Bible Study Podcast

What Does Matthew Teach Us About Discipleship? with Travis Bookout

This episode of the Radically Christian Bible Study Podcast tackles some crucial questions about discipleship and following Jesus in today’s world. What does it really mean to be a disciple of Christ? How do we reconcile Jesus’ radical teachings, like loving our enemies and not storing up treasures on earth, with the realities of modern life? The conversation explores the tension between obedience to Jesus’ commands and the challenges of living them out in a world that often seems at odds with Christian values. The discussion centers on Matthew’s gospel, examining how it presents Jesus as the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecies and the ultimate authority. The podcast explores key concepts from the Sermon on the Mount, unpacking what it means to be salt and light in the world without trying to change it through force. It addresses the nature of Christian obedience, the role of forgiveness, and the hope of resurrection that makes discipleship worthwhile despite its costs. The guest for this episode is Travis Bookout, the preaching minister for the Maryville Church of Christ. Travis has written books on the gospels of John, Mark, and Matthew, and is currently working on his Doctorate of Educational Ministry from Southern Seminary. Travis brings both scholarly insight and practical experience to the conversation about discipleship and living out the teachings of Jesus in today’s world. Links and Resources Sponsor: FHU Church Leadership Workshop (September 27-28) King of Glory: 52 Reflections on the Gospel of John by Travis Bookout Cruciform Christ (Gospel of Mark) by Travis Bookout The Cost of Discipleship by Dietrich Bonhoeffer Salvation by Allegiance Alone by Matthew Bates Note: Some links may be affiliate links. Meaning, if you choose to buy something through these links, we receive a small commission at no extra cost to you. Transcript (Credit: Beth Tabor) Welcome to the Radically Christian Bible Study Podcast. I’m your host, Wes McAdams. Here we have one goal: Learn to love like Jesus. As many of you know, we’re in the middle of a series on discipleship, and the gospel of Matthew has a lot to teach us about being disciples of Jesus. My guest today just finished a book on the gospel of Matthew, and it is excellent. He has so much wisdom to share with us. My guest is Travis Bookout. Travis is the preaching minister for the Maryville Church of Christ. He’s written books on the gospel of John, Mark, and now Matthew, and is currently working on his Doctor of Educational Ministry from Southern Seminary. He has been married to his wife, Lauren, for 16 years, and they have two sons, Oliver and Levi. Before we get to that Bible study, I want to read from Matthew chapter 28, starting in verse 18, which says, “Jesus came and said to them, ‘All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.'” I hope that today’s discussion and conversation and Bible study is encouraging to you. I hope that it gives you a better appreciation of the gospel account of Matthew, and, as always, I hope that this conversation helps all of us learn to love like Jesus. WES: Travis Bookout, welcome to the podcast, Brother. TRAVIS: Hey, thank you so much. Glad to be here. WES: It is fantastic to get to visit with you, and I’m excited about this conversation. I’m excited about telling people about your new book on Matthew, God With Us. It was fantastic. I really enjoyed reading that, and I can’t wait for other people to read it, as well. But today we’re specifically going to talk about discipleship, and I’m asking all of the guests that are part of this series on discipleship what their take or their definition of discipleship is. So how would you define what it means to be a disciple? TRAVIS: That’s a great question, and it’s one that, you know, I don’t know that I have a super unique or creative answer. What I wrote down was being a faithful learner who shares and embodies the beliefs, actions, and mission of the teacher, and I think that’s basically ‑‑ it’s a transformation into the image of the teacher through listening and through following and imitation, and I think that’s ultimately what Jesus calls us to be, and, you know, Matthew has some helpful ways of taking that from just a definition to something you actually embody and do. WES: Yeah. And I love a lot of those words that you used, transformation into his image and embodiment, and Matthew does give us a pretty unique take on discipleship. So I’d love to hear your thoughts, in general, about the gospel of Matthew even before we talk about the specifics of how that relates to discipleship. But what did you notice as you have been studying? I’m sure you’ve been pouring into and allowing this book to pour into you quite a bit here recently, so what’s your take on the gospel of Matthew? TRAVIS: Good book. I like it. Matthew’s fantastic, and it is ‑‑ you know, each of the gospels ‑‑ you know, especially you have like the three synoptic gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and they have a lot of similarities, and one of the things that I tried to focus on in the book that I wrote are some of the ‑‑ what makes them unique from one another, and Matthew has a couple of things that seem to be ‑‑ not that they’re absent in the other ones, but they are a special point of emphasis in the gospel of Matthew. One of those key ideas is that Jesus is the fulfillment of so many scriptures from the Old Testament, or from the Hebrew scriptures, and how those come to a deeper and fuller meaning when you look to Jesus. And what that meaning often represents, I think, is that Jesus should be seen in comparison to a lot of key figures and key ideas from the Old Testament. So one thing that can sometimes be problematic for readers is you read through Matthew, and he’ll say “This happened to fulfill what the prophet said,” and he’ll quote, like, Hosea 11:1, and you go and you read Hosea 11:1, and it says, “When Israel was a youth, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son.” And you read that and you think, well, okay, that’s about Israel coming out of Egypt, like that’s the Exodus story. And then you keep reading Hosea and you come to find out that the son is a disobedient son who keeps going after idols and all of these things. And you think, how in the world does Jesus fulfill a passage that’s about Israel being disobedient? And I think the way you do that ‑‑ and this is just kind of an example of the type of thing that Matthew regularly does when he uses the word “fulfillment,” is Jesus should be seen as the faithful Israel who comes to fulfill and complete what was lacking in the Israel that God had called. So Israel was called with a mission and, repeatedly, they don’t fulfill their mission or they fall short of their mission, and so Jesus, as an Israelite, comes and takes on the identity of Israel and he fulfills what was lacking. So Jesus does go to Egypt and he has his own Egypt story, his own Exodus story where he comes out of Egypt. Jesus does go to the wilderness, but where Israel failed and a generation died, Jesus is tempted but is overwhelmingly successful. Jesus is able to go up on the mountain like Moses did and get to the heart of what the law was always intended to produce in the Israelites, and he is trying to produce that in his disciples, so that, as Israel is called to be a light to the nations, the disciples can be the light of the world. And just all the way through you see that Jesus is taking on these different roles. He takes on a role like Moses. He takes on a role like Israel. He takes on a role like David or the son of David. And then, in every one of them, you see that Jesus is not only taking on that role, but he’s doing it in greater and in superior ways than could have been seen or recognized beforehand. So that’s one of the unique ways that Matthew tells the Jesus story. Along the way, he does several other things. He presents Jesus as this authoritative teacher. There are like five major speeches in the gospel of Matthew. If you take those speeches out and you take out the birth narrative and, depending on the manuscripts, the resurrection narratives, Matthew is a whole lot like Mark. It follows a lot of the same structure, a lot of the same chronology, and even the same wording. But Matthew has a birth narrative and a greater resurrection narrative, and then it has these five speeches interspersed. And I think those five speeches ‑‑ they give us deeper insight into what the kingdom is all about, the kingdom message, so that’s a key idea, is the idea of the kingdom of heaven, and it shows how to live in that kingdom, how to faithfully endure for that kingdom. It answers some of the mysteries of that kingdom. It shows you the mindset of humility that’s essential to the kingdom, and the hope in the coming of the kingdom. And so you can look at these five speeches, and afterwards you come to realize that Jesus is speaking not only with the authority that comes from some great rabbi or some great person, but he’s speaking with the very authority of God. So he’s introduced in the book as “God with us,” and by the end of it he has all authority in heaven and on earth. Like there’s no person who can have all authority in heaven and on earth. The person who has all authority in heaven is God, and we might see counterfeit authorities on earth, but Jesus is the one who actually is the supreme authority overall. And so Matthew ends ‑‑ I love the Great Commission. I think it sums up so much, and it will lead into our discussion of discipleship. It ends with Jesus on a mountain. Like Moses went on a mountain, Jesus has been on a mountain regularly throughout the gospel of Matthew. The mountain is an important setting. You know, in Matthew 4, he’s on a mountain with Satan, and he’s offered all the kingdoms of the earth, and he rejects them. And then Matthew 5, he goes up on a mountain again to talk about his kingdom, the kingdom that he is actually representing and he does actually bring, and it’s the Sermon on the Mount. But then you keep reading. He tells his disciples to be the light on ‑‑ or the city that’s on the mountain, you know, the city on a hill, but it’s the same Greek word as mountain. He goes back up on the mountain again in the transfiguration, where he is literally compared to Moses and Elijah and is shown to be superior to them. The Mount of Olives is where he goes before he is arrested. And then the final verses of Matthew, he’s back up on a mountain and he is worshiped while he’s on that mountain. The disciples gather and worship with him, which, you know, if you’re comparing him to Moses, Moses went up on a mountain, but Moses wasn’t worshiped there; God is the one worshiped on the mountain. So Jesus is on the mountain, he’s being worshiped, and then he says, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me,” which is something that can only be true of God, and it’s with the supreme authority of the divine being himself that Jesus offers the commission to go out and to make disciples. So I think all of that is kind of Matthew’s way of demonstrating that the whole story of Israel has been leading to Jesus and is fulfilled in Jesus. And he comes not only as a great Moses or a great son of David or Israel, but as the embodiment of God himself, with all authority to cause us to go out and to transform the lives of people into becoming followers and disciples of his. WES: Yeah, yeah. Amen. Well, it’s such a wonderful way that you’ve laid everything out, and I just feel like studying the gospel accounts is so important for Christians. I laugh because that should be obvious, I think. But I think back to growing up and, you know, what I heard in church, or just the impression that I got ‑‑ I don’t know that anyone ever said anything like this, but I just think I got the impression that what really mattered was the death of Jesus, and we spent, it seems like, very little time talking about who is Jesus, his life, the way that he lived his life during those 33 years, the things that he actually taught us to do. I think what seems to get emphasized ‑‑ this is what Scot McKnight calls “the gospel of sin management.” That may not be original to him, but that idea that all that really matters is that Jesus was perfect, Jesus died on the cross to save us, and now you should read the epistles and do those things there and not do the bad things. And going back to who is Jesus and what did he teach us to do, how did he teach us to live is so fundamental. If we’re going to be, as you said, transformed into the image of our teacher, into the image of our rabbi, we have to know what he did, how he lived his life, and the things that he has taught us to do. So let’s talk about that idea of discipleship, and specifically to the gospel of Matthew, how does Matthew give us a unique perspective on what it means and looks like to be a disciple? TRAVIS: Well, one of the reasons that I wanted us to get to that mountaintop scene at the end of the gospel of Matthew with the Great Commission is because Jesus is very explicit there about what discipleship is. He says, “Make disciples of all the nations.” So if Jesus has all authority, then that means even though there’s other kings and governors and things like that throughout the world, there’s all kinds of nations ‑‑ ever since the promise given to Abraham, there has been this vision of the nations uniting together with Israel under the one true king, and Jesus is now that king, the one with all authority. That’s the way a king speaks. So he says, “Go into all the nations and make disciples,” and then he follows that with two essential parts of making disciples, one of which is baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, which, again, if you’re looking at clues to the divine identity of Jesus, he’s on a mountain, he’s being worshiped, he has all authority in heaven and earth, and he is named with the Father and the Holy Spirit in the baptismal formula. So anyway, you have this description of baptizing in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, but then he says, “teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you, and I’ll be with you always, even to the end of the age.” I think that final phrase, “I’ll be with you always,” is really important for discipleship, also, to know that we’re not doing this alone, that we’re not on our own. It connects back to the first fulfilled passage in Matthew. It’s from Isaiah 7:14, where he’s given the name Emmanuel, which means “God with us.” And I think, from the beginning, we’re told Jesus is God with us. At the end, we get this picture of him divine, on a mountain, saying, “and I will be with you always,” and there are a couple of clues in Matthew as to how he’s with us. For example, in Matthew 18, you have Jesus saying, “Where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there in your midst.” Like, he’s with us in the community of believers. You see that again in Matthew 25, where he separates the sheep and the goats, and he says, “When I was naked, you clothed me. When I was hungry, you fed me. When I was in prison, you visited me.” And they’re like, “When did we do this?” And he says, “As much as you did it to the least of these, my brothers, you’ve done it to me.” And so how is Jesus with us? Well, in one way, he’s with us through the community and he’s a part of the community with us. But all of that is to say discipleship is something that we need to remember is done with the community and is done with Jesus. Very difficult to do on our own, and we’re not called to do it on our own. We’re called to be a city on a hill, not an individual standing up on a nice hill. But he does mention that it is baptism and then teaching to observe all that Jesus says, and so disciples are baptized people who followed the teachings of Jesus and practiced them. So when you conclude with those words, what the reader is encouraged to do is to think, okay, so what did Jesus command? And so you go back to the beginning of Matthew and you read it again, this time paying attention to what types of things did Jesus say. And if I’m supposed to observe all that Jesus has said, well, it’s gonna make the Sermon on the Mount a really important part of discipleship. It’s gonna make Matthew 10, the second major speech, a really important part of discipleship, Matthew 13, Matthew 18 about forgiveness and about little ones versus great ones in the kingdom. Like, humility is going to become an essential part of discipleship. And I think it’s important that Jesus was not just some armchair theologian who sat there and spoke the words of the Sermon on the Mountain and said go do it. If a disciple is someone who learns but also imitates, it’s important to know that Jesus not only taught, but also did. And so when Jesus says things like, “You’ve heard that it was said an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, but I say to you, if someone slaps you on the cheek, turn the other to him also. If someone sues you for your cloak, give him your tunic, also. If someone forces you to go one mile, go with him two” ‑‑ you keep reading Matthew, and every one of those things Jesus says, he also does. He is literally slapped on the face. He is literally taken to court unjustly. His clothes are literally taken from him by his enemies. He is literally forced to march by Roman armies. It’s like Jesus ‑‑ I think that’s intentional, that the things Jesus teaches are also the things he does. So if we’re gonna be disciples, we gotta go back through and see what he teaches and look at his life and see what he does, and his life leads him to the cross, and it’s no accident that he tells us, if we’re going to follow him, we have to carry our cross. A lot of times following Jesus leads to uncomfortable places. It leads to death. And, I mean, I’m reminded of Bonhoeffer’s words in The Cost of Discipleship, “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die,” and those are powerful words, but, really, that’s the call of discipleship, to completely lose yourself in following Jesus wherever that takes you. WES: Yeah. Well, there’s so much in Matthew, as you’ve pointed out, about his authority, about obedience, about doing what he tells us to do as a king ‑‑ as you would expect a king to do, would be to tell us what to do and how to live our lives. So I think that that brings up an interesting question, too, is just about obedience. In fact, you said it really well in your book. You said, “Obedience is critical, but not central. Jesus’ obedience is central.” So what did you mean by that? What does that mean, and why is it important to kind of keep in our minds that we have to be obedient to the teachings of Jesus, but it isn’t our obedience, our obedience to do all of these things and don’t do all of these things, that actually saves us. TRAVIS: Yeah. So, honestly, that’s tough sometimes. When you’re reading the gospel of Matthew or you’re reading the book of Romans, like even the way they use the word righteousness, it’s not quite the same. You know, in Matthew, righteousness is something, like, you do, you know? Fasting and praying and giving in Matthew 6 are all called ways of practicing righteousness, and we’re told that our righteousness needs to exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees. And so it sure sounds like, man, if I’m going to be a righteous person, I have to do all of this stuff. But then you read Romans, and righteousness is like ‑‑ “There’s none that’s righteous, no not one,” and righteousness is a gift from God to those who place their faith or allegiance ‑‑ I’ll probably borrow the word allegiance a couple times in my answer from Matthew Bates. He has some excellent books on understanding faith in the New Testament. But when you give your faith to Christ, righteousness is a gift from God that you can’t attain on your own. So what do we do with that? And I think one direction people have taken it is to devalue the significance of obedience, and I don’t think that’s the right path. When you read Matthew, like at the end of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus has this comparison between the wise man and the foolish man, these two builders. And who is the wise one? He actually hears and does what Jesus says. So the Sermon on the Mount is not just for us to memorize or to learn or to see essential truths that would be great if someone did them sometime. It’s not just a picture of what heaven’s going to be like. You know, some have suggested the Sermon on the Mount is this glorified demonstration of what God actually expects, and what you’re supposed to do is read it, recognize how short you fall, and then thank God for his grace, you know? And I think that’s gonna happen, sure, but that’s not the purpose of it. The purpose of it is for you to actually do it. You know, that’s how Jesus ends it. And so our obedience is absolutely critical. You have to obey Jesus if he’s actually your king, and I think that putting your faith in Jesus is more than just a mental assent to a couple of facts about him. It’s actually pledging your allegiance and fidelity and faithfulness to him throughout life, and that will include your heart and your mind and your body. And that’s so much of what Jesus is trying to do, is he’s trying to unite those things so that not only do you not commit adultery with your body, you don’t lust in your heart. Jesus wants all of it in obedience to him, and so obedience is absolutely critical. However, the reality is I have not fully obeyed the Sermon on the Mount, and that’s going to be a constant struggle. That’s going to be a constant ‑‑ I’ll be grappling with that my entire life. And so what is my hope of salvation? Jesus, I don’t think, teaches the Sermon on the Mount and says, “And any mistake along the way will discount you from my kingdom.” In fact, right in the middle of the Sermon on the Mount, he offers this prayer where it describes, I think, some of the most important kingdom values, and in this prayer, he says, “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us of our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.” But that phrase right there about forgiveness, I think, is really important because it’s not the fact that I am perfect at following the Sermon on the Mount; it’s the fact that I’m forgiven when I fail to follow the Sermon on the Mount. And where does that forgiveness come from? Well, it comes from the fact that Jesus was perfect in following the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus actually did the things that he said and he did them perfectly so that Jesus, in loving his enemies, didn’t kill them or destroy them. He went to the cross for them. He tells us to love our enemies, but that’s not something he himself wouldn’t do. He not only loves his enemies, he went to the cross to die for the salvation of his enemies so that even me and you and all of us who fail to live up to his call can have hope in a God who loves even his enemies. He loves us and he saves us, and that’s why our obedience to Jesus as Lord is critical. If we’re going to say that he’s king, if we’re going to say that he’s Lord, we have to do what he says. But you will fail, and it’s the fact that he also loves his enemies, the fact that he also suffers for the good of others, the fact that he gave his life for us means that we can have hope and assurance of our standing before God even in spite of our failures. WES: Yeah, yeah. I think that that word ‑‑ and I also really enjoy Matthew Bates’ work on that idea of allegiance and how that’s tied to the pistis in the New Testament, or faith. And, in fact, I’m preaching ‑‑ this whole year here at McDermott Road my theme is loving loyalty. I think words like loyalty and allegiance and faithfulness are so important. In fact, I started the year by introducing this idea, and I talked about how, as a husband, I am not a perfect husband. I said you can ask my wife and she’ll tell you that I’m not a perfect husband, but I am a faithful husband, and I have been faithful since the day we got married, but I have not been perfect. And I think we understand that when it comes to marriage, that even if you look at our marriage vows ‑‑ I mean, I used 1 Corinthians 13, I think, probably in my marriage vows, but, you know, I made all of these promises to my wife about how I was going to love her and I was gonna do all of these things. Have I kept all of those promises to a T? Have I dotted every I and crossed every T? Have I been perfect in my obedience to those marriage vows? Well, probably not if you’re measuring it that way, but I have been faithful. I’ve been a faithful husband. In fact, my youngest son was a little appalled that I would claim to be faithful, and I said, no, no, no, we should be able to say that, to say, I’ve been faithful to my promises, I’ve been faithful to my spouse, my wife. And I think the same should be able to be said about God, that we have been faithful to God. We have been ‑‑ I think there were so many Israelites who could have said that, who were faithful to Yahweh. None of them were perfect except Jesus, but they were faithful to Yahweh. The vast majority, of course, were not just not perfect, they were also not faithful, and Jesus calls us to faithfulness, to loyalty, to allegiance. And does that include obedience? Absolutely it does. But he understands that we’re not perfect. He is merciful. He’s gracious. He’s slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. This is the way God has always been. But I think that we ‑‑ as you said, we go so far ‑‑ I used to listen to a lot of reformed, Calvinist type of teaching that literally teach about the Sermon on the Mount, that that should be your reaction, is read it and say, oh, what a sinner I am, and then just be grateful that Jesus has saved you without any implication. No, no, no. Now it’s time to go to work and be obedient to the teachings of Jesus. And this is actually ‑‑ if we’re going to take Jesus seriously, we have to not only take him seriously when he offers to die for us and to cleanse us of our sins, but we also have to take him seriously when he says build your life on my teachings, go and obey everything I’ve taught you to do and teach others to do the same thing. So it’s both. It is yes, we are forgiven because we’re imperfect, but we’re also called to a life of faithful obedience in Christ. TRAVIS: Yeah, I think that’s absolutely right. And yeah, it’s like you get to the end of the Sermon on the Mount and it’s a call to go and do it. You get to the end of the gospel of Matthew as a whole, defining what discipleship is, it’s a call to observe all the things that he has commanded. So like doing is essential, but then, as you read through it, you get to Matthew 18, where you have this guy who owes this debt, can never in a million years repay, and the king forgives him of it. I mean, so forgiveness is absolutely a part of the system because that’s who God is and it’s why we should forgive other people, because we’re supposed to be demonstrating to the world around us who God is. That’s why you obey. I mean, you don’t obey because God is in need and he can’t make things work in this world without us. God can do what God wants to do, but our commission is to show people who God is, and forgiveness is an essential part of that. So that should motivate us to be forgiving people, but also it ought to thrill us and fill us with joy that we serve a forgiving God. And so, yeah, you’re not gonna perfectly embody the Sermon on the Mount. You won’t be the perfect husband. You won’t be the perfect citizen. You won’t be the perfect follower of Jesus, but you can be forgiven. And like you said ‑‑ and I think that’s a great distinction, you can be faithful. He can know that your allegiance is with him even with your failures. It’s the progression of your life, you know? The commitment you’ve made in the progression of your life into discipleship and into following him, I think, is what defines our allegiance and our faithfulness. WES: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Let’s kind of switch gears a little bit, but still on the topic of the Great Commission, there is this commission that Jesus gives his followers at the end of this gospel account to go into all the world, to make disciples, but at the same time, you make the point in your book that following Jesus, specifically following his teachings in the Sermon on the Mount, is not about changing the world for Jesus. I think sometimes we’ve gotten it into our head that our job as the church or our job as Christians is to go and make the world a better place, that we’re supposed to force our neighbors to follow Jesus, to implement strategies or to implement policies that reflect God’s will and to make the world more obedient to God because we’re Christians. So what’s the distinction there? How do we distinguish between being salt and light and making disciples, but at the same time recognizing that our job is not to take the world over and make it better for Jesus? That’s not what the Sermon on the Mount’s about. TRAVIS: Yeah. So I think that’s a really good question, and it is a question that ‑‑ the answer, I don’t think, is what I want the answer to be. Sometimes I want the answer to be, no, Jesus tells you that if you turn the other cheek, that your enemy will be so impressed by your kindness and your meekness that he’ll say, you know what? I shouldn’t hit this person again. In fact, what I should do is ask this person, why are you the way that you are? And I could tell them, well, the reason I’m this way is because of Jesus. And they could say, well, tell me more about Jesus. Like I hope that happens, and that might happen. That type of thing can happen and that type of thing has happened. But it’s also very likely you’re just going to get hit again and then mocked for being so foolish, and following Jesus opens you up to that. Jesus was ridiculed. Jesus was mocked. There were a lot of people who, instead of following Jesus or being so impressed by the life of Jesus, they absolutely rejected it, and that’s one of the reasons why the cross is such an offense. You know, we’ve had 2,000 years to get used to the idea of the cross, but when Paul’s out evangelizing, teaching the message of self‑sacrifice for others, teaching the message that the Messiah, the king of all, gave his life on a cross, it was foolishness to the Gentiles and a stumbling block to the Jews, but to those of us who are called, it’s the power and the wisdom of God. We see something different in that than other people do. And so what that means is, by embodying the message of the cross, we very well may simply be opening ourselves up to persecution or to mockery or to look like fools for the sake of Christ. But our goal is not to only do the things that will transform the world. A lot of things we do might not transform the world. If our goal was to transform the world, that would open up the door to leaving the teachings of Jesus behind and simply going with what works. You know, trying to be very pragmatic, trying to think, well, this will have an impact, that won’t have an impact, so I’ll do this and not that, and that’s not the way Jesus wants us to think about this. Jesus gives us things that might work in some instances, but very often won’t. And when it doesn’t, he says rejoice anyway that you’ve been considered worthy to be persecuted. You know, blessed are those who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness. But I think our mission in the things Jesus says is not about pragmatism and it’s not about if we do this, then everyone will be so impressed that they’ll become followers of Jesus. Rather, I think what it is is to represent God and his faithfulness and his goodness into a world that’s lacking it, and that’s what it means to be the salt of the earth, to be the light of the world, to be a city on a hill. You can do a lot with coercion and force. People have. Like, there have been massive changes in this world because of coercion, force, violence, and all of that. But that’s not ‑‑ our job is not transformation by whatever means necessary. Our job is to follow Jesus, to show the world who God is. Why do we love our enemies? It might not change our enemies, but he says, “Love your enemies that you may be sons of your Father who’s in heaven, who causes the rain to fall on the just and the unjust and the sun to shine on the good and the evil.” When you look at that, it’s saying the reason you do it is because that’s who God is. He says, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.” Like, why are we peacemakers? So that we can be children of God, we can be like God. And so when we are peacemakers, when we love our enemies, I don’t know what it will do to others. I hope and pray that it will change them, but even Paul says, “I planted, Apollos watered, God gives the increase.” If there is change, that’s what God does. In Matthew 13, Jesus gives a parable about the wheat and the tares, or the wheat and the weeds. And there’s the question, should we go pull up all the weeds? It’s like, no, that’s not what you do. You be wheat. You be the best wheat that you can be. You be a faithful presence. You show the world a better way. You be a kingdom of priests. You be a holy and royal nation. Like, you represent God’s goodness to the world, but God’s the one who will change the world, and that’s the hope that we live with, that there will be a day when the angels come and they separate the wheat and the weeds. So I think the Sermon on the Mount is giving us something that, yes, hopefully, prayerfully, people will see it and be transformed. I think Christianity has done a tremendous amount of good in this world, and I think it has made changes, so praise God for that. But my goal is not to change the world by any means necessary because that can open up the door to a lot of things that Jesus didn’t say. Jesus gives me a way of transforming my life into conformity with the image and the will of God, and if I do that, then hopefully people will see the goodness of God in me and in the community of faith. Whether or not they change, that’s God’s business and that’s their business, but I’m supposed to be faithful regardless. WES: Yeah. Yeah, and I love how you put it in the book, that I don’t know if it will change others, but I know that it will change us, that it will change you to be obedient to Jesus. It does change us. And it’s interesting; we live in a time right now that’s kind of interesting to watch, where religious people, even those who claim to be followers of Jesus, are making claims that, well, turning the other cheek ‑‑ and, for some reason, that always gets used, even those words ‑‑ “Turning the other cheek used to work, or it worked at one time, but it doesn’t work anymore, so now is not the time to turn the other cheek. Now is the time to do these other things.” And like you said, we can’t accomplish the will of Jesus by abandoning the way of Jesus. We can’t find a different way to live our lives and to function in the world and think that we’re accomplishing the will of Jesus. The will of Jesus is for us to be obedient, is for us to be faithful and to do what he said regardless, and, as you said, to look at the life of Jesus and then his apostles and the first 200 years of Christian history and think that, quote‑unquote, “it worked” to turn the other cheek back then, as if they weren’t persecuted, as if they weren’t thrown to the lions, as if they didn’t face all kinds of horrible persecution exactly as Jesus said that they would, and then to think that our world today is so much more hostile than their world that we can’t actually do what Jesus told us to do. It’s just ludicrous. But it’s really a misunderstanding, I think, of the entire gospel, of the cross itself, really. TRAVIS: Well, I mean, like you said, if you read something Jesus says, step one, and then step two, you ask yourself, will this work, and how you answer that question depends on whether or not you’ll follow it, you’ve missed the boat entirely. The question is not will this work? The question is, is this faithful to Jesus? WES: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I met a guy one time, he was a recent ‑‑ I want to say convert. He had recently been baptized, but I think that he’d kind of been rushed into baptism, maybe, I’m not sure. But he was a prison guard and he worked in a local prison, and then he had a Bible study with me to say, I’m kind of second‑guessing whether or not I want to be a Christian. In fact, he was toying with the idea of being a Muslim because he was listening to the words of Jesus, and he said, I work in a violent environment with lots of criminals and this turning the other cheek and loving your enemies, I just don’t know that I can buy into that. And I thought this might be the most intellectually honest reason for rejecting Jesus that I’ve ever heard. And at the end of the day, I just have to present Jesus, and whether or not he accepts him ‑‑ I can’t say, well, if you don’t like that version of Jesus, here’s a different version of Jesus that you might appreciate more, or, hey, if you give this a try, it might work for you. Jesus is really, really honest about this is going to get you in a lot of trouble, and if you’re not ready to pick up your cross and follow me, if you’re not ready to die for me, then don’t become my disciple. And the fact that we have sort of buried Jesus’ teachings about what it actually looks like to be a follower of Jesus and haven’t put those out front, I think goes to show that we’ve had a different approach to making Christians while maybe not making disciples. TRAVIS: I think that’s a good distinction. I’ve had a situation where there’s someone I was studying with who’s not a believer, and it was interesting. It wasn’t like the miracles were the problem with coming to faith. It was an atheist. It wasn’t like the flood ‑‑ even this person said there was probably a flood. It was just interesting, like some of the things that they were willing to accept, but it was reading the Sermon on the Mount and Jesus saying love your enemies and Jesus saying do not resist the evil person, and they’re like that’s ludicrous. You can’t live in a world like that. Evil people will just run amok all over the place. And you’re tempted to say, well, Jesus doesn’t really mean that, but as soon as you start changing what Jesus says to make his message more palatable, you’re not creating disciples of Jesus. You’re creating disciples of a culture that thinks this will work well or you’re creating disciples of yourself. So much of the history of interpretation of the Sermon on the Mount ‑‑ and I think we see it a lot today, and it’s something that I try to not do in the book, but we’ll see how good I do. But so much of the history is a history of just trying to find creative ways to get around the teachings of Jesus. How can we love our enemies? Well, okay, you love your enemies. Well, who are my enemies? Well, that’s not applying to politics. That’s not applying to foreigners. That’s not applying if you’re in this career. That doesn’t apply if you’re ‑‑ and it’s like, man, okay, I don’t know, maybe. But instead of reading the Sermon on the Mount trying to find as few ways as possible to apply it, what if we really grappled with, what if I applied it here? What if I applied it to this person? What if I applied it to this political party? What if I applied it in a time of war? Would that change who I am? And I wish we would seek to apply it more and at least be willing to admit where we fall short rather than try to change what Jesus says to make it so easy that it doesn’t impact our lives. One of the things that you’ll see as you read the Sermon on the Mount is Jesus will often compare his teaching to just what other folk do. He’s like, “Your righteousness should exceed the scribes and Pharisees.” He says, about greeting those who greet you, “Don’t the Gentiles do the same?” He says, “Don’t the tax collectors do the same?” He says, “Don’t offer long prayers the way the Gentiles do.” Like so many of the teachings are rooted in this idea that there’s a surpassing righteousness, something that’s different than the culture. So if we then interpret loving your enemies to mean, you know, don’t kill the guy down the street who wronged you, well, okay, but everyone agrees you shouldn’t do that. You know, if you say, it’s okay to kill provided you have a good reason, well, then, that’s ‑‑ again, everyone agrees with that. Jesus is calling us to something that not everyone agrees with, and if your intuitions feel that it’s wrong, you might be right. Maybe Jesus is saying something that we will have an initial visceral reaction to. It will not sit well with us. In fact, if Jesus isn’t doing that, then it’s likely that it’s not actually Jesus you’re listening to anymore. WES: Yeah, yeah. And I think about how many things Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount that apply to so many different people in so many different situations with so many different perspectives, especially today. We’ve talked a lot about loving your enemies, but we could also talk about sexual immorality and how Jesus says, hey, it’s better to pluck your eye out or cut your hand off than it is to go into hell with all of your parts. TRAVIS: Yeah, there’s a thousand other things. Yeah. WES: And so to take Jesus seriously on that is just as radical in our culture today. But, again, I hear Christian religious people discussing what does the Bible say about sexual immorality or what does it say about sexual ethics? And we debate a lot about, well, what does Romans 1 mean or what does 1 Corinthians mean? And we talk a lot about Paul, and people will even make the claim that, well, Jesus was for loving everyone and Jesus wouldn’t be for coming down hard on sexual sin, and it’s like, wait, have you read the Sermon on the Mount, either? And there’s so much there that applies to all of us if we take it seriously. TRAVIS: Yeah, lust itself ‑‑ before you even get to what things people are doing, lust itself, he says, is something that you should be lopping off limbs for. And so it goes to show that Jesus ‑‑ when it comes to money, you know, it’s hard to take seriously what he says about money. When he says, “Do not store up for yourself treasure on earth,” I wish he would say, like, “Do not greedily store up for yourself treasure on earth,” because then I could just say, okay, so as long as you do it without greed, you’re good, or you could take what he says and you could find some angle to make it a lot easier to accept. But, really, I think if you’re storing up for yourself treasure on earth, a responsibility comes with that to be giving that treasure away, and so there are a lot of ways that we can read what Jesus says, whether it’s sexual ethics, whether it is wealth, whether it is anger. There’s actually a funny thing in the history of translation ‑‑ or of the copying of the Sermon on the Mount, where a phrase gets added to what he says about anger. Where he says, “I say to you not to be angry with your brother,” and it adds the phrase “without cause.” That’s in some of the manuscripts, and it’s not in the earliest ones, but eventually that got added, and it’s really easy to see why because, you know, you can see, you know, don’t be angry, but, dude, there’s some reasons you gotta get angry at someone, and so we need to just kind of lessen it a little bit. But then you ask the question, well, everyone agrees you can be angry with cause. If there’s a good enough cause, that wouldn’t separate you from the scribes and Pharisees or from anyone. Everyone would agree with that. And so, yeah, you go through, and whether it’s divorce, oaths ‑‑ that’s a tough one because, you know, how often do we add to our “yes” and “no” in order to make ourselves sound more credible? And what Jesus wants us to do is don’t add more words to your “yes” and “no.” Instead, live a life of credibility. That’s a lot harder. It takes a lot longer. But you should live in such a way that people will hear your “yes” and it will sound the same as if you said, “Upon the life of my children, I give my oath.” You know, you don’t need to add all those words if you’re actually living with the type of integrity that Jesus is calling us to have. But it applies to a lot of areas, and there’s nothing I read in the Sermon on the Mount and I walk away thinking, whew, okay, I got that one mastered. It’s like every time I read it, I end up recognizing, okay, there’s more to being a follower of Jesus than what I’m comfortable with. WES: Yeah. And it goes back to what you said a minute ago, that we find all kinds of creative ways of getting around what Jesus says, and we say, well, you know, that’s obviously hyperbole. He doesn’t really want us to cut our hand off or pluck our eye out. And I would say I agree. I agree; it’s hyperbole. But I always use as an example, if I tell you that it’s raining cats and dogs outside, and you say, well, that’s just ‑‑ that’s a figure of speech; you don’t mean that literally, and then you go outside as if it’s not raining at all, then you’ve made a huge error in how you’ve interpreted what I’m saying. So yes, you’re right, it is a figure of speech, but you’re wrong to dismiss it as if a figure of speech or a metaphor or a hyperbole doesn’t actually mean something important. In fact, sometimes we use those kinds of hyperboles or metaphors or figures of speech because a plain, just surface‑level, very basic way of saying it wouldn’t capture how important and significant this is. TRAVIS: Yeah. Hyperbole means that a truth has been exaggerated. It doesn’t mean that you’ve said something false, you know? And I think that’s a really good illustration with the cats and dogs. But, yeah, so Jesus says, you know, plucking out eyes and chopping off hands ‑‑ okay, the early church wasn’t literally doing that. But the question you should ask, okay, what have you actually sacrificed? What have you amputated or gotten rid of to get rid of lust? I know a lot of people ‑‑ you walk around with a smartphone in your pocket, you have access to pornography 24/7. Okay. Would you be willing to live without that? Is that something you could amputate for the kingdom? Is that something you could get rid of? You know, I think the idea of giving up things for the kingdom because the sacrifice you make now is far less damaging than hell will be, then those are sacrifices we need to make. But a lot of times, if we think it’s hyperbole, we think, okay, so you shouldn’t lust, and we just kind of walk away. But we don’t really think about the sacrifice that ‑‑ or I don’t want to say “we” don’t ‑‑ some people do ‑‑ but it’s common or easy to not do that. WES: Yeah. Well, I think that that leads really well to our last question, and that is, why is it worth it? If following Jesus really does demand sacrifice, if it does demand, at the worst, taking up our cross literally and dying for Jesus, if it calls us to this life of self‑sacrifice, if it calls us to not store up treasures on earth, to even hyperbolically cut off our hand and pull out our eye ‑‑ if that’s the life that Jesus calls us to, then why is it worth it, and how can we present it to other people in a beautiful and compelling way? How do we become disciples, and how do we convince others to become disciples if it really is so costly? TRAVIS: Well, I don’t think it’ll be easy, but I do think there are a couple of things to keep in mind as you consider why you follow Jesus, and one of those ‑‑ and this isn’t maybe the most exciting one, but the fact that it’s just true, Jesus really is ‑‑ like God really did come to earth. Jesus really is Lord. You know, when we talk about the gospel ‑‑ maybe it was N.T. Wright who said something like the gospel is not the good suggestion or the good invitation or the good advice. It’s the good news, and the news is declaring something that is true. Jesus really is Lord. And so if you care about doing what’s right and what’s true in the world, then it does matter. But secondly, I would say that truth can really be good and beautiful. That truth of what Jesus says, it takes perhaps a tremendous amount of faith to see it, but it really is a more beautiful world when we love our enemies rather than wanting to destroy them, or it really is a more beautiful world when, instead of thinking how much wealth can I accumulate for myself, I put my trust in God and I store up my treasure in heaven, which I think actually is a reference to using your wealth for the good of others and for the poor. It really is a more beautiful world, and I think we see that when we see acts of generosity. We appreciate those. And when we see stories of forgiveness, we appreciate it. We can see beauty in that. And Jesus is calling us to live in a kingdom that is not defined by violence, the accumulation of wealth, by hatred, by power, by rising up in status, but rather it’s a kingdom where the least are the greatest and the last is first, and not everyone finds beauty in that. You know, there are some who famously think that that will lead to absolute chaos and the weakness of humanity, but I believe there’s beauty in that, and it’s something that the more we see it, I think the better things are. But even with those things, Jesus is specifically asked that question by Peter. This is at the end of Matthew 19. Peter is saying, Lord, we’ve left everything for you. Like, is this worth it? And Jesus gives an answer, and it’s an answer that contains truth and it’s an answer that contains beauty, but it’s also an answer that contains hope. He says that there’s nobody who, having given up family or possessions or the farms or all these things for the kingdom who will not receive back a hundred times more so in the regeneration or in the new world. And he says when that day comes, you will receive so much more, including eternal life. And I think ‑‑ I think, even now, it’s like when you look at the church family, when you look at the community of Christ, I have more mothers and I have more brothers and sisters. I have family and I have community, and that’s something that makes the suffering worth it. When you suffer alone, there’s something tragic about that and there’s something in that that makes it really hard to continue on, but when you suffer and when you make sacrifices as part of a community for the common good with other people who are doing the same, then you have a fellowship in that and a sharing in that that is transformative for yourself and for that community. And like we’ve talked about, maybe sometimes, in the world around us, that that’s something we pray for. I remember years ago, living in Monroe, Louisiana, there was a flood that came and it flooded our house, and my wife Lauren was pregnant at the time and we ended up having to leave our house, but you know who we left with? Some members of the church came and we were able to walk in waist‑deep water from our house to the nearest road. They had a car waiting for us. They took us to their house and we stayed with them for several days. And then we had to get some things fixed on our house and we stayed with other members of the church. We had a church that we didn’t even ‑‑ we’d never even gone to before sent us money to help with some of the repairs. There were people that we knew who were family; there were people who we didn’t know who were family. And my family was also very kind to us, but we didn’t live near any of my family. My family didn’t live in Louisiana, but we were still surrounded by family. And I think following Jesus creates a community of family, and that’s the type of thing that can help you overcome so many of the obstacles of this life. Plus, finally, the resurrection and the new world. There’s a new world coming. There’s a regeneration, and the resurrection really is why doing what is true and beautiful matters. The resurrection is really why it matters that Jesus is Lord, because the suffering we have in this life, I mean, to use the words of Paul, wouldn’t be worth it if there weren’t something eternal and true on the other side. He says we would be, of all people, most pitied. And so I think the reason we do this, it is with hope and with trust that what God says will come about, and that’s why the gospel of Matthew ‑‑ we are called to carry our cross, and the Sermon on the Mount does take Jesus to the cross, but that’s not where the gospel ends. The gospel ends with the resurrected Lord being worshiped on a mountain with all authority in heaven and on earth. The story ends with a commission to go out and to find, within all of the nations, those who will be disciples of the one true king and those who will give their allegiance to him. The resurrection is where the whole story culminates. So like Philippians 2, Jesus was equal with God, and yet he “did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but he emptied himself, he took the form of a servant, he came in the appearance of human, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore, God highly exalted him and bestowed upon him a name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee would bow, of those in heaven, those on earth, and those under the earth, and every tongue would confess that Jesus Christ is Lord of the glory of God the Father.” The one who humbles himself will be exalted. There is a tremendous amount of humility that comes in following Jesus. You can’t put yourself first, but God will see, he will exalt, he will raise you up, and I think that makes it worth it. WES: Yeah, absolutely. Amen, Brother. I love the already and the not yet of what you’re saying, Brother. Thank you. Thank you for this conversation. Thank you for your book. I can’t wait for other people to read it. It’s fantastic. And thank you most of all for your work in the kingdom, Brother. TRAVIS: Thank you so much, and thank you for reading the book and for giving me your thoughts. Thank you for this opportunity. I love the work that you do. I love your podcast. I love your books and your writing. You’ve had a positive impact on my life and my ministry, and it means a whole lot. WES: Thanks, Brother. Thank you so much for listening to the Radically Christian Bible Study Podcast. If you have just a moment, we would love for you to rate and review this podcast on iTunes or wherever you’re listening. It really does help more people discover this content. I also want to thank our guests who join me each week; Beth Tabor, who volunteers her time to transcribe this podcast; and our whole McDermott Road Church family who make it possible for us to provide this Bible study for you. Now let’s all go out and love like Jesus. The post What Does Matthew Teach Us About Discipleship? with Travis Bookout appeared first on Radically Christian.

How to Create a Disciple-Making Culture with Marcus Stenson

In this episode of the Radically Christian Bible Study Podcast, Wes McAdams and Marcus Stenson tackle the crucial topic of discipleship and how to create a disciple-making church culture. They address common misconceptions about discipleship, explore why many churches struggle to prioritize disciple-making, and discuss how individuals can embrace their role as disciples even in challenging environments. This conversation is particularly valuable for those feeling frustrated with church stagnation or wondering how to move beyond mere church attendance to truly following Jesus. The episode delves into biblical concepts such as the transformative power of discipleship, the importance of both “growing” and “going” in the Christian walk, and Jesus’ model of investing in individuals. They also discuss how the early church’s understanding of discipleship differs from modern church culture, encouraging listeners to reimagine their approach to spiritual growth and community impact. Marcus Stenson, the guest for this episode, brings a wealth of experience and passion to the conversation. He currently serves as the preaching minister at the Leander Church of Christ and is a co-founder of Christians for Kenya, a nonprofit focused on equipping Kenyans to spread the gospel. Stenson is also a team member at Be1Make1, an organization dedicated to empowering disciple-making. His practical insights and strategic approach to fostering disciple-making cultures in churches make this episode a must-listen for anyone seeking to deepen their faith and impact their community. Links and Resources Leander Church of Christ Be1Make1 Christians for Kenya Transcript (Credit: Beth Tabor) Welcome to the Radically Christian Bible Study podcast. I’m your host, Wes McAdams. Here we have one goal: Learn to love like Jesus. It is great to be back after a long break. I’ve really missed releasing new episodes, but we’ve still been recording episodes and we have some fantastic conversations to share with you over the coming weeks. We’re starting a new series on discipleship, and today we’re going to talk about how to be a disciple‑making church. My guest today is my good friend, Marcus Stenson. Marcus currently serves as the preaching minister at the Leander Church of Christ, north of Austin. He’s a cofounder of Christians for Kenya, a kingdom‑facing nonprofit organization that focuses on equipping Kenyans to spread the gospel through education and humanitarian aid. Marcus is also a member of the team at Be1Make1, an organization dedicated to empowering the disciple‑making purpose that lives inside everyone. I want to begin today by reading from Ephesians 4, starting in verse 11, which says, “He gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes. Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into Him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love.” I hope that today’s conversation is an encouragement to you, and I hope that it, as always, helps all of us learn to love like Jesus. WES: Marcus Stenson, welcome back to the podcast, Brother. MARCUS: Hey, Wes, thank you so much. It is always a good time here. Happy to be here. WES: So excited to have you, and I know that this topic that we’re talking about is close to your heart. It’s something that you’re passionate about. So let’s talk about discipleship. First, how do you define that term? MARCUS: That’s a great place to start. I define discipleship as closely as I can to what we see walked out in the scripture, with a little bit of context. And what I mean by that is a disciple, speaking of what we read of in terms of a disciple in the New Testament, is a person who has dedicated their entire life to following a rabbi or a teacher. They have decided not only am I going to listen to this person’s teachings, but I actually want to model my entire life after this person. And so when we see the disciples who are called to Jesus follow him, they’re dropping everything. Their life is now all about being like Jesus. And so our walk with Jesus modernly, in my view, is really about two things, and the first is growing like Jesus grew. And I just look at Luke when it says that Jesus grew in stature and wisdom and in favor with God and man, and, one, just put a little mental note that yes, Jesus grew, as hard as that is to fathom, in all of those different areas. So if I’m going to be like Jesus and a disciple of Jesus, I need to be committed to growing like he grew in those areas, as well. It’s about growing like Jesus grew, and, to me, it’s also about going with Jesus into mission or going where Jesus went. And so when I think of discipleship, I think of those two terms, growing and going. God tells us many times in the New Testament that the point of our faith and the point of our discipleship is to be continually transformed more and more into the image of Christ. That’s that idea coming through strongly in the writings of Paul, as well, and so when I think about discipleship, I think about that as it pertains to daily spiritual rhythms. What was Jesus doing and committed to that I see exemplified in his walk that I need to be committed to and exemplify in my walk, too? I want to grow like he grew. And then, you know, Jesus doesn’t grow us just for the sake of knowledgeable acquisition or just to say that we grew or so that we can feel like good disciples. He always grows disciples so he can send them, so then the going part happens, right? And those are the two ways that I would define discipleship. WES: Yeah, I love that, growing and going. That’s so good. That’s so good. So how do you think that a lot of people misunderstand ‑‑ as you’ve taught, as you’ve made disciples, as you’ve helped others to make disciples, how do people misunderstand the word discipleship? Because it’s kind of a religiousy, churchy word that we don’t really use outside of church context, so how do people misunderstand that? MARCUS: Yeah, it can kind of seem like a buzzword. It’s kind of a double‑edged sword at this point in time. I think a lot more people are talking about discipleship, and it’s something that’s been talked about in past eras, as well, with varying results and varying applications, and sometimes we have to press up against those a little bit. But just for the common, everyday person that I encounter and that I work with, I think that the idea of discipleship does sound super‑religious. It can sound a little hooey, and sometimes I think that the biggest obstacle that we have individually is that we consider it like it’s another thing that we’re supposed to do. It’s almost like another thing that we add to the list that we keep about how to be a good Christian or how to be faithful or how to incur or curry the favor of God so that he’ll be pleased with us, almost another checklist, if you will, that we need to make sure that we take care of so that we’re in good standing with God. But being a disciple and being in discipleship to Jesus, and even making disciples, is not performative in that way. It’s diagnostic, really. When you think about it as another thing that you should do or need to do, it invites a whole lot of other issues to the table because then you start thinking about, well, where do I get the time to go and make disciples, right? How do I fit this into my already busy schedule? And now I feel guilty and now I feel ashamed that I never do this, or I don’t commit to this, or I don’t feel qualified to do this. But when I say that it’s actually diagnostic is that, really, being a disciple is something that you’re called to do in the scheme of your everyday life as it is already, as you go walking along. And even being a disciple‑maker and helping someone else along that path is the same thing. Discipleship is less about creating extra time or finding a way to create extra time, and it’s more about inviting the rhythms of Jesus into the time and life that you already have, and it’s about inviting other people into the life that you’re already living, as well. So it’s not about creating more. It’s about kind of living through a different perspective and lens where you already are, if that makes sense. WES: Yeah. I was thinking about Colossians 3:17 as you were talking, “Whatever you do in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to the Father through Him,” that idea of this is about everything that you do. It’s about learning to be a follower of Jesus in your workplace, in your school, in everything that comes out of your mouth, everything you think, everything you do. You know, one of the misunderstandings I think that I encounter ‑‑ and I just thought of this as you were talking ‑‑ is that a lot of people that I talk to think that when you say disciple, you mean apostle, like they think of the 12. They think of the 12 disciples who, as you said earlier, literally followed Jesus, as in they walked where Jesus walked, they lived with him, they learned from him every day, and they certainly were amongst his first disciples, but it’s a much broader term that included a lot of other people who followed Jesus, and the people that would continue to follow Jesus in subsequent generations, including us. And so I think that maybe there’s a misunderstanding, and it kind of goes with what you were saying, that a disciple is like a super‑Christian or something. Like you have Christians, you know, you have saved people, people that, you know, they’ve been baptized and they go to church and that kind of thing, but then if you ask them if they’re a disciple, they think, well, I don’t know if I’m a disciple, or they think of just a select group of people who literally followed, walked with Jesus in the first century. They don’t necessarily think of that as something that, quote‑unquote, normal Christians are supposed to be and do, and it encompasses everything that we do in our life. MARCUS: Oh, yeah, that’s such a good point, and I just remember that Jesus told those apostles ‑‑ or those super‑Christians, as we refer to them, to go and make disciples. He didn’t tell them to go and make more apostles, so everybody who becomes a follower of Jesus becomes a disciple. That’s how it’s supposed to look, and so I think you draw out a really good point there not to conflate the two in drawing that distinction there between apostles and disciples. Every follower is a disciple of Jesus. I do think, though, it can help in a way. Because the word disciple carries such a different kind of flavor and connotation in our church makeup today, it’s a really good opportunity to talk about what that actually means, and it is an opportunity to call yourself deeper into a spiritual rhythm and in patterning your life after Jesus as opposed to just maybe showing up on Sunday, or whatever idea we had of Christianity before, in playing a part in this large matrix. So yeah, I love that. WES: Yeah. Well, and I think it’s helpful to point out that the word Christian ‑‑ that’s the word we use all of the time. It’s in the URL of my website; it’s in the title of my podcast. So we use “Christian” all the time. It’s not a bad term, but it’s not a term that, apparently, first‑century followers of Jesus used about themselves. It seems to be something ‑‑ it occurs very seldom in the New Testament. It seems to be a term that others used about them, and they said, well, you know, they’re calling us this, but Luke says they called the disciples Christians. They called these followers of The Way “Christians.” So I think it is helpful for us to really adopt this idea of discipleship and to call ourselves disciples and think of ourselves as disciples because, to your first point, it’s about growing, it’s about going, it’s about doing, it’s about being a follower of Jesus. It’s not just about being saved. It’s not just about eternal destiny. And I think, so often, we think, well, I became a Christian, I am a Christian, and what we think that means is I’m going to heaven when I die. I’m in a saved relationship with God rather than I am in the process of being transformed into the likeness of Christ; I’m in the process of becoming more and more like Jesus every day of my life; I’m doing everything in word and deed in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. That is a much different idea than simply I’m a saved person. MARCUS: Yes, so much, and one way that I’ve kind of tried to articulate this is even based on what you just said, where Christians were first named that in Antioch. “Christian” is what you are called; it’s what you’re named. But a disciple is who you are; it’s central to your identity, and there’s a deeper aspect to that, and it calls all of you into that being in terms of your identity, your esteem. How you evaluate your standing with God is based on a measure of discipleship and not just the name that the world has to call us because we’re so radically different from what they see around them everywhere else, so yeah. WES: Yeah, absolutely. So let’s talk about this idea of ‑‑ well, actually, let’s let you share a little bit about Be1Make1. This is one of the reasons you’re so passionate about discipleship and disciple‑making. So tell us about Be1Make1, because I think that that’ll help set the stage for the rest of our conversation. MARCUS: Yeah. Man, Be1Make1 is an organization that I have the benefit and the privilege of being a part of that the idea really started for back in 2015. Back in 2015, myself and a couple of really good friends, a couple of brothers in arms, so to speak, Chip and Anthony, we sat in a dusty church office in Athens, Ohio, and we had all been in ministry for some time at that point and we kind of started carrying this burden around, and we’d come together because we came to find out that we shared this burden. And what we started to encounter almost everywhere we went, in a lot of different church contexts ‑‑ and this is certainly not prescriptive or descriptive of all church contexts, but in so many we were seeing folks that were incredibly dedicated to the faith, but they were dormant, and they were aware that they were dormant and they were upset by the fact that they were dormant. They were serious about the faith. I don’t really know many folks more serious than our faith tradition in the churches of Christ about their faith and about doctrine and what it means to their lives. But along with that seriousness also came a level of being stagnant that, also, instinctively they knew was not good, but there was just this inertia that it seemed like everyone was incapable of overcoming. And then the one that really got me the most was that folks that are just genuinely faithful to the core, in every measure by which you could even measure faithful, but absolutely fearful at the same time, paralyzed with fear, and that fear really fed into the dormancy and the stagnancy that everyone was experiencing. And we all three just kind of agreed that we had a passion to see people actually experience the joy and peace and power that Jesus actually promises his disciples, and we started to work very diligently to figure out how we can get back to the original mission that Jesus gave us in a church context, and that is to just simply be disciples who make disciples, and what started there has grown over the last almost decade now. It feels crazy to say. And we’ve just been endeavoring to help the individual live in that spiritual rhythm that I talked about a few minutes ago, to grow to be more like Jesus and then, ultimately, going with Jesus into his mission, whatever that mission is for them personally that God has called them to; and then also to help church leadership come to alignment in mission and vision and values and how they can start to shift or make the pivot out of what I like to call the Field of Dreams ministry complex into one of a disciple‑making culture. There’s one thing that I became absolutely convinced of, and that is through being told dozens and dozens and dozens of times by so many people, “We want to share the gospel,” “We want to be known in our community.” But I became convinced that it’s human nature not to share something that they’re not absolutely confident in, and so it was going to take a total ‑‑ not a reimagining, but really just getting back to the heart of where this really begins for us individually, between us and God, and then congregationally, between us and God. And so that’s what Be1Make1 does. We build on mission leaders, and on mission leaders, build or nourish on mission churches, and it’s just our goal to see everybody tap into what Jesus has for them. So I would love to dig deeper on any specific aspect, but that’s where that comes from. WES: Yeah. Well, it’s that idea of leadership and churches, and you used the phrase “disciple‑making culture.” So if a church is going to become a disciple‑making church, that that’s their vision, that that’s their culture, that that’s their mission, that they are committed to that and passionate about that, what needs to be ‑‑ what do their practices need to be? What does their vision need to be? What do they need to prioritize? Maybe priorities are something we need to talk about. MARCUS: Absolutely. So there are a couple things here. This is a great question. I love it. The first thing ‑‑ and I say this not to be critical or accusatory of anyone in any church context. This comes from my personal experience in working with lots of different church‑leadership groups. I think the first thing you have to do is you have to change the goal, and I think the goal so many times, especially in a church that maybe doesn’t feel like it’s thriving, is to get people in the doors, and if we’re being honest, if we ask, you know, what do I want for them when they visit our church or when they finally come ‑‑ I want them to like us. I want them to have a great experience. I want them to find people like them and maybe they’ll come back. And if they keep coming back, they’ll get baptized and then our church will grow and we’ll have a young family or we’ll have kids and then we’ll feel really good about what we’re doing. And that’s not to say that any of that is wrong in and of itself, but I think it’s really important for churches to ask themselves, is what we want for people when they contact the body of Christ here the same thing that Jesus wants for people when they contact the body of Christ here? If you’re gonna be a disciple‑making church, you gotta care more about getting them everything that Jesus promises them, first and foremost, and beyond them just liking what they experience when they come. And that kind of flies in the face of our model that’s really worked well in our country since probably 1960 or ’70, where you try to have the best preaching, the best praise, and the best programs, and that’s why I call it Field of Dreams. If you build it, they will come, and, hopefully, they just keep coming. So that’s the first thing: Change the goal to what Jesus’ goal is for every person. The second thing is to recognize, as a leadership team, that you are chosen and you have relationships and spiritual formation that you are stewarding. And as church leadership, you have a responsibility to provide a picture of what spiritual maturity looks like and a pathway for how it’s achievable, and that means that you can’t hope that your church is going to be filled with disciple‑makers, or disciples for that matter, if you’re not committed to going first and doing that yourself. So be committed first to being what you want to see. And then kind of a related recommendation on this is prioritize the action over the announcement. Traditionally ‑‑ because above all, especially elders, who I respect and love and always have the best intention at heart, they fear, above all, losing people on their watch or being one of the guys that, you know, the church went off course in some way during my tenure. And so those two fears dominate a lot of actions that are taken or not taken, and then we usually try to craft announcements about new programs or new initiatives that will not upset the people that we don’t want to lose, and, therefore, we have to be really conservative in what we’re talking about and we end up trying to speak to folks that are probably going to be disgruntled anyway and it ends up ruling the culture. So, you know, be in action first because the thing that will churn over a culture at a church are the stories that are being told and the testimonies that are coming from action that is already happening, right? And that way, when the announcement is made, the demonstration of the benefit and the value has already been lived out live and direct, and you’re not in the position of trying to convince anybody of something new that you guys need to do; you’re just sharing something incredible that God is already doing in your church, even if it starts small. And so when you’re sharing something that everyone already agrees is a need and a desire, as opposed to trying to convince somebody of something new and scary, your chances for success go through the roof as opposed to where you were operating from before. So change the goal. Know that it’s on you, as leadership, to go first and to show a picture and a pathway, and then prioritize action over the announcement. Just start being disciples that make disciples before you ask anybody or try to convince anybody that this should be the grand design of our entire church. So those would be my three. WES: Yeah. Man, I love that. That’s so good. And, really, going back to that idea of changing the goal and really having discipleship as the goal, it really does change how we, quote‑unquote, do church, how we lead a congregation. And I think often about ‑‑ I keep coming back ‑‑ in this series, I keep coming back to Luke 14 and Jesus’ words, his admonition to count the cost before you become a disciple, and his warning that if you take on this [mantle] of discipleship, if you come and follow me, it’s going to be costly, and not everyone can pay the cost. So if you’re not going to take up your cross and follow me, if you’re not willing to hate your father and mother, your wife and your children, your own life, then don’t bother coming and being my disciple. And I think how different that is as a strategy than the way that we typically, quote‑unquote, do church or the way that we try to attract people. And we just ‑‑ again, as you said, we want people to like us. We want people to attend. We may even want people to get baptized. But, again, I think there’s a slight difference between what we think of as making Christians, getting people saved, and making disciples, and churches that are really passionate about making disciples, they set a high bar for themselves and for other people because Jesus sets a high bar. He doesn’t ‑‑ Jesus doesn’t go out and say, hey, we’d really like for you to come to church on Sunday. We really want you to be a church attender. He calls people, follow me, like your whole life, like everything, 24/7. I want you to come and follow me, learn from me, become exactly like me, take up your cross and die like I’m dying. I mean, it’s everything. It’s total, 100 percent commitment. And to the people that say, I don’t know; that seems like a lot, Jesus says, okay, see ya, and I don’t know that we’re willing to do that. I don’t know that we are willing to let people walk away. And I think often about John 6. I think about the fact that Jesus is willing to let people leave. He even asks the 12, “Do you want to leave, as well?” And of course they say, “Where else would we go? You have the words of eternal life.” But I wonder, are we willing to do that? Are we willing to look at our congregations and say this is a place for people who want to be disciples and make disciples; this is a place for people who want to become like Jesus, and we are going to hold each other to that standard; we’re going to hold each other accountable to growing and going? MARCUS: Yeah, I think you bring up a really good point there. It’s not just the person that comes new to your church that might walk away. It’s ‑‑ unfortunately, there are some folks in your number, when you say to them, hey, we are serious about this. This is what we have been called to as a congregation ‑‑ there’s going to be some uncomfortability there, and that’s why it becomes a challenge for leaderships. And I don’t want to diminish that at all. I’m not saying that this is easy to count that cost and say, you know what? There’s a certain culture that we are committed to having here. There’s a mission that we’re called to and we’re all in on that. It might not be for everybody, and we’re okay with that. That is probably the scariest thing that any shepherd or elder can even think about. But you make a really good point, Wes. I don’t find one place in the New Testament where Jesus was just trying to get someone to synagogue the next Saturday. He was about creating lives that were modeled and shaped and formed after him, and, ultimately, that’s our job, too, and that’s what we have to be committed to. WES: Yeah. And even talking about, quote‑unquote, doing church or what does the assembly look like ‑‑ I mean, I think there’s so much that could be said about the transformative power of worship, the transformative power of what we do in the assembly, what we do when we break bread together, when we share the cup together, when we sing songs together. In fact, I think we could spend a whole hour talking about that, about the way that our worship assembly, however you want to phrase that ‑‑ how that contributes to making disciples. And if a congregation, if the leadership has that mentality, that the answer to the question, why do you sing, is not, well, because it’s wrong to do anything else. You know, the answer to why do you sing is because we want to be followers of Jesus. We want the Spirit of God to dwell in us richly. We want to be transformed into his likeness, and singing to one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs is part of that process of becoming more and more like Jesus. I think everything that we do, both in our individual lives and when we come together on Sunday and Wednesday, and whenever else we come together, would all contribute to that disciple‑making and disciple‑being process. MARCUS: Agree. As we kind of talked about in a past question, so much of this comes down to not necessarily not doing things that we’re committed to doing, or even adding something new always. Sometimes that’s appropriate, but it is why we do what we do. Why we do what we do informs everything about ‑‑ everything from how it feels, to how it presents, to what you gain from it, to how it blesses other people. The perspective that you bring into it will change what you get out of it. I like to say the story that you live in is the story that you live out. What is our story as an individual in relationship to this God that has created us and, for some reason, lavished so much favor and grace on us? What is our story as a congregation, a community of believers who come together to pour into each other to that end, to glorify this God every single Sunday? It really changes the dynamic and the why you are there, not necessarily the what, because we need to be in community worshiping the Father together, but it does put a slightly different twist on why we’re there and what it means to us. WES: Yeah, absolutely. And it gives us a metric, too, doesn’t it, to be able to look at ourselves and to look at what we’re accomplishing as a church family, also, to say, are we accomplishing that? If the goal is simply being present and checking that off of our list, that, yep, I showed up, I showed up, I showed up, I showed up ‑‑ for 35 years, I’ve shown up. If that’s the goal, if that’s the metric, then we feel like we’ve accomplished something even if we haven’t grown, even if we haven’t gone, even if we haven’t done this process of becoming more and more like Jesus or going and making disciples of others. But if that’s the metric ‑‑ if the metric is, are you becoming more like Jesus, well, that really requires some introspective examination, and that requires us to go and actually do something in addition to just showing up. And, again, showing up is important, it’s good, but to what end? What are you accomplishing in showing up? What are you trying to accomplish? Or do you even realize there is something to be accomplished in the showing up? MARCUS: I think, just to add to what you’re saying, we really have such an opportunity because churches that are looking at this and wrestling with this ‑‑ not even just churches corporately, but disciples that are wrestling with this and looking at this, I think we leave so much on the table in terms of our ultimate purpose on this planet and in this life by not tapping into this. Jesus is saying I’m going to give you a life of significance, not just a life of temporal significance, but eternal significance. If you become like me, if you walk with me, if you live this life, the things that you do and the life that you live are going to matter forever. And if it’s really just about attending for 35 years, you may wake up 35 years later and still be racked with anxiety that you haven’t done enough, that you haven’t been good enough. You might wake up and never be able to share with another soul because you’re really not confident in your own security and well‑being. It changes the way that you can treat your brothers and sisters because you carry this guilt or shame around with you on a daily basis. You haven’t really gotten to the bottom of why God has actually put you here on this planet. And I think just walking with Jesus in a daily rhythm, and understanding what that looks like and letting God work on you, coming together and letting God work on you in community with other disciples, provides you so much more depth and richness of life as you go from day to day, and resources with which to even meet stress and the trials and tribulations that are sure to come, that this really is the best way to do life. It’s not just something that we intellectually know, and we read it and we go and hope that it actually comes to pass someday. Right here, right now, living as a disciple is the most fulfilling and rewarding way that you can walk this thing out. And I just hope and pray that more and more brothers and sisters can kind of latch onto that and sink their teeth into it because it really is beautiful and powerful. WES: Yeah, yeah, that is beautiful. And I think it goes back to what you said in the beginning about this confidence that comes from knowing that we’re saved by grace through faith, that we are saved as a gift from God and that it’s not about this legalistic checklist of things that we’re trying to accomplish, but about a relationship that we have with Jesus and a relationship that we’re trying to share with other people because we know how good it is, we know how wonderful it is, and we’re so excited to have experienced it ourselves, and we want other people to experience it, as well. MARCUS: Yeah, a faith and a sharing that comes from an overflow of gratitude as opposed to one that is compulsory or something that is something that you have to do is totally different. I am famous ‑‑ well, famous is definitely an overstatement. I shouldn’t use that word. I have been known to say that we’re all disciple‑makers anyway. We make disciples of all sorts of things. You make disciples of the books that you read and the shows that you binge on Netflix and the restaurants that you eat at. I don’t even live in DFW anymore, but everybody knows about [Hutchins] BBQ. Shout out to those guys over there. They’re doing good work. I make disciples of lots of things. Anything that has truly blessed and impacted my life, I’m prone to make a disciple of it and share with people. And so when I say being a disciple or disciple‑making is diagnostic, if you don’t have that with Jesus, it might be a red flag or a clue to you that something is a little bit convoluted in your conception of how this works between you and him, what you’re actually doing here. So I want everybody to have that overflowing joy. It’ll take the pressure off of you. If you think, you know, I need to go and share Jesus with somebody because that’s what I need to do to be good, it’s always going to be arduous. It’s always going to be stressful. It’s always going to be ridden with anxiety. You’re always going to feel like you need the perfect script and the perfect words to say instead of it being what Jesus really designed it to be, an as‑you‑go, organic exercise in which someone is actually just asking you, “Why are you the way that you are?” “Why do you have joy when I know that your life is going through utter turmoil right now?” “Why don’t you lash out at people? Like I would have lashed out, but you never lash out. What is that?” “What is this peace that you have? I’ve seen you in grief and it doesn’t look like grief that I’ve seen before.” These are the things that become present in a life, the fruits of the Spirit that cause people to ask questions, and your opportunities to make disciples are going to come much more naturally than you ever imagined. It’s just going to be sharing from the overflow. Not something that you do, but it’s just who you are. WES: So what do you think we do ‑‑ and you may have already touched on some of this, but what do you think we do collectively, as churches, as congregations, that build hindrances or roadblocks, obstacles that keep us from being disciples and making disciples and growing as disciples, things that become part of our programs, our systems, our cultures that become a roadblock to accomplishing this mission because we sort of had a different mission in mind and we didn’t have this perspective, and so we’ve set things up that actually have unintentionally hindered people from growing as disciples? MARCUS: Yeah, there’s probably a lot that comes into play here, and we did talk a little bit about ‑‑ I briefly mentioned that sort of Field of Dreams ministry approach, and I only would go into a little bit more depth on that because I want to make sure that everybody knows that I’m not critical of this. I think that the way that we kind of learned to set up church and do things and do church successfully was a product of a very unique period of time in American history. What I mean by that is, you know, there was a point in time where, you know, the data will tell you that 70 percent of people were in church somewhere every Sunday, and in that place and time, you can devote an awful lot of energy to just being the best church out there, and this is where Rick Warren and those guys over at Saddleback kind of patented the three P’s model, and everyone else adopted it with varying degrees of success. And as the culture moved away from regular church attendance, we found ourselves in a position of not really relating to the culture so well anymore, not really having talked a lot about discipleship because, you know, it wasn’t really about that. It was about just presenting as the church in town that everyone’s going to go to since pretty much everyone’s in church. But now there are less than 20 percent of people in church every Sunday, and, really, that’s if you’re counting three out of every eight Sundays as regular attendance. So the environment in which we find ourselves is so very different, that if we are still married to that approach to ministry, if that’s how we’re going to make every decision, it will get in the way of organic disciple‑making culture. Something that’s kind of an aside to that is just the way that we talk about this. Just to go a little bit deeper on action over announcement, in that Field of Dreams approach, we want to make the perfect announcement for a new program or a new initiative, and if that’s the way you want to try and bring an idea of disciple‑making to your church, you make it programmatic, but disciple‑making is not programmatic, it’s cultural, and so it will fail. If anyone out there is familiar with the product adoption curve, this is just human psychology and how it works. In every single new ‑‑ I guess when you introduce something new to a market, you’re going to have 2.5 percent of people that are, like, innovators. They’re on it because it’s new and it’s exciting. That exists in a church. It exists when Apple drops a new phone. It’s the same phone every year, but they’re going to camp outside. They’re going to wait in line in a tent or something like that because they’re the innovators. After the innovators, you have early adopters. Your early adopters are 13.5 percent of the population, and they will do what the innovators do because they have the influence, and they’ll do it once the benefit has been established or demonstrated to the market. The next 34 percent is early majority, and the early majority will do whatever the early adopters do because the early adopters are people of influence in the community. The late majority will follow the early majority. That’s another 34 percent. And then you have 16 percent of any given population that are just laggards, and if you’re a laggard out there, you still have like the original Razr flip phone, and you are now trendy again because Razr flip phones are back. But that 16 percent is always going to exist. It’s just how people work. The mistake that churches make ‑‑ and this gets in the way of a disciple‑making culture ‑‑ is what we try to do, since we look at those two, the early and late majority, 68 percent of a church population in any given context, and since that’s the largest percentage, we want to make sure we don’t upset those people. Whatever we’re going to do, those people got to be bought in, and so we will try to craft an announcement that will appeal to that 68 percent and somehow still motivate people to move in a different direction, and that seldom works. Matter of fact, most of the time it doesn’t work, and, you know, you probably have heard story after story after story of, well, we always try to do something and then it just never happens, or it fizzles out, or we do it for a little bit and then it stops. This is the kind of culture that this exists in. But the real cool thing about this is, if you understand how this works scientifically and datawise, in order for any new introduction to reach momentum where it’s going to be adopted by the early and late majorities, all you have to do is get the first 16 percent. A new product will reach momentum when it hits 16 percent. Most people probably have no idea that there are still more Android phones out there than iPhones because there’s such social pressure to have an iPhone and have blue bubbles instead of green bubbles. That’s because they reached momentum a long time ago, but they’re not even the majority in the marketplace. So if you’re in a church context and you’re saying we really want to be disciple‑makers, we want to be a church where we are disciples who make disciples, what you got to do is you have to be willing to go first. In most churches, that 2.5 percent, those innovators, could be just your elders and your ministry staff. It might be some deacons or a couple of key players there. It’s actually much smaller than you think. If you take your church ‑‑ if your church is 200 people and you say we only gotta get 16 percent of people here to believe that they’re a disciple who’s supposed to make disciples and to start doing it before it will become the culture of our church, that is way different from saying we have to craft an announcement that motivates and moves 68 percent of our people immediately. So the mentality that ‑‑ that Field of Dreams, make the announcement, start the program will get in the way every time because it overcomplicates what this really is. So that’s the first thing. The second thing is, I think sometimes there’s an unwillingness to create intentional spaces for discipleship to occur, and we come by it honestly because Sunday is so important to us, and it’s going to remain important to us. But when I look at the life of Jesus, we see him operating in different spaces of community, and I think it’s important for us to provide the space as much as we can for every disciple to develop in those same spaces. I’ll give you an example. Jesus spent time in the erémos, the wilderness. Without question, daily, with regularity, he’s got one‑on‑one time with his Father all of the time. That’s a spiritual rhythm that every disciple should be in. I can’t really be responsible for that, or you can’t, as a church leader. That’s up to the individual disciple. Then he had a transparent space with three disciples, Peter, James, and John, who got to see him not only transfigured on the top of the mountain in all of his glory that wasn’t accessible to everyone, but also saw him deep in the dark garden when he’s shedding tears and sweat drops of blood that not everyone got to see, either. So these were people that were doing life with him in a way that the peaks and the valleys were visible, and they kept each other accountable and they walked together. Every disciple needs that, too. From there, Jesus had the 12, and we’ve talked about them today. That’s a personal space, and he was on mission with those guys in a special way that he wasn’t with others. Churches that are serious about disciple‑making will create a space for people to find their 12 there in that context. That might take the form of a small‑group ministry. It might take the form of another ministry that’s happening at the church. But if all of your energy is just dedicated on get people here on Sunday, and you’re not creating the space for some folks to get transparent with one another or personal with one another, you’re kind of cutting your own legs out from under you in terms of creating a space where folks can be disciples who make disciples. Social space for Jesus ‑‑ he had the 70. He sent the 70 out. They were on mission with him, too. That’s a little bit more analogous to our regular church gathering on a Sunday, where everybody is coming together. Teams develop, ministries develop. That’s the easy one for us because our entire way of church is centered around that social space. And then there’s the public space. Jesus, you know, sat in front of the multitudes with his disciples. They fed those that were needy. They healed dozens and dozens of people, and that’s the going part. When we’re not together in that transparent space, that social space together as a body, are we still on mission together in public? Are we still going with Jesus in that mission to make an impact positively on someone’s life so that they are provoked deep within them to ask the question, “Who are these people? I need to call them something. I think they call them Christians. What is it about these people? Why are they helping us? Why are they invested in us?” And so that would be one of the unintentional obstacles, as well, just not facilitating those spaces, and the expectation that you talked about before, that this is what it looks like, this is the pathway to spiritual maturity. We are already walking it; we want you to walk it with us. WES: Yeah, that’s so good. And I can’t help but think that so many of our congregations are set up with the potential for exactly what you’re talking about but without the intentionality. Without the goal or the vision of it being to serve that purpose of being and making disciples, then it becomes something different. And I keep coming back to the idea that so much of what we do is about information, maybe inspiration, but very seldom transformation. And so we like to inform, and sometimes we like to inspire, but it just ends there. But if our goal is transformation, it’s a much more difficult goal. If our goal is actually to take people from where they are to where they need to be, which is more and more like Jesus, that’s difficult because then we have to deal with the fact that, oh, well, we’re kind of resisting the Spirit here. We’re quenching the Spirit here, and we need to repent and we need to change, and there needs to actually be change over time. If we are the same people today that we were 10 years ago, something is failing and we need to repent drastically. But if we just teach to inform or teach to inspire, well, then we can feel like we did a great job and we can pat ourselves on the back. We’re informing people. They know more Bible now than they used to know, or they feel inspired every week and they feel like, oh, that was a great sermon or that was a great Bible class or that was a great small group or whatever. But if they’re not actually ‑‑ if we’re not actually being transformed, there’s a problem and we’re falling short. But, again, we have Bible classes, we have small groups, we have big assemblies. People are out in the community. They are in the workplace. They are in the school. They are in the public. But if we’re not doing those things with the intention of being and making disciples, then we’re falling short of the mission. MARCUS: I love that you say that. Actually, I laughed ‑‑ someone said, the other day, if you don’t look at your Facebook memories from 10 years ago and feel embarrassed, then you’re not growing, and I thought that was a really funny way to look at that. But yeah, it’s true. There is no living thing in God’s creation that ‑‑ I mean, if it’s not growing, it’s dying. That’s just kind of the way things work. And we got to be growing as disciples because sanctification is not a process that finishes this side of the new heavens and the new earth. I want to speak to potential fear. If someone out there is kind of weirded out by this whole disciple‑making pivot and church culture already, let me try to assuage your fears a little bit. What Wes just said is so important because we have a lot of the skeleton in place already. Those spaces sometimes exist almost completely in different church contexts and dynamics. They’re just not purposed towards that. One of the greatest fears that I hear when I sit down with folks is that there are a lot of sacred cows here. Like we can’t get rid of VBS. We can’t get rid of this program or that program, and that’s really not a viable way to approach it. A better way to approach it is to say, okay, here are the things that we are doing already. How do these or how can these be purposed towards the goal of disciple‑making? How can we maybe reinvent this thing that we love to do but has been losing steam and we feel like we’re supposed to do it? How do we revitalize it with this mission that draws us all together and unifies us and galvanizes us and gives it a greater purpose than just we’ve always done this here? So you might find that you won’t find everything that you’re afraid of ending up on the cutting floor on the cutting floor. You just might find that there’s new life in the places and the context that you already have if there’s purpose and intention behind them, if there’s a unifying vision and a mission and value as the way you carry yourself in that space behind them. So I want to encourage anybody or any church that is looking at this not to get intimidated or afraid of what you might lose by making this a focus because you really only stand everything to gain. WES: Yeah. So well said. So let’s talk to the person who is not just in the 16 percent; they’re in the 1 percent. Like they’re listening to us and they’re like, amen, Marcus, I 100 percent want to be a disciple. I want to make disciples. I want to be part of the overall mission of the church. I want to be part of the Great Commission and making disciples, but they’re part of a congregation that is stagnant, that isn’t focused on this, that has no desire to do this, that really doesn’t want to change, that they want to keep doing what they’ve been doing and they’re really not interested in reimagining what they should be, what they could be. And so how do we encourage that person that feels like they’re all by themselves and they’re not part of a community that’s committed to this mission, and what can they do in their context, do you think? MARCUS: Excellent question, and those people exist. I’ve had the privilege of working with a couple, and my advice is always to them, and my advice is to you, if you find yourself in this position, always look at Jesus. We can’t have this whole conversation about patterning ourselves after Jesus and growing like he grew and then abandon it if we’re in a non‑ideal circumstance. It’s always going to be the answer: “What Would Jesus Do,” like an old bracelet we used to wear in 1993. What would Jesus do in this situation? One of the concepts that I like to teach, and I really like to dig in deep on, is called invest in the one. It’s one of the skills that I think Jesus was incredibly proficient at, and what we see in Jesus’ ministry is, whether he was in a larger or smaller discipleship context with the folks he was in community with, he impacted a lot of people one at a time: one person at a time, one feeding at a time, one healing at a time, one conversation that really shouldn’t have been happening at a time, and it teaches us that even that one person, in Jesus’ eyes, is worth it. It’s worth the investment. And the gospel, when it impacts one life, has infinite power, so please don’t be intimidated or think that you need everyone else to come to consensus about doing this discipleship thing before you begin, because Jesus, in his example, was able to take the most socially outcast, the most destitute and turn them into some of the greatest disciple‑makers and evangelists in history. I love Jesus’ interaction with the woman at the well, not because she’s a woman that he shouldn’t have been talking to, not because of the life that she led before that time that we focus on so much, but because she became a woman who led an entire village to Jesus, and not I or maybe anyone else on this podcast right now has that on their resume. So don’t think that it has to be a big movement. The greatest movements start with one. Find the one that you’re supposed to invest in and start making a disciple right there. And in addition to that, it might not even be somebody that is outside of your church. It might be somebody that is right there in front of you that you see every week, who you don’t really know that well for some reason, or maybe God has kind of been tugging on you, there’s something going on in their life. Huddle up with that person and start walking out these rhythms of Jesus together. Give each other permission to encourage and keep you accountable with one another, and you’re going to be surprised with what God is going to do with that. What will happen in a church where nothing is happening and all of a sudden one or two people start happening is word will spread very quickly, and the question is gonna come, well, how ‑‑ like we haven’t had guests here in at least three years. All of a sudden, you know, Wes has got a new ‑‑ what is going on with that? Or, wow, someone got baptized. The preacher didn’t even do it. What was that? Someone got baptized on Saturday. What are we doing on Saturday? Those stories, those testimonies will be much better at inspiring and convincing the folks that are in your context that this is a worthwhile endeavor. So be the one who makes the one, and you’ll be surprised how fast God can generate momentum like that. I’ve seen that happen several times. So that would be my encouragement to you. You can do way more than you think, and every one person is worth it in God’s eyes. WES: Amen. Amen. So well said. Be the one that makes the one. I just can’t help but think that, yes, it would be ideal ‑‑ it would be ideal if everybody in your congregation ‑‑ if your elders, if your preacher, if your deacons, if your friends, if everybody was on board, if they were all passionate about this, but we can’t wait for the ideal situation to start obeying Jesus. That’s what discipleship is. Discipleship is obeying Jesus when it’s in season and when it’s out of season, when it’s easy and when it’s hard, and so we just do what Jesus would have us to do. We strive to be faithful regardless of the situation, and that’s it. And I’m so glad that you said that it might not be a person outside of the body. It may not be somebody who is not a Christian. It might be a saved, baptized person, but they’re really not growing as a follower of Jesus, as an apprentice of Jesus, as a disciple, and your influence, your encouragement, your admonishment, your just being friends with them and walking with them and letting them see you be a disciple might be the encouragement that they need to start being the person that God wants them to be. MARCUS: 100 percent. So much of this discipleship thing is about the one‑anothering one another that we read about in the New Testament, and it starts there. Ultimately, if you did have someone that you were discipling that comes into your church body, you’re going to want them to see that community. You’re going to want them to see that love. You’re going to want them to see that discipleship on display, so start right there with who’s in front of you and let God create all of the other opportunities organically as you go throughout your day. Keep your head on a swivel, keep your eyes up, ask God to show ‑‑ who am I supposed to invest in today? When we are talking about people outside of church ‑‑ I used to think that this was where this fits, but, actually, sometimes it fits with folks that are inside of your church. Your biggest opportunity to make a disciple or to create a relationship that matters is probably somewhere buried underneath of your deepest agitation or frustration. It’s the places where you feel hurried, you feel rushed, you feel annoyed. That’s a place where I would be very serious about inviting God into and just seeing what he does with that situation because he has a way of turning those on their heads, and it can be really incredible to see what he does working in those situations. WES: That’s good. That is so good, Brother. Thank you for this conversation, Marcus. Thank you for being a disciple, for making disciples, and for all your work in the kingdom, Brother. MARCUS: Thank you so much for having me. This has been a great conversation, and thank you to everyone who’s listening. If you’re feeling the tug that there’s more to this than just showing up every Sunday, there is. And it’s not always easy, but it is beautiful. It is powerful. There’s joy, there’s peace, there’s purpose in it. So chase it down. God will meet you there. WES: Amen. Thank you so much for listening to the Radically Christian Bible Study Podcast. If you have just a moment, we would love for you to rate and review this podcast on iTunes or wherever you’re listening. It really does help more people discover this content. I also want to thank the guests who join me each week, Beth Tabor, who volunteers her time to transcribe this podcast, and our whole McDermott Road Church family who make it possible for us to provide this Bible study for you. Now, let’s go out and love like Jesus. The post How to Create a Disciple-Making Culture with Marcus Stenson appeared first on Radically Christian.

How to Prepare Yourself for Worship with Daniel Dalp

In today’s fast-paced world, it’s easy to get caught up in the hustle and bustle of daily life, leaving little time or energy to prepare our hearts and minds for the Sunday worship assembly. We often show up to church gatherings feeling distracted, exhausted, or preoccupied with the cares of the world. This episode of the Radically Christian Bible Study Podcast tackles these challenges head-on, exploring practical ways to cultivate a mindset that is truly focused on worshiping God and encouraging our fellow believers. Drawing from the teachings of the Apostle Paul in Colossians 3, the conversation delves into the importance of setting our minds on things above, rather than being consumed by the fleeting concerns of this world. Today’s guest, Daniel Dalp, helps unpack the biblical concept of corporate worship and the role it plays in shaping our spiritual lives. Wes and Daniel also examine the communal aspect of worship, highlighting the need to encourage and uplift one another, and how our mindset can either foster or hinder that process. Daniel Dalp is the creator and host of the brand new podcast, “For Your Sunday Morning Drive.” Dalp’s unique perspective stems from his own experience as a preacher and his desire to help others prepare their hearts and minds for meaningful worship. With a keen understanding of the challenges families face on Sunday mornings, he offers practical tips and insights to help listeners cultivate a worshipful attitude, even during the journey to the church building. Links and Resources Watch This Episode on YouTube “For Your Sunday Morning Drive” on Apple Podcasts Ministry League Transcript (Credit: Beth Tabor) Welcome to the Radically Christian Bible Study Podcast. I’m your host, Wes McAdams. Here we have one goal: Learn to love like Jesus. Today we’re visiting with my friend, Daniel Dalp, about his new podcast, “For Your Sunday Morning Drive.” It’s all about helping Christians prepare themselves mentally and emotionally to worship God, but also to encourage each other on Sunday mornings. Before we get to the podcast, I want to thank Freed‑Hardeman University’s Graduate School of Theology. They’ve been sponsoring the podcast over the last few months, and I really appreciate their sponsorship, and I also appreciate what they’re doing for the kingdom of God. We’ve been telling you about their master’s and doctorate‑level programs, how they offer a unique blend of academic rigor, spiritual formation, and practical application to both deepen your understanding of scripture, but also sharpen your ministry skills. They offer flexible online courses, so of course you can pursue your graduate degree from anywhere in the world. Right now, in order to make it more affordable, all application fees are being waived and scholarships are available. So if you want to find out more about Freed‑Hardeman University’s Graduate School of Theology, visit fhu.edu/RadicallyChristian. And, also, I want to mention that this will be the final podcast for this spring season. We’re going to take a break over the summer. I’ve got a lot of stuff going on personally and also in the church here, and so we’re going to take a few months’ break, but please stay subscribed so that, in the fall, when we relaunch the podcast, you will get all of the new episodes. And take this opportunity to share the podcast with other people so that when we relaunch in the fall, we’ll have a lot of new Bible studies, a lot of new guests, and we’ll be able to, as always, encourage each other to love like Jesus. But before we do anything else, I want to read from Colossians chapter 3, starting in verse 1. Paul writes, “If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.” As always, I hope today’s Bible study and discussion is an encouragement to you, and I hope that it helps all of us learn to love like Jesus. WES: Daniel Dalp, welcome to the podcast, Brother. DANIEL: Hey, Wes, thanks for having me on. I appreciate it, man. WES: It is good to get to visit. I’ve known you, we’ve been sort of connected online for a lot of years, but it’s good to finally have you on the podcast. DANIEL: Yeah, it’s interesting to see those circles that we all kind of run in but we don’t really ever interact, but I’m certainly excited to be here. WES: Well, I’m excited about your new work, your new podcast. It’s really fantastic. It’s really unique, and I’m excited to talk about what it is, help people to understand about it and check it out, hopefully, but also how it got started and where the idea came from. So tell us about the podcast and what made you think of it. DANIEL: Absolutely. So the podcast is called “For Your Sunday Morning Drive,” and how it kind of developed is I have about an hour‑and‑15‑minute drive to work with the congregation in Hawesville, Kentucky, and it was really kind of just dead space, right, where ‑‑ we get ready, we’re in this mad rush to leave the house and make sure everybody is ready to go to worship, and then there’s this hour‑and‑15‑minute lull where I’m like, I don’t know what to do here. And then we get there ‑‑ and I think you’re probably familiar with it, too. I won’t speak for you, though, but as a preacher, you have all of these things that you have to prep and make sure that this is ready, and it kind of felt like, on the way there, I was losing the intentionality behind worship. And so I would listen to a bunch of brotherhood podcasts, yours, and then there’s just so many others that are out there right now, and they’re all doing such good works, and it was really helpful for me to kind of help recenter my mind. And as I was driving, I would stop and I would share one of these posts, if I found one of these podcasts to be specifically really helpful, and I would say, “Well, here’s some thoughts for your Sunday morning drive,” and that kind of got me thinking. And the more I thought about it, I said, you know, this could be a really interesting space to fill and something that could help a lot of people, and if they’re having the same issues that I’m having with making sure I’m prepared for worship, then let me see if I can help them. So that’s kind of where the idea came from. They’re short, really digestible episodes with that intentionality behind it to help prepare our minds for worship. WES: Yeah. Well, to say that they’re short might be a little bit of an understatement because I think that I listened to all of the episodes on my drive from my house to the church building, which is not nearly as far as your drive from your house to your church building. So they’re, what, about five minutes long? DANIEL: Right. I try to keep it around five minutes long. The format is they ‑‑ you know, there’s a prompt to kind of help move you along and focus your mind spiritually, and then there’s some discussion questions at the end. And I think, at the time of this recording ‑‑ I don’t know when it’s going to come out, but there’s about five episodes, and I’ve got one in the chamber for Sunday, so… WES: That’s fantastic. Well, they’re short enough that I think families with even young kids that don’t have a long attention span ‑‑ I think families, no matter what their situation is or how long their commute from their house to their church building might be, I think everybody can get something out of it, has time to listen to it, and then even the discussion question is probably my favorite part of it ‑‑ maybe my second favorite part. My first favorite part is the intro that you play every week, the little girl that asks ‑‑ or the little boy, I don’t know which ‑‑ that says, “Are we there yet?” Is that your family or is that ‑‑ DANIEL: That’s my daughter, Evelyn. She’s six, and she saw me down there with a microphone and she’s like, “Dad, what are you doing?” And I was like, “Oh, come here and I’ll show you.” And so she’s like, “Can I do it?” And that’s kind of where that came from. And, yeah, she steals the show, as far as I’m concerned. WES: I love it. I love it. Yeah, that is definitely my favorite part of the show. You hear the car start, the door close, and she asks, “Are we there yet?” And it’s really, really good, and I really think people can get a lot out of it, and I think the mindset behind it, the intention behind it is really important. But, in fact, speaking of mindset, one of the things that you quote every week is Colossians 3:2 about setting our mind on things above, not on things that are on earth. So let’s talk about that idea behind Colossians 3, that passage there, and why setting our mind on certain things, setting our mind on things above, why is it so important, not just for Sunday morning, but all the time. DANIEL: Well, I think if we look at Colossians as a book, it has, of course, some amazing application to it, and if we are narrowing our view specifically to Colossians 3, there’s this list of things that Paul tells us to stay away from, right? He says you set your mind above because that’s where Jesus is, that’s where Christ is, on these above aspects of our lives. And if we look at our motivations for, like you said, not just Sunday mornings, but every day, our intentionality informs our purpose, right? So if I’m going to go throughout my day and just live however I want without purposefully directing my mind to God, then of course I’m going to move all over the place spiritually, and, I mean, I don’t think that’s any more important than whenever we’re coming before God in worship. WES: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I think the church at Colossae is dealing with so many different philosophies and ideas and things that distract them or get them focused on something other than Jesus, and Paul’s point throughout the whole book is the supremacy of Christ and how, if you have Jesus, you have everything, that he is the beginning and the end of knowledge and understanding, that if you have Jesus, then you have all that you need, and how many philosophies there were that they were dealing with that were pulling their minds away from Jesus. And I think about the world in which we live and how many voices with which we’re bombarded constantly, and so ‑‑ not just on our drive to worship on Sunday morning, but every moment of our life we are bombarded with advertising and we’re bombarded with podcasts and with YouTube and with social media, and there’s so many voices that are competing for our attention and our affection that I think that Christians are ‑‑ to just be able to sit down in worship or throughout their day, throughout their week, to be able to focus on Jesus, I think, is so difficult. It’s always been difficult in many ways, but I think especially today, in our culture, it is incredibly difficult because, again, even after we turn the radio off or we turn the podcast off or we turn off the computer, those things are still going through our mind and we’re still just kind of swimming in a noisy cacophony of all of these ideas and thoughts. DANIEL: And worldliness, right? There’s just so ‑‑ we can’t escape it. It’s always around us. And I don’t think that’s any more evident than whenever we look at, you know, just everything that’s infiltrating through media, and like you said, just you turn on any screen and it’s there, and we’re supposed to ‑‑ according to Colossians 3, we’re dead to these things, right? We’re no longer involved in them: immorality, impurity, greed, evil passions. All of these things are to be set aside because we’ve been made new in Jesus. And how do we claim to be made new in Jesus if we’re still living over here with the old mindset? It’s certainly something to think about, and we should inform our decisions by that. WES: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So I think anything that can help us to recenter, reorient, refocus our minds on Jesus on any day of the week is valuable, but especially on Sunday. I always like to say ‑‑ there’s a silly little saying that I say all the time, is that Sunday not only makes for a better week, it makes for a better life, that when you gather with other Christians and you share the bread and you share the cup and you sing these songs together and you go through these things on a weekly basis, it transforms us. I think that worship and that gathering, that corporate worship, that collective gathering of people all focused on Jesus and worshiping him, I think it’s supposed to be transformational. So let’s talk about that specifically. Where do you think most families’ minds are? What’s the struggle here? When we show up for the assembly on Sunday morning, what’s the struggle? DANIEL: And I don’t want to speak for everybody, but I’ll just speak from my perspective. I think Sunday mornings ‑‑ they can be stressful, they can be this awkward, empty space. You know, we don’t really know what to do with ourselves during this time period before we start worship, and I think a lot of it comes from this autopilot mindset that sometimes we can get in, right? And then we wonder why maybe I don’t feel like I’m getting a lot out of worship or I don’t feel like I can put a lot into worship. Whenever we are on the way to church or on the way to meet with our brethren and we’re getting there and we’ve spent all this time rushing and getting ready to put on our Sunday best ‑‑ and I know you’ve had episodes where you’ve talked about that in the past, but that should be more of a mindset, right? I’m making my mind right for worship, and then we walk into the building and, all of a sudden, we’re expected to, like, flip this switch and, “Okay, I’m here, I’m ready to learn in Bible class, I’m ready to be here for worship,” and I don’t really think it works that way. I think it’s more about building up to that and really putting ourselves, everything that we have, into worshiping God in Spirit and truth. I think a lot of families ‑‑ at least I know mine does, we kind of struggle with that idea of ‑‑ there’s so many things pulling at our attention. Let’s talk about the drive there to begin with. A lot of times, you know, we’re already talking about what we’re going to do after church before we even get into worship. How are we expected to worship God in a substantial way if we’re already thinking about when this thing gets out, right? It’s certainly worth, I think, a thought and preparing our hearts accordingly to that. WES: Yeah. I’m so incredibly thankful for my parents, particularly my mom. When we were growing up, she was adamant that, on Sunday mornings, the television did not come on, that we listened to things that were edifying and encouraging and would sort of put us in the right mindset for the worship assembly, but I don’t think that that’s common. I don’t know. Again, you only know what you know, you only know what you’ve experienced. And so I feel like there is ‑‑ maybe the best analogy for me is like having a meal, that ‑‑ when I was growing up, again, my mom would tell me, you know, you can’t eat that because it’ll ruin your appetite. You’ll ruin your dinner if you eat this thing. So you wouldn’t eat a candy bar right before you sat down for a meal, and if you did, you probably wouldn’t have an appetite for the meal. Even though the meal is better and you might actually enjoy the roast and the potatoes and the bread, but because you ruined your appetite on a piece of chocolate, now you really don’t have an appetite for that because you ruined it with junk food. And I feel like, not just on Sunday morning, but even on Saturday night, if we don’t go to bed on time, if we don’t think about the mindset we’re going to be in, the mood we’re going to be in, if we are just constantly filling ourselves with junk food of entertainment and we’re watching movies and we’re watching television and we’re streaming some series on our phone, then when we get to worship, of course our attention span is not going to be what it’s supposed to be. We’re not going to have the right ‑‑ again, I keep coming back to the word mindset, but it’s also about our emotionality, and we’re really not ‑‑ we’re not in the right space. We’re not in the right frame of mind to think about the Lord and his holiness and to be filled up with those things. We may want to, but sometimes I say, you know, our want to isn’t what it’s supposed to be. You know, we want to want to, but, in reality, we don’t really want to be there. We don’t want to be listening to a sermon or a Bible class or be singing these songs because our heart and our mind has been given over to these things that may, in and of themselves, not be wrong. The show you’re streaming may not be wrong, but it’s junk food and it’s distracting you even after it’s turned off. It’s distracting you from the worship. DANIEL: Yeah. And I’m glad you brought up that point about, you know, getting to bed on time, right? That has such a huge impact on the rest of our day. And I had a brother in Christ, he’s since passed, Jim Clem, but whenever ‑‑ he was a Bible class teacher when I was in high school, and he would always ‑‑ you know, he’d see all of us, our youth group, walk in bleary‑eyed and exhausted from staying up to who knows how early in the morning, and he would say, “Daniel, worship starts on Saturday night.” And I’d always ask him, “What does that mean?” He goes, “You prepare your mind, you prepare your heart, and you make sure you’re prepared to be in worship on the Lord’s Day.” And, you know, we typically wouldn’t do that with our jobs; we wouldn’t do that with any kind of family gathering. We’d make sure we were adequately prepared. It’s concerning, I think, that, on some level, we’ve relegated worship to the bottom of that list when it certainly should be up at the top. WES: Yeah. Well, I’ve never really thought about it this way, but the Jewish calendar ‑‑ in fact, you could even say the Biblical calendar that starts with the days of creation, it begins with evening and then morning. It doesn’t begin with morning and then evening, the way we typically think of a day. In the West, we tend to think of there’s morning, and then there’s evening later on, but the Biblical creation account gives us ‑‑ there’s evening and then there’s morning, that, really, in some ways, Sunday should begin ‑‑ like your Bible class teacher said, it should begin on Saturday night. And so Saturday night we should be welcoming in the Lord’s day, welcoming in this day on which we’re going to gather together with our brothers and sisters and not only learn, but also worship, and you just have to be in the right mindset for that. We wouldn’t take a test, we wouldn’t encourage our kids to go to school and take some big test ‑‑ the ACT or SAT, we wouldn’t encourage them to take that without sleeping and eating well and being rested in order to go into that, or if there was going to be a big day at school tomorrow, we’d want to be well‑rested for that. But, for some reason, we take for granted this huge blessing and responsibility of coming before the throne of God and offering up the fruit of our lips, the sacrifice to God of praise, and we’re just exhausted, we’re thinking about other things, we’re dozing off, and we’re really not where we’re supposed to be. DANIEL: Yeah. And you’ve got to imagine, how does God feel about that, right? I mean, it impacts so many areas of our life, especially on a Sunday, right, whenever we’re thinking about the Lord’s Supper and in a worthy manner. Are we really doing that? Are we really there? And then there’s also the aspect of what are we doing for everyone else, our brothers and sisters, right? WES: Yeah. Well, that’s exactly what I want to get to next, is so often we talk about what we get out of it, and I think we shortchange ourselves when we show up and we’re not in the right frame of mind for what we’re doing. We shortchange ourselves and we don’t get out of it what we should. But you used a phrase earlier about “put into it,” and I think sometimes we ‑‑ not only do we neglect the putting into it as far as what we’re offering to the Lord, but Hebrews 10, when the Hebrew writer talks about the assembly, he’s talking, in context, about stirring one another up and encouraging one another. I mean, I could worship by myself, and I do, and I should worship by myself. All of us should, you know, spend time in prayer. If you’re praying, you’re worshiping God. If you’re singing in your car, you’re worshiping God. But there’s something to this gathering together, and part of why we gather together is to encourage each other and stir up one another. Let’s talk about that for a second and just ‑‑ if we’re not in the right mindset when we show up, how does that impact the other people that are gathered with us? DANIEL: Sure. And I love the word that you used, this offering that we’re bringing to the table, right? Because if we go all the way back to the beginning and we think of the sacrifices that were given to God, he always, always wanted the best to be given from his people. You know, we look at the rejection of Cain’s sacrifice, we look at Malachi, where, you know, the priest gave that which was defiled, right? But then we ‑‑ in the New Testament, we also have the aspect of saying, you know, this sacrifice I’m offering up to God, it involves more than just me because I’m also impacting my brothers and sisters. You know, we look at Hebrews 10:24‑25, and so often we relegate that verse to ‑‑ whether or not that’s correct, right? There’s also discussion on that ‑‑ to saying ‑‑ you know, that’s the you‑have‑to‑show‑up verse. And I get it, right? Because if I’m going to be stirring up my brothers and sisters to good works, part of that is you got to be there, right? But we also look at the aspect of ‑‑ I think when we come to the aspect of putting on our Sunday best mentally, we’re doing that because I’m going to go and I’m going to uplift my brethren with song, and I’m going to be there with them as they’re praying, and I’m going to comfort them, and I’m going to love them, and I’m going to encourage them through my fellowship. If we’re not stirring up and encouraging our brethren, or if we’re not in a place to do that, that might be the Sunday, that might be the day that they need us to do that. And if we’re not coming to the table prepared, we’re not just letting God down, which should be our first and foremost priority, but we’re also having an impact on those that are also trying to worship, and I think we’ve all experienced that. We look around and, regardless if we should be doing that or not on a Sunday morning, we notice, right? And it can dampen our worship. It can really start to bring things down and discourage us. WES: Yeah. Well, you mentioned “I don’t know if we should do that or not,” the looking around. I think we should. I think ‑‑ I really think we should, not in a “we want to catch people sleeping” or “we want to catch people distracted” kind of thing, but we ‑‑ not in a judgmental way, but that’s sort of the beauty and the joy of it. In fact, I was in a building that was very much unlike the building in which I worship, that their auditorium where they do their worship gathering was very dark, you know, very little lights over the seats, and all of the lights were on the stage. And I just thought, what would it be like to be here on a Sunday morning? I wasn’t there on a Sunday morning, but I just was thinking, you can’t see anybody. You can’t see your brothers and sisters. What’s the point? And I feel like so many people, over time, will get to the point where they are asking, if they’re not already, why come if ‑‑ especially if your congregation live streams, you know, why be here at all in person if all I’m doing is sitting in a dark seat watching people on a stage or listening to people on a stage? I think the whole point of a gathering is that this is coming to ‑‑ you used the word “table.” We’re a family that’s centered around a table, and if my family shows up at the dinner table, you can’t just be an individual that’s like, “Hey, I don’t want to talk to anybody. I don’t want to look at anybody. I’m just here to eat.” You know, “I don’t want you looking at me. Keep your eyes to yourself.” DANIEL: Sometimes. WES: Yeah, sometimes, right? But that’s not the way it should be. And when we come to a family table, it is about spending time with the Father and spending time with the Son, but it’s also about spending time with the brothers and sisters, and we have to have that mentality when we get there. I think about Paul’s admonition to the church at Corinth, that they were taking the Lord’s Supper without, he says, discerning the body. And I think, there, it kind of has a double meaning. It’s the body of Jesus, I think, but also the body of Christ, the brothers and sisters in Christ, because they weren’t thinking about each other and they were eating while another person hadn’t even shown up yet, and they weren’t waiting for each other and they weren’t making this meal a communal meal, a family meal. They were focused on getting full individually and forgetting each other. And I think we can do the same thing if we just show up with this mentality that’s like, “Well, at least I’m here. I’ve checked the box. I’m here.” DANIEL: Right, yeah. And I love that you brought that up, Wes, because I think that a lot of times, whenever we look at the verses we’re discussing, there can be that danger to say, well, this is ‑‑ I’m just going to show up, and at least I’m showing up, right? As preachers, we get to look at everybody and we see everything that’s happening out there in the audience, right? And what’s so great about that on a Sunday morning is ‑‑ my favorite part is looking and seeing the kids, right? How are the kids involved? Because we have a ton of little ones at Hawesville, and it’s such a joy to be able to see them and their crazy antics and everything that’s going on, right? That’s uplifting. It’s also uplifting to be able to see your brethren looking at a new mom or looking at someone that’s struggling with their kids and you see, instead of people looking around in judgment, “I’m going to go and help this person. I want to share the love of Jesus and show that.” That’s incredibly uplifting. And I think whenever we look at forsaking the assembly, we need to widen our scope, right? We need to look at that more in terms of how am I forsaking my brethren even though I’m still here, than in terms of, well, that’s just about showing up to worship, because I can be present in worship and still not be fully engaged and still be forsaking my brethren. WES: Yeah. Yeah, and if we come ‑‑ even that idea of getting something out of it might ‑‑ even that idea ‑‑ and I think you should get something out of it. I think you should receive a blessing by being there. But so often, I think that idea that “I’m here to get something,” that even gets in the way of giving something, and then we might actually be not getting something because we’re not giving something. Because there’s this reciprocal loving one another, and it’s only in that, when you give, that you actually receive, and I think sometimes, when we show up where we think of the stage, as it were, we think of the podium ‑‑ we think of that as our content device and we’re just listening to content. Then the other people in the room are only potential distractions, and we say things like, “Well, their kids were so distracting this morning,” or “That person was so distracting this morning; they really kept me from worshiping,” as if it’s all about ourselves, rather than, like you said, if we see them as somebody who ‑‑ “I’m so thankful they’re here,” and “Wow, maybe this is their first time. Maybe they’ve not been to worship before. How can I help them? How can I serve them? How can I encourage them?” It’s in that loving each other and stirring each other up to love and good works ‑‑ that’s where we actually do receive the blessing, and we’re not receiving that blessing because we’re showing up to get rather than to give, I think. DANIEL: I think there’s a certain level of humility that we have to still have, right, when we’re coming to the throne of God in worship and we’re looking around and we’re seeing all of our brothers and sisters that are there with us. We want them to feel as encouraged as we are, and if we’re not encouraged and if we’re not in the space to encourage, maybe that’s something we need to work on. Are we going to be there, you know, every single time? Well, probably not, because we’re going to have stuff going on in our lives that’s ‑‑ which is also one of the reasons we come to worship, right, and that we assemble and we fellowship with each other, is so that we can be lifted up. And I agree; I think it needs to be ‑‑ instead of this constant thought of “What am I getting out of worship” ‑‑ especially if that’s a decision that’s made not to come, right? It kind of presents itself as, “Well, I’m trying to steal this thing away from God and just hoard it all to myself,” when, in reality, I’m there to give worship to God and to encourage my brethren to give more. WES: Yeah, absolutely. And it’s amazing how all of that is enhanced by everyone else that’s there, especially when everyone else that’s there ‑‑ when we all have the same mindset. I think often about this family that I know, not here at McDermott where I am now, but where I used to be. But there was this mom who would sometimes come with her son who has Down’s syndrome, and her son was a big boy. He’s bigger than she is. And so if he decided that he was going to go somewhere or do something, there was very little she could do to stop him, and sometimes he would come up onto the stage. He’d come behind the pulpit where I was, and I loved those moments. And I would just ‑‑ I’d sit down by him. Sometimes if there’d be a song leader up there leading singing, then he would just kind of wander up to the stage and maybe sit on the pew behind or just sit on the floor, and I’d come up there behind him and I would just sit behind him. I’d put my arm around him and we’d just sit there until he decided ‑‑ ’cause I couldn’t move him, either ‑‑ until he decided he was done and he wanted to go back with his mom. And she was so embarrassed and she was so apologetic, and she would say, “Well, we don’t need to come,” and “I’m sorry we were here,” and “I’m sorry we were a distraction.” And I said, “No, you being here makes us better people. This is why we are all here, and it makes us better by caring for each other.” And I think about what the first‑century gatherings must have been like. You know, sometimes they gathered in a rich person’s home, but I’m sure sometimes they gathered in whatever home or structure they could find. And to this day, we have brothers and sisters around the world where it’s not unusual for a chicken or a goat or a child with special needs or a baby ‑‑ and they all cared for each other, and it wasn’t a professional production. It was a matter of mutual encouragement and participation, and they’re all gathered there as co‑contributors to this offering that we’re giving to the Lord and this love that we’re giving to each other. DANIEL: I’m so glad you mentioned that last part, Wes, because sometimes one of the reasons we get ‑‑ I guess persnickety is the word I’ll use about what happens during worship is because, to be honest, sometimes it comes off as quite performative. And we get this idea ‑‑ let’s use babies crying because that’s the most common one, right? They’re going to mess up our audio or ‑‑ my goodness, what an un‑Christian attitude to have. And I haven’t always been the best at keeping that good mindset and showing people the grace that they need, but the people that are around us and are worshiping with us, especially if there’s a visitor there, they’re going to know that we are Christians by our love, right? And how we handle ourselves in these situations, it can mean the world to somebody. And if we handle it the wrong way ‑‑ and, you know, I’m sure ‑‑ I know I’ve done that occasionally ‑‑ that can rob someone of their joy and of their ability to focus during worship because now you’re thinking about, “Well, look how he responded to that,” and “Do I belong here?” And “Am I good enough to worship God?” Well, the answer to that is of course you belong here, right? Shame on us whenever we make it more about the production or make it a production instead of worship. WES: Yeah. Amen. Amen, Brother. This is why I get so excited about the thought behind your podcast, that even just these five minutes can help ‑‑ I hope that people start earlier than that, but just this five minutes, and then maybe even the discussion that is generated from listening to your podcast, but if you can help two or three or four or five or six or seven or thousands of people to have the right mindset, then the exponential encouragement that will come from that, not just to the people that listened to it, but the people who are benefited by associating with and fellowshipping with those that listened to it, because now their mindset is in the right place and now they can give like they were unable to give before. But maybe let’s add to that. What else can people do in addition to listening to this podcast? I encourage everybody to listen to your podcast, but in addition to that, what else could people do to sort of help them have the right mindset on Sunday morning? DANIEL: And that’s kind of the goal behind the podcast, right? I’m not trying to compete with the message that’s going to be preached that morning. I want it to be short, where it can kind of help flip that switch, and there’s a ton of different things you can do. I’m going to talk to some practical ones that I find useful, because, you know, the podcast probably isn’t going to be for everyone, nor is it going to be a solution for everyone. But if you’re ‑‑ the first thing you mentioned earlier, make sure you’re preparing the night before. Maybe you look at ‑‑ I don’t know how many bulletins are still sent out in an email ahead of time, but a lot of times you’ll have the sermon topic and a scripture reading. Get your family together and read over that. That way, on the way to church or while you’re in worship, you say, you know what? I know what this sermon is going to be about. I know where to focus my mind. Spend time in prayer. Maybe you spend the whole drive to church in prayer and talking to God and talking with your family. I put on a lot of worship music ‑‑ acapella worship music, and, man, that can really help to prepare yourself. And on that point, too ‑‑ it’s not just about the message that’s preached; it’s not just about the prayer. If you know what songs are going to be sung ahead of time, maybe spend some time learning those songs at home, singing them with your family. That’s something that my daughter, Evelyn, has really loved to do lately. She’ll be sitting in church and she’ll tug on my shoulder and say, “Dad, can we sing this at home?” And, man, talk about an impact on me. Yes, thank you. Absolutely we can. And there’s just a lot of things that we can use, and I think the biggest one is just to make sure we understand who we are there for and that it’s not about making sure everything or everyone or ourselves are looking perfect that morning or whether our kids are behaving well. It’s about, are we there for God? Are we giving God what he deserves? Because he deserves our very best. And along the way, are we also building up and stirring up our brethren to love and good works? And if we keep those things in mind, it becomes less of a thing that we have to do every week, it becomes less of a just routinely planned action, and I think it becomes more of a ‑‑ this is something that I am looking forward to, and I think a lot of people struggle with that. You know, we all know that we should love worship and we should enjoy worship and we should be excited about worship, but I don’t know that we always feel that way, and I understand it. And I think there’s a big aspect of that ‑‑ if we prepare our mindsets, it can help us understand why we should be excited about it. And that’s what I’ve come up with, and that’s kind of what I’ve looked at this week, is I’ve kind of looked over and thought about that question. Did you have anything that you could add to that? Because I’d love to hear it, as well. WES: Well, I love some ‑‑ I just want to go back to a couple of things that you sort of said or hinted at, especially the idea of we spend so much time thinking about what we’re going to wear to worship. We may lay it out ahead of time. We may do an extra load of laundry ahead of time, and we spend more time thinking about what we’re going to wear, what’s on the outside of us than what’s on the inside of us, and that’s exactly the opposite of what ‑‑ we have so few pictures of the assembly from the New Testament, surprisingly, so few sort of direct references to what was going on or what should be going on in the assembly in the New Testament, but we have a couple of references. James is one of them, and he’s very explicit that if somebody shows up wearing, you know, fancy clothes, don’t pay special attention, don’t show partiality to him. And we have these references over and over again to not put a greater emphasis on what is on the outside of a person than what is on the inside of a person, and we prepare ourselves externally, but forget to prepare ourselves internally, and I think that is such a huge mistake. I want to go back to also what you said about the songs. I never really thought about reading over the songs ahead of time, but what a brilliant idea that is, what a great idea. There’s been times, as the preacher, I have not appreciated the forethought that went into the song selection that our worship leader has done to coordinate the songs with the sermon until I’m standing in the worship, and I thought, wow, that song fits perfectly with what I’m preaching, and he really thought about the words of every song and making sure that they lined up. And I look around and I think, I wonder how many, like me, have missed just how coordinated all of these words are in order to help us focus on one idea this morning. And if we went into the assembly already doing that ‑‑ in fact, we send out our worship list of songs and prayers ahead of time to the whole congregation. Every Saturday, that goes out to everyone, and I’ve never even thought about, hey, what a great exercise that would be on Saturday night, to look over those songs and look it up online, look up the lyrics and read through those as individuals or as a family and think about, okay, what big idea is being communicated? Because these are words, not only that are going to be sung to us, but are going to be sung from us, and we’re singing these things. Have we even stopped to think about the words that we’re singing? DANIEL: I think there’s just so many things that we can do when it comes to preparing our minds for worship, and a lot of them ‑‑ you know, sometimes I think we’re looking for these big signs in the sky, like “This is how I magically change my heart overnight” kind of ideas, and a lot of it just comes down to practicality. What’s going to work for my family might not work for the McAdams family, right? And to that extent, the amount of time it takes for me to put my mind in this mindset might be different depending on how long we’ve been doing it, right? It’s a process. It takes time. Don’t get discouraged. WES: Yeah, definitely. Well, Daniel, this has been such a wonderful conversation. It’s been incredibly encouraging to me. Your podcast has been encouraging to me. Before we close, why don’t you tell people a little bit more about where they can find the podcast and make sure they get subscribed so that on their next Sunday morning drive, they can be listening to it. DANIEL: Yeah. Well, I certainly appreciate that, Wes. Yeah, “For Your Sunday Morning Drive,” it can be found on any of the major podcasting apps. Also, we’ve recently entered into partnership with Ministry League, and you can find us on their app or ministryleague.com. They have a lot of great resources for family worship, as well as personal development as a Christian, and it’s all free. So if you’re interested in looking at that or any of the other wonderful podcasts that are on the Ministry League network, please check them out. WES: Fantastic. Well, thank you for a great conversation and thank you for your work in the kingdom, Brother. DANIEL: Thank you, Brother. I appreciate it. As I mentioned in the introduction, this will be the last episode for a few months, but we will be back in the fall with brand‑new episodes. Until then, I want to thank today’s guest, Daniel Dalp; Beth Tabor for transcribing, my McDermott Road Church family, and all of you for listening. Now, let’s go out and love like Jesus. The post How to Prepare Yourself for Worship with Daniel Dalp appeared first on Radically Christian.

Do Not Wrestle Against Flesh and Blood with Kerry Williams

The apostle Paul wrote, “We do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places” (Ephesians 6:12). However, many Christians today struggle with truly understanding or appreciating the reality of spiritual warfare. We often dismiss or gloss over biblical references to demonic forces, the unseen realm, and spiritual battles. Why is having an awareness of these things important? How should we think about the forces of evil and darkness described in the New Testament? This discussion centers around biblical teachings on spiritual warfare, including passages like 2 Corinthians 10 and Ephesians 6. It explores the nature of our battle against the devil and demonic forces, rather than against flesh and blood. Biblical concepts are examined, such as Christ’s ministry being focused on reclaiming what belongs to God from Satan’s domain. Today’s guest, Kerry Williams, shares insights into adopting a spiritual mindset and understanding the overlapping realms of the physical and spiritual worlds. Kerry Williams serves as the Dean of Graduate Studies at Sunset International Bible Institute. He is also director of the Tahoe Family Encampment. Williams has over 30 years of preaching experience and has written books on the topic of spiritual warfare, aiming to inspire greater passion and knowledge about standing firm against the schemes of the devil. Links and Resources Watch This Episode on YouTube Angel at War by Kerry Williams Sunset Graduate School Sunset Sermon Symposium Tahoe Family Encampment Note: Some links may be affiliate links. Meaning, if you choose to buy something through these links, we receive a small commission at no extra cost to you. Transcript (Credit: Beth Tabor) Welcome to the Radically Christian Bible study Podcast. I’m your host, Wes McAdams. Here we have one goal: Learn to love like Jesus. Today we’re going to be talking about spiritual warfare. What does it mean to engage in warfare? What does it mean to wrestle against the demonic forces in the heavenly realms, but not against flesh and blood? Our guest today is Kerry Williams, who is the Dean of Graduate Studies at Sunset International Bible Institute. He is also the director of the Tahoe Family Encampment. I know that you’re going to enjoy this conversation, but before we get to that, I want to read from 2nd Corinthians chapter 10, starting in verse 1. Paul says, “I, Paul, myself entreat you, by the meekness and gentleness of Christ ‑‑ I who am humble when face to face with you, but bold toward you when I am away! ‑‑ I beg of you that when I am present I may not have to show boldness with such confidence as I count on showing against some who suspect us of walking according to the flesh. For though we walk in the flesh, we are not waging war according to the flesh. For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds. We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ, being ready to punish every disobedience, when your obedience is complete.” I hope that today’s Bible study and discussion is encouraging to you, and, as always, I hope that it helps all of us learn to love like Jesus. WES: Kerry Williams, welcome to the podcast, Brother. KERRY: Thank you. It’s really good to be here. WES: Well, it’s great to have you. I got to listen to a sermon that you did ‑‑ I think it was probably last year, so it’s been a little while since you did it, but I just got to listen to it recently, and it was fantastic, about spiritual warfare, and it’s interesting that that seems to be a theme that I keep coming back to on the podcast. So there’s been a lot of discussion about sin and about evil, and evil even beyond the evil that we can see in the world, which is kind of where I want to start the conversation is, you know, there are so many mentions in the New Testament about spiritual evil, evil that we can’t see, demonic forces. I think about what James says about wisdom that is earthly, he said is unspiritual, and he even uses the word demonic. Paul obviously talks about the forces of evil, the rulers and authorities and powers. But I think sometimes, or at least the way that I grew up, we just kind of read over those as sort of a rhetorical flourish or just some sort of rhetorical device, and we, you know, just take it to mean that it’s really bad or something like that. But we don’t often, I think, think about and are aware that there are forces of evil and darkness. And you mentioned in your sermon about demons existing in the spiritual plane and that sort of overlapping with the physical plane, so let’s talk about that for just a little bit, if that’s okay. Just why is it important for us to have an awareness of demonic forces, spiritual evil forces, and what should we think about that? KERRY: Well, kind of building on what you said about why it is, perhaps, that we don’t dive into this very deeply, I think that it does have to do with just glossing over things that maybe we don’t fully understand, but I think there’s kind of a root reason for that, and that’s kind of in our very identity of how we approach, homiletically and hermeneutically, the scriptures, how we ‑‑ I mean, we’re Restorationists and we come out of the Restoration tradition and the Restoration background, which you and I both believe in strongly in that homiletic to be able to restore New Testament Christianity. But in my studies, it kind of opened my eyes because in my doctoral work, I did a lot on Restoration fathers and kind of the background of where that all came from, and it just kind of clicked with me we’re not comfortable with anything we can’t clearly define because we come from that Lockean, Baconian, logical tradition where we’re trained to find, well, if the Bible says it, that’s what it means. But what do we do with the subjects ‑‑ and pretty much, across the board, every subject where there’s vagueness in scripture, where it’s a gray area of, “Well, it seems like this or it might be this,” rather than concretely? We’re not good with that. I mean, we struggle with it. And what I found was that, you know, you look back in our background and we very much want to give people concrete answers. We’re very formulaic in how we approach the scriptures, which I think is not a bad thing at all. In fact, I think it’s caused us to arrive at truth that needed to be found and brought to the religious world and to the lost. So it’s not a critique of it, but I think we became so adjusted and used to that, that we get to the point where, if it’s not something we can give a clear yes or a clear no ‑‑ I mean, we all know how formulaic we are about things. I mean, “hear, believe, repent, confess, be baptized.” I mean, those steps ‑‑ you don’t find that in any place in scripture where those are ordered in that way, but yet extremely formulaic. Some of our old preachers, I’ve heard lessons from them about the five steps very plainly, and you can’t get the steps out of order. Well, how does that even work when it comes to, like, repentance and confession? Some of that stuff is lifelong. It begins, you know, but we just want it to be so clear, step by step by step, that ‑‑ you know, five acts of worship. I mean, we are great about formulas, but there are some things in scripture that just do not fit into any type of formula, and across the board we’ve been this way. Think about the Holy Spirit. I mean, some of the arguments that are made about the Holy Spirit, when you talk about “word only” versus whether there’s an actual indwelling and all of that ‑‑ I mean, we try to approach a subject that we just can’t really fully understand in all of its completeness, and, in that, we come up with all sorts of trying to find concrete, absolute yes or no’s. WES: Yeah, yeah. Do you think ‑‑ and I heard in your sermon that you taught philosophy, I guess, at a college level. KERRY: Yes. WES: And do you think that this is ‑‑ that a lot of that ‑‑ you mentioned several, you know, reasons we think this way, but do you think that this is sort of a Western mindset that we have as we approach the scripture as opposed to more of an ancient Near Eastern/Eastern mentality that they would have had when they wrote the scriptures that we are trying to ‑‑ I almost feel like we’re trying to analyze and break down like you would if you heard a poem or a song and we’re trying to look at it scientifically or mathematically. It’s like, that’s not how it works. That’s not how poetry works or that’s not how this genre of literature works. And so do you think we have that tendency to read it through a very Western lens? KERRY: I definitely think that, you know, our Western virtue/ethics type of philosophy ‑‑ I mean, our way of looking at life, even today, is so very different than the Eastern world. You know, they have a very, very Confucian mindset where harmony matters. I mean, you know this when you go and you watch a baseball game in Japan today. They don’t tell ERA; they don’t tell batting averages. They aren’t concerned with the individual at all. They’re concerned with the whole, with harmony, and your place in the larger society or group, or whatever it may be, where we come from a very Western mindset that comes from the Greeks and Romans, primarily, and they had more of a meritorious type of approach to things, a meritocracy, you know, that you need to achieve the very best individualistically that you can, and we adopted that. That’s even true in our founding documents. I mean, Benjamin Franklin was a virtue ethicist, and we see that so much. It runs through our society top to bottom. And so, yes, I think that has ‑‑ you know, the scientific method came about, John Locke, Bacon, those guys who influenced our thinking. And if you read Campbell, I mean, he was powerfully influenced by those kind of people, and Stone, to a little less degree, but pretty heavily, as well. And so they searched the scriptures, and reason is what is promoted over and over and over. Reason, reason. And so that kind of comes to almost, like you said, a scientific method of how do you pull out evidences and ‑‑ I mean, think about even the hermeneutic of command, example, and necessary inference. Well, the idea of necessary inference is that you can come to a reasonable, logical conclusion from evidences that is applicable and binding. And so, yeah, those are good things. I mean, I think we’ve ‑‑ I appreciate them and love them and will never abandon them. However, some of this stuff in scripture, they were looking at from a mystical perspective, and there is not much room for mysticism in how we currently ‑‑ or at least how I grew up and how it sounds maybe you grew up ‑‑ in how we were taught to look at scripture. We were taught to find the concrete, to find the absolute, and just not really given any tools to be able to look at things that we know, from the start, don’t fit in that box. Here’s a great illustration. So I teach a doctoral class on Revelation, and, really, all of the classwork that we do is trying to find a date because, as you know, the entirety of Revelation changes based upon how you date the book. And as we’re diving into that, one of the things I emphasize in the first class is that when you write your final project ‑‑ because in a doctoral course, it’s, you know, 35, 40 pages; it’s a big project ‑‑ I will dock you on your grades if you write to me like most of our brothers do when they write in their commentaries, which is like this: “Well, this is a hard subject, but I found the answer.” I mean, you’ve read commentaries on Revelation. Have you seen that kind of thing before? “I mean, I found it. This is what it means.” I’ve been teaching and studying that book all my life since I’ve been in ministry, 30‑plus years, and I’m not willing to say I know what it means. I mean, I know what I think it means and what is most logical and reasonable for me to assume on it. But even on stuff like that, we have to approach it like, “Okay, here’s the formula. Here’s the answer.” There’s no room for questioning, no room for, “Well, it might be this, but we just can’t be sure, but the overall message of the book doesn’t change.” We don’t do that much. We want to tell people exactly what those horns mean, exactly what those beasts are, without question. I mean, that’s how we approach stuff. And when it comes to spiritual warfare, just like the Holy Spirit, just like apocalyptic literature, that formula just ‑‑ it doesn’t work very well, so you know what you do? A lot of people just avoid it. WES: Yeah, because I think we assume that if there’s not certainty on something, if there’s any sort of ambiguity about it, it must not be important. And if I can’t ‑‑ if the Bible doesn’t lay out in XYZ, ABC, very, very clear terms what is a demon, where do demons come from, why are there demons ‑‑ you know, if the Bible doesn’t lay all of that out, then it must not be important. I was thinking, as you were talking, about the way that I grew up reading the gospel accounts and how different it is now for me, because when I would read the gospel accounts, you know, I was just looking for, you know, what did Jesus do? You know, he was born, he lived, he was perfect, he died, he was buried, he rose. That’s it. And then what do I need to do in response to that? You know, I need to repent and be baptized. Well, when you just sit down and read the gospel accounts, it’s kind of shocking now to me how much of it is about spiritual warfare, how much of it is about Jesus reclaiming what belongs to his Father from the domain of Satan, and so much of it is about casting out demons and the demonic, and we just sort of gloss over all of that, and we say, well, you know, yeah, that happened, but it really isn’t important for the story. Not too long ago I was preaching a sermon about the cross and about atonement theories, and I asked people, what part, if any, does the demonic world play in your atonement theory? Like does that have any ‑‑ is there any space in your imagination for what is the cross all about and what does that have to do with Satan and the demonic forces of evil? Because for Paul and for the gospel writers, for Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, I think it had a lot to do with what Jesus was up to, what Jesus’ ministry was all about, what the cross was all about, and what the resurrection is all about and even his current and present reign. And so we have just sort of dismissed all of that and we’ve made everything about just me and God and forgot that there are other spiritual forces that exist in the heavenly places, in the unseen places that we just are not aware of, and we sort of dismiss the significance of them. KERRY: Well, the discomfort is real. I mean, I’ve been doing seminars on this. I’ve written a couple books on spiritual warfare and a novel on it, and I’ve done these seminars around the country. I remember, several years ago, I’m preaching in a place and my mom and dad were able to come, and there were several classes going on at the same time. And you’ve got to understand that, to my mother, the greatest preacher who ever walked the earth is Jesus, and number two is her son. I mean, she’s my mother. Okay? And my mom didn’t come to my class. My dad did, but my mom didn’t come to my class. And I asked her afterwards, I said, “Mom, what” ‑‑ she said, “Well, I went to the other class.” I said, “Mom, what” ‑‑ she said, “Well, if you’d just teach on something else except for that hocus‑pocus stuff,” she said, “it just makes me uncomfortable,” and that’s my own mom, who would come and hear me read out of the telephone book. But she is uncomfortable with it because you just can’t get clear, defined answers, and that’s what she’s been taught to expect and to find comfort in. WES: Yeah. Let’s talk a little bit about 2nd Corinthians 10, because that was one of the texts that you used in your sermon. For Paul, as he’s explaining his ministry and the way that he operates, how do you think that he sees himself engaging in spiritual warfare? I think what we sort of imagine sometimes that that means, “spiritual warfare,” or what spiritual warfare entails is kind of different than what the New Testament writers have in mind, what Paul has in mind in Ephesians 6 or in 2nd Corinthians 10. But how does his apostolic ministry ‑‑ how is that spiritual warfare, do you think? KERRY: Well, he makes very clear there that the weapons of our war are not carnal, and I think that is so powerful historically, that the Lord’s church was persecuted and the government powers that be, the most powerful empire that’s ever been on the face of the earth tried for hundreds of years to stamp out Christianity intermittently. You know, different emperors were worse than others, but at the end of that 300 or so years, you find the Emperor Constantine is converted to Christianity, and not one sword that we know of was ever drawn in the name of Christ because this war is of a spiritual nature, not physical. And the thing is, is that we’ve made so many things so physical ‑‑ which this is true in scripture. I mean, you can’t miss all the holiness passages. You can’t skip over, you know, not to live like the world and be like the world. There’s no doubt that there is a physical component to what we do and who we are and who we’re called to be. But I think we focus sometimes so much on that physical component: stay away from ungodliness, live a holy life, you know, strive for righteousness. And all of that is true and good, but it still kind of restricts it to the things that we can interact with with our five senses, and if we can’t interact with our five senses, we don’t think of it as being powerful. And I wonder if the most significant moment in the real world ‑‑ I mean, I say this all the time, you know, that we’ve seen all sorts of science fiction and things that try to describe the idea of living in two worlds. I think like The Matrix and things like that are probably pretty good. I mean, when I saw that film for the first time, I was kind of floored because I’d already studied a lot of spiritual warfare, and I’m like, this is kind of what it’s like. You know, we live in a very, very clear world to us, as far as what we can see, but there’s another world that we can’t see, hear, taste, touch, or smell that is the real world. And the scriptures tell us that we live in both ‑‑ concurrently in both. And so as we go about our days, it may seem like a very insignificant thing when we’re sitting across a table at Starbucks with our Bible open, but the way I understand what Paul is saying there about the casting down of arguments, and then he says in Ephesians 6 that our struggle is not against flesh and blood but against princes ‑‑ I mean, the war is not against wicked people in Washington who are casting [votes], you know, and producing all these laws that are ungodly. In fact, I see Christians so worried about that all the time and, like, you know what? We really should expect wicked people to do wicked things. It shouldn’t surprise us. And we get all involved in all that when it’s probably more significant, in the spiritual world, sitting across the table at Starbucks with your Bible open than even what you do in the ballot box or what we do civically or ‑‑ I mean, that is the war that the Bible says matters, the war over the souls of people and then the war that goes on within us. I mean, I often say the devil ‑‑ and I talk about the devil all the time because of the spiritual‑warfare emphasis, but the devil is our second greatest enemy. I mean, the greatest enemy is the one that we have to master within ourselves, and that is a spiritual war in and of itself. That is the powerful ‑‑ I mean, Romans chapter 7 ‑‑ talk about a passage that we gloss over ‑‑ where Paul talks about “The things that I do are the things that I hate and the things that I even practice,” some versions use. “Who will deliver me from this body of death?” He’s not talking about the Paul that he used to be, because the context is he’s talking about his own struggle, and he didn’t have a conscience problem before he became a Christian. He says, “I did everything with a clear conscience.” Now he’s aware of his struggle, his sarx, his flesh, sinful nature, whatever word you want to use, and the war that is within him. We’re talking about, arguably, one of the most mature Christian men that any of us could ever aspire to, right? But yet that war is going on within him. And I think, to understand spiritual warfare, we have to think spiritually. We have to try our very best to imagine ‑‑ that’s why I’ve tried to write on this even some fictional things. Not because ‑‑ and I make very clear it’s probably not this way, but at least these things are consistent with scripture, and I want to get people’s minds thinking about what could be going on around me. Am I really here alone? You know, I think people think that we’re alone. But are we alone? Are we ever alone? I mean, angels, demons, the devil ‑‑ I mean, the Bible says that they’re here, and there are so many instances where they’re witnessed. You know, like every time you see something like Balaam’s donkey ‑‑ the donkey saw him, saw the angel when Balaam couldn’t, and the Bible doesn’t say that part was a miracle. Now, the whole talking thing is ‑‑ yeah, that gets miraculous, but he sees it. Elisha, when the servant comes up on the wall, opened his eyes, and then he sees them ‑‑ they were there before he saw it. They were real, just couldn’t interact with our five senses. WES: Yeah, I love the way that you describe that as sort of this overlapping world and that they’re both here, they’re both present. In fact, you used the words “real world,” and we do tend to think about the physical world, the things that we can see that ‑‑ the seen world, we tend to think of that as the real world, but there’s a sense in which the unseen world is ‑‑ for us especially, is more real. It is where our hope lies, is in this unseen world, and also where this battle is being conducted. And, you know, I think about Ephesians 6, and I think about the way that Ephesians 6 was always taught to me when I was growing up and this spiritual armor that we put on, the armor of God that we put on. KERRY: Burger King crowns, right? And trash‑can‑lid shields. WES: Yeah. And I always saw the poster that we would put up in Bible classrooms. In fact, there’s probably still, you know, tons of those even at this building right now, and, you know, it’s always kind of bothered me that we focus all of our attention on the metaphor of the helmet and the breastplate and the sword and the shoes and the belt, but that’s not Paul’s point. His point is that salvation and righteousness and the gospel and the word of God, these are the things that protect you. These are the things with which you are doing battle. And I always tell people, if you read Ephesians 6 and you come away afraid, you’re not reading it right. Either that or you’re not armed; you’re not wearing the armor. But if you are equipped with salvation and righteousness and the Word of God and the Gospel of Peace, then we have nothing to worry about and we can engage in this war, even a war that we can’t see but that we are aware of, but we engage in it in a way that might seem rather ordinary. I was talking to college students one time and talking about spiritual warfare, and I said, really, we engage in it through Bible study, through prayer, through fasting, through worship. You know, all of these things are acts of spiritual warfare, and it seems rather mundane and ordinary, and in a way it is, but we have to, I think, put on these spiritual lenses, as you were saying, and I think that’s ‑‑ I think you’re exactly right. Like, not only The Matrix you mentioned, but I think about C.S. Lewis and the world of Narnia that he sort of painted, that that world exists and that we actually exist in it and are doing things within that world by doing these things that seem ordinary but are anything but ordinary. KERRY: Right. Well, and people don’t ‑‑ I think the way we read it is that ‑‑ I’ve asked people before, in seminars and things, who do you think the devil is personally working on today? You know, because the way I read the New Testament, he just kind of followed Jesus around for three and a half years, right? But the devil ‑‑ I mean, if you understand him to be a fallen angel, which I think Ezekiel and ‑‑ you know, even when it says “don’t fall into the same condemnation as the devil” when it’s talking about an elder must not be a new convert and his pride that matched up with his ‑‑ I think there’s just a lot of evidence that he was an angel, if not the archangel ‑‑ I kind of suspect the archangel ‑‑ before. And, indeed, if that’s true, if he fell, then he’s certainly more powerful than any human being, less powerful than God by infinite measure, but he would be bound by the rules or the laws that affect angels. Well, in Daniel chapter 10, you have him ‑‑ Daniel prays for interpretation to a vision, and this angel appears to him three weeks later, and the angel says, “Well, I couldn’t get there, but I was held up by the Prince of Persia and I couldn’t get free for 21 days. And then Michael, the archangel, came and fought with that Prince of Persia, and now I’m able to bring you this message.” But that tells us something. Angels are bound by time and space. In other words, they can’t be in two places at once, and it tells us that their perception of time is exactly the same as ours because it was the same three weeks for the angel that it was for Daniel. Now, what that means is the devil is in one place right now on this earth. And so I’ve asked people, well, who do you think he’s working on right now? And the answer is always a president or Beyonce or something. You know, people always say something like that, and I’m like, why? He’s got them. You understand the world kind of runs on autopilot because of our own flesh, right? So who’s his enemy? Is the president his enemy? No. Beyonce is not his enemy. I mean, you know, whether it’s a movie star or a politician or whoever it may be, no, that’s not the war. The Bible says the war is between Christians, us, and the devil, and that all those people out there are not the enemy. I mean, he says our struggle is not against flesh and blood, period. I understand the devil uses the enemy powerfully and that he can use people and make them very dangerous to us, but they are still not the ‑‑ it’s kind of like Omaha Beach in World War II. That was a dangerous place for our soldiers to land because they had land mines, they had barbed wire, they had mortar emplacements. But even though the beach was dangerous, the beach was the objective, not the enemy, and so you might have to fight against the beach in order to win the beach back. And that still happens, right? That’s the nature of ‑‑ so I think what would help Christians more than anything else is to get out of their mind that people are the enemy. People are not the enemy. I mean, yes, people are wicked and they’re being used mightily by the enemy sometimes, but they’re not the enemy. But you see, that’s how we see spiritual warfare, in such simplistic terms that are inconsistent with everything the scriptures teach, which is that it is us versus him, the devil, and his minions, and the most significant thing that can happen happens over coffee tables or at Starbucks or happens over email, if you’re studying with somebody. Our weapons ‑‑ going back to the 2nd Corinthians passage, our weapons are not carnal but for the tearing down of arguments. Why? So we can win the souls of people back to him. WES: Yeah. Well, that’s why I always like to tell people that we should think of people that have positioned themselves as our enemies, have positioned themselves against us, unbelievers and people in the world ‑‑ we should think of them as prisoners of war. We should think of them as prisoners of our enemy rather than our enemy, that our goal ‑‑ as you said, they’re our objective. Our objective is to liberate them, and so if we were, you know, in a physical battle, in a physical war, we would recognize that the prisoners of war ‑‑ even if they’re being used or leveraged against us, they are people to be liberated and freed from their captors just as we once ‑‑ we once were those people. We were on the enemy’s side because we had been captured by those lies and by that deceit. Not that we were innocent in it, of course, we gave into it, but we were captured by the devil to do his will, and so we should have compassion on those that are so enslaved to the evil one and we should be seeking to set them free, to liberate them, rather than to destroy them or fight against them. KERRY: Well, you know, evidence that we see this wrong is when you ask another question ‑‑ I ask a lot of stimulating questions, and one of the questions I also ask is, well, so who’s on the offense and who’s on the defense in this war? And I’m telling you, most believers get that wrong, right? Because they think of us as being on the defense, and, indeed, we’re surrounded by ‑‑ we’re way outnumbered, but according to Ephesians chapter 6, I mean, the true dynamic is we’re like special forces that are armed better, right? And yes, we’re behind enemy lines and we’re surrounded by the enemy every single day, but we’re better equipped and we’re ‑‑ if we have our scriptures and we know them, we’re better trained. But yet people see ‑‑ that’s why I think sometimes the church today ‑‑ and you know this; you speak places, and things ‑‑ brethren are beaten down and they think that the world’s never been worse than it is. That is ‑‑ historically, as a historian, that is absolutely not true. If you look at the scale of where the world’s been ‑‑ I’m talking morally, righteously, however you want to describe it, we’re still on the top edge. I mean, it could be a lot worse than it is, but yet, we just have our experiences, and we think it’s so bad. And so we have kind of a circle‑the‑wagons kind of mindset, that we gotta survive, we gotta defend, we gotta survive. But what does Matthew 16 say? Jesus says, you know, “On this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it.” And I’ve studied a lot of military history, and what I’ve never read is any offensive army carrying their gates with them. That is not a tool of offense. That is a tool of final defense. And Jesus doesn’t describe his churches on the defense. He describes his churches taking the fight to the very gates of Hades, and that’s what we’re called to be, because in the end, I mean, it’s abundantly ‑‑ we can’t lose unless we quit. I mean, that’s just the ultimate truth of ‑‑ if we walk in the light as he is in the light, we can’t lose unless we quit. I mean, we’re invincible to the enemy. In the real world, now, yes, we could suffer and we could face all sorts of problems in this life and we could even have our lives taken from us physically, but we cannot lose. And so all he tries to do, everything ‑‑ the devil’s strategy, it’s summed up in this: Get us to either turn ourselves over to him or to quit. That’s it. That’s his entire objective. So if he can tempt us with sin, where we abandon our faith, well, then he gets us. If he can get us to be so afraid or not do anything or be so distraught about what’s going on in the world that we just sit back and worry about ourselves, then we’re no threat to him. That’s his entire strategy. WES: Well, that’s sobering. That’s really sobering. Kerry, you work a lot with the church in various ways, with preachers and teachers and evangelists, and even with members and Christians of the Tahoe Encampment and through Sunset, and so I want to just talk practicality here. How do we help those people that are our leaders, whether they’re leading in a congregation or they’re leading in their home ‑‑ how do we help them to see the battle that’s going on and to be engaged in it, to be on the offense and to go in wearing the armor of God and prepared to do the work that we’re called to do? How do we help get the church across the globe engaged in the battle? KERRY: Well, you know, of course, from my perspective, I think it has to do with education, but more than that. We hear that word as the solution to every problem in the world, right? “Well, if we just have more education.” Well, yes, but what I’m meaning more by that is knowledge and passion. I mean, our people have to get passionate about this and be able to understand who the enemy is. I mean, you know, I think, theologically ‑‑ and we don’t have time to talk about all that today, but there’s some underpinnings of why spiritual warfare is hard for us to grasp, and I can prove it to you by this. I mean, I’ve been preaching 30‑plus years; you’ve been preaching a long, long time. I have never, ever, in all of the grief that I’ve seen in people’s lives, which I would never, never disparage that or ‑‑ I mean, we hurt for people, but I have never seen a believer, when they’re going through pain, blame the devil, but you know how many times I’ve seen them blame God? There is a deep theological problem with that. Clearly, we don’t understand God and we don’t understand the devil, because God is not the enemy, right? But yet, theologically, that’s where people go. I don’t know, have you seen that kind of thing before? WES: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there’s books and there’s seminars and there’s all kinds of things about God and sort of dealing with and grappling with and wrestling with our anger at God when bad things happen. But yeah, again, the whole point of the scriptures is that this is not the way that our good God intended the world to be, nor the way that ‑‑ nor his intention for the future. KERRY: Well, and we’ve bought into a subtle Calvinism that almost makes us think that everything that happens in the spiritual world, the devil has to get direct ‑‑ now, there’s a difference between direct permission and indirect permission. You know, if you give your kid the keys to the car and you say “Go,” I mean, just because you didn’t tell them they couldn’t go there, that’s kind of indirect because you made the circumstance, right? But direct permission, where, “Well, Dad, can I go here? Yes or no?” ‑‑ it’s almost like people think that the devil sends an email to God every time he wants to do something awful, and God gives him permission or he can’t do it. That is just not true in Scripture. I don’t know where we got it, but people believe that en masse. So I think, first of all, we have to get people to see God. It hurts me so much for God. I want to defend his character. I don’t think that anything ‑‑ now, he does chasten us, he does discipline us, but the big, bad terrible things in life are not God. I don’t believe it. And, you know, if you can get people passionate about this, then maybe when they’re hurting ‑‑ I mean, I talk to God every day, but I talk to the devil every now and again, and what I mean by that is I’ve screamed out his name and said, “This hurts, but you will never win. Bring on the rain because you will never win,” because I see him involved in these processes in my life, and I don’t think people see it. I mean, maybe they could intellectually when they’re hearing this podcast or whatever, but when their life has fallen apart, it’s like the devil’s out of the equation and it’s all God. And what does that do to his character? I mean, the God who loves us so much he’d give himself for us. No. And so I think that’s the first thing ‑‑ that’s what I try to do, is inspire passion about these things in people’s lives to show God’s character. He’s on our side. In everything, he’s on our side. I’m the Dean of the Graduate School at Sunset, teach a lot of classes there, master’s and doctoral. I have a class on spiritual warfare because if I can get preachers to be passionate about it, then that’s the process of getting members to be passionate about it. I direct the Tahoe Family Encampment. We always have something on spiritual warfare every year because I think it’s such an important topic. As I said, I finished a novel. It’s called Angel at War, and it’s kind of the ‑‑ I call it the opposite of The Screwtape Letters, if you’ve read that, because that’s about a demon, and my novel is about an angel as he’s defending a Christian and everything that happens in there. And I don’t know that that’s exactly how it is, and I make that clear in the foreword of the book, but I want to get people’s minds rolling on this, and then, of course, through seminars and things. And I think that’s where we start, is we have to be passionate about it ourselves, and, you know, you won’t be passionate about something if you don’t have a powerful reason. And my reason is I’m tired of even Christians who disparage ‑‑ unintentionally much of the time, but disparage the character of God because, you know, it’s almost as if we didn’t ‑‑ you know, we read all those Old Testament stories and we just see the horrible details sometimes, but we don’t see the God who ‑‑ when Abraham lied about Sarah for the second time, Abimelech’s the one that’s gonna be punished, and why not Abraham? Well, that doesn’t even seem just. Because Abraham was God’s friend and Abimelech wasn’t. And you look through David ‑‑ I mean, what a colossal sinner, what an immensely flawed man, but yet he is that man after God’s own heart because, you see, that’s all the way through scripture. Spiritual things are what matter the most. Now, the other stuff matters, too, but they matter the most. But it’s like we push those to the side and ‑‑ no. I suppose it’s possible to get passionate about the details, but when you see the big picture, I think that’s where my passion comes from, is I want to defend God, who is my Lord, my Savior, and my friend. I want to defend his character, and I want to show that he is not the enemy. He is our great help, our great comfort. He is our great weapon as we face against an enemy that, frankly, he hates us and he’s malicious. And it’s funny because he’ll give people wealth and power and influence only to pull it out from under them and laugh in their face. That is his character. WES: Well, I think about how practical everything you’re saying is, and I think about Job’s friends. And even though they were sort of blaming Job for the tragedies that he was going through, they were probably well‑intentioned guys. That’s the way so many of these things, I think, begin, is with well‑intentioned comments in the face of tragedy and horrible things that have happened in people’s lives. And so often people will say things like, “Well, you know, God needed another flower in his garden and that’s why this person died,” or we’ll say things to people, “I don’t know why God took them, but I’m sure God has his reasons.” And I want to stop ‑‑ and I constantly say in funerals ‑‑ I remind people what Paul says in 1st Corinthians 15, that death is an enemy. Now, we know, as Christians, that the sting of death has been removed for us because we’re forgiven, because we don’t have to be afraid of death, but that still doesn’t change the fact that it’s an enemy that God longs to destroy. This is an enemy that Satan has used in his arsenal and that God is going to destroy death, and we long for that day, but so often we take and we act like God is the killer, that God is the one who is using death. It’s not God that’s using death. God is on the side of life. God brings life into the world and God longs to raise his people from the dead and liberate them from the hold of death. And so I think, so often, we get the picture backwards because we’ve taken Satan and the demonic forces and even the personification of death out of the picture, and so we have no one else to blame but God. KERRY: And we so missed it because ‑‑ I mean, the first memory verse probably everybody learns is the shortest verse in the Bible from John ‑‑ what is it, John 11, right? And, you know, it’s like we missed the point of that altogether, because when it says Jesus wept ‑‑ he has no reason to weep. In like five minutes he’s going to raise Lazarus from the dead. And all of those ‑‑ I mean, have you ever had a circumstance with somebody and they kind of thought it was going to be one way, disappointed, but you got a great surprise for them, right? I mean, it’s good. They’re about to ‑‑ in fact, it’s sweeter to see the joy when they’ve kind of been disappointed first. Well, imagine Jesus knew he’s about to raise Lazarus from the dead. All those tears ‑‑ he knows that. He’s about to do it. Why does he weep? Because he weeps that we have to ‑‑ you know, he’s raising Lazarus, but they’re going to go through it again, and everybody who lives in this world is going to go through it again. He wasn’t weeping for Lazarus. Yes, Mary, Martha somewhat, but not in that immediate because they’re about to be really happy. He weeps because we have to face that enemy, and God cares. You know that old song, “Does Jesus care when I’ve said goodbye to the dearest on earth to me?” John 11 is just so powerful because he cares. He’s not the enemy. But yet, how must it hurt him the way Christians look at it? And it’s because, I believe, we’ve been influenced by ‑‑ people kind of think God is the chess master, that every single thing that happens, happens with his permission, his direct ‑‑ I mean, that can’t be so. It’s not a war, then. I mean, if Ukraine has to call and ask Russia’s permission for every single missile they send, that is not a war. And understand, that gets into deep theological wranglings. Well, maybe we shouldn’t run away from the deep. Maybe that’s what maturity is about, growing, wrestling with things, struggling with them. But I know that any conclusion that we come up with that makes it God’s fault and maligns his character is the wrong conclusion. WES: There’s such a difference, I think, when you read the Psalms. There is sometimes frustration with God, even when you read Revelation and the martyrs are crying out, “How long?” But even in that, it is either celebrating the deliverance of God or anticipating the deliverance of God because the psalmist is saying, or the dead in Christ are saying, “How long?” because they’re looking to God for their deliverance, for their salvation. Rather than blaming God, they know that God is capable of bringing all of this pain and suffering to an end. The only question is, “Why are you waiting?” And I think that’s sometimes a really good question, but it’s not a good question if you think God is the one who caused the pain and suffering in the first place. It’s not God who caused it, but God who’s going to bring it to an end. It’s good and right to ask, “God, I don’t know what you’re doing, and why are you waiting and why don’t you fix this?” Of course, Peter gives us the answer, because he’s patient and he wants more people to come to salvation. But we have to know that God is the one who weeps with us. He hates death and disease and destruction infinitely more than we do. He weeps when we weep. He weeps even more than that because he can see what we can’t see. And so often we think that God is just stoically watching all of this happen and so disconnected from that, and that is so the opposite of the gospel. The gospel is that we have a God who suffers with us, who empathizes with us to the nth degree, who became human so that he could suffer with us and liberate us from the suffering. KERRY: Well, and I think the other thing that will help people see spiritual warfare is when you move past religion into relationship because ‑‑ I mean, we do practice a religion, but, I mean, when you seek not just to follow God and do the right things, when you seek to be a friend to God, to be close to God, to ‑‑ like Paul says, I want to know Christ, not just know about him ‑‑ to know him, and then things ‑‑ boy, things open up for us because, you know, what’s interesting is Old Testament characters would pray things that we would not pray. I mean, they said things to God that are ‑‑ Jeremiah’s my favorite. I’ll never write a commentary because I’m not that smart, but if I ever did on Jeremiah, it would be entitled “The Moody Prophet,” because I’m telling you, the guy would have been diagnosed with bipolar disorder if it was today. I mean, he is up and down. “The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases,” right? But then he also writes, in Jeremiah, “You, O Lord, are like an unreliable stream that, when I go to drink, you leave me dry,” in essence. I mean, how could he say that to God? And God doesn’t rebuke him. Elijah just lays it out to God how he feels. God doesn’t rebuke him, because you know what? He’s our Father. And when my kids came ‑‑ even when they were mad at me, as long as they weren’t disrespectful, I care what they feel, right? I want to hear it. But we don’t see it that way. We don’t see it through those eyes of relationship, and I think it trickles down and affects everything else we see or don’t see. WES: I think that’s a great way to sort of couch it, between religion and relationship, that there is a faith of religion that is just a matter of let me get all of the facts straight and let me figure out what all of the things are that I believe and just get all of those things straight in my mind, and then there’s a faith of relationship that says, “I trust you to do the right thing, to do the best thing, to do the good thing even when I don’t know what that is, and even when I don’t know when that is going to come to pass.” That’s what Hebrews is all about. I mean, there’s so much for all of us ‑‑ in every era of our life, in every era of human history and the history of God’s people, there has been so much ambiguity and just lack of knowledge of what’s gonna happen and why am I going through this and what does the future hold? But faith is seeing beyond what is seen and trusting in him and saying, “I don’t know what God is going to do or when he’s going to do it, but I know he’s going to do what is good and what is right, and I know that he’s going to keep his promises.” And with that, we can be comfortable, for lack of a better word, in the uncomfortable. We can be content with the pain, with the suffering, because we know, in the end, this is the way everything’s going to work out. KERRY: Absolutely. I mean, just examine sometime ‑‑ and I know you have, but for your listeners, examine sometime suffering in the New Testament and how it’s viewed. “Consider it pure joy when you face trials and temptations of all sorts.” I’ve never seen anybody do that, ever, in 30‑plus years of preaching. I’ve never seen anybody walk the aisle happy and say, “I’m going through this really hard thing. I just want to thank the Lord.” Never. I mean, that’s not the only passage that talks about it. Philippians chapter 1, “For it’s been appointed to you not only to believe in him, but also to suffer for his sake.” I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and to share in his suffering. “Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake.” “Blessed are those, you know, when they revile and persecute you and speak all manner of evil against you falsely, but rejoice and be exceedingly glad.” I mean, in spiritual warfare, suffering is like a medal of honor. It matters. Why do you think he says “Be faithful unto death”? That doesn’t mean till you grow old and die. “Be faithful unto death and you’ll receive a crown of life.” “No greater love hath any man than this, that he’ll lay down his life for his friends.” “You are my friends if you do what I command you.” All of that stuff is saying that how we see it is so very essential. And this stuff has affected so many things because you ‑‑ I mean, I assume that would be true for you, too. People don’t see suffering ‑‑ and I don’t see suffering that way yet, but I want to. I’m trying to. In fact, when ‑‑ I was just in a car accident this weekend. It was kind of scary, and I ‑‑ indeed I prayed to the Lord, thanked him that it wasn’t worse than it was and I wasn’t hurt and all that, but I want to express to him, also, thank you for trials and difficulty so that I can ‑‑ because, Lord, when things are hard, I can show you how much I love you and that you’re first to me, and that really is what life is all about. It’s choice. Him or ourselves. Him or the world. WES: Yeah. Well, and I think that even those acts of rejoicing in faith when we encounter various trials, that, in and of itself, is an act of spiritual warfare, where we are pushing back, we’re fighting against what is seen and we’re saying there is more to this than what can be seen. There’s more than what can be felt. And we’re not denying the pain and that it’s actually bad, that these painful things are actually bad, but we are saying that ‑‑ by rejoicing in them, we’re saying God is bigger, God is greater, God can even redeem this situation. And it is an act of faith, an act of spiritual warfare to push back against those things. I think even about ‑‑ to kind of wrap this up and go back to where we started, that it’s even in loving our enemies, in loving the people who position themselves against us, the human beings, the flesh and blood, that when we love them, that, in and of itself, is engaging in spiritual warfare. When we love them, we’re heaping burning coals on their head. So let me just ask this as we kind of wrap up, that I think there’s a difference ‑‑ and I want to see if you think there’s a difference ‑‑ between destroying arguments and being argumentative, because sometimes I think we read 2nd Corinthians 10 and we read, oh, yes, we’re supposed to destroy arguments, and we sort of pat ourselves on the back for, quote‑unquote, owning the other person or dunking on them or scoring points against them, and we’re just being argumentative rather than actually destroying the arguments, rather than winning them to Christ and helping them to be liberated from the enslavement that they’re suffering. KERRY: Oh, yeah. Well, one of the things that’s kind of a great example of how we misunderstand this sometimes is our use of the term ‑‑ well, some of our use. I mean, I wouldn’t say everybody does this, but sometimes, in the church, people refer to “false teaching,” and you’ve probably been called a false teacher; I’ve been called a false teacher. I mean, it depends on where you are on any subject; there’s somebody to the right of you that’s going to think you’re a false teacher. But what I’ve found to be so interesting about that is that people make that application to folks outside the church. They’re not false teachers. That topic ‑‑ that title is reserved in scripture, but it’s not even reserved to people who teach things that are false. I mean, have you ever done that? I mean, I’ve changed through the years big time, right? Does that mean I was a false teacher? It can’t mean that, right? But there’s an interesting thing when you dive into every instance where you have a Diotrephes, or whatever, in scripture. There’s always one connecting concept, and it reads something like this, “For their God is their own belly.” It’s not talking about a person who is teaching something false mistakenly. It’s talking about a person who knows they’re teaching something false and are doing it for their own selfish ambition and gain, which is a very small group of people, right? I mean, but yet we take and we feel like victors because we blast somebody into next week because they don’t see it the way we believe the scriptures teach, and that ‑‑ we don’t see that attitude ‑‑ Jesus was real hard on the Pharisees because they fit that description very well, but he was pretty soft with everybody else, including Romans, including Gentiles, including his boneheaded disciples. I mean, he was patient and loving. He got frustrated at times, but ‑‑ and this is the thing, is that Paul, the same one who said “The weapons of our warfare are not carnal,” he’s also the one that says, “I become all things to all men.” He said I will compromise everything except the gospel, except the truth. I’ll compromise my wants, my desires, my own personal preferences, all of that because ‑‑ you know, what about passages like, “If at all possible, live at peace with all men”? That’s what we’re called to be, but yet somehow we’ve gotten this idea that being at war means we have to be combative. It does. We need to be combative to the devil, but not to people, but yet so many brethren have the mindset that the right way to do it is to be combative to people. And are there rare cases where there is a false teacher? Sure. But by and large, most of the time, we just are ‑‑ I mean, I like to think about what would convince me if I was in that person’s shoes? What would reach me? Now, it’s gotta be ‑‑ you can’t water down the truth. It’s gotta be told. But you can tell it with love in your heart and with compassion on your voice and a tear in your eye, and that’s different than sometimes how people want to win the argument. So I don’t know if that’s what you were looking for, but that’s kinda how I see it. WES: Couldn’t agree more, Brother, and I think that’s a great place to wrap up. Before we close, let me give you an opportunity to tell people where they can find out more about Sunset or the Tahoe Encampment or anything that you’d like to point people to. KERRY: You bet. Well, first of all, on the Sunset front, our graduate school, we have two doctorate degrees and we have three different master’s degrees. It’s very, very affordable. You can go to Sunset.Bible and there’s a graduate school page. What we’re really excited about is we just started last year ‑‑ this is our second annual Sermon Symposium in the Dallas/Fort Worth area. It’s for anybody who wants to come. You can register at Sunset.Bible, and then, under “Events,” it’ll be right there, and that’s June the 6th through the 8th at Lewisville Church of Christ, and we’d love to see anybody who can come be there and be a part of it. I also direct the Tahoe Family Encampment, as you mentioned. That’s been going since 1946. It used to be the Yosemite Family Encampment continuously except for one year, and everybody knows what year that was, so ‑‑ but we’ve been going at Lake Tahoe from about the year 2000, and our dates this year are June the 15th through the 21st. We have a web page and a Facebook page, Tahoe Family Encampment. You can find it very, very easily. So love to have y’all. Anybody who wants to be involved, the more the merrier. And then I mentioned the novel that I wrote. It’s available on Amazon. It’s called Angel at War by Kerry Williams, and if anybody has an interest in that, maybe it’ll help to expand our minds, so if there’s something there you don’t like, let me know, because I’d be curious. WES: Well, thank you, Brother. Thanks for this conversation and thanks for your work in the kingdom. KERRY: God bless. Thank you so much for having me on. Appreciate it. The post Do Not Wrestle Against Flesh and Blood with Kerry Williams appeared first on Radically Christian.

The Gospel of Sin Management with Joseph Lewis

“The gospel of sin management” is a phrase that was coined by Dallas Willard. For Joseph Lewis, that phrase perfectly encapsulates the way many people make being a Christian primarily about avoiding sin and following a set of rules. In this thought-provoking episode, Wes McAdams and Joseph Lewis expose the problems with reducing Christianity to mere moralism. They discuss how an obsessive focus on not sinning can paradoxically make us more likely to sin, as well as undermine the true meaning of the gospel. Drawing from biblical passages like John 5 and Galatians 5, the discussion explores the core of what the gospel really is – not a rigid system of dos and don’ts, but the amazing news of God’s grace, mercy, and transformative work in our lives through Jesus Christ. The conversation illuminates how the gospel reorients our entire lives around Christ rather than reducing faith to mere behavior modification. It examines the importance of focusing on Jesus rather than dwelling on a checklist of sins to avoid. The guest for this episode is Joseph Lewis, an evangelist at the Flower Mound Church of Christ. Joseph is known for his rich theological insights and his passion for helping believers develop an authentic, Christ-centered faith. With wisdom and personal examples, Joseph unpacks the life-giving power of the true gospel as opposed to the hollow, powerless “gospel of sin management.” Links and Resources Watch This Episode on YouTube “The Gospel of Sin Management” (Sermon by Joseph Lewis) Divine Conspiracy by Dallas Willard Almost Christian: What the Faith of Our Teenagers is Telling the American Church by Kenda Creasy Dean Transcript (Credit: Beth Tabor) Welcome to the Radically Christian Bible Study podcast. I’m your host, Wes McAdams. Here we have one goal: Learn to love like Jesus. Today we’re going to talk about the false gospel of sin management. Why is the gospel not just merely a matter of managing our own sin? The gospel is not just a matter of don’t do this, don’t do this, stop this, stop that. The gospel is so much more than that. My guest today is Joseph Lewis, who is one of the evangelists at the Flower Mound Congregation. He preached a sermon recently on this topic, and I know that you’re going to really enjoy this very theologically rich conversation. Before we get into that, I want to read from Titus chapter 2, starting in verse 11. The apostle Paul says, “For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people, training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self‑controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age, waiting for our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for himself a people for his own possession who are zealous for good works.” I hope that you enjoy this conversation and, as always, I hope that it helps all of us learn to love like Jesus. WES: Joseph Lewis, welcome to the podcast, Brother. JOSEPH: Hey, what’s going on, Wes? WES: It is so good to finally have you on the podcast. I’m sorry it’s taken so long to have you on. I’m excited about our conversation. JOSEPH: There is zero reason to apologize. I have always listened to your podcast as kind of like a thing that other people get to go on, you know? So when you texted me, you were like, hey, you should be on the podcast. I was like, no, I shouldn’t. So I’m excited to finally be able to talk to you and have it be recorded. WES: Yeah, we always have such great conversations. We have lunch together once a month and get to have some great conversations. We’re with other preachers, but sometimes I ignore all of them because I enjoy the conversations you and I have so much. JOSEPH: Sometimes I try to not talk to you until the end because of that, because I’m like, man, I gotta let him talk to other people. I always take up all your time, so… WES: We get into some great theology, which is what I’m excited about talking about today. You recently had a sermon and it was entitled “The Gospel of Sin Management,” and it was a fantastic lesson. In fact, I asked you, what do you want to talk about? And then I started digging through some of your recent stuff and I was like, oh, this would be really good. And about the same time that I found that, you texted me and said, well, we could talk about this lesson, and I was already going down that rabbit trail. So I’m really excited to talk about this lesson that you did. You talked about this idea of sin management, or the gospel of sin management. Let’s first define that. What do you mean by that? JOSEPH: Yeah, I mean, so it’s funny. I got the sentence ‑‑ or the phrase from a book called The Divine Conspiracy by Dallas Willard. He didn’t go the direction that I went with it. I think he was more talking about kind of what that looks like in people’s lives in different ‑‑ kind of different aspects, but as soon as I heard that phrase, I was like, oh, my goodness, like, I know that gospel. I know that gospel really well. You know, it’s one of those things that I think is defined really well when you look at like sort of what people do: When they hear that gospel, how do they respond? The gospel of sin management has people say things like, well, being a Christian is about stopping sinning. And at the outset, like, I think most of us would agree with that, you know? But at the same time, that’s not really the gospel. You know, that’s the gospel of sin management. I remember I was talking to some ‑‑ I’ve asked this question in a lot of different groups. There’s a Tuesday night Bible study my dad and I have started that’s ‑‑ I mean, God’s doing something there because it started with one guy at the gym, and then he started talking to another guy, and now we’re having 10 to 15 guys from the gym, between 18 and 24 years old, come over to my mom and dad’s house for a meal and a Bible study. I’ll send you a picture sometime because it’s ‑‑ we got some characters in there. It’s really, really beautiful. Anyway, we’re at this Bible study, and a lot of these kids don’t have any background in church or in religion at all and they just know the general idea of what it means to be a Christian or what it means to ‑‑ culturally, what it means to be a Christian. I asked them, I was like, hey, what does it mean to be a Christian? They were like, well, you gotta stop doing these things. I didn’t preload them. I didn’t give them anything ahead of that. They just said, well, it means you don’t drink, it means you don’t cuss, it means you don’t ‑‑ and they started throwing out all these sins. And the gospel of sin management looks a lot like that when people think about it. It’s, you know, if I could just get this sin out of my life, I would be good. You know, I sinned really big, I need to go to church on Sunday, kind of thing. So the gospel of sin management is exactly what it sounds like. It’s the good news that you have to manage your own sin, which isn’t really good news at all. WES: Yeah, for sure. So what first got you realizing that that was a problematic way to be a Christian? I mean, did you grow up with or have a period of your life where that is how you thought about being a Christian? Because I know that I did. I certainly had periods of my life where that’s what I thought it was. You know, you go to church, you sort of have your Sundays the way that they’re supposed to be, and Wednesday nights, as well, and then it’s about what you believe and what you do on Sundays and then what you don’t do the rest of the week, the things that you refrain from doing, that you stop doing. But then, over the years, I realized that’s not really the gospel. So what was it that kind of helped you to realize that that wasn’t the gospel? JOSEPH: I’ve got a whole note in my phone. I don’t know if I’ll ever write a book. I don’t think I’ll ever be a guy who writes books or anything like that, but I’ve got a whole note in my phone so I don’t forget that journey because there were so many things along the way that really made me go maybe that’s not all there is to this. I mean, there’s always ‑‑ I think when you first learn some about, you know, Jesus and church and just the idea of, hey, I’m not gonna do these bad things anymore and I’m gonna start doing these good things is a really great place to start. There’s absolutely no hate or shame associated with that mindset because that is a part of this. But when that was all of it, I had always felt like, man, there’s more to this. There’s more to this. There’s gotta be more to this. And, of course, like anything, the more you read about Jesus, the more it messes with what you think you know. And so, you know, there was always this idea that, especially as I was growing, that there’s more to being a Christian than just not sinning and just going to church. Of course there were a whole bunch of little things that kind of reinforced or pushed me to grow in that question and in that challenge, but when I heard that phrase, it really just gave language to something that I felt. You know, like I could tell and I knew, and, at this point in my life, I was sure there’s something bigger than this, than just not sinning, and I explained it in a couple different ways, and I think I kind of made legalism out to be one of my favorite sort of whipping boys to come at. Anytime someone would preach on something, I’d be like, ah, it’s a little legalistic. And I don’t know that that even encapsulated as much the root of the problem. It was more a product of ‑‑ or a symptom of the problem of this gospel of sin management. So it really ‑‑ when I heard that phrase, it clicked so well because it’s something I had been chewing on and wrestling with for a long time, and I was like, man, that’s the problem. That’s the language for the problem, the real, like, underneath problem that so many Christians have. WES: Yeah. Well, one of the things in your lesson was sort of this paradox. I don’t know that you described it that way, but it really is kind of a paradox, that when you focus on not sinning, then that becomes your obsession. That becomes what you’re thinking about. You’re thinking about sin. I thought about several different analogies or sort of comparisons for when I was growing up. When I was a kid, my parents, whenever we would get hurt, they would tell us, “Don’t think about purple elephants. Don’t think about purple elephants with pink polka dots.” And, of course, they were trying to distract us from our injury, whatever that was. And by saying “Don’t think about purple elephants,” that’s all we could think of. And of course we would laugh and we would really be thinking about a purple elephant with pink polka dots, and the more they would describe it, the more we obsessed over that. And that really is the way it is with sin. When you say, “Don’t sin, don’t sin, don’t think about sinning, don’t talk about sinning,” then, of course, that’s what you’re thinking about. When I was a kid ‑‑ and I was horrible at sports ‑‑ and somebody would throw a ball to me, and while the ball is in the air, the only thing I can think of is “Don’t drop it, don’t drop it, don’t drop it,” and of course that’s exactly what I’d do because it’s what I’m focused on not doing, and so that’s what we become obsessed with. And you used this example of purity culture. Why don’t you talk a little bit about that and why that’s a good example of why it’s problematic to just focus on not sinning? JOSEPH: Yeah. I mean, that’s really what it becomes. When the gospel of sin management produces, like we said, some of those phrases you might say in your head ‑‑ “If I could just quit this one sin, I’d be good,” or “I sinned big and I need to go to church now,” or “Being a Christian means stop sinning,” like the whole gospel, in that context, is about sin. Now it’s about the exact opposite thing that it was meant to be about. Being a Christian is not about Christ anymore; it’s about sin and not sinning. And purity culture is one of the ways that that definitely has kind of pervaded our ‑‑ or that mindset has pervaded our world. You know, when purity culture started, most people will trace it back to the book ‑‑ the I Kissed Dating Goodbye book, and that was a really important book. It was ‑‑ I want to be as gracious as I can with this because I think the author of that book ‑‑ I can’t remember his name at the moment, but I think he wanted to ‑‑ he saw a problem in the world, where Christians and non‑Christians would date and date. Looked a lot like marriage except you just weren’t married. You know, like tax implications was the only difference, I guess, but it was a problem where people were sleeping together before they were married, they were moving in together before they were married, and it was causing a lot of issues ‑‑ I mean, a lot of issues. And so this book came out, and the guy was kind of saying, “Hey, we’re Christians, we’re not gonna date like that. We’re gonna have a higher standard because that’s what God calls us to.” Well, you know, the book kind of started with saying, hey, we are not ‑‑ it was essentially about premarital sex. “We are not going to have premarital sex,” right? So no sex. Well, the book and the way it was written and the way sort of the culture took to it is it bred more and more and more and more and more rules, to the point where you started having to think about sex all the time, in every aspect of your life. So “no sex” turned into “only sex all the time,” and it really showed itself in ways like, you know, women have to think about what they wear, and they’re taught, in this culture, you have to ask the question, “Will someone lust after me if I wear this clothing?” I’m not saying that shouldn’t be a question or it shouldn’t be a thought, but certainly that shouldn’t be the lens through which you look at your life, as it only turns men into monsters and women into sex objects. It’s exactly the opposite of the problem that it was trying to find a solution to in the first place, and it does the same ‑‑ it has similar impacts on them. I think I told the story in the lesson, I had a buddy in college who tried to argue with me, and, I mean, he was in college, I was in college, so I felt like he did a fine job, but I look back on it and I laugh at these conversations. He tried to argue with me that the only reason anyone gets married is for sex. And I was like, well, I mean, companionship, relationship, trust, respect, you know, like, children, there’s so many reasons why you get married. And he goes, well, you can find all of those outside of marriage. And I laughed. I said, well, I mean, you can find the other, too, outside of marriage. And it was just like that culture had pervaded so much the mindset, that, suddenly, sex was no longer about relationship and imaging God by two becoming one and showing unity and showing love and faithfulness. It just all became about sex. And so, paradoxically, like you said, this movement started in an effort to say no sex outside of marriage, outside of the right context, right? And it turned into everything is about sex. You have to think about it all the time. It’s on your mind all the time. Everyone struggles with it, everyone fights with it, and it’s the only thing we think about all the time. And, I mean, it had the exact opposite effect because you weren’t thinking about holiness, you weren’t thinking about godliness, you weren’t thinking about here are the beautiful parts of this or how we can do this in a way that glorifies God. Instead, it was just don’t do this thing, and it turned into only think about and do this thing in shame, you know? WES: Yeah. And it really corrupts every aspect. It corrupts our view of God, it corrupts our view of ourselves, it corrupts our view of people of the opposite gender or the opposite sex, it corrupts our view of marriage, all of these things. When Jesus isn’t ‑‑ we’ll get to this later, but when Jesus isn’t at the center of our theology, if he’s not at the center of our life, when it really is about sin, then it distorts everything because the center is off balance, and then everything in our life is out of kilter. You used John 5 as sort of the text around which the lesson revolved, this idea of the Sabbath and work. Let’s talk about that because I love that picture of how the Jewish view in the first century ‑‑ or at least the leadership’s view of Sabbath really was sort of very similar to the way we think of the gospel of sin management. JOSEPH: I mean, it was exactly the same. Like that was one of the things that came to my mind immediately when I heard the phrase and I started thinking about how I would present this lesson. I was like, man, this is exactly what the Pharisees ‑‑ or in John 5, they’re just called “the Jews,” but, you know, it’s exactly what they did with the Sabbath. So if you look at John 5, you’ve got the story of the man who’s by the Pool of Bethesda for 38 years. You know, he’d been crippled for 38 years, and Jesus shows up and asks, “Hey, do you want to be healed?” Which is classic Jesus in the Gospel of John. He seems to always ask strange questions and say confusing things in the Gospel of John. And, you know, the other man in the story responds with, “I don’t have anyone to get me in the water. You know, I can’t get in there fast enough.” Of course there was that myth around the Pool of Bethesda that when the water was stirred, the first person to get into that water would have healing, and whether or not that was true is not really a question in John’s gospel; it’s just a part of the story, and it was a really important part. This man thought he’d find healing in water. A couple chapters later we find out Jesus is the living water. Where’d the man find healing? In water, which is just cool. Anyway, so this man is laying there by this pool hoping to get into this water and be healed, and Jesus comes up and asks him if he wants to be healed. The man complains, and then Jesus says, “Rise, take up your bed, and walk.” He gives him three instructions: Rise, take up your bed, and walk. And if you read through it, there’s nothing wrong with getting up, there’s nothing wrong with walking, within certain parameters, for the Jews, but the specific command to take up your bed ‑‑ for Jesus to tell this man to take up your bed on the Sabbath, that was where the problem was gonna happen. So do you mind if I read it? Is that okay? WES: No, please do. Yeah, please do. JOSEPH: I mean, I’ve got the general arc of the story, but I always prefer to read it and have the language be the way John wrote it. So at the end of verse 8, Jesus gives him the three instructions: “Get up, take up your bed, and walk.” And then, once the man was healed, he took up his bed and he walked, right? So he checks all three boxes, all three of the things Jesus told him to do. And at the end of verse 9, “Now that day was the Sabbath. So the Jews” ‑‑ which my note says that that’s a shorthand for the leaders of the Jews. This would likely have been the Pharisees, the scribes, and that group that you typically read about interacting with Jesus. “So the Jews said to the man who had been healed, ‘It is the Sabbath, and it is not lawful for you to take up your bed.'” I always laugh here and think, wouldn’t “Hold on, how did you get healed” be a really good first question? Well, they’re completely unconcerned with how this guy got healed. Instead, they’re concerned with him breaking the Sabbath, which means working on the Sabbath. So verse 11, the man answered them, “The man who healed me, that man said to me, ‘Take up your bed, and walk.'” He kind of gives them a “Hey, the guy that miraculously gave me the ability to walk, I’m probably gonna listen to him because you can’t make me walk.” You can almost hear the jab at the leaders of the Jews. “I’ve been laying here for 38 years, and you guys haven’t done a thing about it, but this guy, I’m gonna take what he says to the bank. He said, ‘Get up and walk, take up your bed,’ I’m listening.” So verse 12, they asked him, “Hold on. Somebody healed you?” Like, again, that would be such a normal response, but the Pharisees are so blind to the fact that this man had a miracle performed, that they only respond with, “Who is the man who said to you, ‘Take up your bed and walk’?” You notice they’re really concerned with that one part because that was the part that wasn’t lawful to do on the Sabbath. That was what they called work, and according to the Sabbath, you’re not allowed to work. We’ll skip down and let’s go to verse 15. The man doesn’t know who healed him, then he runs into Jesus. And after he runs into Jesus, in verse 15, “The man went away and told the Jews that it was Jesus who had healed him. And this was why the Jews were persecuting Jesus, because he was doing these things on the Sabbath. But Jesus answered them” ‑‑ and I think the language here is really important ‑‑ “My father is working until now, and I am working.” What was the rule on the Sabbath? Don’t work. So if Jesus just straight up said, “God is working and I’m working,” I mean, obviously, he’s equating himself with God, which is really significant, but he’s also kind of saying God broke the Sabbath, which causes a whole bunch of problems. And, typically, when you see Jesus saying something like this, something else is going on. There’s more that you need to understand. It’s not that God broke the Sabbath or that Jesus broke the Sabbath, but the people who he was talking to needed to learn something about the Sabbath, and that’s exactly what’s going on here. Because if you go back to Exodus chapter 20 and you read the original command about the Sabbath, it says, “Remember the Sabbath, to keep it holy.” You know, six days you’re gonna work; on the seventh, you’re gonna rest. Don’t do any work, you or anyone in your household, and then it gives the reason. “For in six days God created the heavens and the earth, the sea and the sky and all that is in them, and then, on the seventh, he rested.” So the reasoning behind Sabbath points back to Genesis chapter 1, when God created. Okay. Well, if the reason that we’re meant to have a Sabbath ‑‑ or the Sabbath was in the law, at least, if the reason for that had to do with God and creation, then we need to understand God’s resting in creation in order to accurately do the Sabbath. That makes a lot of sense. So you go back and you read, and you say, God rested on the seventh day. Well, why in the world did God rest on the seventh day? You know, we teach little kids ‑‑ this cracked me up. I was talking to my sister, who teaches a lot of younger kids’ classes, and I have younger kids, so we were talking about this. And she said, “Yeah, we always have them take a nap, you know, like you’re tired.” I was like, well, I mean, surely the infinitely powerful creator of the entire universe wasn’t tired on day seven. Six days is enough for our God. He was wore out. Like that’s obviously not the problem. When you look at creation and you look at Genesis 1 and why did God rest, the answer is very clear. God is resting because he’s done creating. He finishes creating and then he steps back and he says, “It’s very good,” right? There’s a distinction. “It’s good,” “It’s good,” “It’s good,” and then after he creates humans, there’s that “very good,” and he’s done creating. He steps back and he delights in his creation. We read all over the Bible about how much God loves and delights in his creation. And so day seven, he steps back. He says, “I’m done creating. This is exactly how I want it. I’ve given you, Adam, Eve, everything. Go enjoy it, go live in it, go celebrate what I’ve done by creating this for you,” right? I think the illustration I used in the lesson was ‑‑ I think it’s Michelangelo ‑‑ I don’t know, you know, Renaissance artists that well, but I think it’s Michelangelo, the sculptor. Is that right? And he ‑‑ you know, he starts with a giant ‑‑ whoever the sculptor was that, you know, did the sculpture of David, he starts with a giant hunk of marble and he just chisels away on it a little at a time, a little here, a little there. At some point, he has to stop and rest from his work because the sculpture is finished. He has to know when to say enough, and if he doesn’t, he’s gonna decimate his sculpture. At some point, his creation will start becoming decreation. He’ll start ruining what he’s made. And so that’s kind of the idea of God resting on the seventh day, is that God stopped creating because things were very good and he enjoyed them and he allowed humans to enjoy them and he gave us the Sabbath. I mean, Jesus says, in Mark chapter 2, that the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath, and so that idea is like, hey, I’m giving you a gift of rest. So what’s the Sabbath really about? Well, the Sabbath is about being like God, doing what God did in Genesis 1, and what God did was rest from his work and enjoy his creation. Let’s take that concept of Sabbath and apply it back to John chapter 5. This man hasn’t walked for 38 years. Do you think it was a joy for him to stand up for the first time and roll up his bed? I mean, if I was him, I’d probably start running. I wouldn’t even think about it. I’d just be so excited. Of course this is ‑‑ what better way to celebrate the Sabbath than to use the things God has given you to celebrate and rejoice in this man essentially being made whole for the first time in nearly four decades? And so Jesus, in John 5, is trying to show the Pharisees that they’re doing that same paradoxical flip that we talked about with purity culture and that the gospel of sin management brings. They were so concerned with work that they had not understood the true meaning of the Sabbath, and I think this is really important to remember. The reason the Pharisees were so concerned with work is because God said, “Don’t work. You should rest.” And they had a question, “Well, what is work?” Because they really, really wanted to take God’s commandment seriously. Like the Pharisees get such a bad rap, like we’re the Pharisees, like they really wanted to do what God said. They loved God’s word and they wanted to know what is work so we don’t get anywhere near that line. Well, then that idea started sort of breeding its own rules, and there are all kinds of ridiculous rules that the Pharisees had about what is and is not work on the Sabbath, and the Sabbath became all about not working, so much so that the Pharisees were like the Sabbath police. Their job on the Sabbath was to work at getting people to stop working. The whole rest, the whole celebration of God had been forgotten and, instead, it was all about don’t work. That’s exactly what the gospel of sin management does in our life. When it’s all about sin, we forget the things it was really meant to be about. WES: Well, I love the way that you said their job on the Sabbath and they would work at getting people to not work, because it really did. They were violating the Sabbath by trying not to violate the Sabbath. They had turned not working into one of the hardest jobs in the world. They were working incredibly hard at not working and keeping other people from not working, and it reminds me of so many things that we do. I was thinking about Paul’s commandments to the church at Corinth in 1st and 2nd Corinthians about giving. His entire instructions revolve around the idea that God doesn’t want you to give out of compulsion. He wants you to give cheerfully. He wants you to give what you’ve decided and what you’ve promised to give. Just give that and do it cheerfully, but I’m not going to exact it from you. I’m not going to twist your arm and tell you this is how much you have to give and this is the way you have to do it. Just give what you’ve promised and what you’ve decided to give. And then we have taken that, 2,000 years later, and we’ve turned all of those instructions about giving into a second law, and then we use that to compel people to give. I want to say stop. That’s exactly the opposite of what he was saying. And so we’re saying, well, you know, if you break down this phrase, you know, this means you need to give a percentage of your income, and we just break everything down and we turn it into the exact opposite of what he was trying to do. And I think all of this ‑‑ it’s such a good way to put it, the way that you framed this, as managing sin. I was thinking about the fact that ‑‑ I don’t remember who I had this conversation with, so if whoever it was is listening, I apologize, but somebody was telling me about a friend of theirs, and they were saying, “This person is not a Christian, but, you know, they live a very moral life. They believe in a traditional sexual ethic. They do this, they don’t drink, they don’t smoke, they don’t do any of these things, and so they’re almost a Christian or they’re practically a Christian.” And I think about some of the leading voices that I see in the world today that are atheists and agnostics, and so many people, they listen to them as if they’re preachers, as if they’re teachers, as if they’re, quote‑unquote, practically Christians. And I want to say a moral person who denies Jesus is nowhere near being a Christian. That is not Christianity. Someone who is really struggling with sin but yet is devoted to Jesus ‑‑ I’m not saying that they don’t need to repent. Of course they need to repent ‑‑ that person is a Christian. And the person who is living a moral life but denies Jesus and believes that all that they have and all that they do is by their own power, they are nowhere near Christ. So let’s talk about that for a second. What’s the difference between, quote‑unquote, “the gospel of sin management” and “the gospel”? What is the gospel and why is that not “just stop sinning”? JOSEPH: Well, I mean, that’s such a great part of this. I wish we had the conversation before the lesson because that’s so important. How many people say, hey, they’re a good person and they’re basically ‑‑ like they literally make being a Christian about your morality. Like if you manage your sin well, you’re a good Christian. If you can’t, you’re not. Where is Christ? Like, I’m not a “Moralitian.” You know, like it’s not about I’m following morality or moral leaders. This is all about following Christ. It’s really important to notice that the gospel of sin management just isn’t the gospel. It’s just not. Like it can be preached in a way that sounds kind of like it, and it obviously has deceived many about what being a Christian is really about and what the gospel is all about, but the idea that, hey, here’s the good news, you have to manage your own sin ‑‑ it’s just not good news. In fact, we read about people who tried to manage their own sin for, you know, a couple thousand years on the pages of this book, and it doesn’t go well at all. Like that’s one of the driving forces for this Messiah, for the Jews, is we cannot manage our own sin. We cannot keep this law. We cannot stop breaking God’s law. We’re a broken people. The Pharisees ‑‑ and I think this is interesting, too. They had this mindset that if I could ‑‑ if we, the Jews collectively, could keep God’s law perfectly, restoration would come, the Messiah would come, our kingdom would be given back, Rome would be overthrown. That adds some pretty serious weight to why they were such sticklers about the law. Like you get where they’re coming from, but like you go read Paul in Galatians, the point of the law ‑‑ or one of the points of the law was to show you you can’t do this. This isn’t the gospel. That’s why the old law wasn’t good news. But the gospel ‑‑ I mean, of course you know the story of Jesus on the cross, and it’s even bigger than that because it’s a story about redemption and reconciliation. It’s about a God who created a good creation, loved them, gave them everything, and we tore it up and we chose ourselves over him. And then you’ve got a whole bunch of chapters and books about a God who is breaking down doors and pleading with his people and desperately trying to bring them back to him. Then, in Christ ‑‑ and this is where the real good news is. In Christ, you have this death, burial, resurrection, and appearing to many that Paul outlines in 1st Corinthians 15. Well, what that did is it finally made a way ‑‑ it carved a way back for humans to be in a right relationship with God, to be close to him again like we were when it was very good, and so you’ve got this good news that you get to be with God. How much of that was about your sin? How much of that is about managing your sin? How much of that did you have to do? Legitimately, none of it, you know? This wasn’t something humans could do. This wasn’t something humans had to do. The idea of forgiveness of sins is a piece of a much bigger and much more complete teaching on what this good news is. You have a new king and a new kingdom, and this king loves you and wants you and wants to give to you. One of the verses we read in Micah chapter 7 talks about how ‑‑ Micah is writing about God. I think it’s in verse 19. He says, “You do not stay angry for long because you delight in steadfast love.” That’s good news. That’s good news that that’s our King. He doesn’t stay angry long. He wants to and is predisposed to being steadfastly loving. Man, I mean, that’s the gospel. That’s the good news. And it doesn’t have anything to do with you taking care of your own sins or managing or your excellent morality. WES: Well, I was thinking about ‑‑ I don’t know if you saw this study. I don’t know, it’s probably been 20 years ago now, but there was a guy who’s a sociologist. I think his name was Christian Smith, and did a study and he determined ‑‑ he was studying teenagers, and he said that, looking at teenagers across the board, some came from sort of a Christian background, others came from Islamic background, Buddhist background, Muslim, you know, whatever different religious backgrounds. But he said that the predominant worldview in America was moralistic therapeutic deism. He said ‑‑ and so he coined this phrase “moralistic therapeutic deism,” and as time has gone on, he said, well, it’s not just teenagers; it’s across the board, that this is the predominant worldview in the United States, is moralistic therapeutic deism. It’s this idea that be a good person, and the primary purpose of religion is sort of therapeutic, help you to feel better about yourself and help you to ease your guilty conscience or just be happy and live a happy life, and there is a God, but for the most part, he’s just kind of hands‑off unless you need him, in which case he’s sort of like a genie in a bottle and you make your wishes and he comes and he may intervene on your behalf. And this is the way that we think about it, and so we have turned Christianity into moralism. And it’s not to say that we should be immoral. Of course that’s not what we’re saying. We’re not saying that it’s okay to be immoral. This is Paul’s point, I think, in Romans 6, that when you say that salvation is a gift that God gives and it’s by grace and not through works of the law, then of course there’s gonna be objectors who say, well, hold on a second. Are you saying that we can go on sinning so that grace may abound? And Paul says, of course not. That’s ridiculous. Why would you do that? The beauty is that when you begin to focus on God and you begin to focus on his goodness, you begin to worship him in spirit and in truth, the way that Jesus really means that phrase. When you worship Jesus in spirit and in truth, then the Lord begins to transform us through the Spirit, through the promises, through his presence. He does the transformational work. And yes, of course you have to repent of your sins, but when you turn your life over to him and surrender to him, that’s when you actually begin to be transformed. Otherwise, all we’re doing ‑‑ the best we can do without the Lord is to swap one sin for another, and we swap sins of the flesh for maybe sins of the spirit, and we become proud, and we become arrogant, and we become bitter, we become angry, and we think, well, that’s better than what I was doing before, but it’s not better. In fact, C.S. Lewis would say, when we swap one sin for pride, we’ve chosen a lesser vice for a worse vice, that pride is the worst vice of all. And we make ourselves proud of “Look at what I’ve accomplished and I’m so good and I’m a better person than so‑and‑so is.” JOSEPH: Yeah. I mean, so I heard that phrase. As you started talking about it, when you got to the “moralistic therapeutic deism,” I was like, oh, I’ve heard that. I think it was referencing the same book, but I think it was ‑‑ Lonnie Jones uses it. And I was like, man, that ‑‑ like the first time I heard that, I was like, yeah, that’s exactly what we do. Again, we should have had this conversation before the lesson, man, because that’s such an important part of this. Like we looked at ‑‑ the book is actually called Almost Christian, by the way, which is exactly the phrase you used just a little bit ago, that they’re almost a Christian. That’s exactly the concept, but yeah. And the other part of that is like if anyone listens to this conversation or that lesson and they come away with it thinking, “Hey, you know, Joseph says you can do whatever you want. It’s not about sin; it’s only about grace, and that’s all there is to it,” you just haven’t read the rest of the New Testament. Like the vast majority of 1st Corinthians ‑‑ maybe not the vast majority, but at least half of 1st Corinthians is about Paul instructing a church on how to do things right. Like chapter 5, 6, 7 are all about sexual ethic. The question he’s answering is how does a Christian live like Christ in first‑century Corinth as it pertains to the Christian sexual ethic? And you have the man sleeping with his father’s wife, and that’s obviously a problem. Not even the pagans deal with that, he says. And then you’ve got the crowd who says, “Well, I can do whatever I want with my body because I’m free in Christ,” the idea of “I can sin and it doesn’t matter because I’m covered.” Paul says, well, I mean, don’t you know the implications of that? Of course that’s not how Christians ought to live. And then you have the other crowd, in chapter 7, who’s like, hey, we should probably never do this sex thing ever, which is purity culture. I mean, it was the same mindset where, hey, we stay all the way away from this because that’s what Christians ought to do. Paul wrestles with morality. He wrestles with the Christians and instructs them on how to wrestle. I think that’s really more of what Paul does, is he instructs them on how to wrestle with what it means to be a Christian and how to live a moral life, not only in 1st Corinthians, but in much of his writing. But that’s never the point. That’s never the whole picture. That’s never what being a Christian is about for Paul. The thing that being a Christian is about for Paul, like number one over everything, is the gospel. It’s the good news about our God, about our Savior Jesus who came and did what he did on the cross and lived how he lived and taught what he taught, and striving to be like Christ and to be transformed into the image of God. That’s what we’re trying to do. The goal is transformation into a Christlike life, not avoidance of sin. I gave sort of a version of this lesson ‑‑ we had a youth retreat on ‑‑ I guess it was last weekend, on Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and our speaker talked on the narrow path, you know, from Matthew chapter 7, right? The narrow versus the broad, and he did a great job, really emphasized all the things that you’d expect at a youth retreat, and I kind of was thinking, you know, there’s another side of this. So he went home on Sunday because he had to be at church, and I usually do the lesson on Sunday, so I gave sort of a variation of this lesson, where I just said, hey, being on the narrow path is not about looking at all the things you can’t or don’t do. You know, that’s the gospel of sin management. Being on the narrow path is about keeping your eyes focused on God, focused on Christ, as opposed to looking around and seeing all the things you can’t do. So, I mean, I think when you bring that element into it and people start kind of going off the rails with, well, you know, then it doesn’t matter what we do or ‑‑ like that, too, is an incomplete picture of the gospel. You’ve got to have the whole picture in order to understand what it means to really be a Christian. That’s why we got, you know, 66 books in this thing instead of just one short list of checkmarks and do’s and don’ts. It’s a picture. It’s a ‑‑ what’s it called, a picture, when you put it all together, all the little pieces ‑‑ it’s a mosaic of different elements of what it means to be a Christian and how to live that life. And it’s why we haven’t gotten it down to an exact formula or an exact science because it’s something that we have to wrestle with. It’s something that we have to grow into. It’s something where we’re being transformed. It’s not an instantaneous kind of thing. So I think any attempt to focus too heavily on one part of the gospel and not have the rest of it is a perversion of what the gospel truly is, and that’s really what sin management is, is it’s a focus on only the morality, and when you do that, you pervert the gospel into being all about sin. And while that’s part of it, it’s a radically incomplete picture of what God has really done throughout history and what he did through his son at the cross. WES: Yeah. Well, to go back to that idea of the narrow path, I always tell people ‑‑ especially when we’re talking about culture wars and we’re talking about politics and sort of the right and left, I always say that there’s a danger on both the right side and the left side of the path, and what we tend to do is we focus myopically on one side, and we think all of the dangers are over there. All the dangers are on the left, and we’ve got to stay away from the left, and the left is so dangerous, and we go off the right side of the path. Or we think all the danger is on the right, and we’re so myopically focused on that, and we go off the left side. And so if our fear is that we’re gonna go off of one side or the other, then we are going to gravitate towards the opposite side. Whereas, to your point, we have to keep our eyes on Jesus, and when we keep our eyes on Jesus, we do recognize that there’s a danger on both sides and we do want to avoid those, but our goal ‑‑ our ultimate goal is not avoiding the pitfalls. Our ultimate goal is following Jesus, and if we follow Jesus, we don’t have to worry about the pitfalls. We don’t have to worry about going off in either ditch. All we have to do is worry about focusing on Jesus. So with that in mind, Joseph, what do you think we can do, as leaders, and how can we encourage other church leaders, whether that’s elders or deacons or teachers ‑‑ I mean teachers from the pulpit, but maybe even teachers in Bible classes. Even our kids are sort of soaking in this moralistic message, thinking that Christianity is simply about avoiding these types of bad behaviors. How do we help to reorient the church around Jesus and around the grace and mercy of God rather than around moralism? JOSEPH: Yeah. I mean, I wish I had like a perfect answer for that. You know, we’d have all of our problems solved. But I think it’s a long battle, fixing that problem. It’s a deep, deep‑rooted problem. You know, when I preached the lesson at Flower Mound, there were some people that were uncomfortable with it. It was too much about grace. I heard multiple people tell me, “I’ve never heard a lesson like that before,” you know? And I just thought, man, this is a real problem that is very pervasive in our culture, and in the church, specifically. So how do we fix that? I mean, I think, truthfully, the way you really solve that problem is not going to be in the masses. It’s going to be a much more individual, relational, example‑driven solution to the problem. When you sit down and you’re able to have a conversation with somebody and you’re able to build a relationship with them and there’s trust and there’s an environment where vulnerability can grow, and they realize, “Oh, hold on. You don’t think I’m a terrible person because I’ve done these things?” I mean, that’s where this message really drives home, because you can tell someone until you’re blue in the face ‑‑ I mean, I heard it my whole life growing up. Listen, we’re all hypocrites, Christians all sin, but we’re forgiven by Jesus, and that’s so true and doesn’t feel real. It feels very distant from where I am, sitting in the pew, listening to this message. It feels very distant from where I am, sitting in the pew, with all these perfectly dressed people pretending like they don’t have those sins, you know? And so I think this is the kind of thing that is going to be much more ‑‑ a much harder battle because it’s not something you can just tell people. It’s going to be something you have to show them. And, I mean, the answer is, Wes, we need to learn to love like Jesus, to quote a guy I know. Like we need to learn how to look like Christ in our relationships, in our interactions. We need to learn how to be gracious. We need to, in our own mind, have an appropriate view of the gospel and sin and not panic when we see someone committing sin. You know, we need to respond graciously and gently and maybe slowly. Maybe don’t respond at all for a minute if you’re struggling with how you’re going to respond to that. I know, as a parent ‑‑ I mean, goodness, when you become a parent, you realize why God called himself a father because it really gives you such a unique perspective on what it’s like to try and get someone who doesn’t understand anything to learn how to be a functioning adult, right? And as a parent, I’ve noticed, like, if I just get onto my kids ‑‑ you know, let’s say I’m having a hard day and I just get onto them all the time for every little thing they do, they don’t really want to be that close to me, you know? Like I’ve had those days. I think every parent’s had those days, where, like, maybe I didn’t get good sleep or maybe I’ve got a lot of stress, maybe some guy asked me to be on a podcast and I’m all worried about it. You’ve got something going on that’s not their fault, but you’re sharp with them, and they don’t come climb up in your lap and nuzzle into your neck, you know? But when they do things that are wrong and you’ve given them grace or you’ve sat down with them and talked to them, immediately after that ‑‑ I remember the other day I did this with my daughter, where she ‑‑ I don’t have to give you the whole story, but she had done something she wasn’t supposed to do but she knew she wasn’t supposed to do it. And I just sat down and talked to her. I was like, “Baby, what were you thinking?” And I just saw her melt. “I don’t know. I just was wanting to.” I said, “But you know it was wrong?” “I did.” And she immediately jumps into my arms. When we show grace and mercy and gentleness, when we show the fruit of the Spirit working in our life, I mean, that’s what changes people’s hearts. That’s what changes people’s minds. That’s what changes people’s perspective on Christ and perspective on what it means to be a Christian. You can tell them, but this is, I think, one of those battles where maybe small Bible class teachers are going to have a better success rate as teachers because they’re going to be able to relate to and build those relationships and demonstrate what it means to be a Christian better than ‑‑ easier than you or I from up in front, in a pulpit. Jesus went one at a time, you know? He preached to the crowds and he taught them, but his work was with individuals. He so often forsook the crowd to sit down with one person, and I think that’s more where the answer to this problem lies, unfortunately. I wish it could just be one sermon. Everyone go preach my sermon and we’ll all quit having a problem with this, but, really, I think this is one of those things where we’re gonna have to roll up our sleeves, we’re gonna have to dig in, and we’re gonna have to counterintuitively respond to people struggling with sin in order to show them God’s grace and Christ’s love. WES: Yeah. I was thinking about an old skit with Bob Newhart where he’s a counselor. I don’t know if you’ve seen this. So the lady comes in and she has this problem, and he says, “I can fix whatever it is.” And she explains her problem. She’s afraid of being buried alive, I think. And so she says ‑‑ she pictures this and it’s horrible and it’s bad. And he says, “Well, do you like having this problem?” And she says, “No, I don’t.” And he says, “Well, then stop it.” And that’s his solution, is just tell her to stop it. And I think that that’s exactly what we do with hurting people and struggling people. We say, “Well, just stop it. Stop. Stop doing that.” And the answer is, point them to Jesus. Point them to the grace and the mercy of Jesus. Point them to the work of the Holy Spirit in their life, because this is the only way. Paul, he describes this struggle, this human struggle. I don’t think he’s just talking about his own struggle with sin, but he talks about what life is like just trying to obey the law, and it is futile. You’re never going to accomplish it. And the answer is ‑‑ what’s going to save me from this? The answer is Jesus. Jesus is, and the work of the Spirit in your life. And I think, whether that’s one‑on‑one or even in the pulpit or in the classroom, pointing people towards Jesus ‑‑ this is why I think that sermons have to be worship, that our gathering on Sunday has to be more than just getting together to say “Stop it. Hey, you know all the bad stuff you’ve been doing? Stop doing that stuff.” It can’t be that. We have to gather together for worship to reorient our lives collectively and individually around the person and the work of Jesus, his work at the cross and his ongoing work as our high priest, as our advocate and our mediator, and to point people to the work of the Holy Spirit in their lives. And I think that when Sunday ‑‑ I have a cheesy little saying that I always say, that Sunday not only makes for a better week, it makes for a better life, that when we gather together and we reorient ourselves around Jesus, that whether someone says “stop it” or not, we know. We know we need to stop it. We know that needs to change and we’re looking to the Lord and surrendering ourselves to him, looking for his power and work for the transformation. JOSEPH: Yeah. So I taught through Galatians a couple years ago now. It’s funny how that happens; it feels like I just did it. But a couple years ago we were teaching through Galatians, and I noticed, when you get to chapter 5 where we talk about the fruit of the Spirit, Paul’s obviously talking about slavery and freedom the whole time. And then, like, he contrasts the work of the Spirit ‑‑ or the fruit of the Spirit to the works of the flesh. And obviously his language that he chooses, like fruit versus works ‑‑ the whole book he’s loaded that word “works” with negative connotation, so that’s very clear. It’s also really cool because he ‑‑ well, I’m getting too much into it. One of the things that’s really significant is the fruit of the Holy Spirit is the same thing as the works of the Holy Spirit. Like he could have used the same word, the fruit of the Holy Spirit and the fruit of the flesh, or the works of the Holy Spirit and the works of the flesh, but he contrasts them that way. And what’s really significant is, like if you’re the one working, is that spirit or flesh? It’s flesh, right? It’s not your working, you know? When you think about it, it’s the work of the Holy Spirit in your life. Like this isn’t ‑‑ I made this point in the class. I said, you can’t do the fruit of the Spirit, which is so funny because it’s all we teach out of the fruit of the Spirit. You need to be more loving, you need to be more patient, right? You can’t do the fruit of the Spirit. That’s the Spirit’s fruit. Your fruit is jealousy and strife and anger and drunkenness and ‑‑ like, that’s yours. What you do when you’re the one working, that’s what happens. When the Spirit’s working in your life, it produces those things, and that’s like, I mean, a really beautiful way of putting that, about worship ‑‑ the sermon being worship, because it is. It’s reorienting, it’s refocusing. So often we make that about refocusing to not do things, but it’s so much more than that. It’s a more complete picture of, like, this is who we love. This is who we’re doing this for. This is why I’m making my decisions. And if it’s not that, then it’s just ‑‑ it’s not worship. It’s maybe a fun speech. WES: Yeah. Well, I think about what Jesus said. Jesus, when he was asked, what do we need to be doing to do the works that God requires? And he says, believe in the one that he has sent. That’s the work that we do. Align ourselves with Jesus, focus on Jesus, surrender to Jesus, trust in him, give him our loyalty and allegiance. And is there a sense in which that’s work? Absolutely. It’s very challenging, but it’s not a work that’s focused on don’t do this, don’t do this, don’t do this. It’s a work that’s focused on who is Jesus and what is he doing in our lives? So, Joseph, thank you for this conversation. Thank you for your work in the kingdom, Brother. Thank you for pointing people to Jesus. JOSEPH: Man, thank you for having me on, Wes. You know I love talking to you. Anytime we get a chance, it’s a blessing to me. 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