About This Talk

Everyone is looking for "the Good Life," but few seem to find it. In spite of career success, many men are drowning in sorrows that seem to multiply. Dr. Joe Castleberry, President of Northwest University has discovered the well worn path of life that brings men fullness of joy and lasting pleasures that money cannot buy.

Joseph Castleberry is President of Northwest University in Kirkland, Washington, a Christian university founded in 1934 that offers over 70 academic programs at bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral levels in residence and online. In addition to President Castleberry’s work in higher education, he is the author of several popular books and a frequent speaker at conferences and churches around the world. President Castleberry is a graduate of Evangel University, Princeton Theological Seminary, and Columbia University, where he completed a Doctor of Education degree in International Educational Development. He began his professional career as a chaplain at Princeton University, and for twenty years, served as a missionary church planter, college professor, and community development leader in Latin America.

Married to his wife Kathleen since 1983, Castleberry’s family includes three daughters, two sons-in- law, a grandson, and three granddaughters. He enjoys golf, tennis, visiting America’s National Parks with his wife, and watching Northwest University sports.

Transcript

Dr. Joseph Castleberry: You know, it's a funny thing to be in producer group. As a college president, we are not the most popular people in America right now. Our industry is in real turmoil right now 'cause a lot of colleges across the country have, really been following some nutty ideas. And, it's kind of thrown the whole industry into disgrace. So, I don't want to be that kind of college president. So I could just say, you introduce me as a minister. Boy, that was a real improvement. Because I mean, ministers like 30% of the country now say they respect and admire ministers. Ministers have never been so disrespected as they are right now. And that's not fair 'cause most of 'em are pretty good guys. But you know how the media is. You only hear the bad news. You'll never hear about that guy that's working.

I mean, I saw this interesting, graphic this week. It was about average pastoral salaries across the country. It turns out I always thought Washington pastors were terribly underpaid. Turns out Washington has the most highly paid pastors in the country, but the average is $72,000. In Washington, yeah. And, but it's the highest in the country by $6,000. So anyway it's a rough profession. whatever you introduced me as, I'm just a regular guy. And, I came to your meeting a couple months ago and I thought, this is a great group of guys. These are just regular guys that the living life and they like sports and they like all the stuff I like.

So, so who am I? I'm an Alabama Crimson Tide football fan from the date of my birth in Theopolis, Alabama, 70 miles south of Tuscaloosa. I love football and I'm never miss a Crimson Tide football game for anything. And I love baseball. I'm an Atlanta Braves fan from birth. I'm not one of those fair weather fans. I used to listen to a hundred games a year when I was a kid, and we'd lose a hundred of 'em. The Braves were horrible before Ted Turner came to Atlanta. But I was a fan and didn't matter if we won or lost, I was faithful. And then we started winning, and that was great.

But, I love national parks and hiking and outdoor activities, and my wife and I have set a goal of visiting all 63 United States National Parks. We are at, we are now at 47. But we just love 'em. And, you know, it's, there's so many different things you can do in the parks. If you go to Channel Islands in California, it's kayaking through river, through ocean caves. I mean, it's phenomenal. We go snorkeling. My wife's a scuba diver, so, I've taken her to different places around the world to do that. Been to 50 countries, have landed in 227 airports around the world. And I just love life. I mean, it's just so much goodness to, to pursue in the world. And, you know, the greatest thing in my life is that I am married to the same woman for 40 years. I admire her so much. She's such a great friend to me. She's had babies for me in three different countries.

We lived in four but, I'm afraid to go to another country. But, you know, raised three daughters and they're all married to fine men that love them and, work hard and seven grandchildren now. And life is good. So I feel somewhat qualified to talk about the good life 'cause I've had a great life. And, you know, I know something about the good life. People have been thinking about good life for a long time. As long as human beings have been around, we've been thinking about the good life. And most people just define the good life as being happy. The Greeks had a word for it: eudaimonia - having a good spirit. You know, feeling good about yourself, being happy. Being happy is great, but it can be fleeting as well. And happiness is not all we need to be concerned about.

Goodness is more than happiness. Sometimes doing the good thing isn't the thing that makes you most immediately happy. But there is a an approach to life that's better than other approaches that'll bring you the maximum happiness and the maximum success and the maximum fulfillment outta your life. So, going back in time, you think about the ancient Greeks, they're famous for philosophy, right? My wife just got back from Greece and she brought me a philosophy trading cards. I like philosophy. I studied a philosophy minor in college, and studied western philosophy from the presocratics to the postmodern. I like philosophy. But the, it is pretty simple really what the ancient Greeks thought about the good life. Socrates and Plato and Aristotle, they particularly thought this, that there three different kinds a life. One is what they call the contemplative life. And that's a life that's lived in search of the truth, virtue, of right behavior. And that's what they thought was the best life.

The second best life in their mind was the political life. And that isn't just like going into politics, but it's a life built, It's a life lived for other people. A life lived for the community. And that's a good thing too. I mean, living for others is a wonderful way of fulfilling your life. But, well, I'll tell you, the thing about other people is that they can really disappoint you. So, it can be difficult to keep that together. But that's another approach to life is living a social, political life.

And the third form of life, which they see as the most inferior, is what they call the hedonistic life. And that's the life lived in search of pleasure. And that's the one most people try to live and don't do very well at it 'cause I mean, if you go into drugs and stuff, it might make you feel good for a while, but it just, it's not gonna help. And, you know, alcohol leads to alcoholism in some people. Not everybody. But, you know, it's just, it doesn't really improve anything. I always tell people the University of North Carolina has a dry campus 'cause they've done the research and they figured out that alcohol use doesn't really improve student learning. .

This is what we, in my doctoral program was called Obvious Sociology. Did some studies to know what we obviously can tell you, but the life lived in search of personal pleasures, whether they be sexual, whether they be thrills. It just doesn't turn out very well. And you look at your celebrities out there and the lives they live, and very few of them are really happy. And you look at people who've lived their life in pursuit of wealth. We just recently had some spectacular divorces of the richest men in the world. One was Jeff Bezos, the other was Bill Gates. They have both lived three miles from me. How can they be so happy, how can be so unhappy living in such a happy place? But they've sought money and they've achieved it. And, you know, they have power and fame and all that stuff. But there's an emptiness that comes with it. And I'll tell you why. There's no woman in the world that is worth the disappointment of my three daughters. It just not possible.

So anyway, these Greek philosophers, they understood that the best life was the contemplative life, the life that's lived in search of truth and goodness and virtue. Socrates said that the unexamined life is not worth living. So it's good idea to stop and take stock of yourself. Think about your life. What am I doing? Is this working? Is this a good life? Am I doing the right things that will truly maximize my happiness? A lot of people don't spend a lot of time reflecting. Some people might call it prayer, but reflecting is really good because it keeps you centered and helps you to not chase after things that aren't gonna really help.

Part of that examined life is a life of discipline, self-control. It'll tell you the man that's got control of himself is a happy man. So, discipline's important too. More recently, there's an article in Psychology Today that I looked at, and it was looking at what's the good life. And these psychologists basing themselves not on religious belief at all. They're not religious people, these two, but they concluded after looking at all the evidence that religious people tend to be happier and healthier than other people. Duh! And it's absolutely true that on just about every possible measure of human wellbeing, religious people are better off than folks that aren't religious. I don't know why people talk so badly about religion. I mean, religion is really good for you. Religion is really good for you. It makes makes you happier on every scale.

By the way, they have happier marriages. They have less marriages, they have more children, they have better family life on average. Not every person gets it all right, but on average it just works out better. They live longer. They have a whole lot more sex. Enjoy it more. Religious people enjoy sex more than non-religious people. Funny thing. It happens to, it kind of turns out if you love the woman, it actually works better. This is non-obvious sociology, maybe. They surmise that a major reason for the greater happiness in religious people is their connection to a spiritual community. And a deeper sense of meaning. Well, yeah. Yeah. Having a good community around the people that care about you. And, you know, it's a wonderful approach, wonderful help in life. Having a deeper sense of meaning in your life. It's, that's powerful. It's wonderful. People are looking for meaning. And so religion's really good for you. But no matter what people's religion are, according to these psychologists, most people will benefit from pursuing a life of purpose rather than solely focusing on hedonistic pleasures. Yeah, yeah. Exactly.

There was a Hebrew king, you've all heard of him. No matter how secular your life may have been, you've heard of this guy. His name was David. You heard of the star of David. He was Israel's greatest king. He was a knucklehead, but he knew well enough to seek God. And in Psalm 16 in the Bible, you see some ancient Hebrew philosophy says this, this is a call out. It's a prayer. "Keep me safe, my God, for in you I have refuge. I say to the Lord, you are my Lord. Apart from you, I have no good thing." That's powerful that David recognized that God was the source of every good thing in his life. The book of James in the Bible says, "Every good and perfect gift comes down from the father of lights." God is the source of every good thing. And David knew that, but he knew more than that. He goes on to say, "I say of the holy people who are in the land. They are the noble ones in whom is all my delight." They could look at that as the folks he goes to church with, right? The folks he went to the temple with, the folks he worshiped God with the holy ones, the saints. He took his delight in them.

And I'll tell you what I have found I really like people that love God. I like 'em everywhere. I like Catholic ones. I like Baptist ones. I like non-denominational ones. I found that I even like people of other religions who love God. Loving God is a great strategy for happiness in life. If you haven't tried it, boom, there it is. Loving God is the secret to real happiness. But, David had figured that out and he'd like to be with people that love God. And I do too. He goes on to say this, "Those who run after other gods will suffer more and more. I will not pour out libations of blood to such gods or take up their names on my lips." Well, that's kind of weird 'cause that's, it's not like we don't pour out libations of blood anymore. And it's not most, for the most part, we're not what you would call a pagan society, a polytheistic society. We don't call things 'gods.' But the thing is, anything that really gets your attention and that you really desire is your god. And so we have lots of gods out there. The Bible mentions folks whose gods are their pleasures. You know, if you think about the ancient pagans, these people who believed in lots of gods, what were the gods they believed in? They believed in gods of harvest, gods of prosperity, gods of fertility, sex gods. You know, the ancient Greeks would go to the temple and have sex with the temple prostitute. That was what they called worship. They did the same thing in Canaan and in the other pagan societies that had multiple gods. That's just part of, baked into the religion 'cause the pagan religions were by definition of pursuit of pleasures. So, I mean the fact that we don't call it gods anymore doesn't mean we're any better than they are. If we allow something to be our all consuming passion, that's our god.

David says he didn't want any of those, he wanted the real God. Hey, David searched, did search after some of those things. And he found them to be empty and found big mistakes in them. But in God, he didn't find any mistake at all. He said, this, "Lord, you alone are my portion and my cup. You make my lot secure." I love this. "The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places. Surely I have a delightful inheritance. I will praise the Lord. He counsels me. Even at night, my heart instructs me. I keep my eyes always on the Lord with him at my right hand. I will not be shaken." And that is exactly right.

And I tell you... Things aren't always going well professionally, right? Things aren't always going good at the job. Things aren't always good and going well with our investments, our health isn't always perfect. I, somebody asked me the other day how I deal with the stresses of running an institution. I've got over a thousand employees, over 250 full-timers. I gotta pay their salaries every week .Every two weeks at least... pay every two weeks. We don't skip a week. But, it is a bad time for our industry. It's a hard time for our institution. People ask me, you know, how do you deal with the stress of it? And I tell them, I practice professional distance. Professional distance is a great category and it works for any kind of occupation. You ever seen a preacher preach the funeral for his own family member, for his father or mother? Sometimes we get to do that. I, I've done that. I'm the funeral preacher for my family. And, people ask me, how did you hold yourself together while you were talking about your father or your mother? And the answer is professional distance. You just go into professional mode. You cut off those emotions and you do the job.

That's what you do at work, isn't it? You don't, especially if you're working with your hands. You're a welder. You're, maybe you're a carpenter. You work with something dangerous. You can't be thinking about that stuff on the job. It's funny. People who aren't tradesmen don't understand the work attitude that these, that the people work in dangerous stuff have to put on. You go to work. Man, it gets serious. Doesn't mean you don't have a little fun at work, but you know when to have it. When not to. You've gotta distance yourself professionally from that other stuff or you can get hurt on the job. Most people get hurt on the jobs 'cause they stopped concentrating on what they were doing and let their mind wander off into some other problem. To be successful at your job, no matter what it is, you've gotta adopt this professional distance. Just focus on the job. And when you leave the job, you turn it off . And you go and enjoy what's good about your life.

I think about the boundaries of my life. And I think about having a happy marriage. I think about having beautiful daughters who are married to wonderful men. I think about my grandchildren. I think about, I'd love to be on the golf course. I think about my next trip. I think you know where I'm going next and things that bring me pleasure. And I think, goodness, God has really blessed my life. Boundary lines have fallen in precious places. But interesting what he calls them, 'boundary lines.' He's not living a life of with no boundaries. A life with no boundaries is a path to misery. There's boundaries, there's disciplines. Man who's smart doesn't cheat on his wife. Figures out how to make it work with her. Boundaries. Man who's smart doesn't allow himself to let any pleasure overwhelm him. Whether it be food.

I don't know about you guys, but I am celebrating Lent right now. Lent is a great idea. Church calendar's a great thing. It builds discipline into the year. Not all year. Sometimes for ordinary times, you know, don't have to do these things. But right now it's Friday. So I'm losing weight. It's a good thing, but you know, you can't just eat anything you want. There's gotta be boundaries. You can't just drink anything you want or any amount you want. It has to be boundaries. For some people can't drink at all 'cause you tend, family prone to alcoholism. You cut it out and say, no. Other people, you drink in moderation, but you keep a line on it 'cause boundaries build better lives. But he says the boundary lines have fallen in pleasant places.

Then he goes on to another level that's a source of happiness that people don't know if they don't know God. And stunning what he says next. Because in, if you understand the ancient Hebrews, they thought the ancient Hebrews and the ancient world, they thought that when you died, you were dead. They just thought when you died, you were an animal, like an animal. Your life's over. They had this notion of a place called Sheol. It really just meant the grave, just a figurative way of talking about the grave. No place you wanted to be, dead in the grave. Done. People live in fear of death. Nobody would sign up if I offered any. Nobody wants to die. And ancient Hebrews didn't have any view of the afterlife. You look at the Pentateuch and the early chapters of the Bible, there's no mention of heaven or life after death or anything. But David had this revelation as he got to know God. It says this, "Therefore, my heart is glad and my tongue rejoices. My body will rest secure because you'll not abandon me to the realm of the dead. Nor will you let your faithful one see decay. You will make known to me the path of life. You will fill me with joy in your presence with eternal pleasures at your right hand." And so David dares to believe here that the same God who's given him these pleasant boundary lines in life, we've given him this life that he loves to live, has a plan for him even after death. Eternal pleasures at God's right hand. A person who knows they have the hope of eternal life has nothing left of fear in the world.

New Testament gives us an absolute promise of eternal life. That the wages of sin from 3:23 or 3, 6:23 says, "The wages of sin is death. But the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ, our Lord." That's the promise that those who turn their hearts to God, who love God, receive the gift of eternal life. It's wonderful. It's the most wonderful thing in the world. And you know, I'm not worried about dying. I'm 64 years old this last week, turned 64. My grandfather died at 65 when I was a kid. I thought, that's the age you die at. My father lived to 68, my mother lived to 70. They lived long lives. I think I'm gonna outlive both of 'em. I'm awfully healthy, take pretty good care of myself, but I don't know, might not have that many more years. A few years ago, I thought I was 50 years old. If I live to be like, if I live to the age my father lived to, that's 18 years. And I read the Bible through once every year. But if I keep reading the Bible through once every year, I'm only get to get to read it 18 more times in the rest of my life. That's not enough. So I doubled it, read it through twice, and then I tripled it last year, three times through the whole Bible, and five times through the New Testament.

Because, you know, it's, the older I get, the more I value the word of God, the more I value the strength and wisdom and peace and. And it's a, it's just a good thing. The older I get, the more I want God. And the more you want God, the less death seems like a bad idea. And so you don't fear anything. And once you've got, once you have won the battle over fear, you can live. I mean, it's amazing the life you can live if you're not afraid to die. And if you want God more than anything else, death is how you get there.

It's wonderful, talking about the good life knowing God is the good life. Now, how much time do I have left? None? About three minutes. Three minutes. The interesting thing's going on in our society right now is that liberal public intellectuals are going back to church. Yeah. In big numbers. In big numbers. partly because there's two kinds of liberals. There's old fashioned liberals who believe in human rights and believe in free economies. That's what it means to be liberal. You believe in freedom, human rights, and a free economy. But there's also the postmodern liberals, and they're Marxists. And they don't believe in free speech, and they don't believe in freedom of religion. They don't believe in free economies. So more and more liberals are going, Hey, that's not me.  I, that's not my way of looking at things. A lot of these guys are part of a group called The New Atheist. Ten years ago, they decided to announce that they were atheists. They didn't believe in God. Well, what a lot of them are coming to understand right now that that was not a good move.

One of 'em is a guy named, Neil Ferguson. He's a fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford. Brilliant economic historian. Wrote a great book on the history of money. And just this guy's so stinking smart, liberal, public intellectual. He now calls himself a lapsed atheist who goes to church every Sunday. Douglas Murray's another one. Brilliant guy, Douglas Murray. He calls himself a Christian atheist because he recognizes that atheism doesn't give you the basis for public morality. He's figured out that the west reached the highest levels of culture and economic development in human history because of Christian values. And even though he doesn't believe in God yet, he has decided that Christianity is good for people. And so he's decided to identify as a Christian. I identify as male myself too.

Good idea to be what you identify as. But he's on his way. I am, I'm proud of him. He's making his way back. But the granddaddy of 'em all is a guy named Jordan Peterson. Seen his stuff? Jordan Peterson was an atheist psychologist and just found his way to God. And, in recent years is, fully found his way to Christian faith. And he's careful about how he testifies, because what he found was that on his path to God, he brought tons of people with him. And he figured out that the best way to evangelize people in today's world is not pretend like you know everything. So if you were ask him to, is there a God? He'd say, I don't like the question. But in the process of not making a full fledged confession, he brought thousands and thousands of people into faith in God by not pretending to know the answer to the question, letting them figure it out themselves. Very Socratic. A Socrates, that was his method. So Peterson has, he's become a full fledged Christian. And he's brought tons of people with him. And he's having an incredible effect on these liberal, public, intellectuals. Public intellectuals are people who don't just teach at a university and talk to academia, but they're smart folks who talk to the regular public. They're scholars, but they talk to regular people all the time. They're on the news programs, they're on television, they have podcasts, and they're constantly talking to the public.

One of these people that has become a Christian is a woman named Ayaan Hirsi Ali. She grew up Muslim in Somalia. She was, she suffered a female genital mutilation as a child and grew up in a very oppressive Islamic situation, fundamentalist. So as a young woman, she renounced Islam, confessed herself to be an atheist, and moved to the Netherlands. Because she's crazy smart, she quickly became a member of the, of a citizen of the Netherlands and became member of parliament. But as she became publicly an atheist, she was obviously an apostate to the Muslims. And so they put out a fatwa on her. And then they started, they killed her colleague, a guy named Theo van Gogh, and were threatening to kill her. And so she lit out of town and came to America. Over the last 10 years or so, 15 years, she has been one of the most public of the new atheists until this year. She married to Neil Ferguson, the other guy that I mentioned who says he's a lapsed atheist and goes to church every Sunday. He's not quite there yet, but, she recently just announced that she's a Christian and she's accepted faith in Christ. And she's now writing as a Christian and she's a brand new Christian. But man, she's writing some smart stuff.

So seems like the smartest folks in our society are finding their way back to church. What does that have to do with us? I'm not one of the smartest people in society, but I like them. I like smart people. What does it mean for us? Artists and intellectuals and philosophers tend to be the first people who feel the zeitgeist. Do you know who zeitgeist is? The spirit of the age, the moment you could call it. They tend to be the first because their the smartest, most sensitive people. They get the moment before anybody else does. And then they start announcing what they're seeing and social movements then come behind them. Everybody jumps on the bandwagon. That's how social movements get started. A few artists, intellectuals start saying things, picks up steam, it finds a popular expression, and then every guy on the street corner thinks it. That's how it happens.

And the fact that these people are coming back to church and many of them coming back fully to faith in God is a really bright sign for our society. I don't have time to go into this, but America has a great awakening about every 80 years since the Pilgrims America goes to God goes back to church, things go really well, and then... for about 20 years, and then they start unraveling 20 years. And then we hit a crisis like the Great Depression in World War 2. That was one of the crisis periods. And then after that, you have 20 years of economic boom. And then you have 20 years of religious revival, awakening. Billions of people come back to God, come back to church. Sometime in the next 20 years, we are going to see our country flood back to church. We're gonna see people flooding back to God. That's what I see out on the horizon. It may be a cloud the size of a man's hand, as a Elijah said, but I see it out there. People are starting to come back to God. Smart people are figuring out that the good life is a life spent in pursuit of God.

Can I pray for you? Heavenly Father, thank you, you've reached the men in this room and that we can gather together and talk about important things. And nothing more important in this world than you. Don't know every person in this room. And I don't know where we're standing. I don't know what we're facing. I don't know what we are struggling with. I don't know what grave problems we may be tackling or may be tackling us, but I know that you are the solution. God, put a desire for God in our hearts by your Holy Spirit, speak to us. Call us and say, this is real. Speak to every man in this room, Lord, and say, I'm real. I've got something for you. I got a better life for you now. It's got boundaries. You're gonna like that. I've got a better life even in the future for you. Don't be afraid. Here's my hand, I'll help you. If you've never reached out to God, I just ask you right now in your heart, say, God, I'm reaching out to you. Not me. It's what it says in Isaiah 41:13, "I'm the Lord your God who takes you by the right hand and says, I will help you." You call out to God, he'll help you. Everyone in this room is ready to help you as well. Amen.