Eden: Thanks so much for being willing to do this and join the call. I’m excited to get to talk to you a little bit. I like to ask, what are three things that bring you joy? So that people that are watching this can get to know you a little bit.
Jim Gruenwald: Three things that bring me joy. Well, obviously number one is my—not to sound too cheesy—but I mean, obviously, I think the center of my life needs to be God in Christ. And so I find joy, you know, getting up in the morning and reading God’s Word. I find joy in that relationship with him. And I say joy—and I’m glad that you said joy instead of happiness. There’s times that, you know, when you have deaths of people that you can find joy in the fact that they’ve moved on to heaven, where you’re not real happy that they died. And the same thing. I find joy in Scripture.
I think my wife would probably be the second source of joy.
And then I think the third is the ministry God has given me working with my athletes, with my kids, just pouring into them. Yeah, I think those would probably be my three biggest senses of joy that I found from God.
Eden: Yeah. Wonderful. And so you talked about your current ministry and I know you don’t know what’s on the horizon, but, tell us a little bit about your ministry for the past number of years and how it began.
Jim Gruenwald: Yeah. So right now my ministry outside of my family is wrestling. And so, practically speaking, that presents itself in several different ways. I’m the wrestling coach at Wheaton College, which is great because I have an opportunity to build into the young men every four years. Every year I get a new crew. Every year I get guys graduating and going out in the world and hopefully spreading the idea that “Jesus Christ is life. The rest is just wrestling.”
So that’s one way that I enjoy my career, but the other part is going to camps and clinics. Already this summer I flew down to Georgia and Kentucky. I’m going to be in Wisconsin and Illinois and South Dakota. And those are all opportunities where, yes, I’m going to be teaching young men and kids how to wrestle, but I’m also going to be sharing the gospel. I mean, earlier this year at FCA Wrestling Camp in both Georgia and Kentucky, we had close to 100 kids in the combined camps. There were 200 kids in the Georgia camp, 300 kids in the Kentucky camp. Then you’re probably looking at another 100 coaches and maybe another 50 college athletes. Well, out of that, close to 100 people came to accept Christ. Close to another 200 have rededicated their life to Christ. At least another 50 reached out and said, “I want more information about Christ.”
So this is just an extension of the ministry that God’s given me with Wheaton College and then, of course, through wrestling. So those are two of the balls that I’m juggling in the air. And then, obviously there’s building into my family.
Eden: Awesome. And so I know that you have the Olympics somewhere in your history. And today, you pair talking about Jesus and spreading the good news about him with wrestling. But when did you come to know Jesus? When were the Olympics part of your life? And then when was coming to know Christ part of your life?
Jim Gruenwald: So that’s actually the third part of my ministry is, last summer and this summer I’ve gotten really involved with USA Wrestling again and have been acting as—I don’t know if I want to call it a chaplain—but I’ve been running faith and life development sessions, which allows me to build into those who are believers.
And this is something that I tell the guys: If you’re a believer, I’m here for you. If you’re not a believer and you’re searching, I’m here for you. If you don’t want anything to do with God and Christ, you just have questions about life, the universe, and everything, I’m here for you, okay? So I still have my feet firmly planted in that as part of my ministry, outside of Wheaton.
As far as my own Olympic journey and my own faith journey, I grew up in a family that was nominally Christian. We were your typical “Easter and Christmas Christians,” which is to say, probably not Christian at all. I don’t remember having any relationship with the Lord. Then after my parents got divorced, we completely pulled away. I don’t think we were atheists, but there was no God or Christ in the house until my mom was working at a print shop, and there was a pastor there that was moonlighting (working multiple jobs) because the church wasn’t big enough to support him, and he invited us to church. We went and then after listening to an evangelist share some things, I went forward and accepted Christ as my Savior.
And he walked me through that “Romans Road” of Romans 3:23, “for all have sinned, and fall short of the glory of God” (ESV). He walked me through Romans 6:23, “for the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord” (ESV). And then you know the idea that even “while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8 ESV). And that, Romans 10:13, “for whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved” (KJV).
So I went through that, was really on fire, and then went through a period in high school where I struggled with it. Did I say the right thing? Did I do the right thing? Did I pray the right thing? And I just opened up my Bible again and went through that Romans Road, this time just myself, and recommitted my life to Christ and just realized, what I believe is right.
I don’t know that I was a strong follower of Christ at that moment. It took several years, even through the Olympic Training Center and having some ups and some downs in my wrestling career and my personal life, where I finally said, Jim, you got to either stop calling yourself a Christian or start acting like one, because there was not a whole lot of fruit in my life.
And again, I know I was a believer at the time, but I definitely was not living it out. I mean, the guys at the training center called me God Boy, so they knew that I had something right. It was an insult. It was kind of an affectionate insult, right? But I got to a point where I’m like, I need to start being more intentional about my faith.
And so then then we saw some definite fruit with guys who ended up coming to Christ at the Olympic Training Center. And so then, as far as the Olympics are concerned, I made the 2000 and 2004 Olympic teams and the three world teams in between, and then made a run at the 2008 Olympic team after I thought I was done wrestling and then found out that I wasn’t. But, a catastrophic injury ended up keeping me from competing in 2008. But yeah, that’s kind of my faith and Olympic journey in less than five minutes.
Eden: Well, I love it. I’ve interviewed a few different people, and I love hearing how Jesus is for everybody, like he saves people of all walks of life, of all interests. And then what he does with us is he makes us a new person and he sends us into part of his kingdom. And you touch guys that I might never meet in life and would have no connection to, and yet God has equipped you and given you gifts to serve this community of wrestlers because he loves those people and he wants to pursue them. That’s so cool. It’s so neat to see God’s care and his wisdom and design in all that.
Jim Gruenwald: Absolutely. So one of the things, too, that I’ve noticed even working at wrestling and being around the wrestling community is that there’s so many different roads to Christ. And of course, he provides the road to God.
So I’ve seen guys that have come out of great homes—mom and dad are both pastors. I’ve had other guys whose mom and dad are screaming at each other, others whose mom and dad are divorced. I’ve had other guys who’ve been in prison and have come and wrestled for me at Wheaton College, and so you have such—I don’t like to use the word diverse because the world is kind of co-opted it—a broad range of young men. And so that’s why instead of using the word diversity, I try to focus on uniqueness, that we are unique in the body of Christ, whether it be through our ethnicity or our gender or our different paths that we took to Christ. And yet, you know, through Christ we end up having that relationship with the Father (John 14:6), which is just so beautiful.
Eden: Amen. What I had hoped to talk to you most about today was your ministry to young men. I’m hoping to have an interview with a woman and ask her the same question for women. But our culture is really confused right now about what it means to be a man and what it means to be a woman. And so, you know, we have we’re going to have people watching this that are young men and young women.
But as you talk to your wrestlers, how do you encourage them about what it means to be a man, biblically speaking? Because we know the culture has its own ideas about what a man is. As you shepherd these guys and you teach them about life as well as wrestling, what do you like to share with them about what it means to really be a man from God’s perspective and how to pursue that role?
Jim Gruenwald: Right. So the first thing that I do is distinguish between what it means to be male and man. So male is just someone who’s born XY, right? He’s got the parts and that’s great. And we have a lot of males in the world. We don’t have a lot of men in the world. And that’s that kind of the next level.
And so I make that distinction by saying the ultimate man was Jesus Christ, right? You look at the way he treated women, you look at the way he treated children, you look at the way he reached out to those who society is going to deem undesirable, and he made it a ministry to build into people who weren’t the elite.
Now, I’m not saying that you can’t be elite and know Christ, because I very definitely know people who are rich and attractive, and they’ve got everything going forward for them, all who have got wonderful relationships with Jesus Christ. I think a lot of times, though, when the world or even God gives you something special, we’ll make that an idol in our lives. I was an athlete. I could have used my athleticism as an idol in my life, rather than saying, okay, this is something that I can use as a platform to point people to God in Christ.
And so number one is to distinguish the difference between what it is to be male—okay, you were born with the parts. And then what does it look like to be a man: How Christ-like are you?
And so all of my teaching is pointing my guys to who Jesus was, looking at—he was an emotional individual, right? You see Christ being angry. Now he could do it, and not sin. We have a harder time with that. But he also wept. He grieved. He was frustrated. He was tired. So these are all things that you can read about in Scripture that Christ experienced. Okay, so if Christ went through that, we’re going to go through that.
What is the next part? Because there’s not always an answer in Scripture. You know, despite what some people would like to say, I can’t go to my Bible and find an answer on how to solve a calculus problem. It’s just not there. I don’t think that we’ll ever get a complete answer for pain in Scripture. And yet there’s an example.
One good example is Job. Look, he lost his entire family. He lost everything that he owned. He lost his health. And his wife says, “curse God and die”(Job 2:9). His response was twofold. At one point he says, you know, God’s given me everything. It’s well within his right to take everything (Job 1:2). Wow, what a response. And then the other thing that he said is, you know, I came into the world with nothing. I’m going to leave with nothing (Job 1:2). So here you have Job pointing back to the awesomeness of God and that he’s in control, so then Job doesn’t curse God. And I think that’s a good example.
But the great example, the perfect example, is Christ. Here you have innocence. You have God stepping down from his throne and taking on flesh, still being God (Philippians 2:6-7), but also fully experiencing humanity other than the sin component. I think our humanity in its perfection, you know, was sinless, but we sinned, and so now humanity is equated with sin. But anyway, you still have those examples in Scripture. We might not have an answer all the time of why God allows what he allows, but we have examples on how to handle it.
I had an awful situation of pain when I dislocated my shoulder and I shook my fist at God, initially. It’s an embarrassing way to handle pain and yet I shook my fist at God. But then years later, I realized, well, God allowed me to walk that road of pain to understand compassion. I was not a very compassionate person before I had this catastrophic injury that eventually took me out of the sport.
So I want my guys to understand that. So I use Christ primarily, but then I also use my own life experiences as just another story, not as good of a story. But Job isn’t as good of a story, but God still includes it in his Word. I’ve been created by God. I’m an image bearer of God. So what I’m going to do is use part of my story as well to point people toward God and Christ. That’s one of the reasons I wrote the book Not All Roads Lead to Gold, because it’s just another story of God using another person’s life to point people towards him.
Eden: So on the one hand, you said the Bible doesn’t have an answer for everything, right? Like if I am stuck on the side of the road and need to change my tire, I can’t open the Bible and figure out how to do that.
But at the same time, when you want to know, “how do I teach these young males how to be men?” you go to the Bible and you look at Jesus and he’s the answer. And so I think it’s really neat that in one way, the Bible doesn’t answer everything, but in another way it is the answer for everything in terms of how to live a life that pleases God, how to live the good life in this world. When we have questions on, “Who am I to be? What’s my relationship to God? How am I to live out this life in a way that honors him?” We have the answers in Scripture.
People often say, “where are you getting your standard from? Is it your culture? Is it science? And we point to, “well we get it from Scripture. We get it from Jesus because he is our ultimate authority on things.” So I just really appreciate how you point them to Jesus, and in doing so, you teach them that the Bible is sufficient for our life. It does have what we need most.
Jim Gruenwald: That’s kind of where hope comes from, right? It’s knowing that there is the truth out there. There’s objective truth, because if we don’t have that, then the world is going to tend towards chaos, which you see now. Now I’m not going to lose my mind because the world is being the world, and I’m not here to judge the world, right? My responsibility is to ensure that the Christian body is doing what it’s supposed to do. That’s where we’re supposed to do.
And when I say judge, too, I think we need to distinguish between judge and judgment, because of the way sometimes the world likes to play with terms. I make judgments every day as a dad, as a husband, as a father, or even as a as a wrestling coach. I look at someone doing a technique wrong and I say, “hey, that’s wrong technique.” Now, of course I want to have grace and truth and say the right thing the right way to the right person at the right time. But I made a judgment. Now when I look at that person doing that move incorrectly, that’s not me saying, “okay, you did that move incorrectly, you’re going to hell,” or, “you just cheated on your wife, you’re going to hell,” or, “you just got drunk, you’re going to hell.” That’s a judgment that I’m going to leave in only God’s hands. I can tell a person that they’re making a mistake in their life, that they shouldn’t live that way, that there’s a better way to live their life, but I’m not going to judge whether a person is going to heaven or hell. Again, that’s God’s responsibility. I can kind of get an idea of where they’re going by the fruit in their life. But again, I’m not making that final judgment.
So that’s one of the beauties of having objective truth and having hope. And then also having verses like Philippians 4:13, which is the key to life, right? In fact, Paul even says it’s the key to handling life (Philippians 4:12). Now, a lot of people misuse the verse and they say, “Oh, ‘I can do all things through Christ, which strengthens me,’ so I can win an Olympic gold medal.” No, that’s not what God meant. He meant that “if you do win that Olympic gold medal, you can handle the situation and not become so arrogant that you become a disservice to me. Or if you don’t win the Olympic gold medal, that you’re not going to become despondent.” So that key to life, of handling the highs and lows, is that Christ gives me the power to handle life, that I can lean on him and the Christian community, which we’re supposed to do to be able to handle life. So that’s just another example of how I point these guys to having a better relationship with the Father through the Son.
Eden: So if I were a young man listening to this, I would say, so if I want to become a better man, I need to spend time getting to know Jesus. Are there things outside of me spending time in God’s Word, getting to know Jesus, that you think would help develop me as a man?
Jim Gruenwald: Yeah. So there’s six things that I tell my team, or whenever I speak.
Number one is, you have got to get in Scripture, right? Because if you’re going to know God, you have to read Scripture. We don’t have Christ walking around the way they did 2000 years ago. In fact, Christ said, because we can’t see him, our faith is even greater (John 20:29). We have to have a higher level of faith because we don’t get to see Jesus the way the people of his time did. So you’ve got to get into God’s Word to know God, to know Christ.
And then, of course, you gotta pray. You’ve got to talk with him. I’ve never heard God audibly respond back to me, but I’ve had him impress things on my heart. I’ve heard other people say that they have. I have not. But I pray because I know that I’m supposed to pray and I’m going to talk to him, because I’m a dad and I get that. Even though I may not give my kids everything that they want, I want to hear the longings and the losses that they have in life, because that’s what keeps us up at night. And so when we realize there’s someone out there that’s always listening, it’s kind of comforting to know that we’re not alone. And so again, you’ve got to read God’s Word. You’ve got to pray.
You’ve got to fellowship. We’ve got to have that Christian community. I mean, there’s so much in Scripture. One of the first things that God created—at the beginning of creation, he said, “it’s not good for the man to be alone” (Genesis 2:18 NIV). He gave him instant community. That doesn’t mean you have to get married, but you do have to have community. I think marriage is awesome, but you don’t need it the way you need community now. Marriage is a form of community. Again, I want to make it very clear: marriage is awesome. Marriage points to Christ and the church (Ephesians 5:32), so I think it’s valuable, but it’s not essential.
Then outside of that fellowship, I think you need to mentor people because that holds you to a higher level of accountability. And within that also is getting mentored. You need to have a mentor. You need to have somebody building into you. It could be a book, right? It could be a person through a book. It could be a face-to-face with an older gentleman. My mom mentored me. So it could be, you know, a woman building into me, because obviously there’s knowledge there as well and there’s a perspective that I’m not always going to get—I think a compassionate perspective that I think is sometimes lost on men.
I think the last thing, and I if there is an important thing—I think all of them are super important—it’s sharing Christ. If you want to grow as a believer, if you want to grow as a man, you have to multiply yourself. And not multiply yourself in a worldly way, but as Paul said, you know, he wanted people to imitate him as he had imitated Christ (1 Corinthians 11:1). So it’s still an imitation of Christ. You know, that’s in Philippians like 3:12-18 where he’s talking about, straining towards the prize. He talks about imitating him as he imitates Christ (Philippians 3:17-18).
You have all of that right there in Scripture. So those are the six things that you need to do if you want to grow as a Christian man, and, you know, quite frankly, as a Christian woman as well.
Eden: I’m sitting here going, yeah, I need to do all that. So in closing, I like to ask if there is a book that you would recommend, outside of the Bible, because we know that Bible is the first book that we need to be paying attention to. Is there a book that you would recommend that has really transformed your life, that you would say, man, this really changed my thinking about God or really motivated me in some way?
Jim Gruenwald: Oh man, that’s hard to come up with one. So I’m going to give you four real quickly.
Number one is, is the story of John Henry, because I think there’s some very beautiful, self-sacrificing elements of it that—outside of seeing Christ die for humanity—transformed my life. And the idea that if I’m going to do something, I’m going to outwork everybody else around me. I’m going to work hard and smart. So that’s the beauty of John. So there’s that.
Then there’s a book that my coach wrote called Road to Gold: The 1972 Olympic Journey of Ben and John Peterson, which talks about two young kids from the middle of nowhere, Wisconsin, that ended up making world and Olympic teams and becoming world Olympic champions. They’ve been the icons, not idols, but icons of Christian wrestling for the last 40 years and have both been in ministry for well over 40 years. I think both Ben and John, close to 50 years, have both been in the ministry. So Road to Gold would be the second one because I think it’s a really good book.
The third one, and all these books work really well together. Okay, the third one would be Chosen Suffering: Becoming Elite in Life and Leadership by Tom Ryan. It is soul-crushing to read his book, but it talks about how he was surrounded with ordinary people that did extraordinary things, and how we use chosen suffering in our life to help us prepare for unchosen suffering. His unchosen suffering was the loss of a child, when the child five years old. And so he found a relationship with God through Christ by searching for God in Christ after his son died. So he talks a lot about unchosen suffering, but he also talks about the necessity of chosen suffering in our lives to help us draw closer to Christ and being able to handle unchosen suffering.
And then the book that I just wrote, Not All Roads Lead to Gold, because everything we do isn’t always going to end in victory. I tried 16 years in an Olympic training center to be a world Olympic champion and never did it. So was my life wasted in those 16 years? Absolutely not. Because in those 16 years, the number of people—the first and foremost that come to my mind are Ethan Bosch, Jeff Shearing, Chris Mirabella and the list goes on of men—that came to Christ through my Olympic journey. And so it talks about simple facts like winning and losing don’t define me; they direct me. I mean, that’s a biblical concept as well, that we’re not going to be perfect and flawless. And how do we handle that? Well, we lean into Christ, you know, regardless of those wins and losses.
So I would recommend those four books, as each has something super valuable to give to you. And all of them are easy reads, really easy reads.
Eden: Awesome. We like that. Yeah, there’s a lot of great Christian books that are really a trip when it comes to the academic nature of them, but we like the easy reads. But that doesn’t mean they’ll be easy emotionally. And it sounds like they’re really challenging books, which is awesome.
Jim Gruenwald: No, absolutely. And part of life is failure. And I don’t ever want to get comfortable with failure, especially as an athlete, but even more as a Christian. But one of the themes you’re going to see in all four books is not getting comfortable with failure, but getting comfortable pushing through failure. There is a very significant difference between the two.
Eden: Wonderful. Well, I’m going to have to look those up and hopefully people listening will as well. I love just a last thought, as you were talking about how we’re not always going to have success in life…And I recorded a number of these interviews and, you know, I’ve talked to a singer, I’ve talked to a lawyer, I’ve talked to a wrestling coach. And there’s a constant theme of how Christians are okay with not having worldly success. And I think that’s wonderfully freeing because for someone that has not encountered Christ yet, it’s easy to think that Christianity is one more aim at success in life. Like, I’m going to become my ideal self through this. You know, there are a lot of wrong ideas about what it means to be a Christian—
Jim Gruenwald: Also what is the ultimate success? I mean, Christ came that we can live life and live it to its fullest (John 10:10). So the ultimate success in living life to its fullest is that everlasting life that we have.
And so that’s just an extension of Philippians 4:13 that I can be a wildly successful Christian, but still be Christ-centered. And so it’s not an “either or,” it’s always been the “and.” Is it harder being successful and staying focused on Christ? Yes, because we’re always going to slip. But it’s also hard to stay focused on Christ if we’re only ever despondent. That verse in Proverbs says, God help me to have not so much that I forget about you, but not so little that I curse you (Proverbs 30:8-9). Well, Philippians 4:13 is just an extension of that verse saying, listen, you don’t have to worry about having too little or too much. You can handle both through Christ, again, who allows you to handle the ups and downs of life.
Eden: Yes. And so, because Christ is the measure of our success and not our own ups and downs in life, it’s just it’s wonderfully freeing. Like he is our eternal life. He is what makes life good. It’s relieving to hear someone that’s had both success and failure say, it’s all about him. And so those things don’t define my joy. They don’t define how other people see me. It’s Jesus.
Jim Gruenwald: And across the board—athletics, relationships, monetarily. I’ve had some real highs and some really lows. And when I was focused on Christ, it didn’t make life easy. It made it easier.
Eden: And ultimately, this life is not all we have if we have Christ. So there’s hope in that too. Thank you so much for your time.
Jim Gruenwald: And thanks for the interview, I appreciate it.
Eden: Yeah, yeah, it was great to get to know you, and I’m so glad that people can encounter you and your heart for Jesus and hopefully be inspired to know him and continue to know him. It was great to see you and thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it.
Jim Gruenwald: Yep. Take care.
Eden: Thank you so much for listening to our podcast today. If you enjoyed our conversation, I would encourage you to like or subscribe to our podcast so that you can hear the next conversation. And if something that you heard today spoke to your heart or got you thinking, I would encourage you to not let the day go by without talking to God about what’s on your mind. We believe that he loves you and that he’s pursuing you today out of that love.