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Podcast: Robert Smith on Recording the Entire ESV Bible: “It Humbled Me”

August 14, 2024 by: Crossway

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

“Most Challenging and Most Rewarding”

In this special episode, Robert Smith discusses his long career in preaching and teaching God’s Word, the unique characteristics of African American preaching and how that impacted his approach to reading Scripture aloud, and what it was like to record the entire Bible in just six weeks.

ESV Audio Bible, Read by Robert Smith

ESV Audio Bible, Read by Robert Smith

Crossway

The Bible is made up of 66 books that tell the magnificent story of God’s redemptive work through Christ. In this audio recording of the full Bible, that story comes alive in a fresh way through the voice of teacher and preacher Robert Smith.

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Topics Addressed in This Interview:

01:06 - Called to a Life of Preaching and Teaching the Bible

Matt Tully
Robert, thank you so much for joining me today on The Crossway Podcast.

Robert Smith
Thank you, my brother. It’s a joy and a privilege to be here representing Jesus.

Matt Tully
Absolutely. I think it’s fair to say that you have devoted much of your life, a significant portion of your life, to preaching God’s word and also to teaching other people how to do the same. You were a pastor for over two decades. You’ve written award-winning books on preaching. You taught preaching at Southern Seminary, and now you hold the Charles T. Carter Baptist Chair of Divinity at Beeson Divinity School. But I actually want to go back before all of that, before all those accomplishments, and I wonder if you can take us back to the moment that you first realized that God was calling you to a life of preaching and teaching the Bible. When was that?

Robert Smith
It was when I was fourteen years of age. I had been trained by my pastor as a junior deacon that carried no authorial power, but he demanded excellence. I needed to know by heart, not memorization, but by heart the Twenty-Four Articles of Faith. I needed to know the Baptist Church Covenant by heart. I needed to be able to be articulate and to be able to internalize Scripture. So at age fourteen I had the privilege of teaching deacons. I know that seems strange. It seems strange to me. I don’t understand it to this day. But I had such a desire for the word of God, so I was given that opportunity of teaching deacons for their Sunday school class. And then I had a desire to be with older people—those are the people I hung around with. I had very few friends my age. I loved to go to the mother’s board meetings and listen to the mothers sing the hymns and pray. I loved to visit the convalescence centers and the hospitals where seniors were there sick and aging, etc. So I would go from church to church and collect bulletins and look at their sick and shut-in lists, and I would inquire about who was a senior, and I’d go and visit them. I don’t know where that came from, my brother, except the Lord. No one told me to do that. I was unauthorized, but I had such a desire to be with them and to pray and sing songs as a teenager. But at age seventeen I had to make a decision. I had a choice to go on and do baseball. I was being the told that I had a career as a Major League Baseball player. We were traveling every Sunday. And the Lord told me, so to speak, “Choose you this day whom you will serve.” Not that anything is wrong with baseball. It’s wonderful. But that’s when I knew I had to make a choice. Who was going to be dominant in my life? Was the Major League Baseball career or was the Lord? And when I chose the Lord—he chose me, of course, and I responded to what he had chosen. While I was at the New Mission Baptist Church in Cincinnati, Ohio, worshiping with my congregation in that church, the Lord called me—I know he did—to a specific ministry of preaching and teaching. And I surrendered to that. Little did I know that ten years later I would become the pastor of the church in which I was worshiping, and I would serve eight years as assistant pastor, and twenty years as senior pastor—a total of twenty-eight years. But it was at that meeting on June 10th, 1966 where God specifically impressed upon me a calling to the preaching and teaching ministry. And that’s where it happened and when it happened.

Matt Tully
I’m just struck by how at such a young age to be so sensitive to the Lord, so desirous of his word, so desirous of fellowship with other believers, even older believers who could teach you things and you could learn a lot from them. Were your parents believers?

Robert Smith
My father was a deacon. He gave me the privilege as a junior deacon to sit with him and the other deacons on the front row, because they open up the worship services on Sunday morning. And they gave me a chance to read the Scripture before the whole congregation, to pray for the whole congregation, and to lead a song. That was powerful. I can still see myself sitting next to my dad, and my feet dangling, not nearly touching the floor, but it was just that atmosphere. You talk about being sensitive; I didn’t know what I was doing. I look back now and I stand amazed. It wasn’t anything on my part. Nothing on my part. It was God who was moving me and putting me in places and giving me favor with people like the senior women and men who were mentoring me. We didn’t know the word mentoring. I had never heard that word before, or discipling, but that’s what they were doing. And it was God all the way, preparing the way for me so that he could prepare me for the way.

Matt Tully
So your first experience teaching was maybe teaching this deacon’s class, but do you remember the first formal sermon that you delivered? Do you remember the moment of walking up to a pulpit and getting ready to preach the word to a congregation?

Robert Smith
Yeah. Before I actually taught the deacon’s class for Sunday school, I knocked on doors in the community. I didn’t know the word evangelism or evangelizing or canvassing the community, but that’s what I did, because I wanted to gather people in the neighborhood to come to our house, which was an apartment (I was a teenage boy), and to study the Bible. And so forty people or more came every Tuesday night, and I would be teaching the Bible to people that I had gathered from the community, and I would borrow chairs from the church. That was the Lord. But I preached my first sermon on July 3rd, 1966 at the Rose Chapel Missionary Baptist Church at that time. And the text I used was Luke 4:18: “The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me because he has anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor, to heal the brokenhearted, to give sight to the blind . . . .” And I preached that passage, Luke 4:18–22. And that was my sermon. The title of the sermon was “Lord, I Shall Preach the Gospel.” That was the title of it. Now that I look at that sermon and, of course, my Dean at that time, Dean Timothy George, we got to talking about it. He wanted to see if I had a copy. I searched and I found it—handwritten, something like twenty pages. And I discovered, because you just do what God has called you to do; you don’t necessarily know how you do it—but when I looked at it, I discovered that after, at that time, after about thirty-five years, that I’m still preaching the same way. I call it exegetical weaving—exposing the text and using exposition, illustration, and application all the way through the passage. I don’t do things any different. I wasn’t trained to do that. I don’t know where that came from, brother. No one taught me that, in terms of a homiletician. It’s been God all the way. I’m ignorant. That’s all. He’s the one who has taught me.

09:03 - Characteristics of African American Preaching

Matt Tully
One of your areas of academic interest and research is the literary history of African American preaching. For those of us who didn’t grow up hearing African American preachers on a regular basis, what are some of the most important distinctives or characteristics of that, in your experience, and how would you summarize what it is that defines that kind of preaching?

Robert Smith
Well, African American preaching doesn’t have a monopoly on preaching. No preaching tradition has a monopoly or ownership. But African American preaching, at its best, borrows from the best of preaching—the best of white preaching, the best of Hispanic preaching, the best of Asian preaching, the best of Native American. And there’s a confluence, like a good honeybee drawing from the nectar and the pollen from different flowers, and then comes back to his own beehive and makes his own honey. Or, African American preaching milks a lot of cows and makes his own cheese. So it blackenizes what it has. Like you, you would whitenize it. You dip it in chocolate. White chocolate, black chocolate; both of them are good. I love white chocolate. Sweet! I love black chocolate. Sweet! And so the mold, the contour, the nature of African American preaching, in terms of its presentation, is narrative. It’s story. Blacks come from an oral tradition. They would not allow the slaves to read and write, so they don’t come from a script tradition. Whites come from a script tradition, in the literary sense. They could read and they could write. And whites would teach blacks to read and to write, even though it was illegal at that particular time. So narrative is really important. That’s why the stories of Joshua fit the battle Jericho and the walls came to me down, and Daniel and the lion's den, and the three Hebrew boys, those stories come out of the womb of their own tradition. The Exodus—forty years of slavery—blacks identify with that. As God brought Israel out of Egypt, God will bring those who are oppressed out. And as God brought Daniel out of the lion’s den, then God will bring us out. It’s identification that’s important. So you will discover in African American preaching that there are two voices that are heard, at least. There’s the voice of personal witness. That is “I.” Testimony. “I have experienced this.” It’s not just telling the congregation about Daniel going into the lion’s den. “I have been to the lion’s den, and this is what God has done.” Then there’s the voice of personal address. That is, “You, you, you. God can bring you out of the lion’s den. God can deliver you.” Because people want to hear about the preacher, not just to hear the preacher tell the story from the Bible. They want to take the word that was in the Bible and see it become the word that is in the twenty-first century. Ray Stedman said that the New Testament is not twenty centuries old. He said the New Testament is one century old, repeated for twenty centuries. So the same thing that happened in the first century is happening in the twentieth century and in the nineteenth century. And the answer to it is what was answered then: Christ. So that becomes important, to hear the voice of personal experience through personal witness, and then personal address. Those two things. And then I guess the last thing is there is a sense of passion. I don’t mean emotionalism, but passion, where the heart of the preacher is touched by the text, in terms of his interpretation. And the preacher sees what the text is saying and says with joy what he has seen, or what she has seen, and it becomes alive. “This is my story. This is my song. Praising my Savior all the day long.” There are several others, lots of others, but those are a few.

14:00 - Called to the Ministry of Reading the Bible for Others

Matt Tully
In addition to everything we’ve discussed, all of this experience that you have preaching God’s word, you’re now also an audio Bible narrator. What went through your head when Crossway first approached you about doing this kind of a project?

Robert Smith
Number one, I can’t do it. Number two, I can’t do it. Number three, I can’t do it. And then God asked me, “Do you believe what you’ve been preaching? You’ve been telling people that with God all things are possible. And you’re saying you can’t do it? You’re right about one thing—you can’t do it if it’s something you’re going to do, but I can do it through you.” That’s why I undertook it. And so that’s what initially went through my head. And then it was, for me, a challenge, if you will, at that time, after fifty-five years of preaching, to ask, “Was this something that you did because you needed to have a career? Was that it? Or did you have an irresistible urge when God called you? And if you believed it, then is there anything that God calls you to do that, with his help, you can’t do?” Once I got that straight, I was ready to go. And understand that I’ve never had a challenge and I’ve never entered into any enterprise, now in almost fifty-eight years of preaching, that has been more challenging and the most rewarding. Nothing. I don’t care about writing anything. I don’t care about standing before Westminster Chapel where the great Martyn Lloyd-Jones preached and preaching there. I could go on and on and on. All of those fade and take back seats to what the Crossway Audio Bible ministry was for me and still remains for me.

Matt Tully
You talk about the feeling that you couldn’t do it and the challenge of actually doing it even after you decided to. Help us understand what was it about the project that was so intimidating or just felt impossible at first? And as you got into it, what were the things that made it just as difficult as it was? And then could you also speak to the sources of joy that came out as you were actually doing that work?

Robert Smith
Number one, I knew I had six weeks to read the Bible.

Matt Tully
Just six weeks?

Robert Smith
Six weeks. I couldn’t do it. August 6th, I believe, was when I ended, because the faculty retreat of Beeson Divinity School was going to take place within a week or so. I live in Cincinnati, Ohio, so I fly to Beeson Divinity School in Birmingham. I’ve done that for twenty-seven years. Once our school started, the kind of attention the Lord has given me to give to my students, I don’t have any time for something that is as prolonged as this. My work is with my students in the classroom, but most of it is with them one on one outside of it. An hour and a half with each student, two hours sometimes, or three hours. I don’t have time. And therefore, I knew that if it was going to be done, I had to have an uninterrupted period of time where I would start, and I did, at four o’clock in the morning and read to eight o’clock at night for six days a week.

Matt Tully
Wow!

Robert Smith
And that’s all I would do. On Sunday I’d give myself sometimes to preaching, but that was it. I had to be focused, even to the point that I dreamed about reading something. I literally dreamed about it. And it wasn’t just reading. It was getting my mind set to visualize what’s happening at Jericho, to be able to smell the atmosphere at the Dead Sea. To try to tune in to what’s going on in various battles, how people felt. Reading it was secondary to all of that. My preparation to read it took time and energy. And then the pronunciation of the words, like in 1 Chronicles and all that. I remember reading 1 Chronicles, maybe in the first or second chapter, and it took me about two or three hours, and I said, “I can’t do this.” And the Lord said, “You will.” I went back, and then I started seeing connections in the words in terms of the sounds, the phonetic sounds, and all that kind of thing. It became fun. I realized that this is the Lord’s doing, and whatever I had done so far, it just took off. It just absolutely took off.

Matt Tully
Before you even started this project, as a preacher you’ve obviously hundreds of hours reading God’s word, studying God’s word, pouring over God’s word. Do you feel like, though, through this experience of reading the Bible aloud completely, did that help you to see the Bible in a different way or in a fresh way? Do you feel like you’ve learned new things about God’s word through that experience of reading it aloud?

Robert Smith
I felt like, when reading the Bible before this experience, I was like the blind man that Jesus took and spit on his finger and put his finger in the man’s ears, touched his eyes, and asked him, “Can you see?” He said, “Yes.” “What do you see?” “I see men who look like trees.” The Lord gave him another touch. Then, he saw things as they were. In the words of the popular singer (I can’t think of his name) who says, “I can see clearly now. The rain has gone,” when I read the Bible in six weeks, I could see clearly. The whole counsel of God came together. That broad and overarching concept that unites and ties together every passage of Scripture so that it relates to the overall plan and comprehensive purpose of God revealed in the Scriptures by the Holy Spirit in order to magnify Jesus Christ. Now, because of that, God has enabled me now I can make the connections. The Bible is a network. I can put the dots together now by three or four examples from areas that we barely give any attention to. So what it has done is to cause me to be more responsible in my exegesis. I have less of an excuse now to say, “Well, I don’t know.” No. You’ve been exposed to this. So, much to whom much is given, much shall be required. It’s made preaching harder for me and teaching harder for me. And so I no longer see through a glass darkly, in a way, but I’m seeing more transparently, not as translucently as I was. It’s certainly not an opaque way, but that’s what has happened to me.

Matt Tully
It’s such a unique experience, I’m sure. Not many of us will have the opportunity or even the drive—we certainly probably could—to read the whole Bible in that short, compressed amount of time. But then to do that aloud, it just kind of adds a layer of hearing it read aloud. It’s just such a different experience even than reading it in our minds. How did you approach the schedule? Did you start at Genesis and read all the way straight through, or did you kind of jump around in Scripture?

Robert Smith
No. I read from Genesis 1:1 to Revelation 22:21. That’s the way I read it. And like I said, I would think about chapter 1, chapter 2. I’d visualize, because that’s very important. It’s part of the narrative of the African American tradition I was exposed to. You got to be able to see what you say so that you can say what you’ve seen. And so I think about this and think about the emotions. What are you saying that you haven’t seen? What are you hearing? What are you tasting? What are you smelling? What are you feeling? To bring all five of the senses. Maybe only one sense is in that passage, but that’s what happened. I got excited. It was hard to turn it off. I told you that I’d dream about this. I thought I read it, but didn’t realize I was just dreaming. The studio you guys set up for me was just great. I’d get to my office at the church early in the morning. I had wonderful helpers. They’d bring me tea, coffee, and food. Aside from them, I saw no one all day long. And I stayed there until about eight, went home, slept about four hours—maybe five—and that was it. And that’s the only way it could be done.

Matt Tully
What did your wife think about that schedule? That sounds like a pretty intense schedule. It’s a grueling routine almost, even if you’re enjoying that, to get up that early, to then work so long all day reading out loud, and then to come home and have a relatively quick night, and then back at it again. What was your family’s reaction to all of that?

Robert Smith
Our children, of course, have been grown and gone since 1995. So we have an empty nest. My wife, Wanda, is a marvelous Christian and wife who understands my calling. I understand her calling. She knew that this was temporary. This was not a three year project. I’ve always been an early riser. I’m always getting up at three or four, so that’s nothing new there. But it’s just the all day, uninterrupted time away from the house for six days a week. But she understood it. She prayed for me. She recognized not me, but that this ministry could be a blessing to people all over the world, even after I’m in heaven. She recognized the importance of it, that it was not about me; it was about this ministry. And God had given me an opportunity to be a broadcaster of his word. And so she was quietly supportive, concerned to make sure I got enough to eat. The Lord has always given you what you needed in terms of rest. And that’s what she was. She was like Moses’s mother, Jochebed, who stood by to see how Moses—of course, I’m mixing metaphors—in the little boat that was waterproof, what was going to happen to it. And of course, Jochebed would go on to be the babysitter of her own son and get paid for it. So she watched and prayed, and that was it.

Matt Tully
I wonder if you can take us back now to the moment that you prepared to read that final chapter, that last chapter of Revelation. How did that feel?

Robert Smith
Well, number one, it was a moment of unbelief, but a moment also of just humility. I felt that God has entrusted me to read up to the last chapter of a book that will not need an addendum. The last chapter, and here I am. How will I read it? And so when I came to places like Revelation 22:5, “And in that city, there will be no need of the sun because God will be the light of that city. In that city, there will be no temple . . . .” And then finally to come to that last verse: “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ . . . .” And it closes with “Amen.” That’s what got me: “Amen.” So be it, Lord. Amen. The Bible opens up with “In the beginning, God,” and it closes with “Amen.” From “In the beginning, God” to “Amen.” And then there’s a period, not an ellipsis. I know that in the Greek there’s discussion about punctuation marks and all that. But the fact that in our translations we have a period there, which means the end, that nothing can be added to it because nothing need be added to it. He is already the omega point. And I stopped, and I worshiped. I remember that. It wasn’t like, “I’m glad I’m finished with that.” It was like, “Wow! Look what God has done! This is the Lord’s doing, and it is marvelous in my eyes.” I was blown away that God had enabled me to complete it and to complete it not with a sense of a burden but with a sense of joy. It was joy. It was not a duty; it was a delight. And that’s the way it was.

28:54 - Read the Bible like a Tourist

Matt Tully
That’s wonderful. That’s so wonderful. Maybe as a last question, I heard you say recently, I think it was in a video that Crossway produced with you related to this project, but you said that you thought one of the greatest obstacles to our engagement with the Bible as Christians is the sense that we already know what it says. What advice or exhortation would you leave us with when it comes to cultivating a fresh hunger for God’s word day in and day out?

Robert Smith
The greatest obstacle to the knowledge of the Bible is the knowledge of the Bible. What keeps us from knowing more about the Bible is what we think we already know about the Bible. First of all, that was true with me. It humbled me. I didn’t realize how ignorant I was of Scripture. I assumed I knew, but I only knew superficially, in a very shallow way. God took me into depths that I’d never been in before. And so I had a desire; my appetite was increased to know more about the word. “Sing it over again to me. Wonderful words of life. Let me more their beauty see. Wonderful words of life. Words of life and beauty. Teach me faith and duty. Beautiful words, wonderful words of life.” I wanted more and more. Wanda and I, my wife, went to New York City, and we stayed in a hotel on Times Square. I was preaching for the Billy Graham Crusade, and so we stayed in the hotel where it was held. What an event. But we decided one day we were going to leave the hotel and step outside Times Square where there were places we would see various times of the year, particularly New Year’s Eve. But we walked, and we stopped and then we walked some more. We looked there and pointed at that. It took us over an hour to go one block because we were tourists. But other people who live there were used to it. They had seen it all. They were in a hurry, walking real fast and so forth. We were tourists. They were individuals who were residents. The glamor, the excitement, the innovation was gone for them. They see it all every day. I would hope that we would not be residents of the word, but that we would be tourists. That we would see Scripture with new eyes, fresh eyes, with a heart that was open to hearing God speak afresh, with our antenna up so that we would have to stop reading because the revelation would come because it would apply to our lives just like that. Things we’d never seen before. I think we become residents. We’ve been down this street before, and Isaiah 6, “In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw also the Lord high and lifted up, and his train filled the temple . . . .” Well, we know that. But do we? Robert, how do you get so familiar with God that you’re not touched to the point that you say, like Isaiah, “Lord, I’m an unclean man! Woe be unto me! I’m an unclean man and I dwell in the midst of people who are unclean! For mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of Hosts.” So that’s what I want. I want to stay a tourist. This is my first time in this chapter. I want to be a person like a child of second naivety. I want to sit on the lap of the King. I want to crawl up into the cranium of Yahweh, and I want him to reveal to me things and sites and aspects that I have never considered before. And if I’m a resident, I’m going to miss that because I know that, I preached that, I’ve taught that, I’ve heard that, I’ve read that. But if I’m a tourist, I’m still baffled, befuddled. I’m still immersed in mystery, and God is taking a diamond and turning it and letting the light refract through it so that I see a different facet of the diamond. It’s the same diamond, the Bible, but a different facet of it that I’ve never seen before.

Matt Tully
Amen. That is all of our prayer as we engage with the Bible. As we read it in our hands, and as we listen to it in our ears, may we all pray for that kind of posture toward God’s word. Thank you so much, Robert, for taking the time today to share a little bit about this experience of creating this audio Bible and the journey that it was for you and for the encouragement for all of us to love God’s word in that same way. We appreciate it.

Robert Smith
Thank you for the opportunity to represent Jesus. Appreciate it.

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