Hello, friend, and welcome to the Dig Your Well Podcast! I’m Jane Johnson, unapologetic Bible teacher and compulsive Scripture-Digger with a passion to teach women like you how to study the Bible in-depth entirely on your own. and before we get into the meat of the episodes I have lined up for you, I want to share with you why I’m even here, doing this. The simplest reason is that, for years, I’ve known the power of the spoken word. Or, more specifically, the power of my voice (which, I know, that sounds a little bit crazy, but hang with me – I only know it because of the lengths to which Satan has gone to discourage me from using it with a veiled yet pointed voracity that I thought at first was coincidences until I began to notice a pattern that had been forming for quite a while before my spiritual eyes were able to spot it.
I was studying in James 1 the other day, and the part in verse 12 about enduring temptation. The Greek word for “temptation” is peirasmos, and the word is often translated as “trial.” Now, when I think of a trial, I think of judge and jury. When you are on trial, whether or not you are guilty, your life stops, and everything you do revolves entirely around mounting your defense, right? It was only last week, as I was looking beyond the surface of this Greek word, that I realized I had been thinking about spiritual trials wrongly this whole time. A trial isn’t something that stops your world, and you do whatever you can to survive. The word “trial” here isn’t in the sense of a court case. It’s in the sense of an experiment, like a trial separation or a free trial membership. You’re trying something to see if it works. And, if it does, you stick with it because it’s working. That’s the sense of peirasmos. You can see it in action in Matthew 4 just after Jesus is baptized by John and is led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be peirasmos –tempted by Satan. It’s a temptation that the devil used to try to divert Jesus from His divine errand (which, of course, we know was salvation).
Trials, for believers, are nothing more than a series of experiments on the part of Satan, whose end goal is to divert your attention away from the calling God has placed on your life and onto correcting the diversion. Ignoring the diversion. Resisting the diversion. Or, simply surviving it.
Seven or eight years ago, when we were still living on Maui, I first thought about creating podcast-like recordings to teach more in-depth than blogging allowed me to do at the time. So, I began a voice recording on my phone one afternoon, just on a whim with no planning, and I remember talking about David in 1 Chronicles 14 and the men that came alongside him, representing so many of the 1 Corinthians 12 spiritual gifts.I was enamored with the ways that God connected the two passages together and how He always uses Scripture to explain Scripture.
Anyway, once I really got going and got about halfway through my thoughts about it all, and things really started clicking, my car alarm started going off in the driveway. I had to stop recording and go outside to turn it off. It was enough of a distraction to interrupt the flow and throw me off my game so that if I picked my phone up again, the tone and voracity of my speaking would be noticeably different. I’d have to re-record, but because it was off-the-cuff, I couldn’t really duplicate the fire that had just come out of my mouth. Frustrated, I put it aside for another day.
The next time I tried recording, the same thing happened – six or seven minutes into it (far enough in for it to be annoying to start all over again), my car alarm would go off. It happened over and over until I just sort of lost interest in the whole thing and forgot about it altogether. I didn’t realize then that once I quit recording, my car alarm stopped randomly going off.
I have many stories like this, detailed accounts of occasions where Satan was not-so-subtly trying to stop me from speaking out loud the things that God was speaking to me. It just took me a few years to realize that I was being peirasmos-ed and it was time to stand up and refuse to allow Satan to distract me from this any longer. Because, if there’s one thing that I know: it’s that the one thing Satan is actively diverting you from is the one thing God is actively calling you to.
Now, that being said, I do have to confess something: I don’t love podcasts. I don’t actually listen to them unless I’m on a road trip with my husband and he puts something on. I get approximately 73 minutes to myself during the day. I don’t want to spend 60 of them listening to someone else talking.
But, as I’ve already said, I also know the power of voice. The power of the spoken word. And the power of doing the very thing that Satan is trying distract you from doing. So, here I am, the anti-podcast-listener launching her own podcast. It’s just me, tucked up in the bonus room of my house, talking to myself while my kids are at school. And I kind of love that this space is different than social media. There are no followers, no likes, no comments, just some reviews at the bottom of the page that might give an indication of who might be listening. It’s sort of a throwback to my blogging days, back when blogs were a thing, and everyone read them. I could not care less if anyone left a comment. I was just getting out the river of Spirit-spoken words that I knew were too big for me to just stuff into a prayer journal and store on the shelf. It helped me to breathe. To feel less alone, knowing that someday, somewhere, some other woman in another town would stumble upon my message in a blog-bottle and, for the first time in a long stretch, feel seen.
That’s my prayer for this podcast. That’s why I’m here.
This first season of the Dig Your Well Podcast explores a handful of people in the Bible, both men and women, who actively walked in that beautiful space where their gifting and calling have collided into an incredible kind of anointing that only the Holy Spirit can give – and they had the gall to believe that God could and would use them in it and through it. But before we get to them? I’m going to start with me. So check back with me right here next week for the very first episode of this podcast’s very first season, and I’ll tell you a little bit more about my story so that you can learn why I’m able to teach you about theirs.
Ok, friend, I’m super excited to dive into all of this with you. I hope you leave it feeling empowered, impassioned, educated, and always a little bit more in love with Jesus than when you came.
