What are you ashamed of? If you’re like most people, a blunt question like this has the power to resurface long-ago-buried memories of wrongdoing. It doesn’t even matter whether you were caught or got away with it, shame can stay with us for many years—and yet it is too often ignored and unresolved.
On today’s episode of the Great Stories podcast, David Wollen and his wife, Marci, are joined by author and counselor Heather Davis Nelson. In this conversation, they discuss the destructive force shame can have on the life of a believer, how it is as old as sin itself, and how Jesus ultimately redeems us and rescues us.
How do we heal our brokenness and find freedom from shame? “Unashamed” by Heather Davis Nelson explores the chains that bind us and points us to the one who redeems us and makes us new.
Whether it’s related to relationships, body image, work difficulties, or a secret sin, we all experience shame at some point in our lives. While shame can manifest itself in different ways—fear, regret, and anger—it ultimately points us to our most fundamental need as human beings: redemption.
Heather Davis Nelson invites us to not only be healed of our own shame but also be a part of healing for others—after all, shame never disappears in solitude. In this book, Nelson shines the life-giving light of the gospel on the things that leave us feeling worthless and rejected. Through the gospel, we discover the only real and lasting antidote to shame: exchanging our shame for the righteousness of Christ alongside others on this same journey.
If you liked what you heard, please write a review and help new listeners discover the show!
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Did you know that Haven Ministries is celebrating 90 incredible years of ministry?
If you missed our live 90th anniversary celebration, no worries! You can catch all the highlights and heartwarming moments in the video below. Be encouraged as David Wollen, Charles Morris, Joni Eareckson Tada, and more reflect on Haven’s rich history of sharing the gospel for 90 years … and counting!
All About Jesus Hymns (CD)
A good hymn has the power to catch your ear, warm your heart, and fill your soul with truths about God and His Word. Haven’s 90th anniversary album All About Jesus Hymns seeks to inspire this through foundational anthems of the Christian faith, including “Softly & Tenderly,” “How Great Thou Art,” “I Surrender All,” and more.
Allow the familiar voices of Steve Ragsdale, Paul Sandberg, Truitt Ford, and other vocalists through the years to lead you to Jesus in a deeply personal way. This hand-selected collection brings together 20 of the Haven Quartet’s greatest recordings in a new 90th anniversary album that includes a commemorative booklet on Haven’s rich legacy from 1934 to the present day.
This commemorative album includes an accompanying booklet featuring the rich history of Haven Ministries! Go back in time with photos of First Mate Bob, the Haven Quartet, Charles Morris, and more.
God speaks powerfully through the books of the Bible. This is especially true in the Psalms. Not only does it include words to help us express our deepest thoughts and emotions to the Lord, it can also direct our worship and draw us nearer to Jesus.
On today’s episode of the Great Stories podcast, David Wollen is joined by one of his good friends and mentors, Dr. David Sunday. After serving 30 years as a pastor, Dr. Sunday is now the president of WordPartners, a ministry that exists to train pastors to teach God’s Word with God’s heart.
In this conversation, Dr. Sunday shares how the Psalms teach us to lament, repent, praise, and thank—all while pointing to Jesus and giving us a path to flee to Him for refuge.
FURTHER RESOURCES
Recently on Haven Today, David Wollen walks through 1 and 2 Samuel to uncover how Saul, Samuel, and David point to Israel’s need for a perfect prophet, priest, and king who can only be fulfilled in Jesus Christ. Listen to the 10-part series here.
Haven is excited to announce their newly published book! It was written to help you read and pray through all of Scripture — with the eyes of your heart fixed on Jesus!
Christ in All the Scriptures: Reading and Praying Through the Bible in a Year is a 264-page resource written with you in mind and is the first of its kind from Haven. This easy‑to‑navigate book contains overviews of each book in the Bible and prayers centered on each reading. It helps you see more of Jesus on every page of your Bible … and that, in turn, will help draw you nearer to Christ as you engage with Him through the Word.
66 Contextual Book Summaries
Guided Prayers
365 Daily Readings
Ribbon Bookmark
Clothbound
You can use it to help you read the Bible in a year — with a reading for each week — or as a reference to pray through the Scriptures at whatever pace and place in Scripture you are reading God’s Word.
If you liked what you heard, please write a review and help new listeners discover the show!
Sign up for the Great Stories Podcast newsletter to get a weekly update on new episodes each Wednesday.
How can all the Bible be all about Jesus when His name doesn’t explicitly appear till the New Testament? From Genesis to Leviticus to Esther, it may be hard to see Jesus on the surface of every page, but he’s there—in profound and subtle ways.
Dr. Dennis Johnson is a scholar and one of the founding faculty members of Westminster Seminary in California. Today, he joins David Wollen to discuss a christocentric approach to reading and studying God’s Word.
If you are new to this way of reading the Bible, we encourage you to be patient. It may take some time to learn to see Jesus on every page, but it’s important and worth the effort. Because this is not merely a hermeneutical trick of smoke and mirrors … it’s the way Jesus himself taught his disciples to study and teach the Scriptures.
Further Resources
This week on Haven Today, David Wollen walks us through 1 Samuel to uncover how this Old Testament book points to Israel’s need for a perfect prophet, priest, and king who can only be fulfilled in Jesus Christ. Listen to this week’s series here.
Haven is excited to announce their newly published book! It was written to help you read and pray through all of Scripture — with the eyes of your heart fixed on Jesus!
Christ in All the Scriptures: Reading and Praying Through the Bible in a Year is a 264-page resource written with you in mind and is the first of its kind from Haven. This easy‑to‑navigate book contains overviews of each book in the Bible and prayers centered on each reading. It helps you see more of Jesus on every page of your Bible … and that, in turn, will help draw you nearer to Christ as you engage with Him through the Word.
66 Contextual Book Summaries
Guided Prayers
365 Daily Readings
Ribbon Bookmark
Clothbound
You can use it to help you read the Bible in a year — with a reading for each week — or as a reference to pray through the Scriptures at whatever pace and place in Scripture you are reading God’s Word.
If you liked what you heard, please write a review and help new listeners discover the show!
Sign up for the Great Stories Podcast newsletter to get a weekly update on new episodes each Wednesday.
With a Bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other, Charles Morris has shared the great story that’s all about Jesus for a quarter century. Today he crosses the finish line. Though he will return as a guest on the program in the future, Charles is now stepping away from daily production … but not before sharing a few memories and prayers.
In honor of these 25 years, we asked Charles a few questions about his time as Havens’ fourth president & speaker, the people he met, the moments he saw Christ move, and the prayers he has for the ministry’s future.
You’ve interviewed many people over the years. Sometimes we reshare those interviews on the air. But there are a few that have unfortunately been lost to time. Can you share about an interview you did that you wish we could unearth?
Two interviews stand out in particular that we lost in our archives due to moving our office when we sold the old Maranatha music studios and moved to another part of greater Los Angeles. One was an interview with the famous Chuck Smith, who founded Calvary Chapel and took part in the Jesus Revolution movement. I used to have lunch with him when our office was a few blocks from his church. On the program, he shared his life story. We even had him sing.
The other one was when I had first come to Haven. I was speaking — the Haven of Rest Quartet was with me — in Pennsylvania. And this man shared his story about how someone broke into his house late one night. I don’t remember the whole story, but it was a robbery. The intruder wielded a hatchet and as the man tried to defend himself and his wife against this home invasion. He was struck in the head with this hatchet and he almost died. And it left him with recurring headaches. He had to take disability. The lingering effects meant he couldn’t work anymore.
But the highlight of this story that we lost in our archives was that he decided to ask himself, “What would Jesus do?” He went to the prison and shared the gospel with the very man who tried to kill him and led him to faith in Christ. When the man was released, they took him in and ministered to him.
What a sweet, sweet story of grace. A sweet story of repentance and forgiveness. The gospel works in the most unlikely of circumstances. The gospel still works today.
Is there a guest you always wanted to have on the program but it never seemed to pan out?
Charles Morris in his twenties, working as a state capitol correspondent in Missouri.
I interviewed Billy Graham as a secular journalist, but I was never able to interview Billy after coming to Haven and that’s something I wish I could have done as a Christian pastor on the radio. I did interview George Beverly Shea for Haven, but Billy was unable to do interviews at that point.
But I did spend half an hour with him doing an interview as a secular journalist. Even though I was a believer, it was a totally different context. But to his credit, he still shared the Lord in a secular interview.
A lot of our listeners express how great it would be to meet so many Christian authors, pastors, and artists. Is there a moment in your 25 years where you met a personal hero?
I think there were heroes of mine that I really warmed up to, that were either theologians or preachers. One that comes to mind was the late John Stott who pastored a famous church in London, close to Buckingham Palace. Queen Elizabeth asked the current king as a young man to go and learn more about the Christian faith from John Stott. And every time Billy Graham would pass through London, he tried to make sure he was there on a Sunday so he could hear John Stott preach.
The last interview John Stott ever gave was with Haven Today when he was speaking in Santa Barbara California. And one topic that did not go on the program was I asked him about hobbies. He was famous as a birdwatcher, a twitcher. And he even wrote a book about God’s creation and being a twitcher.
Another one, since I’m thinking in twos, the other one would be the times that we put on a well known pastor in New York City, Tim Keller, who’s also now with the Lord. We first knew him in Philadelphia.
We had him on a number of times, but probably the most significant time was on 9/11. I was on the road speaking and I gave four questions along with Tim and Kathy’s private, unlisted phone number to team member Robert Jacobson. And I said to Robert, “Just keep dialing over and over again.” Finally, Tim picked up the phone.
This was the only interview that Tim did with anyone that day. He thought at this point he had lost 2,000 from his congregation in the World Trade Towers. Thankfully, he didn’t lose that many, but it still ended up being a few hundred. And that crisis led to a period of depression for Tim and his wife, but he still had to lead — he still had to pastor his flock. He still had to minister Christ to people who were hurting after 9/11 in New York City.
Charles Morris interviews Tyler Van Halteren about Pilgrim’s Progress
Charles Morris interviews Phil Vischer on VeggieTales and What’s in the Bible?
Charles Morris interviews Sally Lloyd-Jones about the Jesus Storybook Bible
Charles Morris interviews Jacob Dienner about grace in Lancaster County
Charles Morris interviews N.T. Wright about the historical resurrection of Christ
Charles Morris & David Wollen interview Joni Eareckson Tada on Christ’s presence
You often get to meet listeners when traveling who get the chance to tell you what Haven has meant to them. Is there a moment like this that sticks out in your mind?
One was a young Mennonite lad about 15 years old in Pennsylvania. His family drove a couple of hours to where we were holding an event. He had recently met the Lord listening to Haven Today, and they wanted to bring their son and the rest of their family to just say thank you. His voice hadn’t quite changed yet at 15 years old. And that was just encouraging to see that the Lord would use us, you know, and use the program to lead people to Christ.
And then back to 9/11, this couple heard the program whose son worked in the World Trade Center. And they tried repeatedly and couldn’t reach him. They had just heard our program, and a couple weeks before they were in New York City and had gone to church with their son who had just graduated a few months before from Wheaton College. And the pastor they heard preach was Tim Keller.
So, roll ahead about five years later, I was staying at a Christian retreat center in Michigan. The head of the ministry said there’s a couple I want you to meet. They run our retreat center. They used to run a bed and breakfast, but now they’re with us.
It was the same couple who had lost their son and they had just received some of the fragments of their son’s body. We sat there in this large kitchen and wept together. Their son knew the Lord, but he lost his life in the World Trade Center on 9/11. And somehow they just happened to listen to our radio program five years before and hear their son’s pastor on the air. I’ve visited them since. I saw them a couple years ago when I was in Michigan. I stopped and had a memorable lunch with them.
You’ve gotten to see Christ move in many places. Would you mind sharing a story from your far flung travels that showed you how God was at work in surprising ways?
Some of the trips into Iraq come to mind. ISIS was bearing down and I was in this city of 100,000 that was empty — an historic, ancient Christian city. And I’m very thankful for an Iraqi soldier.
I was doing a live interview over the phone and ISIS had used this church courtyard for target practice. And I was doing this interview there on my cell phone on a talk show back in the United States. I started to step into a room and all of a sudden this soldier grabs me by the back of my collar and yanks me out. There was an unexploded IED in that room that had not been disabled and I was one step away from hitting the trip wire. It would have been on live radio in Los Angeles had that happened.
But the interesting thing was every time I go into a part of the world where Christianity was birthed, but now is such a minority. I always meet new believers. It’s in the last 20 years that more Muslims have come to faith in Christ than the last 1400 years combined. And that kept increasing even faster as ISIS tried to grow its caliphate.
But the people I would meet, through Spirit-inspired moments, often had an encounter with Jesus in a vision or a dream. And then somehow, in a part of the world where there aren’t Bibles, they found a Bible and started reading God’s Word.
I’d say, “I’m a Christian pastor from North America. I’m here doing radio programs to send back home, and they would all say, “I’m a lover of Jesus.” I found that very intriguing. They hadn’t been to Sunday school. They didn’t have church to attend, but they had somehow met the risen Lord. A smile would appear on their faces as they would say, “I’m a lover of Jesus.”
Wow! Doesn’t get better than that. I’m a lover of Jesus, too. And there may have been a language barrier but there wasn’t a faith barrier.
Ukraine was a significant trip too. The Christians we encountered there at the border who were escaping and leaving their husbands behind, not knowing if they would ever see grandparents, husbands, dads again. And then we’d start hearing the stories of how the Lord was using a war and an invasion of a country to bring people to faith. I’ll go to my grave thinking about that.
You’ve been making 26-minute radio programs every weekday for the past 25 years. Now that you’ve gone emeritus, what will a day in the life of Charles Morris start to look like?
Well, I still have projects I’m working on for Haven, primarily the Amazing Grace movie which we’re working on to get out the door. The book is published, but the movie still has to be finished and released.
But, you know, I don’t like the word retirement. It’s hard to get to the point where you’ve worked so many years, so many hours, and just stop. I mean, for many years I’d start at six in the morning, work even more after dinner, and still put in a full day on Saturdays. Three or four more hours Sunday after church, too. Because, as my predecessor the late Ray Ortlund warned me, it’s a freight train that’s always moving. And it’s always moving until you jump off. And I’m jumping off. But I’m not finished yet.
The wonderful thing is we get to serve Christ until the day they die. The Lord will always keep bringing tasks into our lives. Our work on earth is never done until he calls us home. And that’s the joy of following Jesus. That alone is our full time job, whether you’re working and paid to do that or not.
What is your prayer for Haven Ministries now and in the future?
That as technology changes, we will be able to reach more people than ever before.
As I leave, Haven is on more radio stations than we’ve ever been on in the history of the ministry. But there are still people who need to be reached with grace. I pray that we would be able to continue the broadcast with the gospel and reach more people through new technologies that I can’t even envision – to share the risen Christ. The only answer to all problems, to all issues, and to all darkness is Jesus.
What is your prayer for Haven’s many listeners and readers?
I pray to see Christ reign in the lives of more people everywhere. That every day they would hear the words of Jesus, and respond to Jesus speaking to them. For those who don’t know Christ and those who do know Christ, every day may they hear the Savior say, “Come to me … and I’ll give you rest.” Just unpack that from the gospels. That would be my prayer.
How can Christian parents and grandparents hope to disciple their children amid the struggles of everyday life? Even more, how can we use these often chaotic moments as golden opportunities to lead them to Jesus?
On today’s episode of the Great Stories podcast, Charles Morris and David Wollen are joined by Christian parents, including David’s wife, Marci, who share their own unique approaches to raising children to know and love Jesus. Later in the episode, Charles Morris goes on to discuss the tender subject of what to do when your child walks away from the faith.
On this episode, you’ll also hear from two members of the Haven Team. Tamara Chamberlain is an author, podcaster, and mother of three children with her husband, Dale. She also serves as Haven’s director of project management. Troy Lamberth is a filmmaker, podcaster, pastor, co-founder of Five Solas Media, and father of three children with his wife, Melissa. He also serves as Haven’s executive producer.
More Resources for Christian Parents
There are many ways to disciple a child to faith in Christ, but some are more helpful than others. These 6 simple ways to lead your child to Jesus is hardly exhaustive, but it’s a great place to start.
If you liked what you heard, please write a review and help new listeners discover the show!
Sign up for the Great Stories Podcast newsletter to get a weekly update on new episodes each Wednesday.
War between Israel and Hamas have dominated the headlines for months. And yet news about what Christ is doing, even in the midst of great suffering and conflict, is often overlooked. Here to talk about it, as well as how modern Jews are discovering Christ in Old Testament Scriptures, is the Executive Director of Jews for Jesus, David Brickner.
Three months have now passed since Hamas invaded Israel, sparking a war that continues to rage on today. Following that initial attack, Haven listeners responded by sending more than $200,000 directly to Israel to provide help and hope through Jews for Jesus. On today’s episode, David Brickner will also offer updates from the field on how this support has been used to feed Israelis — both physically and spiritually.
If you liked what you heard, please write a review and help new listeners discover the show!
Sign up for the Great Stories Podcast newsletter to get a weekly update on new episodes each Wednesday.
Christmas is usually a time when we look back on stories of ages past. Think of classic tales like A Christmas Carol or The Night Before Christmas or even It’s a Wonderful Life. But what about some extraordinary stories that we don’t often get to hear — modern Christmas stories from ordinary people, like you and me, that help us see Christ in Christmas.
That’s what this episode of the Great Stories Podcast is all about. These “Christmas Nuggets” (as Charles has been calling them) whisper the name of someone you and I both know and love and talk about this time of year … a hint, his name isn’t Santa Claus.
As you anticipate Christ this Christmas, it is our prayer that these conversations will be just what you need to hear at Christmas, ultimately reminding you of your Savior and what he came to do on that first Christmas.
If you liked what you heard, please write a review and help new listeners discover the show!
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It’s the nightmare call every parent fears. For Charles and Janet Morris, the news of their son’s death came on a late Summer night in 2003. Nearly five years later, they sat down to speak with friend and counselor Dr. Dan Allender for a public discussion of their son’s overdose, the courage they’ve found in the intervening years, and the understanding they’ve gained that Jesus rescued their son — even through death.
Now twenty years after the incident, we are sharing this vulnerable conversation that has been a profound resource for so many who have also been touched by similar tragedy and grief. Whether you have experienced the loss of a loved one or not, we pray this episode from the Haven archives will bring you hope.
More from Charles & Janet Morris
All week on Haven Today, we are revisiting content related to the struggles of grief, loss, and drug addiction — all pointing to Jesus. Listen in to hear Charles’ appearance on the air the day after his son died, as well as more from other parents relating their own unique situations.
The book Saving a Life by Charles and Janet Morris goes into greater detail the process they went through following Jeff’s overdose. You can get your copy here.
If you liked what you heard, please write a review and help new listeners discover the show!
Sign up for the Great Stories Podcast newsletter to get a weekly update on new episodes each Wednesday.
With a reach of over 500,000 people a day, it’s often hard to visualize who is listening. We want you to meet Louise Farmer, a listener and supporter of Haven Ministries. Just like you, her partnership helps provide hope to a troubled world.
As you think about how Haven has blessed you over the past twelve months, will you consider making your year end gift before December 31?
Your Year End Gift to Haven
Since 1934, Haven Ministries has existed to be exactly what our name suggests — a Christ-focused refuge that offers hope for a troubled world. With conflict and uncertainty raging high in our world, what we really need is the hope of Jesus.
Today, we are asking friends of Haven Ministries to help us fulfill this mission by raising $745,127 by the end of the year. Will you give now to help us finish strong?
Your partnership today allows Haven to be a beacon of hope for hundreds of thousands of people. Thank you so much for your generosity to provide . . .
Hope by radio over 650+ stations in North America
Hope in the hands of 14,000 devotional readers
Hope throughout Cuba and the Spanish speaking world
Unashamed
