Deep Dive
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First Person is produced in cooperation with the Far East Broadcasting Company, who rejoice in the stories of changed lives through the power of Jesus Christ. Learn more at febc.org. Paul says Jesus was crucified in weakness, and yet God is El Shaddai, and so it came up with this idea, well, the most awesome thing El Shaddai ever did, he accomplished through the weakness of Jesus, because Jesus dies. That's the song sort of wrote itself, based on that idea. ♪
He wrote the lyrics to El Shaddai and hundreds of other songs. But now, Michael Card has an announcement to make on this edition of First Person. So stay with us now for the conversation. I'm Wayne Shepherd.
Just before we begin with Michael, thanks for your support of First Person and the Far East Broadcasting Company, which makes this program possible. We encourage your feedback, and you'll find us online at both firstpersoninterview.com and at facebook.com slash firstpersoninterview.
Well, for many years, Michael Card has been writing and singing songs that are drawn directly from his study of the Bible. His songs are teachers in themselves, but Michael has also been teaching as a speaker, impacting many lives around the world.
Now, Michael, Joe Carlson, and I started a radio program something like 30 years ago that became a podcast in recent years, and it has enriched my life along with thousands of listeners each week. But now there is a turn about to be made, and I asked Michael to talk about it here on First Person. Well, I'm retiring. You know, I've always been suspicious of people who say, the Lord told me to do this, but as far as I can tell, the Lord told me.
that this is a new season in my life. I'm not going to quit ministering. I still teach Bible studies, and I'm active in my church. I have Wednesday night Bible studies in my church. But in terms of touring and all the other stuff that was associated with it, I think 42 years is a
is good. So I'm retiring this year. Well, I thought we would do a, this is your life kind of conversation. Some of the questions I've not really planned these questions, but some of the thoughts rolling around my mind are things that I've never even asked you before on the radio and all the interviews and all the conversations we've had. So if you don't mind, I'll just jump right in. Sure. I know that you attended Western Kentucky university and met a guy named Bill Lane who
But you grew up in Nashville, and you were always kind of into music, right? Right. Yeah, I grew up in North Nashville in Madison, and especially around the Scruggs family, Earl Scruggs, the banjo player, Flattin' Scruggs. He was very influential in my life. I won't say like a second father, but almost like a second father. He really did take an interest in me.
He was deliberate about spending time with just me. I mean, his sons, Randy and Steve, his two younger sons, were two of my friends. But Mr. Scruggs would take me flying with him. He would spend time with me. So, yeah, so I grew up kind of in this...
I'd go to the Grand Ole Opry with them and watch them play on the Grand Ole Opry. This is the banjo master, Earl Scruggs. This is the person who's the reason everyone plays the banjo the way they play the banjo. But he was a very sweet man. What I love to tell people was he was a good banjo player, but he was a great man.
And I was one of the beneficiaries, a very simple, sweet guy, barely spoke above a whisper.
But he just had a tremendous heart. And you see it in his sons. His sons were the same. Randy, I mean, Randy, his middle son, is the person that got me into the music business. I did my first three or four records with Randy. So anyway, yeah. So I grew up in Nashville in that music world. There were other people. Maphis, Joe Maphis, was known as the king of the strings. His son Dale and I were best friends in school. And
And we always had a band, some kind of a bluegrass band or a 50s band. All we did was play music. We didn't play ball after school. We played banjos and guitars. Did you envision yourself becoming a full-time musician or anything like that? No, not at all. My vision for...
My life was I wanted to be a forest ranger. I grew up going to the Smokies, spending summers in the Smoky Mountains and hiking and
And, uh, I wanted to do bird counts for the forestry service. And I actually began at Western and my major was forestry when I started. Oh, so, uh, no, I did not want to do music. I saw what that was like and I did not want that life traveling and being away from your kids and that kind of thing. You were a believer by the time you went to college. Oh, definitely. I came to faith when I was eight. Uh, both my grandfathers were ministers. My parents were Christians. Uh,
Yeah, I knew who Jesus was and that he had died for me when I was eight. And that was always, it was kind of the, we were in the middle of the Jesus movement. So by the time I got to college, I was sort of a Jesus freak. I was reading the book of the Bible a day. I probably turned a lot of people off to Jesus, being so, you know, such a Jesus freak. But yeah.
Those were those times. Yeah. But you met a man named Bill Lane. Yeah. Who became a lifelong mentor of yours. Yes. Well, I had to take a religion class or humanities class in the humanities department. Again, I was a forestry major. And so I signed up for this New Testament class. And you got to understand that in my world...
Bill Lane was the enemy. A religion professor in a secular university teaching New Testament, he was the guy that you had to defend yourself from. He was the guy that was going to tear the Bible apart and do that sort of thing. And so that first day of class, all my shields were up. And this quirky little guy walks in, and he sits on the corner of the desk. I'll never forget it.
And he said, my name is William Lane, and all you need to know about me is I'm a man under the authority of God's word. In a secular university, he said that. And I was just blown away by that. And he sort of, I don't know, opened the door of his life.
to me and to all of us. And so four years of undergrad and then two years of a master's program, I took every class he taught. I was with him. He preached on Sunday at Cecilia Memorial Presbyterian, which is a little black church in Bowling Green. I went to that church. I was with him almost every day for six years after that.
Jumping way ahead, but when I first started working with you, Bill was very much alive and very much still a mentor of yours and would often join us in conversations. And I certainly see what you learned from Bill and how influential he was in your life. Oh, he was awesome. I mean, he was a New Testament. He wrote commentaries. He wrote the New International Commentary to Mark, which John Stott said was the greatest commentary in the English language.
Yeah, that's pretty good. And I think that was at a time when they weren't putting little blurbs on the backs of books to promote them. But then he also, when I was with him, when I was his graduate student, he was working on a two-volume Hebrews commentary for the Word Biblical Commentary series. And I walked through him. I was walking with him once a week when he was doing that. And he had writer's block for a couple of months. And I remember walking with him, talking about that.
But he was always struggling with, you know, some archegos, some word in Hebrew, what it really, I mean, Greek, what it really means, that sort of thing. So it was wonderful to be with him and see this amazing mind and an equally amazing heart. And I was holding his hand when he died. I was with him when he died. Wow. Yeah. Wow.
And you learned as a mentor, he is a mentor to you, but you learned to be a mentor really through Bill, didn't you? Well, I learned it...
I learned what it looks like when someone opens the door of their life to you. I don't know. I don't think he and I ever used the word mentor or even disciple. I would never say, oh, Bill's discipling me. We just spent time together. Which is the best kind of mentorship, right? Yeah, it's not defined, and there's something that's not deliberate about it. There's just something that was natural about it. And what I like to say is he really opened the door of his life to me. I mean, eventually, in later years, he would share with me his struggles and things that he...
uh, was, uh, you know, having a hard time with, um, which was, uh, uh, amazing to me. Cause I never imagined that people like him would struggle with anything. Um, but, uh, yeah, I, uh, I wouldn't, I wouldn't be sitting here. We wouldn't be friends if it wasn't for bill lane. I would be off in the smoke. He's doing bird counts right now. If it wasn't for bill lane. Yeah.
Didn't he encourage you to write your first songs? He did. I would have never written music if it wasn't for Bill. I remember the day. We're at church, Cecilia. And he walks up to me and he says, you play the guitar, don't you, Mr. Card? He was very quirky and formal, you know, Mr. Card. I said, well, yes, Dr. Lane, but guitars are for attracting girls in the student center. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.
And he handed me a sheet of paper. He said, this is my sermon for next week. Write us a chorus. And I would love to say that it was a spiritual moment, and I'm this deeply spiritual man, and I heard God speak. But I just did it to please Bill. I wrote a song. I think it was Stranger on the Shore was the first song. John 21, he was preaching on that. And then for all those years...
I got this great input from him to write songs about. You know, Emmanuel, the song Emmanuel I wrote, which is probably one of the most popular songs I've ever written, that was the sermon he preached at our wedding. When Susan and I got married, he...
He talked her into marrying me in the first place, which is pretty cool. She didn't want to. I see why you're grateful to him. Oh, yeah. But then the sermon he preached at our wedding was, Immanuel, if God is with you in the context of marriage, who could ever be against you? And I wish I could remember more about the wedding, but I just remembered the sermon. It was just incredible. And about three, four months later, I wrote a song that wrote the song Immanuel.
And three or four months later, maybe six months later, it comes out on the radio, and Bill calls me from Seattle. He's the head of the religion department at Seattle Pacific University by this time. He calls me and says, Michael, I just heard your song, Emmanuel. What a marvelous use of scripture you have. And I laughed. I said, Dr. Lane, that's the sermon that you preached at our wedding. Don't you remember? Oh, I hear him laugh on the other end of the line. And he said, I did think it was particularly fine. Yeah.
We'll continue the conversation with singer, songwriter, Bible teacher Michael Card coming up on First Person.
Hi, I'm Ed Cannon. And as you know, situations around the world are changing quickly. Stay current with FEBC's ministry and get a deeper understanding of people who need to find hope. Hear how you can feel the pulse of God's Spirit moving through the hearts of believers dedicated to reaching the lost. Be sure you join me for the podcast until all have heard. Discover how the gospel is making a difference around the world.
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My guest is Michael Card. Michael has been a longtime friend. We've been on radio together for many years. We've hosted a podcast for many years. And we're talking with Michael because he has announced his retirement from musical ministry. Now, but that's a misnomer in a sense, Mike, because you're going to continue to teach. You've always been a great Bible teacher. Thank you. Your music has been a great teacher in and of itself. But beyond that, you've been a real serious student of the Bible and passing that on to other people.
You've written so many books. We could talk for hours about the books you've written. Are you going to continue writing and teaching? Yeah, well, I have one more book that I've been working on. I've been working on it for about three years. And I think once that book is done, I'll probably be done writing books. I really believe life is seasonal. And that's been a...
That's been a neat sort of realization because I look at some other people's lives that I know, especially in the music business, and some people just don't understand that that season is over for them and they need to, you know, there's another season that's waiting. People tend to try to keep the same thing going past the time where it's really meant
you know, meant to stop. And I've, I've felt that really, really strongly. Um, I'm very involved with my grandchildren. Um, we, one of our granddaughters, we keep, um, you know, three or four days a week, um,
And so I want to be involved in their lives. My wife has, for 40-some-odd years in this marriage, has put up with me being gone most of the time. And when I'm home, I'm off writing or recording someplace. So I'm anxious to be there for her. She has a flower farm. I'm going to work on her flower farm. In fact, I have to do that this afternoon. So I'm looking forward to this next season, and I want to make the most of it.
Yeah, of course. There's a certain amount of sadness in the rest of us, but I don't sense any sadness in you about what's ahead. No, I don't long for the road. With the church that I go to, there's a young guy there who's a musician who's on the road, Jess, and he was leaving to go on the road for five weeks, and I'm praying with him yesterday. Yesterday was Sunday, and
And my wife, you know, looked at me like, she said, do you miss it? I go, no. No. I'm so glad that it's him that's doing it, not me. Yeah. Understood. Understood. Okay. I want to go back to the writing if we have time. But I do want to ask you a question I've never asked you before that I can recall. Uh-oh. And that is about the song El Shaddai. How did El Shaddai come about? That, of course, is one of the songs you're best known for through the years. I just heard it on the radio the other day. Really? Yeah.
Yeah, that's a song. John Thompson was one of the guys in the early days that I worked with. John and Randy Thompson were partners. And we were in the studio recording something, and John said, I've got this melody. He said, I've given it to two or three people, and no one's come up with anything yet.
He said, so here, I'll give it to you. And so on a cassette, you know, and I said, well, what do you, when you hear this melody, what do you think about? He goes, well, I think about like God Almighty, right?
When I hear this melody, I go, well, that's El Shaddai in Hebrew. So it was one of those songs that kind of wrote itself. It was maybe 15, 20 minutes to write the words down. And the idea was the contrast between Paul says Jesus was crucified in weakness. And that's a verse that's always just really struck me. He's crucified in weakness.
And yet God is El Shaddai, and so it came up with this idea, well, the most awesome thing El Shaddai ever did, he accomplished through the weakness of Jesus, because Jesus dies, of course, and then he's raised again. And that's the song sort of wrote itself based on that idea. Mm-hmm.
But you must have been studying Hebrew to have that come to mind like that. I did. I mean, part of my program at Western was Hebrew. I wish I had done better and studied more. I've sort of lost it in the years since. There was a time when I could read it, but you don't keep a language unless you have to. That's my idea. So all these years in the music business, I didn't have to read Hebrew or translate it.
So, I mean, there's a dozen words probably that I know the meaning of them. I'm left to that. You mentioned you have another book. You said your last book. We'll see. I somehow wonder if that's true or not, but we'll see. Yeah. On the life of Jesus, you've been working on that a couple years now. Tell me the process that you go through. I have. Well, it started with a conversation in Jerusalem with a rabbi, Moshe, who –
We were talking about, I was trying to impress him with how kosher, how observant a Jew Jesus was.
And I said, well, you know, Jesus, he made the pilgrimage to Jerusalem. There are three pilgrimage feasts in Judaism. And as far as we know from the New Testament, Jesus made that journey, a walk of 100 miles. He did that three times a year. And I'm trying to impress this rabbi with how much I know about Judaism and how great a Jew Jesus was. And he's...
He says, yeah, but what does that mean? Rabbis love to ask you questions that they know you don't know the answers to. He said, so what does that mean? I said, well, I don't know. You tell me. He said, it means that Jesus spends three months out of every year walking back and forth to Jerusalem. And that completely blew my mind, Wayne. I realized that there was something I knew, a fact that I knew about Jesus, but I didn't know what that fact meant at
And so I started this process of collecting all the facts that I know about Jesus, what languages he speaks, what's the central theme of his message, any kind of fact that's biblical and kind of legitimate, and then ask what that means. What does that fact mean? I mean, Jesus' major theme, I mean, his message is the kingdom.
That's what, that's, I mean, that's a fact, you know, that we, the good news is that the kingdom has come. And that really means the reign of God has begun. But what does that mean? And so I've been working, you know, quite a long time on that.
Yeah, I've seen the stack of books you've been reading. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. And I've got stacks and stacks of articles, and I just need a big block of uninterrupted time to really get it done, and I'm hoping that's coming soon. All right. On the life of Jesus. Boy, we look forward to that, Mike. We really do. Do you have a favorite episode, I'll call it, in Jesus' life that you've studied all these years?
Yeah, I think that when he's in Jerusalem, it's one of those instances that I was referring to earlier when he's walked over 100 miles from Galilee, from Capernaum to Jerusalem.
And he goes for tabernacles. That's one of the three pilgrimage feasts. He's in Jerusalem. This is in the Gospel of John. He's in Jerusalem for tabernacles. And John says, "...on the last and greatest day of the feast, he stood and said in a loud voice..."
If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. Well, John's readers, first readers, they know what happens on the last and greatest day of the Feast of Tabernacles, but we don't.
And what happens is the high priest gathers with a group of people and processes down to the pool of Siloam. He has a pitcher in his hand. He fills that with water. It's a commemoration of Moses striking the rock and water being provided in the wilderness. They go back up the hill, up through the city of David to the temple, and he pours out water
pours the water in front of the people in quotes a passage from the prophets that says, with joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation. That's what happens on the last and greatest day of the feast. So the high priest pours out this water in front of the people. He shouts out across the crowd, with joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation. And Jesus says, if a man is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. That to me is
Well, I'm speechless. Yeah. And it's just an example. And again, this goes back to Bill Lane. It's an example of understanding the backgrounds, Jewish backgrounds to Jesus' ministry and life. But
If a man is thirsty, let him come to me and drink, because with joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation. Mike, as your radio partner for many years, I've been privileged to read the comments of listeners, the feedback that you get from your concert touring and, you know, your Bible teaching and your music and all. And it's so complimentary. How do you look at that?
Well, I'm an affirmation junkie. That's part of the way God created me. And affirmation means, just means so, I won't say it means everything, but it means so much to me. I think we're created to long to hear, well done, thou good and faithful servant.
And, and, and the, and you're right, Wayne. And, you know, a lot of the things you've, you've shared with me, a lot of the letters, um, it's just, it means so much that someone would take the time to write a letter or an email to encourage. I read a letter today from somebody that was so encouraging. And, um, I, I don't want to think that I, I have to have those things to function, but, um,
They sure do make a big difference. That encouragement means a lot. As Michael Card said, the hundreds of hour-long podcasts we've recorded through the years will remain online for listening. We'll put the information about In the Studio with Michael Card in our program notes at FirstPersonInterview.com.
Then if you'd like to start listening, they will be easy to find on his website or on Apple Podcasts, Google, Spotify, or any number of podcast portals. And it's good to hear that he'll continue to teach the Bible and write books, including an upcoming book on the life of Jesus. We'll be watching for that one to talk about here on First Person. A special thank you to the Far East Broadcasting Company for supporting First Person. Reaching the unreached with the gospel is a major goal for FEBC, and you'll learn more about it when you visit febc.org. And
and look for the podcast until all have heard at febc.org. Now, with thanks to my friend and producer Joe Carlson, I'm Wayne Shepherd. Join us next time for First Person. ♪