transform your faith with rebekah simon peter gysis ep 177

What if, instead of having faith in Jesus, you had the faith of Jesus? Rev. Rebekah Simon-Peter, who has integrated the Jewish faith of her birth with her chosen identity as a United Methodist, urges all of us to embrace our inner divinity to live a more purposeful life, one in which we move beyond simply believing in Jesus to believing like Jesus.

RSS Feed

Guest: Rev. Rebekah Simon-Peter

Learn more about Simon-Peter, who is an ordained elder in the Mountain Sky Conference of The UMC, a speaker and author.
"Believe Like Jesus: rising from faith in Jesus to the faith of Jesus" can be purchased here.
Check out the 40 Day Spiritual Transformation Series on Facebook.

Popular related items on UMC.org

Join the conversation

Email our host Crystal Caviness or our producer Joe Iovino about this episode, ideas for future topics, or any other thoughts you would like to share.

Help us spread the word

Tell others: members of your church, coworkers, and anyone else might benefit from these conversations.

Share us on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites.

Review us on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you download the episode. Great reviews help others find us.

More Get Your Spirit in Shape episodes

Get Your Spirit in Shape and other United Methodist podcasts

Thank you for listening, subscribing and sharing.

This episode posted on Dec. 6, 2024.

Get Your Spirit in Shape and UMC.org are ministries of United Methodist Communications. For more than 80 years, we have been delivering messages of hope and leading the way in communications ministry. Join us in this vital work by making a tax-deductible donation at ResourceUMC.org/GiveUMCom.

Transcript

Prologue

Crystal Caviness, host: Rebekah, welcome to “Get Your Spirit in Shape.”

Rebekah Simon-Peter, guest: Thank you Crystal. What a joy and a pleasure to be here today.

Crystal: I am happy that you're here. I have a lot of questions to ask you. You have a new book out. I want to ask you about that. But as I've been learning about you, you've had what I can see as a really interesting life and I definitely have some questions about your journey, your faith journey, the call and all of that. So we are going to talk today about your new book, which is titled “Believe Like Jesus: Rising from Faith in Jesus to the Faith of Jesus.” And I have some questions about that subtitle as well. But to get started, can you just tell us a little bit about yourself?

Rebekah: Yeah, well, I live in Casper, Wyoming, married to a fabulous guy named Jerry, which you can read about in the book. We'll probably get back to him. And I'm currently a foster parent, which you can also read about. But I was born and raised Jewish in an interfaith home on the east coast and Jewish mom, Catholic dad. And do you know if they raised all five of us kids with all the holidays? We had Christmas. At Christmas time, we had a Christmas tree and then we lit the Hanukkah menorah at Hanukkah and we put out a chair for Elijah at the Seder table. And then the Easter egg bunny came, I mean Easter Bunny came and we had Easter eggs. So we sort of did it all and I grew up with all of it.

Crystal: There was a line in your book that says that you've been able to integrate both your Jewish and Christian identities, and I definitely wanted to ask you about that, what that looks like. And so I understand a little more now as you talk about how you were raised, but has that same kind of maybe even double dipping into the holidays, does that happen to you now too as an adult?

Rebekah: Alright, you found me out Crystal. I am a double dipper, but you know what happened is here, I mean Catholic dad, right? Jewish mom, but all of us kids were raised Jewish even though we had those two big Christian holidays quote for my dad. But really what kid doesn't like Christmas presents? What kid doesn't want Easter eggs? I mean, I wanted all of that, but it's so interesting because my two older brothers were, first they were raising all his kids Catholic. And at some point my mom realized my dad was not going to Catholic church with her. And she said, Joe, if you are not going to come, why am I raising these kids Catholics? So my two older brothers, I'm number three, my two older brothers were baptized. They stopped right before me. And yet when I was just about 28, I would say I had a waking vision of Jesus.

Now get the picture. I'm Jewish. So raised reform Jewish, which is sort of the most Methodist along the way. I have these God experiences. I become an Orthodox Jew, okay? I am in the Orthodox Jewish community for six years. And then what happens of vision of Jesus? It was the last thing, Crystal, on my radar screen. I'm telling you last thing on my radar screen, but here's this sort of waking vision, very Jewish looking Jesus. I mean there was no mistaking him. He didn't have a name tag on. There was no little bubble over his head. There was nothing that said, hi, I'm Jesus. What's your name? Clearly it was Jesus, but he had this curly dark hair. He had this sort of olive skin, warm brown eyes, smile lines around his eyes and mouth. I mean, it was a very warm figure. And with his eyes, I felt like he was just saying to me, I love you. I get you. I understand you and I accept you. And in what should have been a stunning moment. Actually, I wasn't sure what to do with it. Here I am an Orthodox Jew, right here comes Jesus unbidden, unexpected. I didn't know what the heck to do with all of it. I determined immediately that I would speak of it to no one. And that lasted approximately, I don't know, five, 10 minutes. And then I called a friend of mine who was in seminary. Now she had a Jewish parent and a Christian parent. I figured she would understand. I told her what happened and she said, did you know that Jesus was a Jew? And I was like, well, everybody knows that. She said, oh, well, did you know the disciples were Jewish? And I was like, what's a disciple? Which was a really funny question for somebody who was about to become one.

What did I know? I knew nothing about disciples. She said, oh, you haven't read the New Testament. And I said, it's not my book. She said, I'm going to get you a copy. And I thought, well, I'm not going to read it. And the truth is, Crystal, I didn't read it, but she was in seminary and I thought, if she can be in seminary, I can be in seminary. She's studying Hebrew. I thought just Jewish kids studied Hebrew. So I went off to seminary and eventually bought a Bible, opened the Bible, read the Bible, and I've been in a love affair with Jesus since then.

Crystal: That is an incredible experience. Thank you for sharing it. That is not in the book, so this is extra. This is some bonus material. Thank you.

Rebekah: Well, that all is in “Dream like Jesus,” which is a couple of books earlier. Yeah.

Crystal: That also leads me to a question I was going to ask you. So I knew that you were raised in the Jewish faith, but I know that you are an elder in The United Methodist Church, that you are in the Mountain Sky Conference, and we're going to talk about your work in the conference in just a few minutes. And I just wondered, what does that, did that path look like

Rebekah: Crazy. I mean, so here's my friend in seminary and I think, well, I'm going to go to seminary. I want to study Hebrew. I love Hebrew. I was bat mitzvahed. I wasn't baptized as a kid, but definitely had my bat Mitzvah confirmation. Our class went to Israel. I loved being Jewish. So anyway, my friend is in seminary, so I think I'm going to go to seminary even as I'm opening up the front doors of that school thinking what is a nice Jewish girl like me doing in a place like this? I didn't think I was ever going to become a Christian. I just thought, oh Jesus, very nice. I want to learn more about him. So I went, and then it turns out in year one or year two, I enrolled for the Master's of Divinity, not knowing what the heck I was going to do with that degree.

It slowly dawned on me, I'm in a United Methodist Seminary. That's where I was. I didn't know. And really I used to think, oh, the Christians are so united. They've got a church on every street corner and the Jews, oh my God, we're so divided. We've got the reform, we've got the Orthodox, we've got the conservative. Now there's reconstructionist and Jewish renewal movement, but the Christians, they really have it together. Now, I knew nothing about reading church signs. I didn't know that you all were all different. I didn't know that. So here I am in the United Methodist Seminary trying to figure out, all right, what does that mean? And the more I learned about being a United Methodist, the more I really liked it. I really did. I liked the focus on what we call the Quadrilateral: scripture experience, tradition and reasoning. You can bring all that to your faith. I really liked that. I liked the emphasis on social holiness and personal piety. In other words, yes, we have this personal relationship with God, but we also have this responsibility out in the world. I liked that balance. So there was a lot I liked about being a Methodist so that when I got the call, as we say, to ministry, I thought, well, shoot, let me be a Methodist. I like these people. I like what they believe. So that's how that happened.

Crystal: I love that. I love that you just kind of accidentally found yourself at, you didn't choose a United Methodist seminary, you just found yourself there and it was where you were supposed to be all along. So that's really great. Rebekah, did you find some similarities when you were learning about The United Methodist Church? Were there some things that felt comfortable to you from what you had grown up learning about the Jewish faith and who you are in your Jewish identity? Were there some places that you felt there was an intersection?

Rebekah: A couple things. One, I was surprised how much Methodist really drew upon Jewish thinkers. I thought that was very interesting and really liked, were intrigued with all things Jewish. So I thought that was very interesting. In reformed Judaism especially, there's a very strong emphasis on, what did we call that in the Christian world, it's called social justice. But in the Jewish world, at the time it was called social action. That's what we called it. And there's so much in the Jewish Hebrew scriptures, the Old Testament about being in right relation with others and what it means to act justly and things like that. So yeah, there was that overlap. But really the very first church I ever joined, this is before I was a minister, and then I became the associate pastor. There was an African-American church in Denver, Colorado, called Scott United Methodist Church.

And Scott United Methodist Church felt the most worship I was used to because it was passionate and there was a lot of engagement. And in the Orthodox Jewish world, I don't know if you and your listeners know this, but in the Orthodox Jewish world, everybody prays at their own pace. So it's this big sound of voices and it's not necessarily everybody in unison nice and quiet and neat and organized. Everybody knows what the prayers are. And so there's sort of this loud sound of people praying in their own way, at their own pace. And so there was something about the aliveness of the Black church that brought to mind the Orthodox experience. And then just the emphasis on Old Testament stories. Of course, I could totally relate to that. That's what I was most schooled in. So I greatly appreciated my formative years at Scott United Methodist Church.

Crystal: That is probably true that not many listeners, well, I'll just stop. It's absolutely true that I did not know that in the Orthodox Jewish tradition that everyone prays at their own pace. But I also don't know the difference between Reformed Jews and Orthodox Jews. So everyone else may know that answer, but I don't. So can you just briefly tell me the difference, please?

Rebekah: Reader's Digest version. Orthodox is what you would think of as original Judaism. So in the days of Jesus, when he is talking about the scribe, this gospel speak of the scribes and the Pharisees, there were four groups of Jews at the time. We learned about Pharisees, Enes, zealots and Sadducees. So there's sort of four different parties I think they're referred to, but that was all within the broad range of what we would think of as orthodoxy. Orthodox Judaism flowed out of the movement that was alive at Jesus' time. But since then, when people after the Holocaust and people came over from Eastern Europe, especially to the United States, and some of them because of the experience of the Holocaust and others, because of the sort of freedom of the new world coming to the United States, threw off some of the garb and the traditions of their time as they crossed the waters and came as immigrants to the United States.

And over time, I can't think of the rabbi's name, but there was a rabbi who developed what became known as reform. It was reform movement. So it carried much of, I would say, much of the spirit of orthodoxy without all the practices of orthodoxy. Now, so there's Orthodox Judaism original, then reform is a branch off of that, opposite ends of the spectrum. But then guess what pops up in between orthodoxy and reform is conservative Judaism. So conservative Judaism, it's not far right, it's in the middle. It conservative Judaism conserves much of the traditions of orthodoxy while still holding the spirit of reformed Judaism. Then there's a couple of other Rs that developed reconstructionist, which sees Judaism as a civilization as opposed to sort of a religion. And then the Jewish renewal movement, which you might think sort of charismatic. They're really into the spirit of things. And there's probably even more break off movements that I'm not familiar with, but those are the big categories in Judaism.

Crystal: Thank you for sharing that information. That's really interesting to me because like I said, probably the same way, you didn't know that there were all these different denominations in the Christian faith. I did not fully understand all of the different segments or sects maybe of the Jewish faith as well. And so in our same vein of educating and defining, we talked before the podcast started that you are an extension ministry in the Mountain Sky Conference of The United Methodist Church. And I was sharing that before I started working for the church, even though I grew up in the United Methodist Church, I didn't understand what extension ministry was. I thought if you worked for the church, well, I thought that you were a pastor, those were your options to be a pastor of a church. But I have learned since that extension ministry can look a lot of different ways. So can you explain to us what your role is as an extension minister in the conference?

Rebekah: Absolutely. Yeah. So I started off as a pastor for 12 years, Scott, then two other churches. And then honestly, I sort of got burnt out, and you can read about that in “Dream Like Jesus.” I got a little burnt out. I felt like God was calling me maybe help shape larger conversations in the church. I looked at my options and it turns out there is something called extension ministry, the purpose of which is to extend the ministry of the church beyond the walls of the church. So there are four different categories of extension ministry. If you've ever read the book of Discipline, there's categories for everything. But one of the categories is sort of self-defined or entrepreneurial, let's say. So who are extension ministers, district superintendents, bishops are extension ministers, not pastors, right? But like chaplains, navy chaplains, professors, all those folks fall into extension ministry. And then folks like me who sort of start their own ministry.

And so that's what I've been doing for the last 18 or 19 years. I felt my call was to help shape larger conversations in the church. And so I started with the series of books I wrote, the Jew named Jesus, in which I really talk about this Jesus experience and what I learned and what does it mean if Jesus really is Jewish? What's the relationship of Judaism and Christianity, et cetera. And then I wrote books, well, first books actually were green church, reduce, reuse, recycle, rejoice. My background was environmental studies, so I wanted to shape a larger conversation around scripture and science and then Judaism and Christianity, Jesus and Christianity and Judaism. And then I wrote Dream like Jesus, which was all about big visions, big bold visions based on the Lord's prayer. And then came the pandemic. So forging a new path, moving the church forward in a post pandemic world.

And I wrote about the bubonic plague and how the church got through that and what we could learn from how the church got through the bubonic plague, how we could get through covid. And then came what I'd always envisioned as the sequel to dream Jesus, believe like Jesus rising from faith in Jesus to the faith of Jesus. So all these books though alongside all these books, I've been developing programs for church leadership to grow in their capacity for them to shape larger conversations in the church for them to be more powerful in reaching their communities and having big, bold dreams and even just getting along better in the church. So I've developed a number of programs over the years. Maybe your listeners have heard of Creating a Culture of Renewal is a big one, and other programs as well as things based on my books.

Crystal: Well, it's definitely a much-needed ministry and I'm just really grateful for you pursuing that path. And it sounds like you were dreaming like Jesus when that came to you, and it is coming together as far as how you reach out with your ministry and with your call. So we'll segue now and talk about the book Believe Like Jesus, and as I mentioned the subtitle, rising from Faith in Jesus to the Faith of Jesus. And I'll tell you as I was reading the book, Rebecca, the line that really it's early on in the book, and it may even be in the introduction you wrote, instead of just believing in Jesus, we also begin to believe like Jesus. And in doing so, we embrace our inner divinity. I think I may be commingled some sentences there, but I never really thought about myself as divine. And you talk a lot about that in the book. You talk about our divinity and how believing in Jesus is one thing, but believing like Jesus is something completely different and really just elevates our entire faith journey. So I want to talk about just, I mean there's a whole book about it, so I'll encourage people to just go read the book because read book, it's such a fabulous, really guide for how you do this. But tell me about how the book came together. How did you get the idea to write this book?

Rebekah: Yeah, well, I told you I served three churches when I was a pastor, Scott United Methodist Church in Denver. Then I went to Parker, Colorado, and then I got sent up to Rollins, Wyoming, which I thought was the end of a line for a single person like me. I'm never going to date again. And then about a week in, I met a guy who wanted to go on a date, not right away, but eventually I met a guy who did want to go on a date. And turns out he was my postman. He was my mailman. So was the postman and the pastor having a date. And this guy asked me a question I never ever thought of before and he asked me, do you think I'm an apostle? And I thought, what? I was still, I was still a pretty new Christian, Crystal. I mean in the grand scheme of things, I was still trying to figure out all the details.

So disciple apostle, are those the same? What's the difference? I wasn't really sure, but his question really impacted me. Do I think you're an apostle? I thought, I don't know. Am I an apostle? It just got me wondering. So this guy by the way, ended up asking me another question about 23 years ago to which I said yes. So the mailman is now my husband. But I loved that question. And so I got to thinking about it the longer I went on in ministry, what is the difference between a disciple and an apostle? And over time it became clear to me, I'm going to throw a little bomb in here, just a second. I want to say this thing. So I learned from doing the Jew name Jesus stuff and teaching churches and folks just like our listeners here, that Judaism was the religion of Jesus.

Christianity was the religion about Jesus. Kind of an important distinction, but just chew on that for a second. So I think that following Jesus and believing in Jesus is one stage in the spiritual journey. We call that discipleship, but the more I read the Gospels crystal, because I had to read that Bible to preach and teach in Sunday school. So the more I read, the more I realized, wait a second, wait, wait, wait. Put the brakes on. There's something in here we always skip over, which is when Jesus called them to be his followers, he called them actually to be his apostles. And the first step, and it says that in Mark, mark is the clearest place that it says it, but he called them to be his apostles. But the very first stage of this apostleship was that they had to be disciples. They had to follow him, they had to learn, they had to just watch him.

And that's how they did it. In those days, you couldn't follow somebody on Facebook. They weren't doing Facebook lives, they didn't send pictures around. They weren't doing stuff like that. So these people literally followed Jesus from place to place. They were students. That's what disciple means. But it was always and only for the purpose of Jesus then being able to send them out to do the things he did. The scriptures are extremely clear on that. And what does it mean to be sent out? Well, the word is apostle. It comes from the Greek disciple comes from the Latin apostle, comes from the Greek, but it means an envoy, an agent somebody sent out in somebody else's stead. So in a way, district superintendents are apostles of the bishop and the pastor is an apostle of Jesus. But here's the thing, there's no distinction. Like Jesus doesn't say, alright, pastors, you should be apostles.

Lay people, don't you worry. You just be disciples. You just follow along. They were all lay people in that day, crystal. They were all lay people. So everybody, those people he called, they were always meant to be sent out to be apostles. Now, when I think about the stuff they did, if they were going to do the stuff Jesus did what they do well, he told them, I want you to go cast out demons. I want you to proclaim the kingdom, and I want you to heal the sick. Well, that's the stuff Jesus did. How were they going to do it? Well, it struck me. They couldn't just think, I believe in Jesus. I believe in Jesus. I believe in Jesus. Here, let me do a miracle. No, they had to believe like Jesus. They had to have the kind of faith he had to do the kinds of things he did. That's what I arrived at. That's what this book is about.

Crystal: And what I loved about it, Rebecca, is that you not only said, well, you're going to have to believe like Jesus, but you then tell us how you walk us through what Jesus believes based on the scripture and also the studying that you've done. And I've never had, well, I've never really thought about that. I've just never thought about, well, what did Jesus believe? And it was this experience as I read the book of both Bible study, biography, guide book, inspirational book. It was all these things together in one place just really woven in. I'd be reading along and learning what is Mark's defining theme, Luke's defining theme. And then I would learn about self-talk and what that self-talk should, why self-talk is important. And so it really, it is a very engaging book, but also just dense with information and just things that make you think. And I love at the end of each section where you'd say, and when you're ready, turn the page.

Because I'm going to tell you, a lot of times I was just sitting there just taking it all in. And had I not been preparing for our conversation today, I still would not turned the page yet. I wasn't ready. So it was just a really excellent way of just how you brought all that information together. And kind of back to your first point, I believe we do use the terms disciple and apostle interchangeably, which I'll never do again because you explained it as a disciple would be like liking Jesus's Facebook page, but an apostle was being an influencer for Jesus, which are very different. So I love that analogy in the book, you discuss what Jesus believes and then how we shift our unconsciousness and our actions. And each section really has this is how to believe this is how to answer, this is how to practice. Did you decide to format the book like this because of just things you've experienced? Have you worked through that with other people? Tell me how that format came together because I found it really interesting and helpful too.

Rebekah: I really did have to think about what did I think Jesus believed? What did I think he was actually teaching those people he called that he was going to send out? And I just kind of did a deep reading trying to get the meta themes of the scriptures about what Jesus might have believed. I'm not saying these are the only things Jesus believed, but I do think that these are big defining beliefs of Jesus that we're called to believe. And then I thought, it's not easy. Hello people. It's not even easy to be a disciple of Jesus, let alone to believe like Jesus. I've been practicing this, I would call it an art as opposed to a science. I've been practicing this art of believing like Jesus. So a lot of what I wrote, I wrote from personal experience. Here's some examples, here's some ideas, here's what could get in the way.

And so I wanted it to be very relatable and I wanted to let all my readers know I am with you in this process of rising from faith in Jesus to the faith of Jesus. I don't know we ever get there. I don't know that you can say, well, I rose, have you risen? I don't think it's like that. I think it's an ING process rising from faith in Jesus to the faith of Jesus. So I wanted to give some examples that were relatable both from the scripture and from personal life, that other people would be able to say, oh, okay, I think I get what she's talking about. Let me try this in my life. And also, I've been teaching this to the people in my program, creating a culture of renewal for the last probably about 10 years, advancing from discipleship to apostleship. So I've had a lot of conversations with church leaders over the years about how to do it, what does it look like? What does it mean? What do the scriptures say? This is probably the most I've ever talked about a topic before writing a book on it. And then even after it got finished, I thought, oh, shoot, I just thought of five more things I could have put in that book.

Crystal: Well, and in the living and learning to believe Jesus and live like Jesus, what that looks like is this life, you call it living on purpose. And I appreciated that the questions of a lot of people struggle with what their purpose is in life, what their identity is. And I appreciated that you made this connection, that what makes you come alive? What engages your creativity, that those are God-given gifts. The reason that makes you come alive is because God put that in you. And I really appreciated you tying that together and how exciting to know that as we learn to believe Jesus, that we become, we find our purpose, and we are living in this really creative space and not creative. I'm not talking about in the sense of being a painter, although it could be that, but it could just be that you're opened up to all that you can be all the possibilities. And that was when I said earlier, it felt like this combination of there's this encouragement and this self-care and all of that, because I wasn't really ready for that when it got to that part. I was like, oh, so when we're living like Jesus and believing like Jesus, this is what that looks like in my life.

And that was very exciting to read that and imagine that.

Rebekah: That's nice.

Crystal: It was really opening up this place of possibility for me as I was reading it and inspiring.

Rebekah: And getting back to inner divinity. And I have discovered that God needs me to fully participate in life. God needs me to come alive. God needs me to be engaged. And that inner divinity, we talk about Jesus being fully human and fully divine. Well, we always talk about the fact that we have a soul and we have a spirit. Well, what is that if it's not the divine that's within us? And so I think, I feel like what we're being called to is yes, the full expression of our humanity, but that should mingle or be informed by or guided by the full expression of our inner divinity, our soulfulness, our spirit. We talk so much about spirituality, the spiritual, but not religious, the people who have left, et cetera. I always feel like they were saying they wanted more from church, more spirit, more God talk, more experiences of God.

And yet right there within each and every one of us is soul. Is spirit, is the breath of God, what I call inner divinity. I think we're being called to develop that. I think we can look around the world right now and see, well, boy, we may be the limits of humanity. We may trying to do good, and sometimes we do good and doesn't come out good. And there's so many problems. There's so many good things, but there's so many problems. I think we need to tap into that inner divinity, unapologetically, unashamed, and know that God is within each and every one of us, and we need look no further than that spirit within to find a wisdom that sustains us and supports us. I'm not saying don't pray to God. I'm not saying don't go to church. I'm saying it's a lot closer than you think it is. And there's power within us. There's wisdom within us. There's capacities within us. We've only just begun to tap into. I think we're called to all of that.

Crystal: I think if we were to replace the word spirituality with breath of God, how does that change the conversation? How does that even change what we're meaning when we say that, that spirituality, and really tying it to, because I agree with you that spirituality has become kind of a buzzword for, and it is a big word. It's a broad word that incorporates a lot of things. But if we start thinking about it more personally, an amount in my life, my spirituality is the breath of God within me.

Rebekah: And I write about that. I write about Ezekiel, yes, the dry bones and the breath of God. Yeah, I actually, I wrote about that and forging a new path. Apparently, I am intrigued with the dry bones and the breath of God, right? It's extremely powerful phrase to think about.

Crystal: Well, as we finish up today, Rebekah, there are so many things that we could be talking about for the next three hours. Honestly, the book is just so rich. But is there something specific that you would hope we had talked about today that we didn't yet cover?

Rebekah: Gosh, what could I say? Well, there's two appendices in the book and one of them, appendix A is a 40 day guide. So if you wanted to use this for, say, lent by yourself or with a group, your whole church, whatever, your neighborhood, you could do that. And then appendix B, and it's got 40 days of reflections, but Appendix B, maybe my favorite part of the whole book was one of the last drafts that came in. And Appendix B is Five Steps to Co-Creating Miracles With God. If you want A How to Be a Miracle Maker with God, page 1 63, check out Appendix B. And then lastly, I'm not sure when this podcast is going to drop, but November 27th to January 6th, I'm actually going to be doing a 40 days spiritual transformation series, and it's going to be on Facebook. So every day we're going to post something to think about and some questions. I'll have some Facebook Lives in there, but it's just really designed to help people feel empowered and engaged and deepened in their ability to believe like Jesus during this season. And then we'll do it again at Lent. But that's what's coming up now, November 27th to January 6th,

Crystal: This is probably going to come out about a week after you start. So can people join it once it's already underway?

Rebekah: Absolutely. Yep, definitely. And January 6th is Epiphany, so seeing us all the way through the Christmas season.

Crystal: Yeah, that sounds great. We'll be sure to link to that on the episode page. Well, Rebecca, now I'm going to ask you the question that we ask all of our guests on “Get Your Spirit in Shape, “ how do you keep your own spirit in shape?

Rebekah: Oh, if we had an hour, I could tell you all the ways, but let me just think. You know what? One of the ways I keep my spirit in shape is I work out with a personal trainer three days a week, and she makes me do hard things. She does. I give her permission. I even pay her. She makes me do hard things. And so it gives me this sense that my spirit can do hard things, and she's always working out the core, right? She said, oh, we're going to work arms, legs, core like every day, but really every day it's core. So I got to thinking, what is the core of me and how can I work that out every day? And it's my spirit, but I know me and my spirit, me and God. We can do hard things. So that's one of the ways that I work my spirit out.

Crystal: I love thinking about the core, not just the physical core, but again, the spiritual core. Yeah. I love that. Rebekah, thank you for being a guest with us today. We will link to how you can purchase the book on the episode page, and then also, I know you have a website to talk more about your extension ministry work, and we'll definitely link to that too. So I appreciate you being here and being our guest.

Rebekah: Thank you, Crystal. It's been a pleasure. Thanks to all your listeners.

Epilogue

That was the Rev. Rebekah Simon-Peter discussing how we can move from simply believing in Jesus to believing like Jesus. To learn more, go to umc.org/podcast and look for this episode where you'll find helpful links and a transcript of our conversation. If you have questions or comments, feel free to email me at a special email address just for “Get Your Spirit in Shape” listeners: gysis@umcom.org. If you enjoyed today's episode, we invite you to leave a review on the platform where you get your podcast. Thank you for being a “Get Your Spirit in Shape” listener. I'm Crystal Caviness and I look forward to the next time that we're together.

Transform your faith: From believing in Jesus to believing like Jesus