about this, but think about it, what they’re doing to our children here in Colorado. When you’re six years old, you go to school, they want to know what gender you are. And I just had someone telling me their daughter went to school for her first day of first grade and are you a boy or a girl? I’m a girl.
Are you sure you’re a girl? Do you want to be a boy? Really trying to talk her into being something other than she is. Wow. Why are we not so outraged about what they’re doing to our kids? Instead to circle back. I see churches that are caught up in bureaucracy and money and not having protesters and man, oh, man, they’re tearing at the core of who we are as a people.
We, as the people of Christ ought to just have our hearts being ripped out and in love, doing everything we can, because, as you said, the other side actually believes this nonsense because they’re deceived by the evil one. Our enemies are not flesh and blood, but they’re the powers and the authorities powers of darkness. We need to be waking people up to the truth, because people know the truth when they hear it, and when they really hear truth, they’re going to have one reaction or another, either going to repent or they’re going to hate you.
That’s what happens because they’re going to be utterly in their deception. Second, thessalonians chapter two, and Romans, chapter one, some people are just completely abandoned to their evil and they’re going to hate you. You’re promised. Jesus promises us that they’re going to hate us. But some people we can rescue, and what a glorious day that is. That’s why we’re here on this world. I just want to wake Christians up.
Stop being so dang comfortable. Stop looking for the approval of the world. Start looking for the approval of the one who matters, jesus Christ. If you have an audience of one, it’s amazing how easy life gets because you don’t care what anybody else thinks, right? It sure more joyful. That’s right. Such great advice. Yeah. We look at things and it’s so easy to fall off one side or the other and get things unbalanced.
And so our response to a lot of people who think that they can earn their way into heaven is to say, no, you can’t do that. There isn’t any way that you can undo what has happened. Only Christ can undo that. But then, as you point out, if we don’t look at the fact that he’s saved us to good works and to do good things, that’s the other.
We can get on one side of the extreme or the other. We can be all about works or we can all be about grace only. But it’s the combination of those two things that are so important to try to get those in the proper understanding and to understand. Now that we’re at this point, I think of everybody knows a parable of the talents that’s now, because of the way that was translated as a unit of silver it was an amount of money that was given to these people in Jesus’parable.
Now people have, you know, you have certain talents, things that God has given you. What are you going to do with that? And when we look at that parable, the people who don’t do anything with what they were given, they get strong condemnation from Jesus, right? And so that’s the key thing. That’s where we are right now. Look at all of the things that God has given us.
He has given us not only forgiveness, but he’s given us abilities. What are we going to do with that, where we are? That’s the key thing that Christians need to be asking themselves right now. And we have just stopped short of that in so many churches that got the part of the gospel right, but they also just stop at that point and don’t go any further. That parable, I go into it in detail, but you’ll notice the first two servants are given certain amount of money and they go invest it and they take risk.
The last servant doesn’t do anything with it. And why not? He doesn’t want to take any risk. And what does Jesus say? Throw him into the outer darkness. Okay, so number one, there’s this contempt for him because he was a coward. And number two, what’s the outer darkness? Because these guys are all Christians, they’re in heaven. So did he lose his salvation? No. Actually it’s pretty clear as you look at over and over again, what he’s thrown out of is the wedding feast of the Lamb, that the wedding feast will be the great culmination of all of history and all the saints are going to be there.
And this is why he has weeping and gnashing of teeth. People think that’s hell or pain, it isn’t. In the Near East, weeping means sorrow and gnashing of teeth means anger. He’s angry at his wasted life and he’s looking at the weding feast of the Lamb and he’s not allowed in because he wasted what God gave him. And I want to wake people up and say, don’t be that person, be the first two servants who went and served the Lord with what they had.
And that takes courage. And the other thing I want to wake people up to is we have swallowed another lie of intellectualism where we think if these guys who sit in their library surrounded by books and criticize other pastors, somehow this is the varsity level of Christ. Just look at the Bible, everything is about courage. Everybody in the Bible. Everything is confrontation. It’s screwed up people who are giving all for Christ, they stood up for something.
Hebrews chapter eleven is a great hall of faith. These are such screwed up people, but they just kept going. We’re all going to screw up, but are we going to be courageous? Are we going to do everything it takes to raise Godly kids and. Say little Sam or Little Jane? What are you learning in school? Let’s look and see. What does Scripture say about that? And getting a little more about our school board.
What’s going on? Just the gal at Starbucks with the tattoos and the nose ring with a dower look on her face and saying, hey, are you okay? Can I pray for you? Is there one thing I can pray for you today? I’m telling you, if you start doing that, I do it all the time. It’s amazing how much of my day gets, quote, wasted because I’ll spend 2 hours with some woman crying on my shoulder with mascara over my shirt about her life and try to walk her through Christ, try to find her a good church everywhere we go.
It’s a Promise Keepers thing that we always say, if there’s one thing I could pray for you, what would it be? It’s amazing what that unlocks with people, but you better be ready. And it’s harder to get that with men. A woman will tell you what may tell you that, but it’s going to be much harder to get that from a man. Especially if you don’t have a relationship already.
Even with a relationship, it’s harder to get men to talk. And that’s why something like Promise Keepers is really important, because we’re just not wired that way to open up and to talk to other people. Well, the question here for Promise Keepers is we’ve got to teach men that being a man comes from your heart and your character, not from your performance. Say that again. It comes from your heart and your character, not your performance.
We say, what is a man like? Oh, a man is somebody who goes hunting and who can grow a great beard like David Knight, or is tall and has a deep voice or is a cop or a Navy Seal. No, a man is someone with it comes from inside. It’s your integrity. It’s who you are. It says, I will defend my family no matter what. I will provide for my family no matter what.
If I get laid up for my job and times are tough, if I got to work at McDonald’s, I’ll work at McDonald’s. Whatever it takes to stand by my kids and my wife, to guard my thoughts and my mind so that all of my sexual energy goes towards my wife and nobody else. These are things that we talk about. Come from the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ.
You cannot do this through self effort. You must do it through dying to self daily. And as you die to self daily. Matthew five through seven is the whole core of being a disciple. Jesus there is not giving the recipe for salvation. He’s giving the recipe for becoming a disciple. As we die to self daily, we can really become men. It comes from the inside. And suddenly we find out that I don’t care if you’re four foot ten and 80 pounds, you have a heart of a lion and a heart integrity, then honesty and courage, because you become a man of God.
But it’s another thing we have to wipe out, is this idea that masculinity is performance driven. It’s not. It’s heart and integrity driven. Yes, I agree. I couldn’t agree with that more. Yeah, I’ve said many times that if you’re looking to Christ, that is a leverage point, a fulcrum that’s outside of this world, and that gives you a tremendous amount of leverage to change this world, because it’s coming from that.
Your focus is not even on changing the world. That’s going to be an outcome. That comes from your focus on Christ having an eternal focus with that. But it is very important, as you point out, it’s so difficult for men to see this. Women just naturally fall into this. They fall more into their relationships. They like school better than we like school. They like church better than church.
And it’s just a natural thing for them. And so men need to have a little bit more of an encouragement, a counseling, and to understand the importance of the one another, helping one another. That’s a key thing. And I think it’s very important for Promise Keepers. So I’m glad that you’re reviving this, that it is now coming back. It really isn’t needed at this point in time. Here’s why.
Men have always done relationships by doing things together. Because if you look at the history of the world, you had to do things together to survive. So somebody was a hunter and somebody was a farmer and a rancher and a blacksmith and all that stuff. So you came together in communities and you had to share skills. And then we learned who we could trust and who we couldn’t.
We saw men in stressful situations. And if you were not a good guy, you were ostracized. And if you’re a good guy, you’re elevated in the town. Women make relationships by communicating. And so now what we see is, because of all our technological advancements, the world today is all about communicating. It’s all about Facebook and social media. None of that is masculine. In fact, it’s demasculating. And of course, our churches have fallen into that too.
So you come to church and you have a chat and maybe you get together to have tea. And if you’re really Godly, you get together and have a Bible study at 630 in the morning on a Friday. But there’s nothing in that having to do with doing things together as men. And that’s where pastors have to be intentional. Get men together. Because I can have lunch with you, David, for 20 years, once a week, but we won’t really be friends.
I’ll tell you what, we go hunting for three days in the backwoods and you shoot an elk that’s 300 yards away across another mountain rain. You got to clean that thing and carry it out. Now we’re friends because now I’ve seen what you’re really like under stress, and you’ve seen that I’m like under stress. You’ve seen how much we hold each other’s work. That’s what creates relationships amongst men.
And so we have to be intentional about that now because we don’t need each other. Can I can order Uber eats, and I can get stuff delivered from the grocery store. And men are being more and more isolated, so it’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with women communicating naturally and men making relationships by doing. But then again, we have to be intentional. So Promise Keepers, what we’re trying to do is tell men don’t get together for Bible study.
Get together with guys who are golfers and golf or hunters and hunt or fishermen or skiers, whatever it is that you do. And then Bible study will come from that. But if you try to get together and sit around, you’ll just try to do a religious thing, and it won’t last. But get together intentionally and do something that matters and have scripture and prayer out of that, and boy, you’ll have true friends.
That’s a great idea. Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s right. I see on your board. One name that sticks out to me is Randy Alcorn. And of course, I know Randy from his works. He’s done a lot of fiction novels that are very well written. He was a pastor who was at an abortion clinic, and they got a judgment against him. And for over 20 years, he didn’t take a penny.
He took, like, the minimum, which is like $8,000 a year. Said he didn’t give any of the money to Planned Parenthood and just donated all the money from these novels, which were very successful. But he’s also written about heaven, and he’s very much focused on what we’re not going to be just doing nothing, floating around on clouds, contemplating our navel. It would be an opportunity for us to work and to create and get involved in a lot of things.
I like his analysis and his way of thinking, but he also writes a lot about money because Jesus talked a lot about money, and that’s one of the key things with men as well. Talk a little bit about what you tell people about money with Promise Keepers because that’s such a powerful drag on our lives, just like sex and many other things. But money has so much of a grip on our lives.
Tell people what you tell men about money. You think about the things in life that are the greatest blessing. They also could be the biggest curses. Right. Sex. Sex is an incredible thing. It procreates species amongst marriage. I wrote in Rise of Serving Kings that sex is the only thing differentiates a marriage from any other relationship because anybody can share a bank account and raise kids together. It’s makes this you one flush it’s extremely precious.
And that’s why, sex aside, a marriage is such a great sin. Fire. Think about fire. What a great blessing you need to survive. Think about how destructive water you need water. But, boy, water can do destruction. Money is freedom if you have a healthy attitude about it, is the freedom to do what you’d like to do. Whenever I have some money and I’m going to spend it on something major, I think, okay, I’m going to go buy a new truck.
I have $50,000 in my hand. I can do anything with this $50,000 I want to. From getting clean water in Africa, to fighting AIDS, to buying a big diamond ring, like whatever I want to do, is this truck what I choose to give that to? And it’s a healthy attitude when you actually think that way. Debt is bondage. Debt will destroy you. Especially today. We have a lot of people are going to end up in massive, massive problems because interest rates have taken off.
If you hit a bunch of credit card debt or you hit floating interest rates with what’s going on, people are going to get crushed. I know. I’m not trying to be who’s the money guy in Nashville? I forget his name now. He’s always saying, Get out of debt. His name is escaping me as well. Yeah, my wife loves him. If you’re in debt, get out of debt. The thing about money, I actually had somebody come to me, he’s an NFL football player, and he said, Look, I have this love of money I can’t get over.
And I said, you don’t have a love of money? What do you mean? I go, Money is a symptom. It’s not the disease. If you love money, there’s something else. Why do you want money so bad? Is it because you lack faith and you think that I never have enough money? I run a huge foundation, and we had one woman who we went to to give some of her money away, and she said, oh, no, I only have $100 million.
I have to make sure I can pay the gasket she had inherited from her husband. She didn’t know what the value of a dollar was. So money is great freedom if you understand what to do with it. And it’s a terrible curse because it shows who you are. So if you’re a greedy person, why are you greedy? It’s pride. So if I have a million dollars, what would I do with the million dollars? I want to go and buy a Ferrari.
Well, maybe I really like really fast cars, but probably I want the Ferrari so everybody will look at me and think how cool I am, right? I’m not going to judge that person, but what is it I want to do with money? So that’s the thing we tell men. Cash, freedom, debt, bondage. If you’re trying to accumulate lots of money, why is that because there’s people dying. There’s people who need stuff, and I think it’s okay to be comfortable.
There’s a conversation you can have. I mean, I’ll tell you that I used to run a huge company, as you think you all sort of from erasm. I used to have thousands of employees and made lots of money and created lots of jobs, and I don’t take any money now. I think you know that from Promise Keepers, I get paid zero, right? But there’s nothing wrong with having money because we can all judge.
Well, what is a lot of money? Well, one day I was in a meeting with a couple of major, major pastors, and I had to leave. And guy said, well, you got to leave, Ken. Why do you have to leave? I go, I got a plane to catch. He said, you have a plane to catch? And the other pastor looked at him and goes, yeah, Ken flies commercial.
And they both started laughing. You don’t have a private said, uh, no. And they’re kind of mocking me. And I go, you know, there’s something kind of telling about the fact that the two guys who live off the money of others have private jets, and the guy who’s created tens of thousands of jobs flies on Southwest. I’ll leave that. And they both laughed, but, boy, hey, that’s between them and the Lord.
I’m not going to condemn them for it, but I’m going to say, for me, southwest Airlines is just plain adequate. And flying somewhere for $400 is a lot different than flying there for 15,000 on a private plane. But everyone has to be their own judge and be convicted in their own heart by the Holy Spirit. Yeah. Dave Ramsay eventually, yeah, eventually it gets there. It’s a little bit slower now, but it’s got all these extra paths that’s got to go around blockages, I guess, to get there.
But yeah. Dave Ramsey the older we get, dave Ramsey was always about staying out of debt, and that’s really good advice we don’t want to make. But again, with anything that we do, we can always become obsessive about it. And I’ve seen people have gotten obsessive about getting out of debt and everything, but it is, as you point out, it is a bondage. And it’s a very dangerous time to be in that kind of debt, especially to me.
It’s just criminal what they’re doing with the credit card rates now that they can get away with. 29%. I know that’s, like, the average. It’s just astounding to me that we allow that to happen, but it’s just another one of these things where everybody just, like, just passively accept it instead of trying to change it. Tell us what the seven promises of the Promise Keepers are. All right.
I’m on vacation, and I totally I cannot walk through all seven of them right now. Well, first one, I’ve got them in front of me so I’ve got a cheat sheet here. Thank you. Honor God, honor God, tell us a little bit about that and we’ll do the next one. Honor God is the whole point of our lives, right? And how do we point that out? And one of the things I point out all the time is honor God.
We were just talking about how you can change things to a negative that are a positive. One of those things is honoring the name of the Lord and not using the Lord’s name in vain, right? And a lot of people think that means saying God for something oh God, I can’t believe you just did that. That’s certainly not a healthy thing. But that is not using the Lord’s name in vain.
Using the Lord’s name in vain is actually something much more nefarious and something done all the time in the church. And let me tell you right now, I cannot tell you, I speak all over the country how many people walk up to me and say, the Lord told me that you right. How many times have I said I have a word from the Lord? I don’t know this person.
I have a word from Lord. And my first response is what verse is it? Yeah, but people manipulate and use others with this business of putting things in the name of the Lord that are not of the name of the Lord. And I can keep going. People who come up with doctrinal points and say, well, God said this well, you shouldn’t drink alcohol because when Jesus drank alcohol, it was really just grape juice.
Well, maybe it was and maybe it wasn’t, but you don’t know that, right? So using the Lord’s name in vain is attributing things to God that God didn’t say, right? And I use example in Rise of Sermon Kings on this, we talk about how somebody said they gossiped about another person or slandered that person and they said even Ken Harrison agrees with me. Well, in fact, I didn’t agree with him.
This buddy called me up and said, hey, you agree? I said, actually, I don’t. But he was using Ken Harrison’s name in vain of that, right, trying to give himself authority by attaching it to me. That’s what we do to the Lord all the time. So honoring God, there’s a lot I could go into on that. But rather than to preach a whole sermon, I just want to pull that one thing out.
Don’t concentrate on the little easy obvious God as a little euphemism. Make sure that you look at your heart and you’re not using and attributing things to God that are not God, they’re really you your opinion and maybe your opinion is true. But it’s better to say in my opinion or the way I read this passage or my life experience has told me, right? But do not go around saying thus is the Lord if he didn’t say it.
That makes you a false prophet. Yeah, kind of a name dropping that’s out know, I also look at it. I heard somebody say once we call ourselves Christians, that really comes from kind of a combined thing of Christ’s men. Right. And Jesus said, Why are you calling me Lord, Lord, if you don’t do what I say? And so by calling ourselves Christians, we don’t really care what Jesus says.
That’s a way I think, of taking God’s name in vain. But there are people who deliberately do it. And I find that I’ve told the story to my audience before Karen and I years ago, probably about 25 years ago, we went to see Pen and Teller perform. Yeah. And they’re funny, but at the end of his kind of towards the end of the thing, after they’d been there for a while, he starts talking about language and says, you know, I really hate it when people use the F word.
They use it for every form of speech. They use it as an adverb and an adjective and all the rest of the stuff. And he goes, It just makes you look stupid because you don’t have any vocabulary. So I refuse to use that. He says, I deliberately take the name of Jesus in vain because I want to blaspheme. I don’t believe any of that stuff. My wife and I got up and walked out, but it was really very deliberate from him.
A lot of people don’t realize that they’re doing that. But I think, as you point out, this name dropping or to say that I’m a Christ follower when you’re really not, that really is a very serious thing. I think that we need to look at ourselves and say, well, am I guilty of doing that in a different way? You mentioned your second promise is brotherhood. Tell us a little bit about that.
Brotherhood is one of the things that we hear so often now is about we shouldn’t let men get together unsupervised by women. Right. I didn’t bring up a different church. There’s another megachurch that we’ve been having problems with right now that a bunch of major leaders have come together and said, we want you to go to this church. And the pastor of that church actually called me and said, I have a question for you.
Yeah. Why aren’t women allowed at Promise Keepers events? Because it’s a men’s ministry. Well, I just don’t think that’s right. Well, I said, let me ask you, do you have women’s gatherings? Women’s? Well, yeah, all the time. So why do you have women’s gatherings all the time and not men’s gatherings? Why is it that you’re only critical of men’s gatherings? Well, that’s a good point. Well, let me ask you this then.
Why don’t you have any women pastors preaching to the men? Let me ask you a point. Why are you so obsessed on that if men talking to men like men. Why would I want a woman there? Because when you put one woman in, it changes how men behave. Men will be authentic. You go to Promise Keepers event, you’ll see guys falling on their faces in tears. I mean, the stories that come out of these events have changed lives.
But when there’s a woman there, men feel like they need to change whether it’s fair or not. I’m not saying it’s fair. I’m just saying what it is. It was amazing to me that in our culture, another thing is somehow men are not allowed to get together. There must be something going on in there that we don’t know about. It’s an amazing thing. So again, I’m taking these things on in a small way, but brotherhood is very important.
Men need to get together with other men and just hang out as we talked about a little bit. And sometimes women don’t totally understand that. But I think when you put it the other way, one of the things I teach people I was just asked this the other day, gigi, you’ve been married for 33 years. What’s the secret to having a great marriage? And I said, Well, I got 30 seconds to answer that question.
I will just say empathy. Empathy is the number one thing. Put myself in the shoes of my wife and say, how does what I just say sound to her, right? Or anybody else? But in sick of marriage. This thing here too, for women to think, well, when women get together and have tea or whatever, it’s no big deal. Same thing with men. And women need to stop and just go, you know what, for my husband to get together with Godly, men and go golfing and go fishing, those are important things because this is how men sharpen each other is by doing thing together.
So brotherhood is incredibly important. And again, the lies of Satan and the world are trying to keep men from getting together because if they do, they just might plot how to make the world a better place. That’s great. I love that. Integrity, another promise. Integrity that is at the heart of being a man. What will I compromise as we talked about? What’s a conviction and what’s a strong preference will I give all for the truth? You know that Revelation 21.
Eight has a list of eight sins. It says, if you are typified by these sins, you are not saved. It literally says here’s, eight sins. If you’re an adulterer, a murderer, a sorcerer, an idolater, all liars will for sure have their share in the lake of fire that burns forever. Never. I left the first one out. You know what the first one on that list is? It’s pretty shock.
Cowards. Cowards. Cowards is the thing that God says. I’m going to start this list off of people. That shows for sure you’re not a Christian coward. That doesn’t mean if you’ve committed a cowardly act? Because I think we all have. Yeah, if it defines you. Just like lying if it defines you. So, integrity because so much of a lack of integrity comes from cowardice. Right. I even say it’s funny because the list starts with cowards and ends with all liars.
Well, liars and cowards are kind of the same thing. Why do most people lie? Because they’re cowards. Right? Yeah. They’re trying to create something that’s not really true about themselves, because they’re afraid of something, somewhere. Integrity is, I will not depart from the truth, no matter what the cost. And that takes great courage. Courage is, again, one of those things. All these other things we can define, they mean something.
I know what it means to be pious. I know what it means to be generous. But courage is sort of this all encompassing thing. What is courage? And courage is integrity. It says, I will not bend no matter the cost. What’s that going to take? And I define courage in daring, faith in a coward. The world is refusing to compromise, no matter what the cost is, whereas cowardice is not doing the right thing because of fear for something, because we’re all afraid.
And the guy that charges the machine gun nest in the middle of a war, he’s terrified. He just does what needs to get done. That’s right. Yeah. That’s a great definition. Family. Talk about that. What is the promise of family? Malachi, chapter three. People like Malachi, what is that? Malachi is one of my favorite books in the Bible. Everybody listening if you have a chance to read Malachi.
It’s the last book of the Old Testament and it’s absolutely fascinating. I preach whole messages on Malachi, but in Malachi chapter three, god says, I hate divorce. Because why? Because I’m jealous for Godly offspring. Family is the most important thing you can do as a man of God is to raise Godly kids, to pass it on to the next generation. There’s lots of things that we have to do.
I’m not minimizing other things, but I am saying that being Coach McCartney who started Promise Keepers, used to say, most loving thing that a man can do for his kids is love their mother. That’s a hard statement, especially if you’re divorced or you had bowel problems. But literally, most loving thing you can do for your kids is to love their mother. Godly man needs to be dedicated to his family because this is the building block of the church of community.
If you have a strong family with Godly kids, with a happy wife because she’s cherished by her husband another free advice thing I’ll give on family and marriage, because I get asked about this a lot. The number one complaint you get from men is what in marriage? A lack of intimacy. Then there’s money and there’s in laws. Those are the three big things. But the lack of intimacy is number one.
By far. I tell guys, absent a whole long thing to tell them, usually a lack of intimacy is because your wife doesn’t feel cherished. If your wife feels cherished, that means she feels safe, protected. She is the apple of your eye. I’m telling you. Has a massive effect on the intimacy of level of in a marriage. That’s fantastic. Yeah, that’s fantastic. Great advice. Serving, serving. It’s an amazing thing.
The Godliest person is always the one who serves the most, not the one who rules the most. And we really have power. Wrong. We look at Jesus Christ, right? So we have the ultimate power. Jesus said, I can call down angels and wipe all these people out right now if I want to. But instead he lowered his head in humility and he says, that’s the person I’m going to elevate in the last days.
See Ephesians, chapter three, says that it’s a fascinating verse that I’d read a million times. A friend of mine, Tim Dunn, pointed out to me one day, and I’m like, how could I not have seen that? It says that God is teaching the full extent of his wisdom to the powers and the authorities in the heavens from the church, which is you and me, David. Now, what world do you or I have to teach the angels that have run for millions of years? What’s the one thing, what’s the one experience that we have that they don’t have? We live life by faith.
This is our one chance, this lifetime that we have. The Bible says that the angels look on us with fascination. They can’t understand it. They see things as they really are. We see things as through a glass darkly. It says, I think it’s in James. So this is the one chance we have to make a massive impact for the rest of our lives. What will we do today? And this is why it’s so important to not be tied into what does the world think, what’s the world’s opinion? Truth is eternal.
It’s not dictated on what the United States of America’s culture happens to think. It’s dictated on what does God say at the beginning of the foundations of time. This is truth. I have a very strong conviction on gravity and therefore you won’t find me walking up to a cliff and jumping off. Right? Do I have that same conviction on the trust, on the promises that the Lord Jesus made in the Bible? Frankly, no, I don’t.
I have a lot of faith compared to most people, but Jesus isn’t comparing me to most people. He’s comparing me to the truth of heaven. How far am I in that conviction? Could you or I be like St. Jerome being barbecued and singing songs and going, I can’t wait to get to heaven because man, is my reward going to be great? I don’t know that I ever will be, but I sure am striving towards that.
That’s. Fantastic number six unity. Unity, really a lot of that goes around racial reconciliation, which is something that Promise Keepers was really big in the 90s. Promise Keepers actually kind of the originator of diversity and all this bringing different races together. I do think, like we talked about earlier, it’s one of those things that can become a god. It can take over where you’re at. You’re saying I’m just going to love a black man today because I’m white.
Well, that’s not going to do anybody any good, is it? Coming from a heart of Christ? So unity is about unity in every aspect. If you look at our board, you started to mention our board of directors and Randy Elkworth is on our pastor’s board. And I’ve known Randy for 45 years. I’ve tried to get him on when I reached out to him last time, his wife was dying of cancer.
And I certainly understood he wasn’t doing interviews at that point in time. Yeah, he’s a good guy. But if you look at our know, we have Senator Langford, who’s a Baptist pastor before he became A-U-S. Senator, and we have Sam Rodriguez who’s a Pentecostal pastor and we know Pentecostals Baptists. Everybody around, we’re unified around the cause of what we’ve been talking about, not around doctrinal differences. And we have great doctrinal differences.
I mean, Sam Rodriguez and I, we’ve had some two hour great debates on different doctrinal issues and we love each other and never is there anger. So unity is around racial unity, around understanding other people have different experiences. It’s also understanding theological differences. It’s okay to disagree. It’s okay if you believe in speaking in tongues and I don’t. It’s okay if you’re pretrip and I’m post millennial and all those things.
These are things just to sharpen each other and have good conversations on. I just had a pastor of a small church, but very intellectual. He gave a great podcast on post millennial, which is something I really didn’t understand. Called him up, explain that to me, here’s how I see it. And he said, well, here’s how I see it. He’d studied it and we had a great conversation for an hour and a half around those issues.
We need to come to each other in humility, but in unity and say, boy, you see this differently than I do. I really want to learn from you. I did have that majorly a controversial issue in the church and I went to a main huge pastor and I sat down with them. I said, look, you believe this and I don’t believe that. And I don’t understand why you believe it.
And he goes, you really want to have this debate? And I go, I don’t want to have a debate. I want to learn from you. I want to learn why you think that way. Because maybe I’m missing something. And after 2 hours I realized I wasn’t missing anything. But this is the spirit with which we need to come together as Christians. Sure, yeah. You’re not compromising on truth, but you want to understand where they’re coming from and have that discussion.
Promise seven. The final one here obedience. Well, isn’t that the foundation of everything I’ve just said? Isn’t? You pointed out Jesus said, if you love me, keep my commandments. I was in a major meeting of megachurch pastors, like 40 of them. We were all sitting around on something, and I was invited. I don’t know why I was invited, but I’m sitting there and somebody was reading from Luke and one of the pastors, and I realized afterwards most of these were really liberal megachurch pastors.
And he said, I don’t believe in that jesus said that Jesus was mean, and my Jesus was never mean. So I said to him, well, it says in Luke, jesus said, I came to set the world on fire, and how I wish it was already a light. That sounds pretty mean to and Jesus said, Well, I choose not to believe in that Jesus. And I said, well, if you don’t believe in that Jesus, then you don’t believe in Jesus.
You believe in an idol called Jesus. And I think that’s where we’re at today is a lot of people don’t actually know Jesus. They don’t know who he is. They have invented a God in their own heads, and they slapped the name Jesus on him. Because if you read the Gospels, you will see Jesus was extremely confrontational around truth, never around frivolous issues. God said to Jeremiah, if you speak noble words and not worthless ones, you will be my spokesman.
So it is as a Christian, we will be in confrontation all the time. It’s upon us, though, to speak noble words and not worthless ones. It’s not about whether we’re getting in screaming arguments about who belongs in the national championship. Is it Oregon or is it Alabama or doctrine issue, or whether there should be a border wall, but we do be very diligent about all the issues we’ve talked about today.
If you love me, keep my commandments. That defines a man or woman of God. Well, I tell you, there’s a lot of wisdom in what you’ve had to say here, and I’m sure there’s a lot of wisdom in your book a Daring Faith in a Cowardly World, and I will be picking that up. And it’s available at Amazon and everywhere the books are sold. I’m assuming that it’s at Promisekeepers.
org and you’ve got a website as well. Tell us the address of your website. I had it here, but I lost it. Where can people find you in particular? Kenrharrison. com. Kenr Harrison. Okay, yeah, there’s a whole lot of Ken Harrison’s out there. One of them is a gay porn writer, so don’t go to oh, OK. That would not be me. So remember R, that’s the one you want to go to.
And someone who’s had you’ve had so much experience as a CEO of an international company, a Marine police officer, but I think that probably you are definitely suited for what you’re doing right now with Promise Keepers. Thank you so much for what you’re doing. Appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. The David Knight Show is a critical thinking super spreader. If you’ve been exposed to logic by listening to The David Knight Show, please do your part and try not to spread it.
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