The Lie Behind Your Busy Schedule | Ian Simkins

Ian Simkins believes most of us aren't simply busy. We're addicted to it, and underneath the addiction is a lie about what makes us valuable.

In this episode of the Academy of the Bible Podcast, Colby F. Maier sits down with Ian Simkins, pastor of The Bridge in middle Tennessee and author of Every Table an Altar: Reclaiming Connection in a World of Division, Distraction, and Loneliness. At sixteen Ian was playing in a punk band when his pastor pulled him aside and told him he was preaching the following month. It went badly. A woman in the church found him afterward and said two things — that was really bad, and I believe the Lord has given you a voice, so you better learn how to use it.

Years later, a church hired him out of student ministry. A year after that the lead pastor was forcibly removed for moral failures, the congregation spiraled, and the elders discovered they were six months from bankruptcy. They asked a single man in his mid-twenties to take it. He said not really. They asked him to spend a week in prayer and fasting first, and God did a complete reversal in his heart.

Ian makes the case that discipleship is slower and messier than most of us are prepared for, and that the church has absorbed an obsession with scalability, output, and return on investment that quietly works against formation. He admits he loves it when someone notices how full his calendar is, and that somewhere along the way he bought the lie that he is only as valuable as what he can accomplish.

Along the way: Henri Nouwen's three lies — I am what I have, I am what I do, I am what other people say about me — and why better time management doesn't touch any of them. Dallas Willard's distinction that grace isn't opposed to effort, it's opposed to earning. Why spiritual formation is more crock-pot than microwave. And what we actually lose when we outsource hard work to AI, which isn't the output but the person we would have become.

Ian argues that friction is the thing that forms us, which is exactly why we avoid it. He talks about a marriage that isn't precious to him because they never fight, but because they've been to hell and back together. He names the three things he heard over and over when he spent his first six months in a new town just listening — division, distraction, and loneliness — and why tribalism is a parody of belonging while Christian community remains, as Francis Schaeffer put it, the last great apologetic.

The episode closes on the one thing he'd say to someone exploring faith for the first time. The truest thing about you is that you're loved. He grew up in church, knew the Bible stories, and it took him well into his twenties to believe it.

For anyone who is tired in a way sleep doesn't fix.

Scripture and sources in this episode: Matthew 13 (yeast and the mustard seed), Matthew 18 (children and the kingdom), Henri Nouwen, Dallas Willard, Francis Schaeffer

Every Table an Altar by Ian Simkins: https://iansimkins.com/every-table-an-altar

Go deeper with the Academy of the Bible — courses, lectures, and weekly community around the Word of God: academyofthebible.org

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Colby F. Maier is a pastor, speaker, and founder of the Academy of the Bible, based in Portland, OR.