Step Into the Story: Experiencing Scripture In A Whole New Way

I’m honored to feature author Tony Stoltzfus on Casting the Net for a conversation that challenges us to experience Scripture in a deeper and more human way.

We talk about the emotional brain, transformation beyond behavior modification, the power of visualizing biblical stories, and how heaven offers hope for the places in life that still feel unresolved. 

This episode is thoughtful, healing, and full of insight for anyone who wants to grow in faith and engage the Word of God more personally.

What stood out to me most is this: many people approach Scripture only through analysis, but God also meets us through imagination, emotion, and lived experience. This episode is a meaningful reminder that the Word of God was never meant to be distant from our humanity.

Guest resources from Tony Stoltzfus:How to Read the Bible Like a Human Being Website: ⁠https://www.LikeaHumanBeing.com⁠ Buy it on Amazon: ⁠https://www.amazon.com/Read-Bible-Like-Human-Being/dp/B0DDTH8Y8S/ref=sr_1_1⁠ Sign up for an on-line bible study: ⁠https://www.likeahumanbeing.com/try-it-free/⁠

Heaven: Experience the Extraordinary Website: ⁠https://www.HeavenExperience.net⁠Buy at my bookstore: ⁠https://www.store.meta-formation.com⁠ Buy at Amazon: ⁠https://www.amazon.com/Heaven-Experience-Extraordinary-Tony-Stoltzfus/dp/098298913X/ref=sr_1_1⁠? On-line book study groups: ⁠tony@meta-formation.com⁠ FREE book club outlines: ⁠https://heavenexperience.net/bookclub/⁠

Social links:

Youtube Channel: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/@TonyStoltzfus⁠Facebook ⁠https://www.facebook.com/tony.stoltzfus.3⁠ Instagram ⁠https://www.instagram.com/stories/tonystoltzfus1⁠ Questions for Jesus ⁠https://www.amazon.com/Questions-Jesus-Conversational-Deepest-Desires/dp/1492177350/ref=sr_1_1⁠

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Happy Monday and welcome to Casting the Net, Reeling In Holistic Health, where we care about your mental health and well-being. I'm your host, Coach Rice, and I want to make sure that you tune in every Monday at 8 a.m. Central Standard Time, where I have my special guest on to talk about real issues that matter most. I want you to check us out on YouTube, Facebook Live, on Business Facebook page, also on the Be Awesome Network. Stay tuned. I think you're gonna really like this next guest. Happy Monday and welcome to Casting the Net, where we care about your mental health and well-being. I am your host, Coach Rice. And with me today, I have a special guest. He's an author. And I can't wait till he tell us about the books he wrote. His name is Tony Stotzfoots. He's German, so you know, forgive me. But anyway, um, so Tony, tell us where you're from and how did you embark upon being an author?

SPEAKER_00 1:02

Well, um, I live in Northern California right now with my wife of this year, is our 40th anniversary. Oh, nice. So I just turned 65, so I'm sliding into retirement. But when you've been self-employed for 25 or 30 years, and your job is author, retirement is sort of a different thing. So one of the things I most love to do is write. And so now I just kind of get to write about whatever I want to, no matter whether it makes money or not. Um, so that's kind of where I'm at now. Yeah, your question was, how did I get into being an author?

SPEAKER_01 1:42

What story do you want the audience or you the people who read your books? What do you what do you want to convey to them?

SPEAKER_00 1:51

Well, I've written 21 books. A bunch of them are about coaching. I trained coaches for 20 years. But the longer I went, my specialty became working with the emotional brain, because my experience as a coach was you have a rational brain, you have an emotional brain, but almost always the problem is in the emotional brain. But the interesting thing is, Christians mostly try to use rational brain tools to change their emotional brain. So, like self-discipline is a rational brain process. And what the emotional brain requires to change is it the emotional brain learns through imagery and experiences. So if you want to change your emotional brain, you need to have a different experience. So, a lot of what I've written in the last 10 years or so has been around applying emotional brain principles to coaching, to scripture, to heaven, to all kinds of stuff.

SPEAKER_01 2:56

So, would you say the emotional brain taps into the inner you?

SPEAKER_00 3:02

Yeah, you're when you try to access a person's heart, if you go through the rational brain, you get a filtered view because your rational brain is this gatekeeper. Whereas your emotions give you sort of the raw, unfiltered content of the heart. So if I want to get to what's really driving this person or what's motivating you, as a coach, I'm gonna start with asking you, what do you feel, as opposed to what do you want to do? Because your feelings will give me a truer read of what's actually going on in your heart. That is true.

SPEAKER_01 3:37

Would you say that your rational side will be more behavior modification that takes place, whereas your emotional side is tapping into transformation? Well, am I looking at it too deep?

SPEAKER_00 3:55

Yeah, scripture says to be transformed by the renewal of your mind. What you have to understand is you have to renew both sides of your brain. So if you memorize scripture and if you do declarations and you those tend to be rational brain things that renew your rational mind. But in this century, in Western culture, our emotional brain is the one that is least impacted by the way we do things.

SPEAKER_01 4:23

Okay, you don't co you don't coach coaches anymore. What happened that made you stop coaching coaches?

SPEAKER_00 4:31

Well, I did that for up until about five years ago. And uh then we had a year where um our house burned down, major challenges with both of our kids. My wife had some mental health issues, my best friend died, Kathy's mom died. Um, we got into a new house after our first one burned down. The new house flooded twice. This is all within a year.

SPEAKER_01 5:00

Wow. Lots of life was life in, right?

SPEAKER_00 5:04

Yes, and it just pushed me beyond my ability to cope. And I finally just said to my second in command, you're gonna have to run this thing because I just I can't right now. And uh then he came back and said, I'd like to actually take this over. And then we were negotiating it, and one of our trainers was uh he did mergers and acquisitions for Ford Motor Company, okay, and uh he's helping us structure the deal, and halfway through he's like, you know, I'd kind of like to be involved with this. So he became the partner who has ended up running the training school. But I had started several different training schools over time. One of them worked with coaches in South Asia that were coaching mission people on the field, um, so a bunch of different things like that.

SPEAKER_01 6:00

You knew that you were over your head, so you made a decision that I have to stop this right now, right?

SPEAKER_00 6:08

Well, it kind of was made for me.

SPEAKER_01 6:10

I mean, okay.

SPEAKER_00 6:12

I was at the point where I was only able to work about a day's worth of week just because there was so much going on emotionally. Um, I was seeing three different counselors at the time for for three different things and struggling with my marriage, and yeah, it just I had no bandwidth for yeah.

SPEAKER_01 6:36

And so that's when you kind of learned about during that 20 years, you kind of learned about you know clients dealing with the emotional and rational mind, right? Right. How did you discern when a client was operating out of their rational mind versus their emotional mind? Did they give you any cues?

SPEAKER_00 6:58

Well, I mean, as a coach, you're you're not so much trying to discern as to help them discern, but people are for instance, if someone is triggered, that's your emotional brain. Um and triggered is when I'm not responding to the circumstances, I'm responding to another set of circumstances in my past. So my reaction is out of proportion to the circumstances. So that's one clue. Um is your is your emotional response to this out of proportion to the circumstances that caused it? That's then your emotional brain is being triggered into your past. Um things that are emotional issues, like for instance, if someone comes to me and says, I want to change this, um I'll be great. You know, what do you want to do? And if if their response is self-discipline, I'm like, okay, let's try that. Um, because that's their idea. And if we try it for several weeks and it's not working, then I treat the process of self-discipline as a diagnostic tool. What we're doing is seeing if this is an issue that resides in your rational brain that you can tackle with the rational brain tool, or if you can't, then maybe we need to switch over and look at what's happening in your emotional brain. Um, so that's another simple clue. If if your discipline isn't working for no good reason, then start looking at what's going on in your emotional self. That's true. I like that.

SPEAKER_01 8:38

So your books, you you have um, tell us about the books you wrote. Is it all wrapped around the emotional and rational thinking or something else?

SPEAKER_00 8:49

Well, I wrote my first book in 2006, Leadership Coaching, and it's an introduction to the whole Christian coaching philosophy. And my best-selling one was my second book, Coaching Questions, um, which has sold like 200,000 copies or something like that. Um, since then I've moved more toward the emotional brain space. So the book, The Infant Invitation, is a whole laying out of the methodology of how you coach the emotional brain. And then in the last five years, I wrote a book about heaven, which is a lot of the books about heaven are people trying to slice and dice the scriptures and come up with a rational theological picture of heaven. And I was like, no, let's experience heaven, let's get immersed in it, let's let it touch our hearts. So I wrote a whole book that's a journey of imagination into heaven. Um, and then I also did this scripture project, um, How to Read the Bible like a human being, which is all about we we have two ground rules in these studies. We don't talk theology and we don't talk application, because both of those are rational brain activities. So, what we do is we take a story and we try to visualize what happened and what's going on with the characters and prioritize how it impacts our emotional brain as opposed to how it impacts our rational side. I give you a good story if you want to see what it looks like. Yeah, uh, woman with the issue of blood. This is an easy one. That's the easy one. And I realized when I first tried to visualize this, what I saw was this woman and Jesus, you know, they're talking and they're in the middle of a field somewhere. There was no background in my picture at all. It was just this woman and Jesus. And I suddenly realized this is like the flannelgrams that I saw in Sunday school when I was seven years old, you know, and you you pasted the figures on top of a flannel board, and and I hadn't updated my picture for 50 years, um, because no one taught me to study the Bible visually. So I started going in and filling in the details. So in this parable, Jesus or this story, Jesus is going to Jairus' house. Jairus is the Archus synagogus, the ruler of the synagogue. And it's most likely that he's the ruler of the synagogue there in Capernaum. And therefore, the story is going to take place on the streets of Capernaum. And having been there, most of the streets are like they're six or eight feet wide, and there would be a ten-foot-high stone wall right up to the street on either side. So you want to visualize a real narrow alley, and the windows were small, like a foot square and high up in the wall, so nobody could crawl through them. So you're in this tunnel-like thing, and Jesus is leading a moving crowd, he's walking along with gyrus, the disciples are probably around him. I think the woman probably waited, you know, in a in a corner or an intersection or something. And when Jesus passed by, she went out and touched him. Because she's she's been living with bleeding for 12 years. She's anemic, she probably has mental health issues, she's been isolated, she's not supposed to touch anybody, so she's also terrified of being discovered. So she goes up and touches Jesus's robe, and the robe that he wore, the hemation, the corner was actually in the small of your back, not down on the ground. So she comes up behind him and touches him. And the Greek word for touch there is a heavy touch. So I think she probably got jostled by the crowd, bumps into him harder than she thinks, and then Jesus turns around and says, Who touched me? Well, if you have a moving crowd in a narrow alley following a celebrity, and the celebrity stops and turns around, what happens to the crowd? Well, they all accordion up against Jesus. And so this poor woman who can't touch anyone and doesn't want to be discovered is pushed up against Jesus, who's saying, Who touched me? And right next to Jesus is Gyrus. And Gyrus, as the ruler of the synagogue, enforced the purity rules in the synagogue community. So he's in effect the chief of police. So she has flagrantly broken the law, she's caught out, she's trapped with surrounded by a bunch of people in a narrow alley, and the chief of police is standing right there. So it says she was trembling, she had a panic attack there in the alley because she thought she was going to be punished. And Jesus um does something beautiful. One thing is he calls her daughter, and she's the only individual in the New Testament that Jesus calls daughter. And I think part of that is she was probably ejected from her family because someone who is continually unclean would be like someone who had ostashed. So if you touch her, you have to go quarantine for the rest of the day. Um, so it was impossible to live with her and keep the law. So she's probably been rejected by her family. Jesus calls her daughter and says, Your faith has made you well. And when Jesus uses that phrase, what he's doing is social healing. An unclean person, uncleanness is not sin, but what it represents is you're not fit to live within the community in this state. So Jesus is saying, Your faith made you well, you did this, you are worthy to be accepted back into your community because you've become well because you're good. And so Jesus is emotionally healing her family detachment, he's socially healing her detachment from the village, and he's physically healing her body all at the same time.

SPEAKER_01 15:14

Wow, that's visualization right there. So in your book, learn about Jesus do like a human being, is it um that book that you just showed me? Is that how you uh teach the visualization part? Is it like a teaching book or is it storytelling? Is a Bible study? What is it?

SPEAKER_00 15:37

Well, the book explains the whole methodology. Then there's a whole Bible study curriculum with it that has videos that I shot in Israel. So for each lesson, you spend three weeks on a story. For two weeks, you discuss, you know, what's the cultural background, what did it look like, you watch the video, you read the background information, and for the third week, everyone takes one character in the story and they write a narrative from that person's perspective, and in week three, we all come together and share our narratives. And people love the narrative part the most. They for them it all comes together when they have to put themselves into a person's shoes and try to live it from that perspective.

SPEAKER_01 16:22

Wow. That how do you find it listening to all the different narratives? Like that's the fun part to see how people see it from their perspective, right? Yeah. Um I always learned to be.

SPEAKER_00 18:10

You didn't take anything out with you. So as a kid, man. Um people are always bringing up just some everyday detail that I never thought of before. Um, like when Jesus heals the paralyzed man at uh the pool of Bethesda. The pool of Bethesda is a mikveh, a public ritual bath. So when Jesus healed this guy, he was probably dripping wet from having come out of the pool. So now I envision Jesus leaning over the guy to touch him, and water's dripping from his hair. But I never visualized Jesus taking a bath, right?

SPEAKER_01 18:52

Um, no, I mean, who right? A lot of us don't. And in and and I like how you say it like a human being, right? And when you saw it from her perspective, it opened up uh the Bible to be so much fun as well, right? Yeah, and so um what are some of the simple ways that people can begin studying the Bible visually?

SPEAKER_00 19:18

Well, the first one is just to be aware that that the Bible is actually meant to be studied that way. Well, particularly the gospels. Jesus was a storyteller, he intentionally put his message into a story format, which is an emotional brain engaging format. So and then we go through and we read it all with our commentaries and parsing every word and looking at the Greek, and we don't read it as story. So, what I would say is take the story passages, you know, not not the teaching passages, but take one of the story passages and just try to put yourself into the scene. And you ask yourself, okay, um, Jesus is in a house teaching, and they lower a guy down through the roof. So they had to dig a hole through the roof. What would it be like if I dug a if somebody got up on my roof and dug a hole? Well, plaster dust would rain down on everyone below, so that certainly happened. What was the inside of this room like? Well, the windows are only like this big, so it was dark and they couldn't get through the door. So, what does that tell you about what the room looked like? Well, it was so crowded there was nowhere to walk. People were literally sitting shoulder to shoulder, and then this hole opens up in the roof. Um, the ceiling is made of logs with branches over the top and then clay. So when they break through this clay and sticks and whatever are falling on everybody. Um Jesus is staying in this house. Where is he staying? The most likely place is this room. So Jesus' bedroll is getting dirt all over it, and Jesus is getting dirt all over him. And yeah, just to start to picture that, and then you start to think what are the people in the room feeling and experiencing? Okay, well, what would I think if someone cut a hole in my roof and dirt was falling on my guests, and I'd be upset.

SPEAKER_03 21:34

Right.

SPEAKER_00 21:35

So the people in this room are probably not happy, right? Um, and yet these guys up on the roof had the faith to cut a hole. They believed that Jesus would accept their act and that it was worth doing in spite of the anger of the people. Yeah. Peter's mother-in-law owns this house. How did she feel about them?

SPEAKER_01 22:00

Cutting a hole in the group. Right. No one would be happy these days, right? And so you have to book. Go ahead. Your book is that's incredible. There has to be the most the I mean has to be a very interesting Bible study for for churches. It's fun. Yeah, because you're opening up a whole different arena to the way, like you said, it's meant to be read like that. And you're opening up rather than uh people taking the posture of like, oh, I'm reading this Bible because I have to, and uh, I go to stories again, whereas they can open up themselves right into the story, their perspective. Because I will probably look at it from a coach's lens. Someone else, a nurse will look at it from a nurse. It's similar to the way the gospels are written, right? Yeah. From different perspectives.

SPEAKER_00 23:01

Early on, we were doing the story of the call of Matthew, and uh, after Jesus calls him, he he has a banquet for Jesus' followers. And Matthew is a tax collector, he's an outcast from Jewish society. So, who's he gonna invite to his banquet? Tax collectors, prostitutes, reprobates. Um, right, and in a formal dinner, you reclined, you you laid down next to the next person. So envision one of these good Jewish boys laying down right next to the big tax collector who robbed your parents blind. Um, and there's prostitutes in the room, and and in this group, I had several people from a recovery ministry who were new Christians who had just come out of drug addiction, and they were so helpful. It'd be like, Okay, so what are these reprobates doing? And they were like, Oh, we know exactly what they'd be doing. So, one of the fun things about it is people, even who are are young Christians, can can bring things from their lives into the scripture so that they can see it and understand it because we're trying to visualize an everyday happening, we're not trying to do cosmic theology. So, right anyway, that's incredible. Can you hold your book up again? Sure. How to read the Bible like a human being.

SPEAKER_01 24:28

Love it, love it, and that's that's that can be in any church doing a Bible studies, people will love it. I think it'd be great.

SPEAKER_00 24:35

And and you're does this does it come with like this guy's wearing uh tefillon, which are phylacteries with the scriptures rolled up in, and I had I had them custom made to match nice based on examples from Masada.

SPEAKER_01 24:54

So we would definitely have your the link to that. Is that the you had you have another book? Is that another book? Yes, another book you promote in yeah.

SPEAKER_00 25:02

This is the website here is likeahumanbeing.com. My latest book is about heaven, and that's heaven experience.net. And this book we bought 2,000 copies to give away to people who are suffering or to spiritual seekers. So if you get the book and you read it and you like it, you can just go to the website and fill out a simple form, and we will send you free books to give to people that you know that are grieving the loss of a loved one or seeking spiritually or whatever.

SPEAKER_01 25:34

So tell us a little bit about that book. Um I know you mentioned that you will you wanted to bring the experience of having it. How was you able to do that?

SPEAKER_00 25:46

Well, one of the things we did in our ministry, um, we whenever we did a workshop, we had a heaven room and we had actors and staging and lighting, and we wrote original music for it, and it was like a heaven simulation. And at one of the workshops, I did this really audacious thing. There were 30 people coming, and I told them, I will interview you for an hour about your worst experience in life, and then I will rewrite your story from heaven's perspective. And then when they came to the heaven room in the workshop, they got a handmade leather journal from Jesus with their story rewritten as it would look from heaven. Um, and people shared stories incredible, yeah. Abuse and deaths in the family and financial reverses. But so I did 30 hours worth of interviews about people's worst experiences, and then about 40 hours worth of writing their stories from heaven, and I got in a mode for a couple of months where it was like I could ask Jesus any question I could think of about heaven, and I'd get an answer. So I ended up with 80 pages of notes about heaven, and that was the genesis of this book. Oh, how incredible. So, for instance, a story might be um there's a chapter in the book about the great ones in heaven, the people who are great, and the great ones in that chapter are a mother and an autistic daughter, and the mother gave her life to raise this child who couldn't even speak and was never able to give anything back. Um but in heaven, um, you know, your brain might be broken, but your spirit is not, right? And every memory of every moment in their lives is stored up in heaven. So when they get to heaven and they're both made perfect, they can relive every moment that was lost. So heaven has the ability to take even something like that and make all things well as if it never was. And in heaven, the love that this experience pulled out and the sacrifice has made such an incredible bond between them that they are acknowledged in heaven. They're famous in heaven, even though they were unknown on earth. And all of that comes from an actual person I interviewed who, you know, she was a young ministry woman and wanted to have a basketball team full of kids, and her first child was born severely disabled. And so she has done full-time ministry for 30 years to this one person. Um and her, her uh, we always ask, what's your biggest unanswered question? If Jesus walked into the room and you could ask him one thing, what would you ask? And her question was, Will I ever hear my daughter say mama? Um and in heaven she will. So heaven has the power to make all things well.

SPEAKER_01 29:06

Wow, that's amazing. They get to experience heaven on earth. Yeah, through the word of God. That's awesome. That's awesome.

SPEAKER_00 29:15

Another story that's in the book in a different form is one of my own stories. I I had an experience where a key matter in my life, I loaned him our life savings, and it took years to get it back and destroyed our relationship. And that was never reconciled. And afterward I saw counselor for a year, and it helped me get down to this belief I had that um I believed that my destiny was dependent on their favor. And if I didn't have his favor, I'd never be able to accomplish what I was supposed to in life. So I had to reach the point of being able to say, Jesus, my destiny depends on you and me and nobody else. Um but years later, I'm doing one of these story interviews for the counselor that walked me through this. And his story was that his father was a pastor who had a moral failure and he was being restored and suddenly died. And my friend's question was, What happened to my dad's call? He was called to be influential in our community, and where did it go? And the story I wrote for him was that all calls are shared, they're communal, and God takes the parts of our destiny that we don't finish and distributes them to the people around us so that when we get to heaven, those people can come to us and say, Look, you didn't finish parts of this, but I did. So join me and we'll celebrate in the fulfillment of your destiny. Uh, and I thought this was a great story. And a couple weeks later, I'm talking to him about something else. And he he says, Where are you on your healing journey with this guy that I loan money to? This is 10 years down the road. And God spoke to me and said, That story you wrote is your story. That you guys were called to do some things together, and there's a lot of that that never happened that I gave to you, and you finished it bigger than the two of you ever dreamed. So when I get to heaven, I'm gonna get to go to him and say, Hey, you know, I know our relationship crashed out, but God gave these parts of our destiny to me, and I've finished them bigger than we ever dreamed. So here, share with me in the reward of our fulfilled destiny, and in that moment, our relationship will be everything that God ever intended for it to be, because we'll be in heaven sharing in the completion of what God gave us to do. So even though it broke down on earth, heaven still has the ability to fix it.

SPEAKER_01 32:03

Yes, that's amazing. That is amazing. I like that. So if you can give our audience one piece of advice, what would it be?

SPEAKER_00 32:15

Oh, as a coach, I don't give a whole lot of advice.

SPEAKER_01 32:19

I know, right?

SPEAKER_00 32:21

Um, I would say ask Jesus this question Jesus, what do you like about me? Um and just take 30 seconds to listen. And the first thing that comes to your mind, you asked for a fish, he's not gonna give you a stone. Jesus actually likes you. He doesn't just love you because he has to, and it's his mission. He actually likes you, he likes being around you. He's happy that he made you, he's happy that you're part of the family. And ask him about that.

SPEAKER_01 32:58

I like that. That's I like that advice actually. Uh, I was in uh freedom prayer one time, and when you went when you're in there in the seating for you, one person is asking you questions, and you have to answer what first comes to mind because it's you're in prayer and you're answering based on that. And I kid you not and talk about freedom. It was amazing the stuff that the Lord talked to you about in those moments that are definitely substantiate everything from scripture, but it was really nice to hear that you know, when you really sit down and think of when you really sit down and listen to the voice of God, it's amazing. So, Tony, thank you so much for what you're doing. I love your books. I will put them in the links in the in the video, as well as um your contact information so that people can reach out. And I just love the visualization. Thank you for that because that was so encouraging. And I read the word all the time, but I never thought about the visualization at that level. And also um, to the audience, I hope this video encouraged you like it did me. And I thank you so much for listening. And if you know someone who really can you, if you've if you're a Bible study facilitator, check this book out because sometimes we don't look at the Bible from a human posture, right? Because we we and we try so hard to not be human that we need to be human because we relate that way. Yeah, and so I just hope that you can share this video with someone else who has a Bible study group so they can start their next Bible study group with this book so they can actually experience what it's like to take a group of people into a situation where they're able to come from their perspective and put and put their narrative to the story, which we do anyway when we read the word. So I pray that this is a blessing to you, and please do share, subscribe, and follow. And um, because we always always have amazing people all like Tony. And so, Tony, thank you so much for coming on the show today and have a fantastic Monday.