Is there a dichotomy between the wrathful God of the Old Testament and the merciful God of the New Testament? In this episode, Wes McAdams and Marco Arroyo explore how our understanding of God’s nature can profoundly shape our own identities and relationships. The conversation also tackles the crucial issue of how to reconcile God’s love and grace with his judgment and wrath against sin.

Through a thoughtful and nuanced discussion, Wes and Marco unpack biblical concepts that are central to understanding God’s true nature. They explore the depths of God’s mercy, grace, and forgiveness, and how these attributes are not limited to the New Testament but permeate the entire biblical narrative. They also shed light on the importance of God’s wrath and judgment, not as contradictory to his love, but as a necessary expression of his holiness and justice. The conversation emphasizes the need to view God’s character and actions through the lens of his ultimate goodness and desire for restoration.

Marco Arroyo is the preacher for the Seagoville Church of Christ and the host of the “In Between Sundays” YouTube channel. With a passion for helping people see Jesus in every aspect of life, Marco brings a unique perspective to the discussion, drawing from his own journey of understanding and embracing the true nature of God. His experiences and insights offer a relatable and refreshing approach to wrestling with complex theological concepts.

Links and Resources

• Watch This Episode on YouTube
• “In Between Sundays” Channel
• Seagoville Church of Christ

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. On today’s show, we’re going to talk about the mercy and the goodness of God. My guest today is Marco Arroyo. He’s the preacher for the Seagoville Church of Christ. He’s also the host of the “In Between Sundays” YouTube channel. I really encourage you to check out his videos. He’s doing a great work there. 

I want to begin today by reading from 1 John 4, starting with verse 7. John says this: “Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.” 

As always, I hope that this conversation is enjoyable and encouraging, but most of all, I hope that it helps all of us learn to love like Jesus.

WES: Marco Arroyo, welcome to the podcast, Brother. 

MARCO: I’m really happy to be with you, man. Really am glad to be talking to you.

WES: Well, I am so happy to finally have you on the podcast. I’ve been watching a lot of your YouTube videos lately, and I really encourage people to go check out your YouTube channel because you’re doing such a great job and it’s such a unique channel, and you sort of highlight different things that are going on in the world and look at it through a Biblical, godly lens, and I think it’s really cool what you’re doing.

MARCO: Yeah, it’s really encouraging to hear that. That’s all I’m trying to do. You know, the name of the channel is “In Between Sundays,” and that’s literally the thought behind it. I just want people to be able to look at the things that are happening in our lives or in the world in between Sundays and to see Jesus in that. And, you know, I love the idea of ‑‑ we’re learning to love like Jesus in the Radically Christian Bible Study podcast, and it’s kind of a similar thought there, too: Just see Jesus in everything, and we really can in the Christian life, so I really appreciate you saying that.

WES: That’s awesome. Well, we had coffee not too long ago and we talked about a lot of different things. One of the things that we talked about is that I think we’re supposed to be changing as people. As followers of Jesus, we are supposed to be constantly growing and becoming different people and allowing the Spirit of God to transform us, and that probably means that our view of God, our theology is going to change over time. It’s going to evolve. It’s going to be hopefully better so we’re going to have a better understanding of who God is and his character and his nature now than we had before, so I would love to just start with that.  How has your theology, your view of God, his character and his nature ‑‑ how has that changed over time?

MARCO: If I had to give you the short answer, I will say God has been getting better and better over the years. He’s been getting better and better. Now, just to preface it, a lot of the times when I talk about like what my growth process has been in my understanding of God and I start from the very beginning, there have been many people who I’ve been talking to where they kind of go, like, “New‑convert Marco was kind of a dummy,” and I agree with you; he was kind of a dummy. But for every reaction that I’ve had like that, there has also been a, “You know, the way that you used to view God” ‑‑ and there were problematic ways that I viewed God when I was a newer Christian ‑‑ “I used to view God that way, too, and I thought I was the only one,” and that always lifts my spirits so much, so I’m more than happy to, like, share my foolishness in this area, in large part because it’s such a testament to God’s goodness on me. 

And so, before I became a Christian, it was, “God is good all the time,” and if I wanted to get real crazy with it, “All the time, God is good.” And, you know, it’s the basic stuff people say: God is love, John 3:16, things like that. But when I started to become a Christian, I was in the process of studying the Bible. I was studied with for like a year, and I was in high school at the time, in Los Angeles, California where I was raised, and that’s when I started to be confronted with the reality of my sin, and I hadn’t really taken that so seriously before. 

And so when I became a Christian, I was very, very new in confronting the reality of my sin and who I was in relation to God. And so, then, my idea of God was closer to, God is good, but you better get it together fast; otherwise, God will be just as readily ‑‑ he will punish you as readily as he was to save you; and as quick as he was to save you, he will just as quickly destroy you. And it’s so funny because, not very long after that, I came into contact with “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” that, you know, 1700s sermon, Jonathan Edwards, and there’s a line in there towards the end. One of the quotes of it is, “And there is no other reason to be given why you have not dropped into hell since you arose in the morning but that God’s hand has held you up.” And every day I was thinking, God is so good and merciful to me, but that was the idea that I had of how God viewed me. It’s like this loathsome creature is kind of what Jonathan Edwards talks about, and he so badly wants to punish you. He’s kind of waiting for you to, you know, commit sin and stuff like that. 

And it took a while, and I was telling you that after a lot of study of the Old Testament, my understanding of God improved so very much. I remember, at one point, thinking, I don’t think I am making it to heaven most of the time, and I’m trying so hard to be more like Jesus every single day, and I would read Hebrews 11, and like the very next thing ‑‑ next best thing below Jesus are those people, Hebrews 11. And so I’m telling myself like, okay, well, I want to read about those people, then. And then I start to study into their lives, and those were some problematic people. They’re lying and plotting and scheming and deception, all these things. And I go, so how did these people make it? I mean, I’ve done some silly things, but like in 1 Samuel 21, David is like spitting on himself and pretending to be crazy, and that’s not even the worst of the stuff that he did. And so I realized their lives, their salvation ‑‑ they were not dependent on the level of goodness that they had attained to, they’d reached, but the goodness of the God who saved them despite them, despite who they were. 

And so, before, it was, how does God feel about sin? He hates it, wants to punish it, and he will punish it. He’s against it. And so then I thought, well, I struggle and I sin. I do that often, so then that means God feels that way about me. And over time, my view eventually became, God gives mercy because he is good, and he wants to save me, not because I’m good, because he is good. It’s not contingent on my perfection. It’s actually despite my imperfection, God wants to save me. And, man, every time I think about the years that I spent not looking at God that way ‑‑ even now I fight back tears thinking about it because God is so incredibly good, and that’s why I say, in short, he’s just getting better and better as the days go by. He’s getting so much better every single day as I come to understand him more. 

WES: Yeah. You know, it’s funny, as you were talking how much our theology affects our anthropology or even our personal identity and how we think about ourselves ‑‑ it’s so interesting. As you were talking, I remember having a conversation, when I first started preaching, and someone said ‑‑ it may have been me who said that when we think about ourselves in relation to God, it’s like we’re a flea. And then someone else said, no, no, no, it’s like we’re ‑‑ it’s like we’re the small toe of a flea. And someone else said, no, no, no, it’s like we’re the hangnail on the small toe of a flea. And we do ‑‑ we have been taught, I think, or we have somehow been trained to think that we are this, you said, loathsome creature, and I think the more we understand scripture, the more we understand the Good News story, it doesn’t paint humanity that way. It doesn’t even paint sinful humanity that way. It doesn’t paint us as being the hangnail on the small toe of a flea. It paints us as being the pinnacle of God’s creation. That yes, we’ve sinned and we’ve fallen short, but God loves us so much that he wants to redeem us and restore us to the place where he created us to be. He wants us to rule and reign with him. He wants to glorify us. He wants to exalt us, and Jesus is that plan. Otherwise, it doesn’t even make sense. The Good News, the gospel, doesn’t even make sense if we really are as horrible as we’ve been taught to think about ourselves. And so I think a right understanding of God does help us have a right understanding of ourselves, maybe.

MARCO: Yeah. The obvious verse with this is John 3:16, and the way I would read John 3:16 was, well, that love that God had for me is what brought me to my initial point of salvation, and now that I’m a Christian, it’s on me, and it’s completely on me, and so God is just waiting around the corner for me to fail so that he can punish me because that’s what he does, and that really did have an impact on me for a long time. You know, earlier on when I was a Christian, there was ‑‑ like almost instantly when I became a Christian, with all the sweetness, there was almost instant bitterness and worry because of that, and it’s so sad to think about that. I remember when I was baptized there were Christians who told me ‑‑ they go, like, “Enjoy this moment. Enjoy the purity that you feel in this moment.” And I don’t know how they meant that exactly, but the way I took it was, this is a fleeting thing and very soon I’m going to go back to my regular life, and my habits, my weaknesses, my shortcomings were not chained to the water ‑‑ inside the water of the baptistry, and so that really did present itself in a really ugly way. 

I got deflated very quickly after I became a Christian. I didn’t, you know, leave God or anything, but I was deflated as soon as I started to be confronted with all these shortcomings. And I didn’t realize that John 3:16 is not just what brings me to salvation at one point, but it’s my entire relationship with God. Jesus did more than just make provisions to allow people to once ‑‑ to initially be saved. You know, you read Hebrews 2:18. He aids those who are tempted. Every single day, this is a ‑‑ as we say, a daily walk with Christ, and it’s all made possible because of the holy love that he gives to us. So, yeah, Jesus didn’t do what he did for fleas or hangnails on fleas.

WES: I’ve heard so many people say, over the years, that it would be better if someone drowned in the baptistry than that they get raised up and then live a life where they’re going to inevitably continue to sin in some way, that that’s the most forgiven ‑‑ I’ve heard people say things like that. “This is the most forgiven you’ll ever be,” or “the most cleansed you’ll ever be,” or “the purest you’ll ever be.” And I have preached from the pulpit multiple times that that’s nonsense, that I am as forgiven right now, as I sit here, as I was 20 years ago when I was baptized. I am just as forgiven now as I’ve ever been because of the ongoing forgiveness of Jesus, that he is, right now, my high priest. He is interceding for me, and his sacrifice is once for all, not only for all people, but for all of my sin. 

And that changes the way ‑‑ in fact, that leads me to my next question, is, how does this idea of God ‑‑ as your understanding of God, your theology, as it has continued to grow, and your appreciation of the goodness and the mercy of God, how does that affect other areas of our life? I think so often we compartmentalize our life and we think about our theology just as being our “spiritual life,” quote‑unquote, and not recognizing that, actually, our theology and having good theology, it affects every area of our life. So how has that affected you and how have you seen good theology or bad theology affect every area of people’s lives? 

MARCO: Well, I’ve definitely been on both sides of the bad and good theology. I’ve definitely been on both sides. I remember, in the week when I became a Christian, that sense of being deflated happened a couple times. I remember the first time I felt the need to avert my eyes. I felt so deflated, and I thought, there goes that purity that I had when I was baptized. There’s a version of that I first heard in Costa Rica when I was doing mission work one time. They were baptizing some people in waters that have been known to have either crocodiles or gators, whatever Costa Rica has. And they go, you know, if one of these guys gets eaten by these things, that’s the best time, you know? And I get the thought process of it, but it’s so wrong at the same time. I remember someone smashed the window of my car when I was a new Christian, the very first week. And, I mean, I had an idea of who it was, and when I tell you ‑‑ I wanted to go mafia on this guy. I remember I was so mad, and I restrained myself. I didn’t curse. I didn’t do anything that I needed to repent for, but even then I felt so deflated that, ugh, there goes that purity. Even the impulse for uncontrolled anger, I just ‑‑ there goes that, too. 

And so the way that the bad theology in this area and our view of God would affect our lives is it just robs you of the comfort of being sure of your relationship with God. I can’t even tell you how many nights I spent going, I’m just really not sure. I know that I became a Christian at one point, but I’m just not sure today. God is good all the time, but he’s not going to be so good to me if I fall short of who he is, and I absolutely fall short of who he is. So all day long, I ‑‑ here’s what this bad theology did to me. I was repenting all day long, all day long, and not because I was actually sinning that much, but any single time I thought about myself, I just thought about my weaknesses, my shortcomings, and who I was in light of who God is, and I just repented all day long. I would repent when I heard a sermon and learned something new. I mean, I was constantly in this misery. To say that that’s bad theology is honestly an understatement. It robbed me of so much joy. It’ll rob you of peace. It’ll rob you of blessings that God has for you to walk in and to enjoy but you think that those aren’t for you because, well, you’re not completely like Jesus at this point of your life. 

And so whenever I think about that, I just think praise be to God, because over time of learning and honest consideration of myself in light of God’s Word, the truth is just inevitable. My view of Christianity has gone from “It doesn’t get any better than this” to “You just have no idea how good God is. You have no idea how good he is, Marco.” And I can only imagine our Father looking at new‑Christian Marco and going, “You have no idea how good it’s going to be.” And these words are true, Wes: There is therefore now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus, who do not walk according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit. Our God is so good, and the knowledge that you can ‑‑ you can know that there is no condemnation for you in Christ Jesus ‑‑ I can truly say every day I am happier. Every day I am more joyful. Every single day I’m more grateful. The more I learn about who God is, I learn how good he is, and every day gets better. It truly ‑‑ it’s not just a saying that I would say to a new Christian. Every day gets sweeter. It’s the best. Our God is so, so good.

WES: Yeah. Well, I think about how timid it makes us when we are constantly afraid that God hasn’t forgiven us or that we’ve, you know, messed up too much or something like that and how we become self‑absorbed and we don’t reach out. I was thinking that it’s amazing the life to which we are called in Christ, to be courageous and to lose our life, if necessary, to not have any fear of death, but how many Christians are terrified of death or the second coming of Jesus because they’re afraid, “Oh, you know, I’m not sure.” I’ve known so many older Christians who have walked with the Lord for decades and they get to the end of their life and they’re worried, “I haven’t done enough, I’ve messed up too much. Maybe I’m not really saved,” and so they’re terrified of the judgment of God when they ought to be able to live their life with such Godly abandon, where we’re saying, “I’m not afraid of dying. I’m not afraid.” 

So whether you’re young or old, we ought to be able to go to a dangerous place or we ought to be able to put our life on the line without any fear because we know, “I’m going to be resurrected to eternal life. What can man do to me?” And we’re not afraid of death because we know that our God loves us and he’s going to raise us to life. But we become so afraid and fearful and timid and self‑absorbed when it’s all about, you know, “I’ve got to make sure that I don’t make this angry God even more angry with me,” and “I’ve got to make sure that I stay on his good side,” so that we don’t live our lives with this courageous, fearless abandon where we’re not afraid of the things that the world is afraid of.

MARCO: Can I comment on that being self‑absorbed for a second? Here’s one way it’ll hold you back if you have that wrong view of God. You will become self‑absorbed, and even though you know that that’s wrong, here’s what you’ll do, and you won’t realize that you’re being self‑absorbed. You will stop yourself from being a blessing to Christians who need you. You will say, “I’m unqualified. I got all these problems. I can’t give any counsel to this person. I can’t be of any encouragement to them. I don’t even know if I should be praying for them,” or something like that. But you’ll tell yourself that you’re unqualified or you’ll do this. You’ll go, “Before I can help all them, I’ve got to help myself. I’ve got problems of my own. I’ve got my own weaknesses to sort out. So before I can help this other Christian who’s maybe a newer Christian than I am and needs someone to kind of take them by the hand, that’s not going to be me. I’ve got to find one of the perfect Christians or almost‑perfect Christians to do that.” 

So you’ll think that you’re prioritizing your relationship with God, but you’re not. You’re actually just being self‑absorbed because of this wrong idea about God, and it’s robbing you from fulfilling the second greatest commandment. So if your relationship with God is your priority, then the people around you are going to be your priority. But if you think that, you know, because you don’t have it all together, that your relationship with God is constantly in shambles, then why would you help anyone? Why would you have that impulse? So it’s a really dangerous thing to view God in this incorrect way. It’ll rob you from doing the second greatest thing we’re here to do.

WES: Yeah. Well, it’s so important that we embrace this idea that we are justified by faith in Christ. Yes, baptism is important. Yes, repentance is important. Yes, absolutely. But our loyalty, our allegiance to King Jesus is the basis on which we are saved, which means it’s not on the basis of my works. I have not done enough. I have not been good enough. I have sinned. I have fallen short. But my covenant relationship with God is based on what Jesus has done for me, and when we embrace that, then we can truly believe what Peter says, that we are a royal nation, a royal priesthood. We are a royal priesthood that ‑‑ to your point, I am a priest. I am a holy priest in the Lord. I can serve in the name of the Lord and do these good works in the name of the Lord by the power of the Holy Spirit, not because I’m perfect, not because I’ve attained some status or because I’ve done everything right, but because of who he is, because he’s gracious and merciful. 

And it does ‑‑ it changes the way that we love people day in and day out and what we do and our courage and our willingness to do those things, because it’s not about us; it’s about them and it’s about the Lord and it’s about our opportunity to connect them to the Lord and to be a conduit for the blessings of God, and that all comes down to having right theology.

MARCO: Yeah, it is so incredibly important. You know, there’s a way that you can answer this correctly, but if you were to ask someone, like, “Why are you saved?” If the answer is all “I” and “me,” then you’re answering the wrong way. Maybe you can say, “Well, I have received, you know, forgiveness,” you can do it that way. Again, there’s a way to do it, I guess, but the reality is it should be 99.9%, if not 100%, “Because this is what God did. This is what God did through Christ for me.”  And I ‑‑ again, I’m not, you know, preaching Calvinism or something like that, but I obviously have a responsibility to, you know, decide to be in a relationship with God, however you want to put that, you know, to have the faith ‑‑ grace through faith, absolutely. But who is responsible for the victory? Who is responsible for the joy? Who is responsible for that? It’s God. It’s totally God, and it’s not even close. It’s not even close. 

Thankfully, God does not have perfection as a requirement. God goes, “No, I know you’re not perfect. That’s why Jesus came to the Earth. It’s because of that, so I can work with that both before you’re a Christian and while you are a Christian. I am powerful enough.” I wish there were a verse in the Bible that said, “My grace is sufficient for you; my strength is made perfect in your weakness.” There is! And what a beautiful idea! God says, “You’re weak, you’re imperfect, you have all these problems. I can do something with that. I can do amazing things with that!” I mean, what joy! Oh man, I feel so much excitement whenever I think about that idea. God can do something with me despite me! Despite me!

WES: Yeah, we don’t realize, I think, sometimes that our bad theology, our workspace theology, our legalistic theology, it robs God of glory and gratitude and thanksgiving, that it’s like if a parent or an uncle or a grandparent gave someone an inheritance of a million dollars or this huge estate, if the person who received that inheritance ‑‑ and of course they had to sign on the dotted line, they had to ‑‑ whatever it was that they had to do to receive the inheritance, if they said, “Well, why do you have this inheritance,” and they said, “Well, because I did all of the legal requirements to get my inheritance.” Like, no, that’s not why you have this inheritance. You have this inheritance because you have a gracious, a benevolent, a generous benefactor who gave this to you. That’s why you have it, because of their character, because of their nature, so that they get all the glory, so that they get all the credit. We can’t even take a minuscule amount of credit for receiving a gift that was given to us. Yes, of course we had to receive it. Yes, of course we had to put our faith in Jesus, but that’s just a matter of responding in faith to the offer that’s been made to us. And I think sometimes we don’t recognize that that’s what we’re doing. When we get all wrapped up in, “Well, I did this and I did this,” and, “Well, have I done all of these things,” and, “Well, I didn’t do this and I haven’t been perfect in that way,” we’re robbing God of his glory and the gratitude that’s due him.

MARCO: Yeah, but Wes, I used my very best pen to sign the thing, and I made sure my writing was super clear, the most beautiful cursive I’ve ever used in my life. Doesn’t that count for something? That’s what I sound like when I start to put the blame ‑‑ or not the blame, but the glory starts to come to me, or I start to put the pressure, everything on my shoulders. I go, well, I guess I better bring out my very best pen, or I guess I better make sure my words, my letters are super clear and legible. It just sounds so silly when you think about it, but, again, you’ve got to be thinking about what God has done, what he is doing, otherwise you’re going to fixate on what you see, and what you see is mainly what you’re doing. So I get why people come to that point and why they stay there. The clear solution is you’ve got to learn, you’ve got to fixate, you’ve got to focus more on who God is and what he has done, and you’ll understand what he does, even today.

WES: Yeah. Let’s kind of switch gears just a little bit. We’re talking about the mercy of God, the grace of God, the forgiveness and the pardon that God gives, but what about his wrath? What about his judgment? It’s undeniable that that’s part of the character and the nature of God. It’s hard to read. It’s interesting you said the Old Testament really helped you change your mind on the character and nature of God because so many people especially read the Old Testament and they say, “Well, what about his wrath? What about his anger? What about his judgment?” And, to me, I think that this is pivotal to good news. It’s part of the good news of who God is. But let’s talk about that for a second. What about his wrath and his judgment is pivotal to understand the character and the nature of God?

MARCO: Well, you know, if Marco from, let’s say, eight years ago would have been listening to our conversation, I would have been saying, when are they going to talk about wrath? When are they going to talk about punishment? I mean, you better talk about the other side, otherwise you must not believe in that, or something like that, and that’s very silly to think about that. But sometimes I would think like it’s a liberal ‑‑ past Marco would say that where Marco is today is at this liberal extreme that ignores God’s judgment and wrath, but that is so far from the truth. God’s judgment and wrath are the very basic and sobering reminder that God always has been, and God is still serious about sin. We ought to ‑‑ every single Christian ought to understand this, and it is a sobering thing. God is so serious about sin. You read passages like Psalm 5:4. God hates sin. God won’t dwell with sin. He doesn’t take pleasure in it. He doesn’t like it at all. And there are also ‑‑ we have to acknowledge this openly, too. There are countless people in scripture, and countless, to me, that have died because of their sin, that God brought about their death because of their sin. 

You know, on the channel, I’m doing lots of apologetic work, and that’s something that comes up a lot from atheists that I talk to. They go, “What about all these people that God killed because they were bad?” And it’s so interesting when you think about that. They claim that God is this moral monster because of his wrath, but the reason is often because of their ‑‑ the reason why they think that is because they have this limited and subjective human morality, and God has to line up with their morality. The infinite mind of God has to align with atheist YouTube commenters’ morality. And I’ve seen, because of that, many Christians try to downplay the severity of God ‑‑ Romans 11:22, “the goodness and severity of God.” I’ve seen them try to downplay the severity of God to make him more palatable to people, and I’ve seen that, and I think, no, don’t do that. God’s judgment and his wrath, they’re crucial elements of understanding why he does what he does. You can’t downplay that and go, well ‑‑ and people try to do the Old Testament/New Testament thing, and let’s understand this right. 

The God of heaven and Earth hates sin and he will punish sin, and when you downplay that part of God, you are indirectly, if not directly, leading people to be more comfortable with sin. I should have ‑‑ and I aspire to have this in my own life ‑‑ the same discomfort that Jesus had towards sin, and I know I’m not there, but I want to be more and more uncomfortable with sin. And so what I tell people ‑‑ when I downplay God’s wrath and his judgment, I’m doing something that is the opposite of the heart of God and how he feels about sin. So everything I see God do has to be seen with the partial thought that ‑‑ at least partially, if not majorly, that he is acting out of his hatred for sin. In fact, you could probably very easily make the case you can connect that to everything that he does; it’s out of his hatred for sin. Where people start to get this wrong is the way they ‑‑ I guess the best way to say it is, what does hatred for sin look like? A lot of the time we kind of apply that in one way. But does that kind of make sense, what I’m saying here?

WES: Yeah, yeah, absolutely, it does. And what’s so interesting, to kind of go back to the idea of the skeptic or the atheist who is angry at God for being angry, or angry at God for his wrath and looking at the God of the Bible and saying, “Well, that God can’t possibly exist, or if he does, he’s a moral monster” ‑‑ what’s so interesting is that the same skeptics will seem to ask ‑‑ when there is a school shooting or when there is some horrible thing that happens, they’ll ask, “Well, where was God? Why doesn’t God do something about the evil in the world?” And that’s so interesting, that when God does something about the evil in the world and punishes evil people, we say, “Oh, well, that’s a mean God and that’s wrong and he shouldn’t be like that,” and then when God doesn’t do something about the evil in the world and he allows evil to go, at least from our viewpoint, unchecked, then we say, “Well, that’s an apathetic God and that’s horrible and I can’t believe God would be that way.” 

And what’s interesting is that scripture deals with this. It deals with all of this, where sometimes the psalmist, especially, will be saying, “God, where are you? Why don’t you show up? Why don’t you deal with this? Why do you allow evil people to continue doing what they do?” And the good news is that God will deal with all of the evil in the world. I think about the things that Jesus told his disciples to do, like turn the other cheek and go the extra mile and love your enemies, pray for those who persecute you. The only way we can do that and live out the instructions of Jesus is if we really believe that someday God will deal with all of the evil in the world, that God will punish the evildoer, that he will punish the wicked. Otherwise, we should just go take vengeance for ourselves. We should just go and punish all of the wicked people if they’re just gonna get away with it. But because we believe that God does take sin seriously and that he will set everything right, then we can turn the other cheek. We can pray for our enemies. We can love our enemies if we really, truly believe that God really takes sin seriously and that he is even more angry about it than we are.

MARCO: Yeah. To connect this to what we were saying earlier, the recognition of my inadequacy is actually one of the most liberating things in my life, and it’s caused me to have such a great trust in God who knows what he is doing. And when I realize that God knows what he is doing and I accept my inadequacy, life, in a certain sense, becomes so easy because all I’ve got to do is trust God. And, obviously, that takes me to difficult places, and there’s something to be said about that, but all I have to do is trust God, so that might lead to action in certain areas or just holding back, peace‑be‑still kind of things, trusting him when I think about maybe my non‑Christian family and how all that works ‑‑ all I have to do is trust that my God, Isaiah 55:8‑9, that he knows what is best. His ways are not just different than mine; they’re higher. His thoughts and his ways are higher than my thoughts and my ways. So it’s such a liberating thing to look at God as the one whose understanding is infinite, in Psalm 147. I can trust him, and that ‑‑ actually, knowing that I’m so inadequate and all I’ve got to do is trust God, that’s such a liberating thing, but I can see why that’s hard for people to do who are not thinking in spiritual but in carnal terms, because it’s hard to let go of your own sense of morality if you’re not really sold on God, if that makes sense.

WES: Yeah, yeah, for sure. And that is what it is to be a Christian or to be part of the family of God, is to, as you said, trust him, and that’s hard. And I think it’s good for us to acknowledge when that’s hard or when it seems like God is being harsh or when it seems like God is being apathetic, and scripture gives us permission to say, “Hey, God, this is how I’m feeling. I’m feeling like this is really harsh. And why can’t I do this thing that I want to do or why did this thing happen or why aren’t you doing anything and why don’t you fix these problems in the world?” And over and over and over again, the scriptures teach us to wait for the Lord, wait for the Lord, wait for the Lord. And we have to be convinced ‑‑ and I think that’s why the cross has to be at the center of our theology. The cross teaches us that God, one, takes sin seriously, for sure. But number two, that God is good and that he is gracious and merciful and he loves us. And if we’re convinced of the goodness of God, we’re convinced that he really will set everything right, then we can wait for the Lord and we can be patient and we can trust him, even if it doesn’t happen in our lifetime, that God will do all of the things he’s promised to do.

MARCO: Yeah, the statement “God is serious about sin,” it often gets translated into, “God can’t wait to punish you,” and that’s not the right translation. That’s not who God is. And it is an overreaction to that mindset that causes people to downplay the judgment and the wrath of God, in my experience, because they have this idea that God is serious about sin; that means he can’t wait to punish you. And that’s not ‑‑ the better Biblical position and approach, in my mind, is God is so serious about sin that he sent his own Son to save you from it, and after having been saved, he continues to aid you in your daily life in spite of your imperfections. So just trust him, knowing that you are inadequate. He doesn’t want to punish you ‑‑ 2 Peter 3:9, he’s not willing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance. That’s what God wants. And so God being serious about sin does not directly translate to, he just can’t wait to punish you. No. In fact, if you look at how he acted in his seriousness towards sin, you see something very, very different than such a limited mindset like that.

WES: Yeah. Well, there’s a couple stories to kind of go with that theme that you’re bringing out there, and even to go back to the idea of God killing people in scripture, God putting people to death. You know, we’ve got Nadab and Abihu, we’ve got Uzzah.  Nadab and Abihu were these priests who offered strange fire and God struck them dead. Uzzah was part of transporting the Ark on a cart, and the oxen stumbled and the Ark began to fall and he reached out and touched the Ark of the Covenant and he was struck dead. And so we have these stories, and for me, growing up, preachers, Bible class teachers, we read these stories a lot and these stories, for some people, they may be some obscure story in the Old Testament they’ve never even heard of before. They don’t know who Nadab and Abihu are. They don’t know who Uzzah was, and so they’re just obscure stories, but for me, where I grew up and how I grew up, for a lot of the churches I was in, these stories got emphasized a lot so that they became sort of central for my theology and I did think about God’s wrath that way, that I thought, well, God is just waiting for me to accidentally reach out and touch the Ark. He’s waiting for me to accidentally offer some strange fire and God is going to punish me. He’s waiting for me to step out of line. He’s like a police officer that’s set a speed trap and he’s just waiting for me to go over the speed limit even one mile an hour so that he can punish me. 

So do you think that these stories ‑‑ obviously, they are stories of things that God did, but do you think they get emphasized in the wrong ways or emphasized to the exclusion of other stories or they become too central in our theology? How do you think we should think about stories like that?

MARCO: Yeah, if you take a lot of those stories ‑‑ I mentioned the God can’t wait to punish you, the overreaction to that that causes people to downplay his wrath. There’s another side to that, where there are those who see people downplaying God’s wrath, and so then they go to an extreme and they go, “We need to harp on Leviticus 10 constantly. We need to harp on the story of Uzzah constantly.” And, honestly, I found myself in that camp for a while, where I thought, because there’s so many people downplaying his wrath, I need to just hammer this constantly. And, again, it led to ‑‑ it contributed to an already limited mindset on God because that’s not who God is, to just reduce him to Leviticus 10, to reduce him to the story of Uzzah. 

I was thinking about it in terms like this. You know, I have two daughters. Parents ‑‑ and even though my daughters are both young, they’re both baby toddlers, parents have to discipline their kids in some way, whatever that way is. And I remember this thought, as a kid, towards my parents: All you want to do is punish me. All you want to do is punish me. And, typically, that statement would come from a lack of perspective, but it also would come from this hyperfixation on myself when I didn’t get what I wanted. And so I would just straw‑man almost who my parents were and say, “All they want to do is punish me.” And I used to be so jealous of kids in school, growing up, whose parents did not punish them ever, whose parents had no rules, they got to do whatever they wanted, no limitations. I thought, those are the good parents. I mean, come on. If only my parents would talk to those parents once, they would know those are the good parents. And now I realize those were not the good parents, and I am not jealous of the kids who had those kinds of parents. 

And when you connect this back to God, you gain a way better perspective in this way. If you were to line up all the instances of God’s severity in the Old Testament up against all the instances of him dealing out extraordinary amounts of goodness and mercy, it would blow you away because God has actually given us a perspective of how to understand who he is and what he does all throughout scripture. In Exodus 20, the giving of the Ten Commandments, there’s that famous line where he says, “I’m a jealous God visiting the iniquities,” but he also says, “but showing mercy to thousands, to those who love me and keep my commandments.” So the God who just said, “I’m a God of wrath, I punish, and I’ll punish for a long time,” he also says, “but I show mercy to thousands, to those who love me and keep my commandments.” 

So if I can find, Biblically, just one person in the Bible who was clearly flawed but God showed them mercy, I can prove to you that you can be so flawed and still be one who loves God and keeps his commandments in his eyes, and that gives you incredible perspective. And that phrase in Exodus 20, it’s in Exodus 34, it’s all throughout the Old Testament, it’s in other places, as well ‑‑ it’s a really repeated passage in scripture, and it makes it clear to you that the overwhelming majority of the instances of God’s wrath and severity, they’re also evidence of his mercy, because in so many situations, the consequence could have and should have been way worse than what they got. And so a lot of times people just boil it down to what the punishment was, and they go, “Look how severe God is,” but let’s remember, let’s not get it mistaken here, God could have and was willing, at one point, to finish Israel and just start again with Moses. And the fact that you can read that and then go one chapter later and Israel still exists? That’s God’s mercy on every single part of the page. And so, a lot of the time, we kind of build this straw man or we’re way too reductionist about these acts of wrath. They’re actually incredible examples of mercy on the part of God and goodness on the part of God.

WES: Yeah. Yeah, I’m so glad that you brought up Exodus 34. I’m going to read this ‑‑ I’m going to read that whole passage, verses 6 and 7. It says, “The Lord passed before him and proclaimed, ‘The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children’s children, to the third and fourth generation.'”

It’s so interesting, when we read that passage, that both of those aspects, the judgment of God and the mercy of God ‑‑ both are obviously represented, but to say that they’re balanced would, I think, be the wrong way to put it because they’re not really balanced as if they’re a one‑to‑one equation. Like God has wrath and judgment, and he also has mercy and grace, and you’ve got to have both. And it’s true, you do have to have both, but not in equal measure, that he is far more gracious and merciful than he is punishing, that it’s a thousand to three or four. He is forgiving to thousands and he is wrathful, or he is judging and punishing three or four generations, and it’s not a one‑to‑one equation. 

And I think you’re exactly right. I’m so glad that you said that, so often, the sort of emphasizing of Nadab and Abihu or the emphasizing of Uzzah and God’s wrath is an overreaction to the perceived liberalism or the perceived overemphasis of mercy and grace. And I hear preachers say things like that, “Well, that church over there, they just talk about love all the time,” or “They just talk about mercy all the time.” And, yeah, that very well may be the case, and we certainly don’t want to de‑emphasize the horrible nature of sin. We don’t want to ignore sin and use grace as a license for sin. Absolutely, that can and does happen, but we’ve got to be so careful that we’re not trying to put the judgment of God as a one‑to‑one comparison of his mercy and his grace, that he is far more ‑‑ I’m so glad that you put it that way, that if you put all of the passages in the Old Testament of God being gracious and merciful, they would far outweigh those times where he does have wrath and he does judge and he does punish, and those are both aspects that we need to talk about and emphasize, but not in the same kind of way.

MARCO: Yeah. Actually, I have a good example for the idea that it’s not one‑to‑one. If you read through Judges ‑‑ you know, I mentioned if you can find one flawed person who God showed mercy to, then I can prove that you can be flawed and still love God and be a keeper of his commandments in his eyes. In Judges, they’re in this vicious cycle of sin, consequences, crying out, God gives a judge, delivers them, time of peace, and then rinse and repeat, basically. And in Judges chapter 3, that whole cycle is happening, and then God gives deliverance in Othniel, and then he blesses them with rest for 40 years. After that time, they go back into sin, and then they’re under Moabite oppression, under Eglon, and then they cry out for God’s help. He sends Ehud. And after they experience deliverance under Ehud, how long do you think now God gives them deliverance for? Would it be less time? Does God say they need some probationary period? “Prove to me, give me a couple years of faithfulness, then I’ll do” ‑‑ God doubles the amount of rest from 40 to 80 years. So why would God do that? Were they just so exceptionally good this time, so good at being delivered this time or something like that? No. God is just that good and he wants to bless that much. Why double it? Maybe God is just so good that he is willing to double his blessings to help you see the joy of living for him, and hopefully, that will keep you from leaving him and experiencing sin, suffering, and wrath in the future. It’s nowhere near one‑to‑one. God literally doubles his blessings on people who deserve way, way less than any of that.

WES: Wow, that’s fantastic. Let me ask you this as we’re closing. It’s so funny that we’re having this conversation because I was just asked by somebody here recently who said if Jesus and God were together from the beginning, meaning God, the Father ‑‑ if Jesus and the Father were together from the beginning, why is the God of the Old Testament so different from the God of the New Testament? Obviously, that’s a question that people have been wrestling with and thinking through for a couple thousand years now. So how would you respond to that ‑‑ or how do you respond to that when you get questions like that, sort of pitting the, quote‑unquote, “God of the Old Testament” against the, quote‑unquote, “God of the New Testament”?

MARCO: Yeah, good cop/bad cop, something like that. You know, I have an answer for the question, but I also reject the premise of the question. It just depends what they mean by this sometimes. Sometimes people are saying, “Why does God handle things differently?” And I think that’s a different question than “Why is God so different?” You know, there’s something to be said about God treating them differently in application but not in terms of his character. And God’s promise was to bring the Messiah through Abraham’s seed, and Jesus isn’t coming into the world through the seed of Abraham if they get picked off in the wilderness by enemy nations, if they have large amounts of people dying from eating certain foods or animals that are more dangerous than others, if they’re playing fast and loose with their sexual relationships, they’re intermingling with other nations, if they’re getting each other fatally ill because they’re touching rotting corpses and then their hands are dirty and they handle other situations like that. But, also, if rebellion after rebellion, civil wars, essentially, in Israel are just allowed to happen whenever people feel like it, Messiah is not coming through Abraham’s seed. They’re not going to last very long. If the people are not going to be held accountable for the disrespect of God’s holiness, they’re not going to make it, either. To harken back to Nadab and Abihu, for example, that’s what God says: “By those who come near me, I must be regarded as holy. If you’re going to make it, you have to regard me as holy. Before all the people, I must be glorified.” So God was certainly more severe physically, you can say, in the Old Testament, in part, for those reasons. They needed to be alive. You can talk about that stuff. 

But here’s where I reject the premise. Was God any more or less loving then? No. Was God more or less merciful back then? Was he more or less serious about sin? Was he more serious or less serious? Absolutely not. So sometimes we take one form of application and make the corresponding principle, like, exclusive to that kind of application, that form of discipline, you could say, when a principle can be applied many ways or a characteristic of God’s nature can be applied many ways. So, with God, we need to take the whole of what he did to more accurately understand his nature and the underlying reasons for the kind of application ‑‑ or the kind of treatment that he dealt out, because you’ve got to remember, again, God could have wiped them out, but he didn’t. So the application ‑‑ you can’t just look at, you know, instances of wrath and say that’s less love. No, no, no. All these things come together and you’ve got to get to know God to understand that part, his nature and the underlying reasons for the application of all of that. Does that kind of make sense?

WES: Yeah, I think that’s a perfect answer. I think that’s a great way to put it, that God hasn’t changed, but that he’s dealing with it in a new way, but his character ‑‑ and that’s, I think, the argument that the apostles made over and over again, that the cross and what God has done is perfectly in keeping with the scriptures. And when the apostles talk about the scriptures, they’re talking about the Old Testament scriptures. They didn’t see any contradiction. They saw, oh, of course, this is exactly the sort of thing that our God would do. Of course our God is gracious. Of course our God is merciful. And not only does he want to rescue Israel, because he’s been rescuing Israel for thousands of years, but surprise, surprise, he also wants to rescue the Gentiles. He wants to rescue the world. And we see that as we look through the, quote‑unquote, “Old Testament scriptures,” as well. We see, over and over again, God’s concern is for all humanity and that the seed of Abraham was going to

bless all of the nations, not just Israel. And, yeah, I so appreciate you helping us to see the grace and the mercy of God in both the Old and New Testaments.

MARCO: Yeah, I love that you said that, that the prophets and the apostles, they understood this about God. It’s us that try to stereotype God in the Old Testament and boil him down to something that ‑‑ he’s way more than that. He’s way more than the instances of judgment and wrath, for example. We have such a good God. 

I think about Psalm 23, and one of the biggest reasons why it’s such a beloved and famous psalm is that beautiful, like, culmination in verse number 6, that “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.” People love the feeling they get when they think about how good God is, and my Shepherd leads me in goodness and mercy. So we have to ‑‑ as such a crucial part of God’s nature, we have to look at everything that he does through that lens. That is who he is. God is love, and we’ve got to look at him in that way, the goodness and the mercy that I get. As someone that ‑‑ I identify with Israel so much, and God blesses me and he shows his goodness to me like he did to them, and what a good God. What a good God.

WES: Yeah. Amen. I think that’s a great place to stop. Marco, thank you for this conversation, but more importantly, thank you for the work you’re doing in the kingdom, Brother.

MARCO: Likewise, man, I appreciate you very much. 

The post The God of the Old Testament with Marco Arroyo appeared first on Radically Christian.

What is sin? Is this a sin? Is that a sin? Is it a sin if I do such-and-such?

In this thought-provoking episode of the Radically Christian Bible Study Podcast, Wes and his guest, Jacob Rutledge, tackle the complex and often contentious topic of sin. They delve into the fundamental questions that many Christians grapple with: What truly constitutes sin? How do we define it in a way that aligns with biblical teachings? Is sin merely a matter of missing the mark, or does it go deeper, reflecting a rebellion against God’s authority? These questions are not merely academic exercises; they have profound implications for how we understand our relationship with God and our pursuit of holiness.

Drawing from the biblical wisdom found in 1 John and other key passages, Wes and Jacob explore the multifaceted nature of sin. They discuss how sin is not just a violation of God’s law but a rupture in our relationship with the Creator, a failure to live up to the glorious potential for which we were created. The conversation also touches on the collective and societal dimensions of sin, recognizing that our actions can have far-reaching consequences beyond our individual selves. Throughout the discussion, the emphasis is on understanding sin not merely as a set of rules to be followed but as a matter of the heart, a reflection of our willingness to submit to God’s will and embrace the transformative work of the Holy Spirit.

Jacob Rutledge is the preaching minister at the Dripping Springs Church of Christ. With a deep passion for biblical teaching and a gift for engaging in thoughtful discussions, he brings a wealth of knowledge and insight to this podcast episode. Jacob’s commitment to exploring the nuances of sin and our relationship with God promises to shed light on this challenging topic.

Links and Resources

• Watch This Episode on YouTube
• Bible Project – Bad Words (Word Studies on Sin, Iniquity, and Transgression)

Transcript (Credit: Beth Tabor)

What is and what isn’t a sin? That can be a tricky question. On the one hand, sin might be a lot more broad and all‑encompassing than we sometimes think. But on the other hand, we have to be very careful when we accuse our brothers and sisters of sin, especially when they’re striving to live for the Lord. Today, I’m visiting with my friend, Jacob Rutledge, the preaching minister from the Dripping Springs Church of Christ, about this incredibly important topic of sin. 

But before we get to that conversation, I want to read from 1 John 3:4‑10. John says, “Everyone who makes a practice of sinning also practices lawlessness; sin is lawlessness. You know that he appeared in order to take away sins, and in him there is no sin. No one who abides in him keeps on sinning; no one who keeps on sinning has either seen him or known him. Little children, let no one deceive you. Whoever practices righteousness is righteous, as he is righteous. Whoever makes a practice of sinning is of the devil, for the devil has been sinning from the beginning. The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the work of the devil. No one born of God makes a practice of sinning, for God’s seed abides in him; and he cannot keep on sinning, because he has been born of God. By this it is evident who are the children of God, and who are the children of the devil: whoever does not practice righteousness is not of God, nor is the one who does not love his brother.”

I hope that you’re encouraged by this conversation, and I pray that it helps all of us learn to love like Jesus.

WES: Jacob Rutledge, welcome back to the podcast, Brother.

JACOB: Good to be here, Wes. Good to be back here with you.

WES: In fact, welcome back a second time for the same day, because we were recording and you were saying some amazing stuff and then the internet cut out on us, so I know that you’ll be able to hit all those notes again. But this conversation that I want to have today is so, I think, incredibly important, but it’s one that I think people are always asking: What is sin? Particularly, you could leave a blank there, “Is this sin?” “Is that sin?” “Is blank sin?” So many things that, again, we could go down different rabbit trails and say, well, is this thing a sin or is that thing a sin, or how about this behavior; is that a sin? Especially things that the Bible doesn’t necessarily give us real clear, explicit guidelines on, and some people are worried, am I sinning if I do this or am I sinning if I do that? And we could probably talk about some of those things as examples, but just, real general, and starting off at least, let’s be real broad and just ‑‑ what is sin? Like how should we define it? Or maybe even like what images should come to our mind when we think about what sin is?

JACOB: Yeah, I think that’s a good question, and, also, this idea of ‑‑ you know, the Hebrews writer says, in Hebrews 12, that sin clings so closely to us, so it’s a very personal thing to us, and so that’s why, when we either get called out on our own sin or we’re reflecting on our sin, trying to be better, it seems so deeply personal and difficult, right? And we can maybe get into that, why it’s so personal to us, but at its most basic level, John says, in 1 John 3:4, that sin is lawlessness. So, in essence, sin is an unwillingness to submit to the law, and specifically within the context of scripture and for Christians and for John, in that context is the divine law, and it brings back with us the picture and the imagery of Eden, right, with Adam and Eve in the fall. God had given a prohibition when it came to eating of the fruit, and they partook of that and they passed that barrier. They went against his will and his desire for their life, and, at its essence, there’s this kind of self‑determination. That’s the temptation from the serpent, you know, “You will know what’s right and wrong.” And, ultimately, in some ways, sin is about this self‑determining aspect of us that wants to be the one that says, “No, this is right and this is wrong,” rather than trusting in what God has said is right and what God has said is wrong. 

There’s a multifaceted dimension to sin. I mean, we realize that sin isn’t just as basic as breaking God’s law. It’s more than that. I mean, we see that even within Eden itself. It’s about, you know, rupturing our relationship with God, barring entrance to eternal life, the generational consequences and relational consequences for Adam and Eve within their marriage and within their children. So there’s a whole dimension to sin, but at its most basic level, it’s kind of a rebellion of sorts, a resistance to submitting to a law which transcends me. And whenever I make myself the determining factor on how I’m going to live, apart from any transcendent law, there’s going to be immense consequences to that. And, you know, we see those consequences in our life, but, you know, we can’t go wrong when it comes to allowing scripture to define sin, and it says sin is lawlessness. And so, that’s what Jesus, of course, says to some on judgment day, unfortunately, is that they’ve done all of these wonderful works, but at the end of the day, he says, “Depart from me, you workers of lawlessness,” Matthew 7:21. And so even the good things that we do can be done outside of God’s will, especially when it comes to when we’re trying to use them for self‑justification. You can try and justify yourself outside of what God has prescribed, so… 

WES: Yeah. Well, I love some of those terms that you’re using, “self‑determination,” “rebellion,” this “failure to submit,” and all of that ‑‑ I think “lawlessness,” that idea, it assumes ‑‑ it implies authority, that both as the creator and as the sovereign, the king, the ruler over humanity, God has a right to determine our steps, to tell us what is right and what is wrong, how to live, what to do, what not to do, and at the heart of sin is this idea that the created being, us, would look at our creator and say, “I don’t want to do what you want me to do. I want to determine my own steps. I want to go my own way.” 

This actually brings me to sort of my first reason I’ve been wrestling with this, I think, is because so many times when we try to define sin, someone will say it means to miss the mark, and from what I’ve studied in Hebrew, that seems to be very much what it is; it’s a missing the mark. But I think that picture ‑‑ and I’ve heard, you know, preachers sort of describe that in detail, you know, you’re trying really hard to shoot an arrow at a small, little target. There’s this little‑bitty bull’s eye and you try really hard, and your arrow, you know, hits just left of the mark or just right of the mark, and so you’ve sinned. And I see that and I understand what people are saying, but I wonder if, at the heart of that, we have in mind a very small bull’s eye. And I think that whether or not that illustration or definition for sin ‑‑ whether or not that’s helpful is determined by how big do you think the bull’s eye is? And I think sometimes we think that God has this minuscule, little bull’s eye for us, and he sets it out there and says, “Here, hit this; live this way,” and then, as hard as we try, we miss the mark. But that doesn’t seem to square with the idea of sin as rebellion, or failure to submit, or lawlessness. There’s a difference between being lawless and trying really hard and just being a little bit off of something that’s very difficult to hit anyway. So maybe how do we reconcile those ideas, or what do you think about that?

JACOB: Yeah, I get what you’re saying there. And the other issue I might have with that imagery ‑‑ although, like you said, I think there’s maybe some credence to that. I don’t want to shame preachers who have used that imagery. 

WES: Sure.

JACOB: But I do think that if we’re not careful in giving other metaphors to aid in complementing that metaphor, for example, it might make us think that one pet sin that we struggle with is the bull’s eye that we keep missing. And I was just talking to somebody about this yesterday, about how our view of sin is often ‑‑ when we’re viewing it personally, we often don’t necessarily think of ourselves as sinners as much as we do, “Well, I have a problem with this thing, this particular sin, and if I could just overcome this particular sin, then I would just be fine.” But, of course, the issue with that is that sin is far more expansive and far more influential on us than we even realize at times, and when we hyper‑focus on that one pet sin that we’re struggling with ‑‑ not to say that we shouldn’t be battling it ‑‑ but it can make us ‑‑ it creates a lack of self‑awareness of some of the other sins we’re probably struggling with and not spending as much time focusing on, and I think it can cause an immense amount of despair because if that’s the only sin you’re focusing on and you keep failing at it, you know, then you’re really going to fall into discouragement, whereas you might have actually been growing in sanctification in some other areas that you haven’t realized because you maybe haven’t been focused ‑‑ and I know they’re all tied together, that sin clings so closely. As we talked about earlier, it’s very personal to us. 

But I do think that maybe the falling‑short imagery can help when we think of it in the context of what Paul says in Romans 3:23, where he says, “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” What do we mean by “the glory of God”? What do we mean by that? Well, that’s a really expansive view of human nature in and of itself. Mankind was meant to be the image of God, the imago Dei, right? So that, of course, was part of the deception of sin, was that the serpent said, “Well, you will be like God.” Of course, the great irony is they’re already like God, and they’re meant to be more like God as time continues and as Earth continues, and so ‑‑ but they fell short of their potential, essentially. 

And so I think that if we view it from that perspective, what that makes us realize is like, from God’s perspective, sin is like a father looking at his son, his child, and knowing how much potential they have and what he has made them to be and what they could be, right? But he also sees what keeps us from getting there. And, you know, I was just reading Psalm 103 where he talks about, you know, that God is like a father who views his children with compassion and he knows our frame, you know, he knows that we are dust. And that doesn’t mean that God shrugs his shoulders at sin, but he sees the potential of humanity, and sin, to him, is a frustrating thing in the sense that it keeps humans from being who he made them to be, which is far greater than we often see ourselves.

And so maybe rather than only thinking of sin as missing the mark, maybe we should view sin more of ‑‑ this is something that is preventing me from being who I’m wanting to be and who God made me to be. And then, when you view it from that perspective, I think many Christians would think, well, I really do want to be that person and I’m really trying to be that person, and God, who’s a father, recognizes that struggle, you know, and he honors that struggle, and I think that glory aspect helps us maybe to complement that other image of missing the mark, if that makes sense.

WES: Yeah, yeah. No, I think that’s incredibly helpful. In fact, it reminds me of The Bible Project videos. I don’t know if you’ve seen these, but they had three Bible study ‑‑ word‑study videos on different words. They called it “Bad Words,” words relating to sin. One was “Sin,” one was “Iniquity,” and one was “Transgression.” And I thought they were really helpful at sort of fleshing those ideas out because we throw those words around as if they’re perfectly synonymous, but there’s some nuance and some difference there between “iniquity” and “transgression” and “sin.” And on the video on “sin,” they specifically said that sin is ‑‑ they talked about the missing‑the‑mark idea, but they also talked about the idea of failure, and I thought that was a really good way to kind of bridge those two ideas that you just talked about. It is a missing the mark, but it is a failure to miss the mark, and, particularly, it is a failure to live up to our created intention, what God created us to be. He created us to be his glory. He created us to be his images. He created us to rule and reign with him. He created us to be exalted creatures, and we’re sort of the pinnacle of the earthly creations, and we failed at that. And not only did Adam and Eve fail at that, but we have all continued to do likewise and fail in what we were supposed to be. 

And so, to me, that helps to frame it in a little bit more healthy way. In some ways, it makes a lot of things sin, that when I fail to be what I’m created to be in any area of my life, then that is sin. When I fail to be the kind of husband that I should be in Christ ‑‑ 

JACOB: Right.

WES: ‑‑ then that is sin. But it’s not this sort of ‑‑ I think the way you were talking about it before is really helpful, that we have this tendency to focus on single, individual little behaviors and get this myopic view of sin on these little things, as if I fixed that one thing and I stopped doing that one behavior, then I would be all right, then I would be good. And it’s like, well, but then you would be dealing with pride, and that’s also a sin. So we struggle with that, I think, and just this overall picture of God intended us to be a certain thing, a certain way, a certain being, and then we failed at that mission. And then Jesus, through his teaching, through his example, through his sacrifice, and, I would say, predominantly through the pouring out of the Holy Spirit, has come to help us get that intention back on track to become what God created us to be so that we are no longer sinners and we are at least beginning to live up to our potential because of Jesus.

JACOB: Yeah. And even think about, for example, like the two different types of sins ‑‑ categories of sins. Like we generally turn to, like, sins of the flesh and sins of the spirit, right? So you have these sins of the spirit, like malice and bitterness and wrath and contempt and division and all of these things. Well, why are those sinful? You know, well, more often than not, when those ‑‑ for example, think of wrath. When James talks about wrath, he says the wrath of man does not produce the righteousness of God. So in that context, for James, it’s not just about, oh, well, you know, you have a temper problem, but it is conveying something about God and his image that isn’t true, you know, and so you are preventing yourself from being what God intended you to be in that moment. And the same thing with malice. That’s why forgiveness is such a big virtue within Christianity, and malice and bitterness are such serious vices, because whenever I give in to that, I am seriously hampering the image of God within my life. 

And going even to the sins of the flesh ‑‑ for example, you think of when Paul does his incredible discourse on sexual immorality in 1 Corinthians 6 and he talks about the body wasn’t made for sexual immorality but for the Lord, and that when you become a Christian, you become one spirit with the Lord, and if you give your body over to a prostitute, you’re giving the Lord’s body over to a prostitute. Well, what’s his whole point in there? It’s not just focusing on, well, sexual immorality is bad, so don’t do this, you know, or it’s ‑‑ because I think maybe if somebody asks a Christian, well, sexual morality is a sin, but why is it a sin, you know, that’s kind of hard to answer, you know, because it’s like, well, why is it a sin? It’s a natural act. Sexual intercourse is a natural thing. Well, why is that? Well, for one reason, it’s because the body wasn’t intended to be simply a sex instrument, and whenever you’re sleeping around like that, you are prohibiting the glory of God that he intended for your body. 

And think about drunkenness ‑‑ the sin of drunkenness. Well, what’s the major problem with someone being drunk and ‑‑ being slovenly drunk, you know? I don’t know how else to describe it. Paul says ‑‑ in Ephesians 5:18, he says to guard against drunkenness for in that is debauchery, you know, because he says you attack ‑‑ you diminish, rather, the dignity of your humanity when you give yourself up to intemperance, and the image of God is then shrouded under this indignity that you have placed upon it. 

And I don’t think that’s meant to make us feel like more guilty than maybe some are feeling that are listening to this podcast, but I do think it helps us to see this more expansive view of sin and help us to realize that, at its most basic level, yes, it’s lawlessness, but that lawlessness is based upon the fact that we’re made in the image of God and he has such high hopes for us and these grand desires for who he made us to be, and Satan doesn’t want that image to shine through. You know, Satan doesn’t want people to see the glory of God because if they see the glory of God, what’s going to happen? They’re going to be drawn to it, right? They’re going to want that. And so he’s got to do everything he can to hinder that from being seen in the world.

WES: Yeah. Well, I think that’s so helpful, and I think it goes back to that idea of self‑determination, that we struggle with this idea of sin ‑‑ we just struggle with the idea of sin, in general, because we ‑‑ especially today and especially in our culture, we tend to be so individualistic, so autonomous, so self‑determining. We say, “It’s my body; it’s my choice,” and we say that in lots of different areas. And we have this general thinking that says if I want to do something and I’m not hurting myself or someone else, as far as I can tell, or even if I am hurting myself, as long as I’m not hurting someone else, what difference does it make? So if it’s two consenting adults or if it’s me doing something, what difference does it make? Why should you care about it? Why should the church care about it? Why should God care about it? Doesn’t God want us to be happy and to

pursue our own happiness? And so much of that is embedded in our culture that we feel like as long as I’m following my heart, doing what I feel is satisfying or will be fulfilling to me, as long as I’m not impinging on someone else’s rights or as long as I’m not harming someone else, then shouldn’t it be okay? 

But I think, going back to this idea of what were we created for, what were we created to do, even the idea of freedom ‑‑ we tend to think about “freedom from,” and Jesus actually gives us “freedom for.” It’s all about “for.” What were you created for? What were you given freedom for? It is so that you can be something that you will not be if you pursue your own desires in a way that is contrary to the will of God. And so it is ‑‑ it is part of us to be rebellious this way and to just pursue whatever it is that we think will bring us happiness. 

But it’s interesting to me how so many times that even people outside of the context of religion or outside of the context of, quote‑unquote, “sin” are realizing that sort of that self‑indulgent pursuit is not ‑‑ it’s not helping them flourish as human beings. There’s a book ‑‑ I think it’s called Rethinking Sex by Christine Emba, and she is looking at sexuality in America, not from a religious standpoint, but from a secular standpoint, and saying ‑‑ 

JACOB: A psychological one.

WES: Right, absolutely.  ‑‑ this idea of setting the bar at consent is not leading to human flourishing, and so just because two adults are consenting doesn’t mean that what they’re doing with and to one another is leading to them being what they were created to be, and so I think it’s so helpful to reframe sin in this way.

JACOB: Well, and along with that, like that idea of consent is ‑‑ because there’s this assumed reality that, you know ‑‑ and I know we’re not going to get too specific on certain things, but it’s just this assumed reality that that is the only thing that matters, whereas if I’m using someone for my own sexual pleasure without any desire to commit myself to them, without any desire to covenant myself to them ‑‑ which a sexual act is a covenant act because it gives oneself completely to the other and it requires the other person to give themselves completely to you. And so, in that, when you use someone for your own sexual pleasure, that is an indignity to them because they are more than just simply an object of sexual pleasure. 

And it reminds me of the passage in 1 Thessalonians 4, which has always been so interesting to me, where Paul says, starting in verse 3, “For this is the will of God, your sanctification: that you abstain from sexual immorality; that each one of you know how to control his own body in holiness and honor.” Notice he’s talking about the body there ‑‑ not the spirit, the body. And, obviously, the spirit’s involved, but he’s talking about the vessel of the body. And then he says, verse 6, “that no one transgress and wrong his brother in this matter, because the Lord is an avenger in all these things,” and so he views sexual immorality as a transgression against another human being, not just you. But even if they’re enjoying it, I am doing something against them, an injustice to them when I am committing a sexual act with them outside the context of a faithful, committed relationship within marriage. And so injustice could cover a whole host of sins. 

And also with that, you know, talking about sin, we begin to think ‑‑ when we view sin from the perspective of, well, I have fallen short of the glory of God ‑‑ of course sin is ‑‑ you’re talking about the individualized aspect of it. Sin in the Bible is more than that. It’s not just “I have fallen short of the glory of God,” it’s “All have fallen short of the glory of God,” “We have fallen short of the glory of God.” And so then you begin thinking about the cultural dynamics of sin and social sins and, you know, these aspects of, okay, what part have I participated in these aspects of sin? What responsibility do I have in relationship to these sins? And even you begin to look at your past and your ancestors and, you know, like, there’s a ‑‑ my family has a history of sexual sin in the men in my family. Well, I mean, I’m a part of them, you know? I mean, I am not them on one hand. I’m my own individual. I’m held responsible for my own actions, but I also can’t act as if that doesn’t play a part in my own struggles, that doesn’t play a part in who I am. I think it would be naive of us just to say, well, just because I wasn’t individually participating in that doesn’t mean that I’m not in some way responsible for what’s going to happen moving forward. 

And, you know, I don’t know how much we might want to get into that or not, but I’m just saying that whenever we begin to view sin as not individual, but as individual and communal, I think it helps us to see that this is a common struggle of humanity but it also makes me aware of when I look at my life and I realize that sin is something that is in my fallen nature and I realize ‑‑ it’s like what Paul talks about. I’m teaching through Romans, and when Paul says in Romans 7:18, “I have the desire to do what’s right but not the ability to carry it out,” man, I feel that, bro. Like, you know, I feel that. You know, you get up in the morning ‑‑ just as kind of a silly example, but it’s an example I use with the church. I’m like, you get up in the morning and you decide, I’m going to eat healthier today. I’m going to do better, and two hours later, you’re eating a 12‑pack of donuts, you know? You desire to do what’s right, but you struggle, right? You struggle to do it. 

And whenever I look at my life and I think about how many times I have woken up on Monday morning and thought, I’m gonna do better today, and then when I go to bed at night, I think, I did a terrible job at being who I wanted to be today. I wasn’t the father I wanted to be. I wasn’t the husband I wanted to be. But I know, at the beginning of that day ‑‑ I know, in my heart of hearts, I know I wanted to be a better man, you know? And what I’m saying is, when I really had the humility to realize that in myself, that really should make me, number one, recognize the limitations of my own intentions, the limitations of my own strength; and, number two, it should make me immensely more compassionate towards other sinners because, you know, I might see them in the late afternoon and they’re being kind of a jerk, but that person might have woken up that day and thought, I’m not going to be a jerk today. I’m going to hold my tongue. I know that I’ve had a problem with my tongue, but I’m going to hold my tongue, you know? And I’m not saying that we’re not going to have frustrations and disagreements with people. I’m just saying that you might be seeing them at the end of a journey where they’ve been struggling for hours trying to be a better person. But Paul says, in our flesh, until the resurrection, we still have a fallenness that’s working against us, and that’s the shared human struggle. That’s why we’re called to have mercy and patience with each other. And I think that if you see someone who doesn’t have mercy and patience towards another sinner, then they’re probably living a pretty miserable life because that probably means they have a lot of, in my opinion, self‑hatred, as well.

WES: Yeah. And I think that illustrates, too, why we didn’t just need a new set of rules. It really bothers me the way that sometimes we talk about the New Testament, as if this is ‑‑ it’s just a second set of rules. You know, you had the Old Testament for the Jewish people and now you have the New Testament, which is just a new set of rules for the New Covenant people, and I think that’s completely the wrong way, on multiple levels, to think of it because we needed more. Not that that’s all that the Old Testament was, because it was so much more than that, as well. It wasn’t just a set of rules. It was a God who would walk with them, a God who wanted to dwell in their presence, and a God who was continually forgiving their sins through this sacrificial system that was set up. 

And in the new covenant, God is walking with us. We need more than just a set of rules. This isn’t just here are the steps; follow these and you’ll save yourself. It is you need a God who will dwell in you, which is Paul’s answer in Romans 8, you know, to the conundrum that he lays out in chapter 7 ‑‑ it’s through the Spirit. And so we need the victory of Jesus and we need the Holy Spirit in order to even begin this process of stepping away from sin and becoming who God created us to be. So I think reframing sin as a failure to live out our created purpose and then understanding that the solution to sin is not just obedience. It is obedience, but as you said, there is something warped, twisted, broken in us and in humanity. 

And I’m so glad you pointed out the collective nature of sin because, I mean, we could go down so many rabbit holes with that. You could look back at, you know, what was happening in the 1800s and 1700s with slavery. You could look at what was happening in the 1950s and ’60s with Jim Crow rules and laws. You could look at what’s happening now with human trafficking and slavery around the world. And if I knew how much these electronics on my desk contributed to the human slavery that’s happening around the world, what is my culpability in that? Am I sinning by using these devices that were only manufactured to support this system of consumerism and capitalism at all costs and the debasing of humans and the injustice that’s going on around the world? And you could say, well, Wes, you don’t have anything to do with that. But do I? 

JACOB: Well, think about the porn industry, right? Think about the porn industry and its connection to sex trafficking. That’s a great example of how many people think, well, I’m not hurting anyone. Like, I’m just doing my own thing; leave me alone. And it’s like human trafficking would hardly exist if it wasn’t for the porn industry at this point. I mean, there would still be some, but it is so interconnected and interwoven to where it’s not just you committing a sin, a sexual sin, but you’re committing ‑‑ you are contributing to an entire culture of the abuse of women, of the abuse of minors, and that’s where the far‑reaching consequences of sin are. 

You know, do you really think that Adam and Eve, when they partook of that fruit, that they were thinking, because of what I’m doing now, one of my sons will later kill another one of my sons? It’s really heartbreaking to me when I think about it because ‑‑ and this is why Jesus, on the cross, says, “Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they do,” you know. And when I look at that, I’m like, what do you mean they don’t know what they’re doing? They know exactly what they’re doing. They know they’re killing an innocent man. They know that you’ve done miracles. You know, they know that all ‑‑ they know all these things, right? Yet he says, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” And what is Jesus saying there? They don’t realize the consequences of their actions. They really don’t. 

And I wonder how often ‑‑ man, it’s just sad when, you know, maybe 20 years down the road we look back and think this is all due to that sin, you know? And God, as a Father and as our Creator, he’s like, I’m trying to ‑‑ you don’t see it right now. All you see me as is maybe like being oppressive and burdensome ‑‑ and that’s why I think John has to say, in 1 John 5, his commandments aren’t burdensome, right? Like because God’s saying, I’m not. I am trying to keep you from consequences that you can’t possibly comprehend. You cannot possibly know where this will lead, and it will absolutely break you if I let you keep going in this direction. 

And then, of course, the saddest judgment of all is like what Romans 1 says, is where God just finally does let them do it, right? That’s terrifying, that God is finally just like, okay, you know, if you want to keep going in that direction, I’ve got to respect your ‑‑ God respects our freedom more than we do, and we give ourselves into slavery. Sorry, I feel like I jumped in on you there, but…

WES: No, no, I appreciate all of those great thoughts. Let’s kind of shift to 1 John and let’s talk about just some of those ideas that he lays forth, but one of the verses that just came to my mind that I hadn’t even really been planning on talking about, but I think it goes along with what we’re saying, John says, in 1 John 2, he says, “I write these things to you so that you don’t sin.” “I write these things to you, little children, so that you don’t sin. But if you do sin,” if we do sin, “we have an advocate with the Father.” 

So let’s talk about that for a second. It seems to me that, throughout the book of 1 John especially, he lays out this picture of sin as in this is something that God’s people don’t do. Like if you belong ‑‑ in fact, reading some of those passages in isolation will make you feel incredibly guilty and you’ll think, whoa, if you sin, you don’t have eternal life. If you sin, if you make a practice of sinning, then you are not a child of God. But then he says things like that, that says, listen, stop making a practice of sin, but if you do sin ‑‑ and I think that the implication is unintentionally, as you’re trying not to sin ‑‑ you have an advocate. So we are continually forgiven. We have this advocate with the Father. We have this continual ‑‑ as we walk in the light as he is in the light, we have this washing of our sins. 

So, I mean, let’s talk about that for a second. I don’t think that we will achieve this sort of moral perfection, but at the same time, I do think there is a way to live our lives where we can say “I am not a sinner. I am not making a practice of sin. I am living in holiness and righteousness,” but understanding that that doesn’t mean I am, individually or as a part of the collective I’m a part of ‑‑ that I am hitting on all cylinders and I’m hitting the mark every time, but it means that through the grace and mercy of God, through the work of the Holy Spirit, and through my intentional submission to the will of God, I am what I’m supposed to be by his grace. Does that make sense? Would you agree with that?

JACOB: Yeah, yeah, and I think that that ‑‑ like we never want to grow callous to our sin, right? We always want to have a tender receptivity to realizing the sin in our life. And I agree with you. I don’t think that ‑‑ I mean, that was an old, old heresy, this idea that you could kind of, you know, achieve perfection prior to the resurrection. But I think Paul’s whole point is, you know, this ‑‑ and he talks about this in Philippians 3, right, the striving towards maturity, and maybe that’s a good way to think of it, is a maturation of our spiritual growth, and that’s how the Bible talks a lot about it, as well, immaturity and maturity. We become more aware and, therefore, we become more culpable, more responsible, and we have to live accordingly. We can’t continue to act as if we’re new Christians who aren’t aware of these sins and aren’t aware of these deceptions. We have to respond to that. And then, at the end of the day, we do have to commit our spirit into the hands of God, right? I mean, that’s what Jesus does. He’s not ‑‑ of course he’s not a sinner, but I’m saying that in his obedience, in that moment of losing control, you know, he gives himself over to the Father, and I think that we give ourselves over to the grace of God. 

But the grace of God doesn’t make us ‑‑ if the Spirit of God is working in you ‑‑ and I think this is John’s whole point in 1 John ‑‑ you’re going to take sin seriously, you know? If you see someone who is just kind of rolling their eyes at sin and not treating holiness seriously and not treating their spiritual walk seriously, then the Spirit of God is obviously not working in that person, not actively so, and so they should, hopefully, be rebuked and brought to a fuller understanding of that because we love them and care for them. But if I’m ‑‑ you know, and I’ve thought about this before, like it’s funny to me because I read something once that said the more holy a person becomes, the more mindful they are of their sin, which is interesting. It almost would seem the opposite, right? Like the more holy you are, you know, the less mindful you are of your sin. But as you mature and grow, you become more and more progressively aware of, okay, well, I need to work in this area; this is another area. And honestly, the incredible thing is it might not even be an area that you were even aware of previously that you needed to work on. 

But I also think about, like, as a Christian, you know, why am I concerned about delighting God? Why am I concerned about submitting to God? Why am I concerned about ‑‑ I really do want to grow closer to God. I really do want to be a better man. I want to be a better Christian. You know, I wanted ‑‑ you know, there’s millions of people that wake up every day and they don’t care anything about that, you know? And so why do I care about that? Well, I can’t help but think that that’s because the Spirit of God’s working in me, you know? He’s wanting to produce that fruit in me, and he pushes me like a trainer, like a spiritual trainer, you know, even when I’m lazy and not wanting to get going. Now, I don’t think that he forces me to do that. I think it’s a participation, it’s a partnership where I have to submit to that. But at the end of the day, you know, I think the very ‑‑ I know this is going to sound odd, and you can feel free to disagree with me on this, but I think the very idea that you are concerned about your sin should be a comfort, if that makes any sense. I don’t know if that makes sense, but, to me, if you are concerned about your sin, God’s doing something there. Like he’s waking you up, you know? He’s opening your eyes. He’s pushing you. He’s prodding you. Something’s going on there, otherwise you really wouldn’t care that much, you know? You’d just live your life in the passion of sin like all the rest of Gentiles do. 

But that kind of brings up that passage in 1 John 4 where he talks about that seed, you know, being placed into the child of God, and he says he does not keep on sinning because God protects him and the evil one doesn’t touch him. Well, you know, there’s a lot there that we probably don’t know all that he’s talking about, but at the end of the day, I think what he is saying is that you’re going to continue to see ‑‑ when the seed of the Word is truly implanted in somebody’s heart, you’re going to see a change and they’re going to keep going and God’s going to watch over them. He’s going to keep them. He’s going to protect them. Man, that’s an immense comfort to me. So I guess if we could maybe offer some comfort, like if you’re sitting here and you’re worried and you’re even listening to this podcast, you know, obviously, you’re concerned about something, otherwise you wouldn’t be listening to this podcast, and so maybe that can be an insight to you. You know, God loves you and he’s trying to wake you up. He’s obviously pricking your conscience and wanting you to follow him and continue in that. You know, keep fighting. You know, don’t give up the fight when it comes to sin. I think that’s the Hebrews writer’s point, but ‑‑ sorry, I feel like I’m rambling now, but…

WES: No, no, no. I think this is good stuff. And you mentioned 1 John 4. I also think about what he says there about ‑‑ that we obey not out of a sense of fear, because perfect love has cast out fear. Fear has to do with judgment, and for those of us that are born again by the water and the spirit, for those of us that belong to him, that are his children, that are walking in love and walking in the light, we don’t have to fear the judgment of God. And I think that goes back to what you said earlier about why should I care about my sin? Well, it’s because I want to do better. I want to please him, but it’s not because I’m afraid of his judgment anymore. I’ve grown beyond that. You know, now that I am in Christ ‑‑ and I think that this also plays into Paul’s idea of the core of the gospel, this justification by faith, that when we put our faith in Jesus ‑‑ and by faith, it’s so much more than just believing in him. It is this allegiance to him, this loyalty to him, this becoming his follower, his disciple, that when we are a loyal follower of Jesus, God counts that as righteousness. God counts even our imperfect loyalty to him as righteousness, the same as he did with Abraham. He counted Abraham’s faith as righteousness. And so here was a man who was imperfect, who failed at being human, but God considered him righteous based on his faith. 

And Paul uses that idea to say, in Christ, everyone who puts their faith in Jesus and becomes his loyal disciple dies to their sinful self, is buried in baptism, raised to this new life. Yes, we will continue to be imperfect, but we are, in Christ, righteous, and that should be incredibly exciting to us. Not that we don’t care about making mistakes because, as you said, the more sanctified we are, the holier we are, the more we are concerned when we’re not living out and living up to the gospel standard. But there’s also a reassurance that whatever we do out of loyalty to King Jesus and in submission to his will, God looks at us and sees us. I don’t like when we say God sees Jesus when he looks at us. I think God sees us, but he sees a righteous us because of his grace and mercy and because of what Jesus did for us. So he looks at Jacob and sees righteous Jacob and righteous Wes, not because of our own ‑‑ not because of what we’ve done, but because of what Jesus has done, and this is the justification by faith and the righteousness that comes by faith, I believe, that is so integral to Paul’s argument that it’s not based on works of the law and it’s not even based on my own goodness, but on his, and that can give us an incredible assurance, that as we walk in the light as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another and the blood of his son continues to cleanse us from all sin.

JACOB: Yeah. And I think that both of those elements of the fear of God and the love of God, they work in varying aspects depending upon where we are within our Christian walk, you know, because you have passages where Paul talks about perfecting holiness and the fear of God, you know, 2 Corinthians 7:2. And I think that the scripture reminds us of that because it’s so concerned ‑‑ I think the Hebrews writer is the one I keep thinking of ‑‑ with this kind of drifting, kind of casualness of taking ‑‑ and he’s like, again, if you don’t take this seriously, you’re going to fall back into it, and there’s consequences for that, right? And sometimes, you know, if we’ve drifted back into that, of not taking our soul seriously and not taking our salvation seriously, sometimes the only thing that wakes us up is the severity of God, you know, the Romans 11:22. So there’s that part of it. 

I think it’s a ‑‑ the fear of God’s kind of a ‑‑ if I can put it this way, kind of a guardrail to be like, you know, there’s some dangerous stuff on this side. It’s a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. But as we ‑‑ going back to what you were saying, as we mature ‑‑ and that’s why I think he says “perfect” love, right? I think that’s how he puts it, “Perfect love casts out fear.” That doesn’t mean that our love of God is perfect. You know, God’s love of us is perfect, but our love of God, of course, is imperfect. But rather, as love is being perfected in us, I do ‑‑ you know, I think all of us who have been Christians for a while and have really striven for holiness, you do find yourself just adoring God and loving God, and, man, that’s a whole new area of sanctification. When you get into that area of, I genuinely don’t want to do this because I have just ‑‑ you know, I have felt so close to God lately, I don’t want to lose that feeling, you know? I know faith is more than feelings, but what I’m just saying is that you do have moments where that ‑‑ you know, God seems more perceptible, you know, tangible, you know? That’s what I think James means, personally, when he says, “Draw near to God and he will draw near to you.” God will allow his presence to become more real to you, more perceptive to you as you grow in holiness. That’s the reward of holiness, that the eyes of your heart are enlightened and you begin to see him throughout areas of your life, and it’s exciting. 

And once you have a taste of that ‑‑ you know, like Peter says, if you’ve truly tasted and seen that the Lord is good, you know, 1 Peter 2:3, you don’t want sin to come in and mess with that, you know? It’s like whenever maybe you’ve had some struggles in your marriage, and then all of a sudden things are going really well with you and your wife ‑‑ I mean, you’re communicating well, your intimacy is good, you know, and then maybe one day you’re kind of tired and you’re tempted to go back into those old habits, but what keeps you from doing that isn’t, well, I’m afraid my wife’s going to leave me, but things are so good, I don’t want to do anything to mess that up and I’m going to sacrifice myself. I’m going to give myself up because yes, it’s going to cost me something to bite my tongue right now and not give in to that back‑and‑forth, but the reward is far greater. And so scripture uses marriage often as a way of helping us to see our covenant relationship with God, and sometimes when we’re talking about sin and obedience and sanctification, it’s helpful to look back to marriage, as well, I think.

WES: Yeah. And I think that’s such a helpful way to put it, because not only is it found throughout scripture, but we also understand that there are things that a person could do in their marriage that could absolutely end the marriage, but a mature relationship is not based on a fear that our spouse is going to leave us. It’s based on a fear ‑‑ if you want to use that word ‑‑ a fear of disappointment, a fear of harming the relationship, a fear of not being as close as you could be, a fear of it not being as great as it could be. So I think you’re exactly right, that mature faithfulness ‑‑ it maintains a right and mature fear of God, for sure, but not a fear of judgment. And so I’m not afraid that God is going to kick me out of his family. I’m not afraid that God is going to condemn me as long as I’m walking in trust and obedience and love for him and faithfulness to him. 

I think when we start asking questions like, well, am I going to be lost if I do this? Am I going to hell if I do that? Well, man, that’s just not a healthy relationship any more than it would be with a marriage. If you said, well, will you divorce me if I do this? Well, if you won’t divorce me for doing this, then it’s not a big deal, it’s not a, quote‑unquote, “divorce issue” or, quote‑unquote, “salvation issue.” If it’s not a salvation issue, who cares? Well, wait. That’s not how we determine what is or isn’t good or righteous or healthy behavior just based on whether or not this is going to end the relationship.

JACOB: Yeah. And ironically ‑‑ and I know we’re coming up on our time boundary here, but ironically, Paul says that part of ‑‑ or John says that part of walking in the light is a willingness to confess and a willingness to be open with the fact that you are a sinner. That’s what always struck me whenever people were talking about walking in the light. And I’m like, yes, but he says in 1 John 1:8, if we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. So the very people who act as if they don’t sin, the very people who act as if they are above sin, that they’ve got it all together, they’re probably not walking in the light because John says that part of walking in the light is this transparency that recognizes sinfulness, and so this openness and this willingness to recognize my faults and to depend upon the grace of God. And it’s just one of those things where that is the greatest cost of sin, of course, is our relationship with God. 

And, you know, if you’ve ever had sin come into a personal relationship, you know how much it can rupture and disfigure that relationship, and it takes work to draw closer sometimes, even though you’re still ‑‑ you know, you and your wife get in a huge fight. I know you and Hollie don’t ever get in fights, but, you know, you and your wife get in a fight and, you know, that’s ruptured the relationship for a while, but you’re still in covenant together, right? But it’s going to take some work to grow closer, you know, and of course that’s where repentance and change ‑‑ and so maybe if we think of it this way, you know, sin is a rebellion, but in order to overcome ‑‑ you were talking about it earlier, it’s not just about commands that help us to overcome sin, right? So if sin is a rebellion, what we really need is regeneration. And that’s what Paul says happens in Titus 3:5, this washing and renewal and regeneration of the Holy Spirit, and so we’re given a new nature in Christ. We’re new creatures by the power of the Spirit, and God’s working in us and with us and through us to bring about this sanctification to where we become more and more like him and we reach that glory once again, which will ultimately be culminated within the resurrection, the redemption of our bodies. You know I had to bring it back around to the resurrection.

WES: Yeah. Yeah, no doubt, Brother, no doubt. And I think ‑‑ until then, I think we’re given really clear guidelines about what is and what isn’t sin. I think ‑‑ you know, go read Galatians 5 on the works of the flesh versus the fruit of the Spirit. Paul says it’s pretty obvious what behaviors belong to the works of the flesh and what behaviors belong to the fruit of the Spirit, and so you can look at your decisions and look at your life and say, Is this loving? Is it joyful? Is it peaceful? Is it patient? Is it kind? And we say, well, you know, there’s some ambiguity there and there’s some openness there, like what Jacob thinks this might be the most loving thing to do and what Wes thinks this might be the most loving thing to do. Is there going to be some disagreement? Sure. That’s going to happen, and I think Paul talks about that in Romans 14, and he says, you know, Jacob, you’ve got to live and act by faith, and, Wes, you’ve got to live and act by faith, and he says whatever is not of faith, whatever is not borne out of your loyalty to King Jesus, then it’s sin. And it may be a sin for you and not necessarily for Jacob because Jacob is acting in faith. He’s walking in faith, but you’re doing this out of selfish motivation, Wes. You’re doing this for your own glory. You’re doing this for ‑‑ you know, to save face. You’re doing this to be self‑determining and, therefore, it’s not by faith, and if it’s not by faith, it’s sin. And so we’re given these, I think, broad categories at times to examine our behavior and to know, is this really the best thing to do, the right thing to do?  

JACOB: Yeah. And faith in like Romans 14, 1 Corinthians 8, you know, that means something a little bit different than, like, saving faith. It really has to do with personal conscience in relationship to God, and conscience does play a part. Something can not technically be a sin but become a sin for the person who emboldens someone to do something they shouldn’t be doing and for the person who gives in to that and they feel guilty. Like he talks about, don’t abuse your conscience, you know? There might not be any scripture that says this is not sin, but it can become a sin for you. Why is that? Why is that? Because God has made you to be a discerning moral agent, and if you are going against your conscience, you’re going against one of the most fundamental laws that God has put into human society. And so, you know, I think that that’s important to just recognize. 

I do think, in Romans 14, 1 Corinthians 8, some people go, well, if it’s not of faith, it’s sin, and therefore, if it’s not in the Word of God ‑‑ you know, but he’s not really talking about that. He’s talking about the conscience, right, in relationship to the Word of God, in relationship to Christ, in relationship to the Spirit. But how your conscience relates to ‑‑ there is some subjectivity in those things that aren’t as clear, aren’t as laid out, aren’t as specified. We’ve got to be patient with each other. The ultimate purpose that Paul says in those moments is ‑‑ the whole point of that argument is Romans 15:7, learn to welcome each other as Christ has welcomed you. 

WES: Yeah, and that’s the beauty of it, that when you’re doing that, when we’re doing all the things we’re talking about, when you’re walking in humility, when you’re walking in faith, when you’re walking in the light, when you’re loving your neighbor, when you’re bearing one another’s burdens, Paul would say, if you bear one another’s burdens, you have fulfilled the law of Christ. And so that’s the beauty of it, that we know ‑‑ we know what behavior, for the most part, is good, just, righteous behavior, and so we can live life in a way that is obedient to God, but there is going to be matters of opinion. And you do have to listen to what you believe ‑‑ your conscience, what you believe is the most loyal, faithful thing to do in this situation, being faithful to Jesus and to the gospel to which you’ve been called, and be gracious with one another and understand that we won’t always see that eye to eye perfectly, but if we’re all striving toward this kind of a goal, then there’s going to be so much harmony and healthy flourishing as human beings within the church, and this is, I think, what it looks like to walk by the Spirit.

JACOB: Yes, and honoring those convictions. I think that’s something I’ve struggled with in the past, where even if someone feels like something maybe that I’m doing in my liberty is wrong, there’s a part of me that kind of feels kind of justified in condemning them and acting as if they’re ignorant and, you know, kind of putting them down and acting as if, well, they’re not as knowledgeable as me about this. You know, that’s the very thing Paul’s condemning in 1 Corinthians 8, right? I need to have enough respect for that person’s dignity to ‑‑ you know what? They’re just operating from their conscience and they might not feel comfortable doing that. They might not even feel comfortable being around me, you know, because they feel maybe that’s a violation, and I have to respect that. I have to honor that because, you know, they’re not answering to Jacob on judgment day; they’re answering to the Lord. 

And so I think that we have to respect people’s convictions and love them even when it hurts, you know, even when it creates separation that we wish wasn’t there. And to the best of our ability, we’re telling them, listen, I’m just operating out of my principles and my convictions, but I also respect the fact that you might feel differently. And that mutual respect in those situations, I think, plants the seeds for further hope of unity in the future, and that’s a whole ‘nother subject, maybe, when sin begins to impact our fellowship and when it begins to impact our communion together. But that goes back to how the consequences of sin and how we view sin can be greater than we even anticipate, unfortunately.

WES: Yeah. There’s so many rabbit trails I want to go down with you because that ‑‑ I mean, it just brings up so many other things. I mean, even the 1 Corinthians idea, it was reminding me about ‑‑ earlier we were talking about the collective, societal, cultural impacts of sin and trying to live lives that are faithful to Jesus in the midst of those, and you think about how difficult it would have been in the first‑century world, particularly in a place like Corinth or a place like Rome, to live out your convictions, live out your allegiance to Jesus, live out your faith in the midst of a society where you can’t go to the, quote‑unquote, “grocery store,” the marketplace, and buy meat without the chance that maybe this was offered to an idol, and what about these coins that have the emperor’s image on them, and all of these questions. And Paul recognizes that you’re going to come to different conclusions about a lot of these kinds of things, the Jewish laws, and which holidays do we keep celebrating, or do we not celebrate any of those, and what if I go to this meal, and what if I eat that? And you’re going to have different conclusions about some of those things, and that continues to be true. 

Your neighbor ‑‑ or your brother and sister, more particularly ‑‑ your brother and sister in Christ is going to be working a job that you’re thinking, how can you do that job if you’re a Jesus follower? Or how can you wear those clothes if you’re a Jesus follower? How can you do this if you’re a Jesus follower? And they’re looking at you saying, no, how can you do that if you’re a Jesus follower? And all of this makes it very difficult, but Paul, over and over again, comes back to these fundamental things about love and unity and respecting one another’s differences of opinion and welcoming one another and be gracious to one another, and then, all the while, all of us striving to live lives of holiness and righteousness.

JACOB: Yes. Yeah, amen.

WES: Well, Jacob, thank you for this conversation. This has been really rich. I think we could have done another two or three hours on this, but thank you.

JACOB: Well, hey, I appreciate the opportunity to come on. And I thought it was funny, I think, at one point, either the first recording or the second recording, you said, well, this is going to be a fun discussion. I was like, it’s always fun to talk about sin. But it’s always a pleasure.

WES: Well, thank you, Brother. I appreciate it. I hope you have a great day.

JACOB: All right. You too. God bless.

The post What Is a Sin and What Isn’t A Sin? with Jacob Rutledge appeared first on Radically Christian.

Every Christian should see themselves as a minister and their work as a ministry.

In today’s fast-paced world, it’s easy to compartmentalize our lives into separate spheres – work, church, family, and so on. However, this mindset can lead to a disconnect between our faith and our daily lives, especially in the workplace. Many Christians struggle with the question of how to live out their faith in a so-called “secular” environment. They wonder if their work has any spiritual significance or if it’s simply a means to an end. This episode of the Radically Christian Bible Study Podcast addresses these concerns and offers a fresh perspective on the role of work in the life of a believer.

Drawing from biblical examples such as Daniel and the teachings of the apostle Paul, this episode explores the concept of every Christian being a minister, regardless of their occupation or workplace setting. It delves into the idea that our work is not just a secular pursuit, but an opportunity for ministry and discipleship. The discussion emphasizes the importance of viewing our work as an extension of our walk with God, where we can glorify Him, demonstrate our trust in Him, and live out the mission of making disciples.

The guest for this episode is Rusty Tugman, a seasoned minister and leadership trainer. After 30 years in full-time ministry, 21 as the preacher of the Alameda Church of Christ in Norman, OK, Rusty became the Leadership Trainer & Workplace Coach for the Oklahoma Department of Human Services. He is also a trainer for Strata Leadership, a True Dads Educator, and the owner of Tugman Coaching & Consulting, LLC. With his unique perspective and experience, Rusty shares valuable insights on how to approach work as a Christian and how to be an effective witness in a secular environment. His journey serves as an inspiration for those seeking to integrate their faith and work in a meaningful way.

Links and Resources

• Watch this Episode on YouTube
• Tugman Coaching & Consulting, LLC

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. 

Who is a minister? Is it just the people who are financially supported by the church or is it every follower of Jesus? Today’s Bible study will reveal why every Christian should think of themselves as a minister and their workplace as a place of ministry. My guest today is my friend, Rusty Tugman. Here’s what Rusty has to say about his life and his work. He said, “After 30 years in full‑time ministry, 21 as the preacher for the Alameda Church of Christ in Norman, Oklahoma, I became the leadership trainer and workplace coach for the Oklahoma Department of Human Services. I’m also a trainer for Strata Leadership, a TRUE Dads educator, and the owner of Tugman Coaching & Consulting, LLC, and I still preach, but now as a guest preacher.” He says, “I’ve never left full‑time ministry, I just changed context.”

But before we get into my conversation with Rusty, I want to read from 1st Peter chapter 2, starting in verse 9. Peter says, “But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy. Beloved, I urge you as sojourners and exiles to abstain from the passions of the flesh, which wage war against your soul. Keep your conduct among the Gentiles honorable, so that when they speak against you as evildoers, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day of visitation.”

I hope that you enjoy today’s conversation, and I pray that it helps all of us learn to love like Jesus.

WES: Rusty Tugman, welcome to the podcast, Brother.

RUSTY: Thanks, Wes, I’m honored to be on. Thanks for inviting me.

WES: Man, it’s good to have you. I’m really excited about having this conversation. You and I get to hang out at Camp Blue Haven every summer, and I’ve grown so much from your wisdom and from our friendship, and so I’m excited for other people to hear your thoughts today.

RUSTY: Well, I appreciate you saying that. Yeah, I’ve had so much fun hanging out with you at Blue Haven and it’s been good to just get to know you and develop our friendship.

WES: Likewise. So I want to talk about ministry, and I think when we hear that word “ministry,” we automatically think about people that are working for a church full‑time or part‑time, and we think about ministry in those terms. In fact, one time I remember I was preaching and I was talking about how your preacher may be a minister, but he’s not the minister, but we tend to attach that term, “the minister,” to a preacher or somebody that is in that sort of, quote‑unquote, “full‑time ministry,” but I think there’s a better way to think about that, and that’s what I want to talk about today, but maybe the best way to do that is you tell us about your story in ministry.

RUSTY: Yeah, absolutely. Well, and you’re exactly right. I mean, that’s how I’ve thought of it; that’s how a lot of us think of it, and so ‑‑ yeah.  So recently, I’ve kind of had a transition in my life that’s made me rethink all of that. And so, you know, the pandemic changed a lot of things in our world, and it made us rethink a lot of things, including church, what it means to be the church, how we go about doing church, so to speak. And so I remember, during the pandemic, you know, I’m sitting there in my nice church office and I’m waiting for the world to come to me, and I’m thinking, they’re not coming to me anymore, but it also made me realize just, as a preacher, how I have allowed myself to just kind of be swallowed up in that church bubble where most of my interactions, you know, were with church members and Christians and all of those kinds of things, and so that really just started to kind of gnaw at me. And so I started praying and really discerning about just this idea that, man, I need to get out there. I need to go to where the world is and truly live out the Great Commission, perhaps in ways that I haven’t before. And so I started praying a lot about that, and, really, that process of prayer and discernment was about a year‑long process. 

So as I’m going through that process, an opportunity came along to join the Learning and Employee Development team at the Oklahoma Department of Human Services. And so I have a background in leadership and, through the years, I’ve done a lot of leadership training with different groups and nonprofits and things like that, and it just seemed like a really great fit and a great answer to this prayer that I’ve been praying, and so after about 30 years of full‑time church work, I transitioned into a secular role, secular environment, but for the purpose of ministry. And so what I tell people is that, you know, I didn’t leave full‑time ministry; I just changed context, and so that’s kind of how I view it, and it’s been wonderful. I mean, I’m able to have conversations with people that I would never have crossed paths with. I’m able to have an audience with people that I would never have had an audience with before, and the ministry opportunities just have been amazing. 

And so what I do there is I do leadership training and coaching for their supervisors, managers, and executives, and it’s an organization of about 6,200 employees, so a lot of people, and, in fact, I’m right now working on just developing an internal coaching program there. And so a lot of great opportunities, but it definitely just has shaken up my world, but it’s just really caused me to rethink our approach to work, to ministry. Like you said, who is a minister? What does that look like in the real world?

WES: Yeah. Well, I think about what Paul says in Ephesians 4.  He’s talking about Jesus giving gifts to the church and, specifically, the gifts that he gives are apostles and evangelists, but he says, about shepherds and teachers, that their job is to equip the saints for the work of ministry, that every saint, every Christian should be a minister and that it’s the job of the church workers to equip the members, to equip the saints, the Christians, the disciples for that work of ministry. And, I mean, I think it would change the way that we think about so many things. I think it would change the concept we have of the church, like what is the church? We often pay lip service to the idea that we are the church, the people are the church, but we have this very institutionalized way of thinking about the church. 

I remember one time I was on social media and someone was, you know, asking for help, needing help with something. I don’t know if it was financial or needing somebody to do something for them, and one of the members of our congregation commented and said, “You should ask the church and see if they can help.” And I thought, what a weird way to say that, because you are the church. What she meant was ask the people in leadership to see if the church collectively can help you, but she was removing herself from that equation, and that’s so often what we do. We think about the people that are financially supported, or the people that are in leadership roles, these are the ministers, these are the people that are running the ‑‑ you know, I don’t know how we even conceptualize it, but we take ourselves ‑‑ the members take themselves out of the equation and they think of the church as this business or this organization that they financially support, but it’s the business or organization that’s doing these things.

RUSTY: Yeah, that’s right. And that way of thinking, it also causes us to separate out our lives into church and work and that these are completely different things, and there’s a lot of danger in that, I think. And I think we miss a lot of opportunities that God is putting in our path to be the hands and feet of Jesus, to tell others about Jesus, to help disciple others and to make disciples because of that way of thinking.

WES: I don’t want to go down a rabbit trail with the money aspect of things, but I think it even goes into the way that we think about church funds. Like we often say this is God’s money, and I’m like, you know what? The money in your pocket is also God’s money. The money in your bank account is also God’s money. And yes, this is money that we put in the collection plate or that we give to the collective church. We’re sharing these funds and we’re doing something collectively with these, and so there is a place, I think, for people in, quote‑unquote, “church work.” I like the way you said that. There is a place for that, that all the members collectively share their funds to support this person’s work and their ministry, but we can’t ‑‑ the person in the pew can’t remove themselves from that process and start to think that, “Well, I gave my money, so now it’s his job. It’s their job to do these things.” They have to see that this is a cooperative work that we’re doing, not just in financially supporting something, but, like you said, every single day when we go to work, we’re on mission for God. We’re part of ‑‑ we are the church. You are the church, whether it’s Sunday or Monday or Tuesday or Wednesday, and whether you’re in the building or you’re out in the community.

RUSTY: Yeah, that’s absolutely right. And so when I was making this transition ‑‑ and by the way, I am so grateful that I’ve been able to be a full‑time minister and have decades of service in that way. And I still preach. You know, I guest preach and interim preaching and things like that, so I still get to scratch that itch a little bit, but I’m so grateful that I had that. But this has been so rejuvenating for me and has really helped me to see things in a lot bigger way. And so, for example, I think about ‑‑ because I had to think about ‑‑ just rethink work, okay, because I’m leaving all I’ve known. I mean, all I’ve ever worked at, up until this point, has been in church. I mean, even from a young age, I was doing internships and all of that, so nearly my whole working life has been in a church setting. And so now, transitioning out of that, I really had to rethink, okay, what is work? What is it about? How does this fit into what God has called me to do? 

And so, in my study of that, I went to a couple of places, and this is just kind of getting to that divide that you’ve spoken of that we kind of sometimes think about, that kind of ‑‑ you know, church, well, that’s ministry; work over here is not. But that’s not supported by scripture. So I think about like Romans 12:1, you know, where Paul tells us to present our whole selves as living sacrifices, that this is really what worship is about. And in that context, you know, what he’s saying is that our proper response to our Creator is the shaping of our total lives by God’s gracious will, and so there’s no separation there. There’s no compartmentalization, that every area of our life is to be formed by and shaped by the grace of God. But then I think a clearer picture of that and how work fits into life is in the creation narrative. And, you know, I think a lot of people, we look at work and we think that it’s just kind of this necessary evil, you know? We kind of have this love/hate relationship with work. And I remember, as a kid growing up in rural Oklahoma, my dad making me get out and work on our land, and, especially during the hot summers, I could have sworn, at that time in my life, that work was from the devil. And that’s a lot of times how we see work, is that, well, it must be a product of the fall and the curse in that work was borne out of the brokenness of sin. But when you go back and look at the creation narrative, work is actually borne out of God’s blessing, not sin’s brokenness, because in Genesis 1 and 2, work is given before the fall, and so ‑‑ but, also, work, in that narrative, it’s given for human flourishing, that this is a good thing, and it’s good for us. 

And so when I look at work through the creation narrative, through Romans 12:1 ‑‑ of course there’s other passages that we could cite and look at, but when I look at work through that lens, I want to embrace work as a gift from God that’s good for me ‑‑ it’s good for me to work; work is good for me ‑‑ but, also, I want to approach work as just an extension of my walk with God, and when I do that, now, work becomes something different. It actually becomes more exciting because if I put work in that perspective and look at it through that lens, well, now, work is a pathway for me to glorify and honor God. It’s an arena where I demonstrate my trust in God and my allegiance to God, but, also, it’s a mission field where I can live out the disciple‑making mission that we’ve been given. Well, now, work is not just this mundane thing that I have to do to pay the bills. It’s exciting, and there’s so many opportunities that come with work to be on mission for God. 

And a great example of this is, several years ago, I got to be part of a small group of preachers who had a meeting with Shodankeh Johnson, who does a lot of work with the Renew Network, and he’s a disciple‑maker in Sierra Leone, leads a disciple‑making movement, but he’s been to America many, many times. And he was talking to us about just our proclivity, as Americans, to always introduce ourselves by what we do for a living, you know? Or we’ll even ask, you know, “What do you do for a living?” And then we respond by literally saying what we do for a living. He said if you were to come to Sierra Leone, if you were to ask the members of our congregation that question, “What do you do for a living,” he said nearly all of them would respond in the same way and they would respond by first saying, “I’m a disciple‑maker who…” So “I’m a disciple‑maker who drives a taxi.” “I’m a disciple‑maker who’s a doctor.” “I’m a disciple‑maker who works in a factory.” “I’m a disciple‑maker who’s a baker.” And, man, I just remember all of us preachers who were there, we were just blown away, and I thought, that’s it. That’s what I want to do. That’s how I want to approach work, because I think that’s how scripture approaches work.

WES: I remember hearing a lesson one time ‑‑ I was probably in high school ‑‑ very similar to the picture you just painted, and the preacher said something that shocked me, and he meant for it to be provocative. He said, “You can’t be a Christian and a doctor. You can’t be a Christian and a policeman. You can’t be a Christian and a garbage man.” And we’re like, why is he saying that? And then he said, “You have to be a Christian doctor, a Christian policeman, a Christian garbage collector, that your Christianity, your discipleship has to be part of that.” But I love that idea, what you just said, taking that even further, that it isn’t just that I’m being a disciple of Jesus while I am in this career or while I’m in the workplace, but that I’m actually being a disciple‑maker and that I’m actually trying to make disciples while I am doing the job that I’m doing. 

So I love your thoughts around Daniel and how Daniel gives us a pattern and a picture for being on mission for God while we’re in the workplace. Talk to us about that a little bit.

RUSTY: Yeah. I love the story of Daniel, and Daniel has been obviously an inspiration, you know, for thousands and thousands of years to Christ followers. And so as I was making this transition from full‑time church ministry to now going to work in a completely different environment, different role, all of that, I really wanted to go into that in a purposeful way, and so I turned to Daniel just to kind of learn some lessons, because Daniel, he’s in a foreign land. Well, I was going into an environment that was very foreign to me. But Daniel did that in such a God‑honoring way, and that’s exactly what I wanted to do, and so I turned to Daniel for some lessons, and, man, I learned so much. And one of the first things that stood out to me when I just went back to his story and started reading it and studying it is that God will put us in secular environments and that’s okay because there’s a purpose for us being there. And sometimes I think, you know, we lament where we’re at, and when we do, we miss the purpose that God may have for us to be there. I’m sure Daniel did not want to be where he was. You know, none of the Israelites did, but God placed them there, but he also had a specific purpose for them, had a specific calling for them in that context, and a mission to fulfill. And Daniel is just a great example of just embracing that calling, embracing that mission, and embracing even where he was. And so his location did not change his allegiance to God, and even though he’s in a foreign kingdom and eventually serving a foreign king, his allegiance is always to God. Well, how did he do that? And that’s what I wanted to figure out. 

And so when I looked at Daniel, several things stood out to me, and I think one is that Daniel, he was commendable. You know, at the very beginning of his story, he and a few others, they’re chosen and, you know, some versions actually use the word “commended” or “commendable” because of his abilities, but also because of his outstanding character. And so I think, you know, as Christians in the workplace, I want to be commendable, not in the sense of, you know, I want praise to be heaped on me.  But being commendable in our abilities, but also in our character, it makes us stand out, but we’re standing out to bring glory to God. And so what that helped me to do is it helped me to realize that the greatest thing that I can bring into this workplace that I’m stepping into is not my degrees, but it’s my character. And I think that’s true for all of us, that a lot of us ‑‑ I mean, man, we bring so many ‑‑ you know, education, experience, and all of that, but don’t underestimate the power and the contribution of your character as a Christian in the workplace. And so that’s what Daniel brought, and so he was commendable. 

I also think, too, just in Daniel’s story, is that he was competent. He was good at what he did. And you think of Daniel’s perspective, it seems to me that Daniel kind of had this mentality that he wanted to do excellent work in order to praise an excellent God. And I think, wow, that’s a great perspective for us to have, is we ought to want to be good at our jobs, be competent. And so one of the ways that I can live out my faith in a secular work environment is to be a good employee, you know, to be responsible, to be trustworthy, to be dependable. You know, I want to be that employee that my boss doesn’t have to worry about because, you know, he or she can trust me, and I want to do good work as an extension of my service to a good God. If you’re a boss, be a good boss and treat your employees well. Care about your employees, have compassion on them, have empathy for them. So be competent; be good at what you do. And I think sometimes we think that, well, you know, for us to say we’re good at this or that or whatever, that that feels a little selfish, and so we’re not boasting, but we’re saying, hey, I want to be good because this is an extension of my walk with God. You know, just like what Paul says in Colossians 3:17, you know, do everything in the name of Christ. So if I’m to take that literally, then I want to be good at my job. I want to do good work and make good contributions. 

You know, I also see in the story of Daniel that, you know, he was convicted. I mean, we see that all throughout his story. And in a secular environment, you’re going to be tempted to compromise your values, your beliefs, your standards. Daniel was placed in so many different situations where he could have been tempted to compromise, but, also, when you look at Daniel’s story, Daniel had enemies, and so Daniel had people who were actively working against him because of his faith. Well, we may encounter that, as well, in a secular work environment. There may be people who actively work against us and try to sabotage us or undermine us because of our faith and our allegiance to Christ, but through all of that, Daniel stayed true to his convictions. 

And then I also just think about, to me, Daniel teaches me to be Christ. And I know Daniel’s story comes before the incarnation of Christ, but I think about like in Matthew 25, you know, when Jesus is saying ‑‑ you know, talking about how when you give food, you give shelter, you visit me, that we’re doing it for him, and so, I think, be Christ by serving others. And Daniel, he served; he did it in the name of God for the glory of God. And what’s interesting is that several times in Daniel’s story Nebuchadnezzar confesses that Daniel’s God is the true God of gods and Lord of lords, and it’s because Daniel, through his character, through his competency, through the strength of his convictions, he made God known to Nebuchadnezzar and others, and they saw God because of Daniel. Well, that’s exactly why God has the Israelites in Babylon, is so that they can show God, and that’s what Daniel does. And so I just thought his story and the way he approaches work as a true mission, man, that was so inspiring to me, and it really helped me to craft the way that I want to approach work in a secular environment.

WES: Man, I love that, and I can see that pattern that you laid out. I see that pattern not only in Daniel’s life, but even in what Paul taught the first‑century church, the way that he taught them to live when he was talking to slave masters or to slaves and telling them how to live out their faith within the context of those relationships, or husbands and wives and children, and in all of those contexts, this is the way you live out your faith. And so much of it was because he knew, not only for their own sake, but for the sake of their influence, that they were going to be influencing other people, that people were going to draw conclusions about what sort of people are these Jesus followers, what sort of people are these based on the way that they live their lives. 

And I was thinking about the fact that the world was turned upside down, not primarily by church workers, people that were supported by local congregations to preach messages on Sunday; the world was turned upside down by ordinary, everyday disciples, followers of Jesus living out their faith, being Christian bakers and Christian blacksmiths and Christian whatever ‑‑ Christian wives and Christian children and Christian fathers and living out their faith in all of these contexts, and it changed the world. It turned the world upside down by people living this out in everyday life.

RUSTY: That’s right, and people notice that. And so I’ll just give you a couple of examples. One of my favorite stories so far is that ‑‑ so there was a person that I’m working with in this secular job, in this secular environment, and he knew my background as a preacher, and so he felt compelled to tell me that he was an atheist, and it’s like, okay, you know. But anyways, we worked together, and worked together really well, and, you know, hit it off and had a good connection and all of that. So at one point he comes to me and he wants to know about forgiveness, and so he asked me about forgiveness. Well, you know, what I know of forgiveness is how scripture teaches forgiveness, so I begin to kind of teach a lesson, so to speak, you know, the Christian standard of forgiveness and how Christianity defines forgiveness, things like that. So we’re talking about forgiveness. So anyway, I’m just thinking, okay, he was just interested in this topic and we had a great conversation and all that. A couple of months go by. He reaches out to me and he says, “Hey, do you have time for a quick call?” And we use Microsoft Teams, so a video call, and “Do you have time for a quick Teams call?” I’m like, “Sure.” So anyway, I get on this call and he says, “Hey, I just wanted to share something with you,” and said, “It’s pretty exciting to me. I couldn’t wait to share it with you.” I said, “Okay, yeah, what’s going on?” And he said, “Well, I just wanted you to know that I was able to forgive my mother.” And he had had some issues and things, you know, through childhood and all, and I said, “Wow, that’s huge. Tell me about it.” And so he’s just telling me about the experience, and you could just see that this huge weight had been lifted off of him. And he said, “You know, I never would have been able to do that if it hadn’t been for our conversation about forgiveness.” And, I mean, I’m just, you know ‑‑ sorry, I’m getting teared up thinking about it because I’m sitting there thinking, well, we’re just having ‑‑ he’s just interested in the topic of forgiveness, and I had no clue that all this other stuff is happening in his background and in his life. 

And so when he calls and says that, it was just one of those moments where you just go, okay, this is what I ‑‑ I’m where I need to be, and that’s not to pat myself on the back, but it’s just to say exactly what you said. The influence that we can have as Christ followers for the purpose of Christ is incredible if we will take the mission of Christ seriously, and instead of compartmentalizing our lives between church and work, but see that it’s all together, we have opportunities like this all the time. I have people at a state government agency ‑‑ maybe I shouldn’t be saying this on a podcast, I don’t know ‑‑ who call me and just ask me to pray for them. Well, I’m not advertising that or I don’t have some sign that says, hey, if you need prayer, call. It’s just they’re seeing Christ and they’re responding to that. And, again, that’s not highlighting myself, but it’s to say that God will put us in secular environments for this exact purpose, to show Christ. And when we lift up Christ, he does exactly what he promised he would do. He draws people to himself if we, his followers, will lift him up.

WES: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I was thinking ‑‑ I don’t know that we defined the word “minister” earlier, but, I mean, it just means to serve. To minister to people is to serve people, and if we see ‑‑ if every single one of us ‑‑ I am in full‑time church work and my work is a ministry, but so is your work a ministry, and so is the work of our sister who works at the front desk at the church building. Her work is a ministry, and so is the person who works at the government agency and the person who works at the school. Their work is a ministry and they’re serving people, not just to serve them ‑‑ anybody can serve ‑‑ but as you said, serving in the name of Jesus, and that service in the name of Jesus, it draws people to Jesus. I think, so often, when we think about our work, especially, quote‑unquote, “secular work,” and we divide it, we just are trying to get through it and we’re just trying to keep our head above water and just get through it and move on to things that are more important, whereas if we really adopted this way of thinking that you’re promoting, that I think scripture promotes, is seeing our work as a ministry to reach and influence other people. So what advice would you have for people that really want to reach their neighbors, they want to reach their co‑workers, but they’re not really sure how to go about that in the workplace?  

RUSTY: Yeah. Well, and before I answer that, I just want to go back to something you mentioned, that ‑‑ you know, earlier you were talking about how sometimes we think of the minister as ‑‑ we kind of leave it all to one person, you know, and all that. But what you just described, if we’re truly doing that, think about the reach that we would have as the church, that if we’re not just putting this on the shoulders of one person or one specialized group of paid ministers, but instead, every Christ follower is seeing that they have a mission to live out in their different contexts, now think of all the people that we’re able to reach for the cause of Christ, because, you know, I mean, you’ll reach people that I’ll never have the opportunity to meet or talk to, you know? I’ll reach people that you’ll never have the opportunity to meet and talk to. But if we’re both doing that, now, all of a sudden, the kingdom is expanding, you know, and so I just think about just the possibilities of what you described, and, to me, that’s so exciting. And I think it’s exciting to be part of the cause of Christ and to see that I can be part of it in my work, that I don’t have to leave what I’ve known and go ‑‑ I can be part of the cause of Christ right where I’m at, and that is really exciting to me.

But to get to your question about just, you know, how do we reach people in our work environments ‑‑ so I think about, again, the story of Daniel. You know, that’s part of a larger story so you think of one of Daniel’s contemporaries, Jeremiah. Think about what God says to the Israelites in Jeremiah 29, where he says, you know, “I have a plan for you.” He’s put them in this secular environment, but he has a purpose for them, and so he tells them to work, to marry, to have children, to live their lives, but he also tells them to seek the welfare of the city where they’ve gone because they’ll benefit from that, too, and then he also tells them to pray for the welfare of the city where they’ve been placed. And so, if I take that and put it in my context, well, then it tells me a couple of things. It teaches me a few things about how I can reach people in my environment or be on mission in my secular workplace. 

And so one is, I think, just accept the assignment. You know, I mean, in Jeremiah 29, God’s given the Israelites an assignment. Okay, you’re in this foreign place. You’re in this secular kingdom, but God has given them an assignment to live out while they’re there. So that’s the first thing, is I’ve got to accept the assignment that God has given me as a Christ follower. That assignment is true for us no matter where we are, no matter what we do for a living, and it really kind of goes to our identity, that being that disciple‑maker ‑‑ you know, that’s what I love about that story with Shodankeh Johnson, you know, “I’m a disciple‑maker who…” because what they’re doing is they’re identifying themselves first as a disciple‑maker, then, secondarily, I do this to make a living. Okay. So I accept the assignment, and so I’m going to be on mission for Christ. 

So, again, just going from Jeremiah 29, well, if I put that in my context, then I want to be part of the team, and that’s what God tells the Israelites. Be part of the community. Don’t separate yourself off, make yourself this own little clique. He’s saying be part of the community, be part of the city. So I want to be part of the team; I want to be with the team, you know, I want to be alongside the team. And so be part of the team that you work with at work, but also be a blessing to the team. That’s what God was telling the Israelites to do. Be a source of blessing to the people that you’re around and in the city you live in. And so, you know, in work, okay, how can I be a blessing to the people I work with and to the team I’m on? And I think about that in terms of how do I add value? What value can I add to this team? 

And then also pray for your team. So just as God told the Israelites to pray for the welfare of the city, I want to pray for my team. I want to pray for their welfare. And I do; I pray for my team by name, and I pray for the things that they have going on in their lives. But then, also, you know, we see God telling them to always be on God’s team. Okay, yeah, you’re part of this community, I want you to be part of this community, I want you to be a blessing to them, but remember that we’re always on God’s team. 

And so I think if we can keep those lessons in mind, again, it helps us to approach work. So, for example, like being part of the team and things like that, well, you know, there’s some lifestyle choices that some of my teammates make that I would not approve of, you know, scripture doesn’t approve of those kinds of things, but I still want to be part of that team because I can’t have influence if I just separate myself from that person or those people. I want to be part of the team. I don’t want to adopt their standards or their lifestyles or their beliefs or their values, but I still want to be among them and be part of them so that I can be an influence in their lives. You know, that story I told about the forgiveness, well, that would ‑‑ you know, like I said, he described himself as an atheist. Well, I would never have had that opportunity to have some kind of influence if I had just said, “Oh, well, you’re an atheist, then forget it. I can’t be part of you.” You know, God says, hey, be part of the community. So I think it’s important for us to really understand that, but, again, we’re there for a purpose, so always be on mission for God.

WES: I love it. It’s such practical advice. I think we would be remiss if we didn’t end with maybe pointing out some of the dangers, the pitfalls, the obstacles that we face. The examples that you’ve used about Daniel and then Jeremiah, they’re written to and written about people in exile, people that are, in a sense, behind enemy lines, and we do need to recognize that we are in exile. That doesn’t mean, as you said, that we withdraw and we have nothing to do with the people and say, “Well, we’re Christians and we have to be separate.” That’s what the Pharisees did. They were separatists. They didn’t want to have anything to do with people that weren’t like them. So we do want to be on the team, but there are also some dangers when you’re living in exile, when you’re living as God’s people in a foreign land, so help us to see some of the dangers we might look out for.

RUSTY: Yeah. Yeah, and I’m glad you brought this up because you’re exactly right, and we have to be aware of that. And, you know, that’s one of the things that scripture even encourages us to do, is we need to be wise and discerning of our environment and people that are around us and things like that. There are some real dangers. You know, I think about like in Daniel’s story ‑‑ well, part of the danger that he had to face was that he had people actively working against him. That may very well be one of the dangers that some of us face as Christ followers, you know, and so we may face some different threats, even feeling like we’re kind of being ostracized at work because of our faith and our beliefs and things like that. So there are some real dangers that we have to be aware of, but I think one of the biggest dangers is idolatry. I mean, as we know in scripture, I mean, this is kind of the foundational sin running throughout the narrative of scripture. And you think about idolatry, it’s ‑‑ you know, in a simple term or simple way, it’s really putting something above God or looking to something or someone instead of God for meaning and fulfillment, for comfort, even, for strength, things like that. So it’s replacing God with something, and so that means that even good things can become idols. And so work is a good thing, but even work can become an idol because I can make work the source of my identity, the source of my fulfillment, the source of my meaning in life, and replace God with work, and so I think we have to be really concerned about the dangers of idolatry in the workplace. 

And there’s several, but three that I have found and that I’ve kind of encountered in this transition of mine is ‑‑ I mean, I guess, four, because, like I mentioned, work itself can become an idol. But I think one workplace idol that we need to be really mindful of is the idol of success, and this is where we root our identity in our performance rather than in Christ or in God, and, man, that is so tempting, you know, because we want to be good at our jobs, we want to be recognized as being good, we want to be successful. I mean, you know, even when I was a full‑time preacher, I still had that draw. I want to be successful; I want to do good things and good work and things like that. The same is true in a secular environment, and so it’s really intoxicating, you know, to chase success, and so that can be a real danger because, now, if that’s where I’m getting my validation is in my achievements and recognitions and awards, well, now, you know, I am subtly ‑‑ sometimes not so subtly, but I am subtly getting off the Jesus path and I am getting off mission and now I become self‑serving rather than God‑serving. So I think success is one of those. 

I think money, obviously, is a big‑time idol that we have to be careful about. But what’s interesting is ‑‑ and there’s all kinds of studies and research about this ‑‑ is that money is also one of those examples of idols always overpromise and under‑deliver, because there’s a ton of research that shows that money does not accomplish what we think it will accomplish in our lives, and yet money can be a big idol.

And I also think fitting in is a workplace danger that can become an idol, and, to me, the challenge there is, you know, am I trying to please people more than I’m trying to please Christ? What am I doing? What’s really at the heart of my ambition here? And the reason I think of those three things is because, in a secular workplace environment, those are kind of the metrics that you measure yourself by, is how successful are you in terms of titles, promotion, all of those things? How much money you make is kind of the symbol of your worth, and your value is how much money you make, and then just fitting in and networking and being known. Man, that’s how people in a secular work environment are measuring themselves. 

And so I think we have to be careful at not falling, ourselves, into those traps, and, again, that can be really easy to do. And so I think about, just in terms of success, we’ve got to ‑‑ our standard of success has to be faithfulness. Am I being faithful? You know, I think about like Isaiah and Jeremiah. You know, they’re told to be these messengers for God, but if we were to measure their success by the standards we measure preachers today, they would be miserable failures, but they’re not failures because their measurement of success was they were faithful. They were faithful to the task that God gave them. And so that’s how I want to measure myself. Am I faithful to the task God has given me to carry out in this secular work environment?  And if I can stay focused on that, it can help me to not fall prey to these dangers of these workplace idols.

WES: Yeah. Oh, that’s so helpful because I think that ‑‑ even as we were talking about the idea of being on mission for God and doing this for Jesus and being in the workplace for the Lord and for influence and being a positive impact and ministering to other people, I think sometimes we can fool ourselves into thinking that’s what we’re doing when we’re really stoking our own ego, when we’re really doing things for selfish, idolatrous reasons, and we’re telling ourselves, oh, no, no, this is for the Lord, and I want to be in the in‑group so that I can influence them, and I want a better position because the better position I have, the more people I’ll be able to influence and reach for the Lord. And we tell ourselves that we’re doing it for the Lord, but, in reality, there’s an ulterior motive, and that’s why I think that there’s so much value in quiet time, in study of scripture, in prayer, in being introspective, because we have to examine our own motives and ask ourselves ‑‑ I love the question you come back to, faithfulness. Am I being faithful? And if I am, then I am a success. And the freedom, the liberty, the joy of knowing that I may not be the highest‑paid employee here, I might not be the most well‑liked person here, I might not be the person with the most prestigious job or office, but I am being faithful to Jesus, and that’s what really matters.

RUSTY: Absolutely right. And like you said, that’s something that requires constant introspection and examination. And so one of the things that I do just as a simple idea is ‑‑ so I have written out for myself what I call a workday startup prayer and a workday shutdown prayer. And so, I’m kind of an organized guy, but what that helps me to do is ‑‑ so I begin my workday with this same prayer, but I’ve written some specific things in that prayer that I want to be mindful of because it’s helping me to start my workday remembering what my real purpose is, where my identity comes from, that I want to be an instrument of peace and an ambassador of Christ in this place. And then I end my workday ‑‑ kind of a way to just kind of turn my brain off from work, you know, is I end my workday with another prayer that, again, is helping me to just kind of evaluate, okay, was I faithful today? You know, was I a good ambassador of Christ today? 

And so I think, just as followers of Christ in these secular environments facing these real dangers, we’ve got to put some things into the routines of our day that are helping us to stay on task, helping us to stay on mission and that incorporates some of that introspection and examination, because if I’m not doing that, it can be so easy for me to get sucked into measuring success in a worldly way and all of those kinds of things. So I think the point you made is really good, and I think we need to just adopt some disciplines and kind of rituals, so to speak, that help us to stay on task.

WES: I love that. I love the fact that you used the word “rituals,” that there are religious rituals that should be part of our, quote‑unquote, “secular work.” And, really, we keep using that term “secular” because we need sort of a handle to talk about it, but it really isn’t secular. For believers, it is religious work. The work that you’re doing now is just as religious, just as spiritual as the work you were doing before. It’s just as much ministry. In fact, Peter calls every believer part of the royal priesthood, that we are being priests, whether you’re a man, whether you’re a woman, whatever your job, whatever your role, even if you’re working at home. My wife is a stay‑at‑home mom and she is homeschooling our boys, but she is doing a priesthood work. She is doing ministry in our home. And if everybody thought of their workplace like that and thought of their workday that way, that I’m going into my realm of ministry where I am going to be a priest for the Lord and I’m going to bring the blessings of God to my co‑workers and to the customers and to the people I interact with, it would change the way that we do everything, and like you said, it would expand the work of ministry across every city and every state and every country throughout the world and would be what Jesus calls the kingdom to be, this leaven that is working through the lump of dough.

RUSTY: Yeah, absolutely. And you’re right; it changes how we think about our work. Now, all of a sudden, work is more exciting. And so here’s an interesting thought. So one of the things that’s happening in the workplace today, kind of across the board, is there’s real struggles with employee engagement. So a couple of years ago, kind of the buzzword was “quiet quitting,” things like that, and so employers are having a real challenge with retaining talented employees, things like that. Well, what’s interesting is one of the factors in that is that ‑‑ there’s a leadership group called McKinsey & Company, and they recently did a survey and found that 70% of the employees that they surveyed ‑‑ it was a large survey sample ‑‑ 70% say that work is their primary source of meaning and fulfillment in life. Okay, now think about this. One of the reasons for that is because here, within our country, we’ve seen kind of the role of the church or the influence of the church in culture has been in decline for some time. You know, we’re really shifting from kind of a religious culture to, now, very non‑religious, you know, in a lot of ways. So what that means is that fewer people are looking to God as a source of meaning, and so if you don’t have God, where does that come from? Well, work is kind of the only place that it can come from, but work cannot deliver what God is meant to deliver and what only God can deliver. And so I think there’s a lot of people that ‑‑ they’re frustrated by work because that’s the only place they’re looking for meaning and fulfillment, and they’re disappointed, you know, and disgruntled, and all of those kinds of things, and so they’re really frustrated with work and it’s because they’re looking to work to provide them with something that only their Creator can do. 

So as followers of Jesus, we get this, but, again, we can be tempted to make work the source of our meaning and our fulfillment. We can be just as tempted to do that as others. But when we keep work in its proper perspective, like what we’ve been talking about, now work is energizing and I can also deal with the frustrations at work in a more positive and productive way because work is not the ultimate source of my meaning or even of my identity. And so I think if we can put work back in its scriptural perspective, I think not only will we be more satisfied, will be more energized at work, but also we’ll be able to see how the kingdom of God and the opportunities we have to be on mission for the kingdom of God are literally all around us and we can take more advantage of that.

WES: Yeah. Amen. Amen. What a great place to stop. Rusty, thank you for this conversation, and thank you for your work in the kingdom, Brother.

RUSTY: Well, thank you, Wes. I love the podcast. Love what you’re doing, so keep on going, Brother.

The post Every Christian is a Minister appeared first on Radically Christian.

Do you struggle to understand the book of Revelation? This episode of the Radically Christian Bible Study Podcast addresses the common problems and misconceptions that people have when reading the book of Revelation. Many find it to be a confusing and scary book of the Bible. However, today’s guest, Garrett Best, explains that Revelation doesn’t have to be scary and that it is actually a highly relevant and encouraging book for Christians today.

The discussion delves into the importance of understanding the genre and context of Revelation in order to properly interpret its symbolism and message. Key biblical concepts explored include Revelation’s role as prophecy, its connection to the Old Testament, and its central themes of exclusive allegiance to God and faithful witness in the face of cultural pressure and conflict. The episode aims to equip listeners with a framework for reading Revelation that focuses on its original purpose and application.

Garrett Best is an associate professor and chair of the Department of Bible and Ministry at York University in Nebraska. He initially avoided studying the book of Revelation, but was eventually drawn to it and ended up writing his dissertation on the book. Best shares his journey of coming to appreciate and champion the relevance of Revelation for the church today, providing valuable insights for listeners seeking to better understand this crucial but often misunderstood biblical text.

Links and Resources

• Watch This Episode on YouTube
• Sponsor: Freed Hardeman’s Graduate School of Theology
• Revelation and the End of All Things by Craig Koester
• Reading Revelation Responsibly by Michael Gorman
• Foretaste of the Future by Dean Flemming
• The Anchor Bible Commentary on Revelation by Craig Koester

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)

The book of Revelation doesn’t have to be scary. My guest today will help you see how encouraging and relevant this book is for your life. My guest is Garrett Best, associate professor and chair of the Department of Bible and Ministry at York University in Nebraska. This is a deep and rich conversation about Revelation. I know you’re going to enjoy it. 

But before we get to that, I want to read from Revelation 22 that says, “Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city; also, on either side of the river, the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each month. The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. No longer will there be anything accursed, but the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him. They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. And night will be no more. They will need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever.” 

I hope that this conversation is encouraging to you and, as always, I hope it helps all of us learn to love like Jesus.

WES: Garrett Best, welcome to the podcast, Brother.

GARRETT: Thank you so much.

WES: Well, thanks for being here. I am incredibly excited about having you on the podcast for the first time, but also just talking about Revelation. This is one of those books that it either fascinates people or horrifies people, and maybe somewhere in between. Before we really even jump into it, why don’t you tell us how you got interested in a book like Revelation.  

GARRETT: Yeah. So I, like any good Christian, spent my whole life avoiding it, which I feel like that’s what you’re supposed to do, right? And so I was ‑‑ I’m trying to think back. I mean, as I was growing up in church, if we talked about anything from Revelation, it was the seven letters to the seven churches from chapters 2 or 3, but any of the other stuff, we just didn’t know what to do with, and so I don’t remember ever having a class on it or having anything in church about the book of Revelation. 

So I did a Bible major, an undergrad, and never took a class in Revelation; I went and did a Masters of Divinity at another institution and never took a class on Revelation, and so I managed to get all of these degrees and never read the book. And then I get to a PhD program where I intended to study the Gospels and maybe Acts, and there was a particular professor that I already knew I wanted to have on my dissertation committee, so I was kind of forced to take whatever was being offered. And so I go to register for classes one semester, and the only course that was ‑‑ New Testament course that was being offered was Revelation, and I thought, you have got to be kidding me. And this professor ‑‑ you would probably know the name, Craig Keener ‑‑ has written a commentary on the book of Revelation and is the most brilliant scholar, I think, out there ‑‑ or at least one of them. And so I was so nervous, and so I was thrown into the fire to have to, like, make up for a lifetime of avoiding Revelation in that class, and so I had to figure out something to write on. Like I had to ‑‑ we had to write a paper for the class, so I ended up choosing a topic. I wrote the paper, and when the professor came to hand the papers back to us, he said, “All of you did great. You did fine, got good grades, but there’s two of you that I wrote on your paper you’ve got to keep going with this.” And I get my paper back, and it says, “You’ve got to keep going with this,” and I said, you’ve got to be kidding me.  Like I can’t get away from this book, you know? 

And so that ended up leading to writing my dissertation on the book of Revelation, and now I have been converted and I’m a believer. I really do believe that this is the book that we need for, like, our cultural moment right now. And right after I took my exams, the pandemic hit, and we had people at our church, you know, saying wearing a mask is the mark of the beast and these sorts of things, and so it just became very real for me. And God works in mysterious ways, and I’ve just seen how leading me to Revelation was kind of one of those mysterious ways he’s worked in my life.

WES: Yeah. I love how it finally caught up to you but you’re glad that it did. 

GARRETT: Absolutely.

WES: Let me ask this: What is it about Revelation that makes it so mysterious, seemingly inaccessible, that people want to avoid it and don’t want to dig into it? What is it about the particular type of literature or the way that it’s written that makes it difficult for Christians to read?

GARRETT:  Sure. I have to tell you something that a good friend of mine, John Young, shared with me once. He said, “If anyone ever comes up to you at church and says that they really want to teach the book of Revelation, never let them teach the book of Revelation,” because, for some reason, this book really

gives us two kind of opposite responses. On the one hand, we just avoid it because we don’t know what to do with it; but on the other hand, I think another reason we stay away from it is it’s attracted a certain type of person to this book who comes in and actually thinks they know everything about it and has all these secrets that they’ll reveal to you about what’s going to happen in the upcoming election and what the conflict with Israel and Gaza means, you know, and how it’s related to the book of Revelation. 

And so we see these, like, really polar opposite ‑‑ just extreme avoidance or just overwhelming interest ‑‑ and we kind of just ‑‑ it’s just easier not to talk about it. I think there’s a couple reasons for that. One is that when we talk about Revelation, we’re talking about a particular genre of literature, and, actually, the genre that we call it is ‑‑ we call it apocalypsis, or an apocalyptic work. And the name of that whole category of literature actually comes from Revelation 1:1, the apocalypsis of Jesus Christ, the revelation, the revealing of Jesus Christ. 

And genre is so important for interpreting a work, anything. So right now my son and I are reading The Hobbit at night together, and if I start a work and it says, “Once upon a time,” I’m not going to leave that reading and go worry that there’s really, like, dragons out there. And it’s that phrase, “once upon a time,” that tells me I’m engaging in fiction here. If we watch a fiction movie in the same way that we do a documentary, then we’re going to be really lost and really confused and really scared, actually. 

And so genre is so important when we’re interpreting something, and when it comes to Revelation, it’s actually a genre that we don’t encounter. We don’t see very many apocalyptic texts because, outside of the book of Revelation, at least in our Bibles, there’s only one other section, it’s the second half of Daniel, so Daniel 7‑12, that we would call apocalyptic. And then there are a few subsections, like Isaiah 24‑27 is called the little apocalypse, and you have Zechariah 12‑14 and Joel 3, so you have these minor sections here and there. But even in the book of Daniel, like if you were to ask your audience, they probably know quite a bit about the three young men in the furnace and Daniel in the lion’s den, but once we get to 7 through 12, that section’s like ‑‑ stay away from that; it’s a different kind of thing. 

But what I like to tell people is about 200 years on either side of the book of Revelation, so from about 200 BC to 200 AD, we have about 37 apocalypses that have survived, so the Jews knew how to read this. They had apocalypses: First Enoch, Second Enoch, Second Baruch, Fourth Ezra, Apocalypse of Abraham. Christians loved apocalyptic texts, as well. In fact, one of the earliest literatures that Christians love that is not in the New Testament is The Shepherd of Hermas, which is an apocalyptic text. And so Christians and Jews, around the time of the writing of Revelation, knew how to read this genre, and we just don’t, and that is one of the reasons that we, I think, have a hard time with it, which is why we need nerdy people to come in and read those other apocalypses and see how they work and figure out kind of how this genre works so it will help us understand and interpret the book of Revelation. So that’s one reason I would say. And then, when you do that, what you see is that the other apocalypses, they communicate profound messages but they do it through things like symbolism, through images, through drawing on myths that are out there through the use of like symbolic numbers and things like that, and so I think the genre issue is a big issue for us.

A second reason that I think we really struggle with the book of Revelation is because, of every New Testament text, there are more allusions to the Old Testament in the book of Revelation than any other. It is ‑‑ I tell my students, if we took Revelation and rang it out, it would just drip with Old Testament text. And here’s the thing about it, there’s not a single quotation of the Old Testament. There’s no quotes. So whereas in the Gospel of Matthew, “This was done to fulfill,” you know, and then it has a quote, there’s none of those in Revelation. And so the numbers of the allusions actually varies pretty wildly, where you have some who would put the number around 300, and you have some that would place the number as high as 600. In 22 chapters, we have hundreds of allusions to the Old Testament, so you might even recognize some of these, but Balaam and Jezebel in the letters to the seven churches; Babylon is a major allusion in there; even Armageddon, you know, that gets a lot of press with Revelation. Well, Armageddon is Har Megiddo, which is an Old Testament city that shows up in references all over the Old Testament. And so, in the same way that you have Jezebel, you have a reference to an ancient city that’s mentioned all over the Old Testament, Megiddo. 

Another instance would be, when we look in Revelation 4, you’ve got these four creatures that have a face like a lion, an ox, an eagle, and a man. Those creatures come straight out of Ezekiel 1. We get all bent out of shape about the number 666 and the mark of the beast and this idea of being marked on the forehead. Well, that concept of being marked on the forehead comes straight out of Ezekiel chapter 9, so it’s like everything in Revelation that we struggle with ‑‑ almost nothing in Revelation is new; it’s all from the Old Testament, and I just find that most Christians ‑‑ we don’t know our Old Testaments, and so one of the things that we struggle with is so much of this is dependent on the Old Testament, and we don’t know it. 

And then the third reason would be, this is addressed to seven churches in Asia Minor in the first century, and that was a very different culture than our own. It was a very different world than our own that was dealing with certain circumstances that they would have known about. But we are kind of reading someone else’s mail, in a sense, and because we don’t know the world of the first century or we don’t understand first‑century Asia Minor, I think that causes us a little bit of difficulty in interpreting the book. So, yeah, that would just be some general things. This is a unique book in our Bible because it’s apocalyptic genre; it’s saturated in Old Testament images and we’re not as familiar with our Old Testament as maybe we wish we were or used to be, or whatever that might be the case; and then I think that it’s written to churches in first‑century Asia Minor, and we don’t know that world.

WES: Yeah, yeah. Great thoughts. If somebody was going to get over that hurdle of not wanting to approach this book and they were going to study it, maybe they’re doing their Bible reading throughout the year and they’re getting to Revelation at some point later on in this year or maybe they’re just wanting to study it, do a deep dive into Revelation, what would be some of the pitfalls that you’d want to warn people ahead of time, to say, “Hey, when you’re reading it, when you’re studying it, be careful of this, or look out for this, or here’s some common mistakes that people make when they’re reading it,” and help them to avoid some of that stuff?  

GARRETT: Sure. I think the best way to answer that question is ‑‑ I just said that it’s really important to interpret the book by genre, and so I think that the biggest pitfalls that we fall into are not interpreting the book according to a genre. And so if I were answering that, I would say I think that we need to think about the genre of Revelation in order to interpret it well. And what’s interesting about the genre of Revelation is it’s kind of a mix a little bit. So, first, it is very clear that Revelation is a letter written to seven churches in Asia Minor. It begins with an epistolary pre‑script, and it kind of ends like a letter does. I mean, if we compare it to the letters of Paul, it begins with an address to the audience; it concludes with this kind of blessing. Then, of course, you have, in chapters 2 and 3, those seven oracles ‑‑ I call them oracles ‑‑ but oracles to the seven churches. So it’s very clearly this like contextualized message to those seven churches. 

And so, with that in mind, then, I think the pitfall is not interpreting it as a message to those seven churches, and so I think because we don’t know what else to do with the book, we just have to do what we as Americans like to do, which is make it all about us because we just don’t know what else to do. And that’s kind of what our initial impulse is when we read scripture, is what does this mean for me? And so we ‑‑ that’s just ‑‑ and I think that’s kind of a pitfall. 

And so I was just this week reading ‑‑ I just saw an article, and somehow I missed this, and I’m honestly not sad that I missed it, but it was in some newspaper in Arkansas and it was a preacher who had written this article about whether ‑‑ it was around an election season. It was whether President Obama was the Antichrist, and that was the title of the paper. Well, the paper actually had to publish and recant their title and issue an apology because the author got upset because he actually didn’t argue that Obama was the Antichrist; he argued whether Obama was the seventh king of Revelation 17, and so they were having this back‑and‑forth, you know. But I tell my students, I say, “If whatever your interpretation of the book is would not have made sense to someone sitting in Pergamum in the first century, it’s probably not right,” and I think that not just about Revelation, I think that about Paul’s letters, too. I think that about the Gospels. I think we have to first interpret them as messages to their original audiences before we can sort of ask what they mean for us. So that would be one pitfall, is not actually taking into account that this is written to those seven churches. 

The second pitfall that I think that we make is the letters ‑‑ Revelation is not only a letter, it’s also a prophecy. So in chapter 1, verse 3; in chapter 22, verse 7, 10, 18, and 19, it refers to itself as “the words of the book of the prophecy.”  It calls itself a book of prophecy. In chapter 10, verse 11, the author says his God‑given calling is to prophesy, and in chapter 22, verse 9, the author describes himself as kind of being in a circle of prophets in Asia Minor in the first century. And so it’s very clearly a prophetic book and so we have to interpret it, then, as a prophecy, and I think the pitfall is that we tend to equate prophecy with future‑telling, when I think prophecy is more accurately understood as forth‑telling. And so because John has so saturated this work and actually even structured ‑‑ I don’t know if people are aware of this, but the entire book of Revelation is structured after the book of Ezekiel. I don’t know if people knew this. The whole structure is like Ezekiel, and it makes sense that John would see himself like Ezekiel. So Ezekiel is a prophet who’s in exile. Well, where is John? Ezekiel starts off by saying, “I am on, you know, this ‑‑ by the River Kebar.” Well, John says, “I’m also by a body of water; I’m out here on this island.” You know, Ezekiel says, “I saw visions of heaven.” Well, John says, “I saw visions of heaven” to people who are in exile, who are living in Babylon. And so, I think John says, “I’m doing the same thing Ezekiel did.” Well, what did Ezekiel do? The prophets in the Old Testament are not simply telling the future. There is some future‑telling elements to what they do, but that’s not all that they did. Really, what they’re doing is they’re forth‑telling God’s truth to the powers that be. They’re delivering oracles to the powers that be. Sometimes those oracles are given towards God’s own people, Israel, but most of the time they’re actually against Babylon and Assyria and Egypt and Tyre and those other nations that are out there. They’re speaking truth to power. 

And so, I think, as we read the book of Revelation, if we’re going to interpret it well, to understand that the book is meant to be prophecy and that it is not meant to just be like telling things that are going to happen way off in the future in Russia or Gaza, you know, in 2024, but it’s speaking truth to power in its own day, and in this case, the target seems to be Babylon. Well, Babylon is an interesting thing in the book of Revelation. It’s called “the great city.” It’s used multiple times. We have another interesting reference in 1 Peter 5:13, where it seems like, in another New Testament book, the city of Rome is kind of referred to as Babylon, so that seems to be a theme there. But we also have some other apocalypses, like Fourth Ezra and Second Baruch, that refer to Rome as Babylon, so this seems to be a thing that apocalyptists were used to doing, is drawing a connection between Rome and Babylon as the major world power. And it certainly makes sense, if this is written after 70, when just like Babylon did in 586, Rome has done in the destruction of Jerusalem in the temple in 70. I think there are just clear references in the book of Revelation that Babylon is Rome. So in chapter 17, verse 9, “she is seated on seven hills” ‑‑ well, this is a picture that everyone would have known of the Goddess Roma seated on the seven hills. This is literally printed on their coins. And what is the city set on seven hills? It’s Rome. So I think there’s just clear indications that Rome ‑‑ and so just like Ezekiel did in his day, John is speaking truth to power, and I think that we’ve missed something about the book when we don’t understand its prophetic spirit.  

And then the third thing ‑‑ so letter, prophecy; third one is apocalypse. When we understand that it’s using symbols and imagery to teach, then we are interpreting it well. And what I find happens a lot of times is that it’s very clear that the book is using numbers in this symbolic way. You know, “seven” is completion and perfection, and “four” is an important number. And anytime you see “twelve,” it’s the people of God, like the twelve tribes or the twelve apostles. But then we get to the number 666 and we just lose our minds. We see that time seems to work in unusual ways, but then we get to the 1,000 years and we lose our minds. And so it’s sort of losing sight of how apocalyptic imagery and symbolism works. I think that’s one way that we end up doing this. 

And I think John actually ‑‑ even if you’ve never read another apocalypse, John actually trains us in that first chapter on what he’s doing with this imagery. So, for example, he says, you know, he sees seven lampstands, and whenever we read that we just go, what is he talking about? What are the lampstands? He says, you know, in his right hand he has seven stars. And we just go, what is this? I don’t know what to do with this. Well, in verse 20 of chapter 1, he says, “I saw the seven stars in the right hand, and the seven stars are the angels of the seven churches and the seven lampstands are the churches.” He’s sort of giving you a clue, whenever you see this imagery, whatever the image is, whatever the symbol is, you need to be asking, what does this represent? What does this mean? What does it stand for? 

And so I think when we forget to interpret it like a letter, when we forget to interpret it as prophecy, speaking truth to power, and when we forget that we’re supposed to be interpreting it according to the ways that you would interpret the symbolism of an apocalypse, I think we get lost. And I don’t know if you want to talk about this ‑‑ I’ll leave this up to you ‑‑ but, I mean, I think the main way that this is being kind of drawn into our culture right now is through these Left Behind readings, through, you know, Hal Lindsey and Late Great Planet Earth. I mean, when Kirk Cameron and when Nicolas Cage are starring in Left Behind movies, I think this is sort of dominating the kind of cultural perspective on what’s happening in the book, and, to me, all of those readings only happen if you are not interpreting it as a letter and a prophecy and the way that I think first‑century apocalypses should be interpreted.

WES: Yeah. Well, I think I think that there’s both those that read Revelation that way, sort of that premillennial dispensationalism and adopting that sort of Left Behind mentality and reading the newspaper in one hand and the book of Revelation in the other hand, but then I think that there are so many people, especially in our fellowship, who avoid Revelation because they have learned to interpret it and just say, well, you know, it is a ‑‑ you know, a “scary book,” quote‑unquote. We’ll get to that in a second, but they look at it and they say, “But it’s all ‑‑ it’s all done. Like that has nothing to do with us now.” And I think that maybe there’s an overreaction that direction, and we sort of lose the relevance for ‑‑ what relevance does it have for us now? 

But let’s kind of talk about what was the relevance then? I think that so many people read Revelation and they just say, “That’s a terrifying book.” I always tell people, “If you’re scared when you finish reading Revelation, you probably didn’t read it correctly because it’s not supposed to be scary.” But what is the point? Like if you were a Christian in Asia Minor and you were part of one of these churches, especially one of the faithful churches that’s receiving this revelation, this revealing, this apocalypse, what were you supposed to get out of it? What was supposed to be the application of it in the first century?  

GARRETT: Yeah. So I said earlier the only part I think I ever heard anybody talk about were those seven letters to the seven churches in chapters 2 and 3, and so most people who have at least attempted to read the book or have ever heard the church try to address this have at least heard those seven letters. And I think we could start there in talking about what it’s supposed to do because those seven letters actually play a really important role in the book of Revelation. So what those seven letters are doing is setting up the issues that the rest of the vision is addressing. 

So in chapter 1, you get this incredible vision of the exalted Jesus that is drawing on the Old Testament, Daniel 7 and 10, and then that Jesus is delivering messages to these seven churches in Asia Minor. And because all the churches are in Asia Minor, they’re actually not that far up the road from one another, and we can imagine that the situations in these churches are actually kind of similar. And so what is going on in one church is likely also happening in some of the other churches, and so let’s pay attention to what’s going on on the ground in these seven churches. And if we read those seven oracles very clearly, I think we see at least three categories of distinct things that the rest of the book is trying to address. 

So the first thing that we see in those seven letters is that there is conflict with outsiders. The church is experiencing conflict, and it comes from a couple of different directions. So in the church in Smyrna and Philadelphia, they’re being slandered, it looks like, by local synagogues, and at least in Smyrna, the synagogue is denouncing them to local government because then the Roman officials ‑‑ it says some of you are gonna be put into prison for 10 days. Well, the synagogue has no power to imprison people, so this is now the government getting involved in this. But the most extreme example is in chapter 2, verse 13. In the city of Pergamum, there’s a guy named Antipas that we don’t know anything about who was martyred, and so people are even losing their life. And so the conflict ranges from, like, slander to being put into prison to even being martyred. And so this is a huge thing that’s happening in the book of Revelation, is addressing this conflict that the people of God are feeling from those outside, and that’s even from other religious communities, like the synagogue, but also from Roman authorities. So that’s the first thing that’s going on. 

The second thing that’s going on is there is a cultural pressure to assimilate. And what we see happening in these churches is that there are some named false teachers. So in Pergamum and Thyatira, we learn about Balaam and Jezebel. Now, again, those are two Old Testament names, so it’s not really their names. It’s just whatever you know about Jezebel and Balaam in the Old Testament, you need to bring that forward, you know, and apply to these two individuals. And who are Jezebel and Balaam in the Old Testament? They are people who are trying to lead the people of God astray and trying to harm the people of God. Well, we also have another individual named in chapter 2, verse 15, Nicolas, and there’s a group that follows him, the Nicolaitans, and in Ephesus, we read about a group of false teachers. So what’s going on with all of these? Well, John actually tells us in Revelation that they’re accused of two things. They’re teaching the Christians to assimilate to culture, and it mentions two things, sexual immorality and idolatry. 

Now, one of the things we need to know about idolatry in the first‑century world, in Asia Minor in particular, is that when we hear “idolatry,” we think about worshiping the gods, and that is absolutely a part of idolatry. So Zeus and Artemis and all of these people, Apollo ‑‑ those absolutely are involved in idolatry. But one way that idolatry takes a unique shape in Asia Minor is that, outside of the city of Rome, Asia Minor is the seat of emperor worship, and that at almost any temple of a god or goddess, a deity, you would have found a local imperial cult to the emperor. Now, why is that? This goes all the way back to 29 BC, where the first imperial cult temple built outside of Rome is built in the city of Pergamum. Outside of Rome, it is the center of emperor worship. There’s another imperial cult temple built in 26 AD, and it’s built in the city of Smyrna, and there’s another one that’s built in 89 to 90 AD, and that’s built in the city of Ephesus. Do those sound familiar ‑‑ Pergamum, Smyrna, and Ephesus? Outside of Rome, this is where the worship of the emperor happens, and outside of those official imperial cult temples, any temple you would have gone to, to Artemis or any of the others, would have been also dedicated to an emperor. There would have at least have been a shrine there where you could worship the emperor, and so Christians seem to be lulled into that. They seem to be lulled towards worship of the emperor, idolatry. They seem to be lulled towards sexual immorality, and so Revelation is speaking into that. 

And then the third thing that we see in these letters is these churches are growing complacent in their faith, and part of that is that cultural pull. So in Sardis, he says, “You have the appearance of being alive, but you’re really dead.” The one that most people are probably familiar with is Ephesus, “You have lost your first love.” In Laodicea, they’re actually saying, “I am rich; I have prospered; I am in need of nothing.” If there’s anything that lulls you into complacency, it’s wealth and ease, and he’s telling Laodicea, “It’s too good. Life is too good.  You’re kind of losing your zeal and your faith.” So those three things, I would say, are what’s happening in the churches:  conflict with outsiders, complacency in their faith, and a pressure to assimilate to culture, and the rest of the vision responds to that. 

And so we have so much we could talk about, but I’ll just mention two. I’ll just mention two ways the rest of the vision responds to that. One is that right after you have those seven oracles to the seven churches and it lays out those three issues that are happening on the ground, what’s the next thing that comes in chapters 4 and 5? It’s the vision of John is invited to look into heaven and there he sees a throne and the one seated on the throne. That word “throne” is going to show up 47 times in the book. And so the first vision that you get is the vision of the throne and the one seated on the throne, and you have to look up to heaven to see it. And I think the effect of that is to say, how do you endure? How do you survive being thrown into prison for ten days? How do you survive being martyred like Antipas was? Well, you do it by looking to the real throne where the real authority lies. You know, how do you shake people loose who’ve grown complacent in their faith, who are, like, tempted on Friday night to go hang out down in Artemis’ temple? Well, you point them to the one throne that ought to have their heart and their attention, that ought to have their sole allegiance. And so one of the ways that this book does this is by calling them back to worship around the true throne and to keep their eyes on that throne, and as soon as you take your eyes off of that throne, where the one seated on the throne is, and the Lamb, then you’re going to get in all sorts of trouble.

And people don’t realize there’s actually a plot in Revelation. The plot starts in those letters, because in the city of Pergamum, chapter 2, verse 13, Pergamum is the place where Satan’s throne is. There’s a throne that Satan has set up and that throne shows back up in chapter 13. And one of the things we see in chapter 13 is that one of Satan’s most effective strategies in this world to get people to take their eyes off of the throne of the one seated on the throne and the Lamb is to place earthly kings on an earthly throne and to call attention from the people of earth to worship around that throne instead of the throne of the one who’s seated on it with the Lamb.  And if that’s not a message for our day, you know? And so this is one of the ways that Revelation does this. 

I mean, one of the reasons we love Revelation ‑‑ I would say this book has had more effect on our hymns than any other book in the New Testament, and in the book of Revelation there are 15 hymns. Why is there so much singing? Because the book is about orienting your worship around where it ought to be oriented, which is the throne of the one seated on it and the Lamb. And that’s a huge ‑‑ and so the book poses this question: What throne are you at? Are you worshipping before that throne, or are you worshipping before Satan’s throne with earthly kings on it? Are you living for Babylon, where Satan’s throne is set up, or are you living for the New Jerusalem, which is where God’s throne is? Which world are you living in? Ask that stark question. So one way that it addresses those things is this question of who you worship, where you worship. 

The second way that I would mention ‑‑ there are so many things we could say, but the second I would say is it addresses this question by the theme of faithful witness. So the very first thing that’s said in the book is in chapter 1, verse 4 and 5. The very first thing said about Jesus is he’s the faithful witness, and then the next faithful witness we meet is in chapter 2, verse 13, Antipas. And how did he be a faithful witness? Well, he gave up his life. And then, in the very center of the book ‑‑ and by center, I mean, literally and figuratively, it is the very central chapter, chapter 11, and everything that has been before it is leading up to chapter 11 and everything that plays out after it is playing out chapter 11. It’s, I think, the central message of the book. We’ve been introduced to the scroll and the seven seals have been popped off, one by one. We’re like, what does this thing say? Well, chapter 11 is what it says, and what does it say? It’s a message about two witnesses. There’s that word again. And the witnesses ‑‑ the short version here ‑‑ have all kinds of characteristics of the people of God, and the biggest characteristic I’d point out is it says the two witnesses are two lampstands. There’s our word again that we just ‑‑ John told us in 1:20 what to do when we hear about lampstands. It’s the church.

I think the call in chapter 11 is for the people reading this book. It’s for us. It’s for Christians. What are we supposed to be? Just like Antipas, we’re supposed to be faithful witnesses in our world. Witnesses to what? Witnesses to exclusive allegiance to the one who’s seated on the throne and to the Lamb. And we fail in that calling when we take our eyes off of that throne and misplace our worship. And so the call of the book is, who are you worshiping? And wherever you are planted, whatever city you are in, you are supposed to be a faithful witness to the one seated on the throne and to the Lamb. And that’s sort of two ways I think that this book addresses those churches. 

You know, there is a lot of judgment in the book. There’s also a lot of hope in the book, and I think the message to those Christians is, to those of you that are hurting, that are suffering because you’re not going to the temple on Friday night, to those of you that are, you know, not compromising your faith and worshiping the emperor, there is hope coming for you. But for those of you that are compromising, you have hitched your cart to the wrong horse. You are headed towards, you know, something that is not going to be enjoyable, and so I do think that’s kind of the function of a lot of that judgment and hope in the book.

WES: I’m so glad that you used the word “exclusive,” exclusive allegiance to Jesus. As you were talking, I kept thinking about both what was happening in the first century then, but also going back to Israel’s history, what led to their captivity in Babylon in the first place, and that was syncretism. They never got to the point, of course, where they exclusively worshiped foreign gods, but they always tried to have Yahweh plus these other gods. And I think one of the things that ‑‑ to make this a little bit more about our time, and now an application, you know, I think one of the things that we’ve tended to do is compartmentalize our lives so much that we don’t even realize when we’re being idolatrous, specifically when it comes to the area of politics, and we have this tendency to think, well, that has nothing to do with my religion; that has nothing to do with Jesus. And yet we give our allegiance, our devotion, our loyalty to a party, to a flag, to a person, to a politician, whatever, and not realizing the divided allegiance. You used the word “compromise,” how much we’re compromising our allegiance and loyalty. 

So to kind of take this book and say what relevance does this have for us now ‑‑ it’s not the relevance, I don’t think, that so many want, to look at the newspaper and look at Revelation, but I think there is a way we can look at Revelation and look at the newspaper and say we have the tendency to fall into the same sinful traps. Even followers of Jesus, we have the tendency to fall into these same traps and give our loyalty to other gods or to ‑‑ I mean, it seems what you’re saying, that Caesar and the worship of Caesar, this imperial cult ‑‑ he doesn’t ever say that specifically, but he says “the throne of Satan,” and it is ‑‑ it’s a very stark contrast. And so help us to see the relevance for how do we take this and use this to help us navigate our current political or just cultural world?  

GARRETT: Yeah. I will add that I think the imperial cult is so obviously there, particularly in chapter 13. Chapter 13 is a satire of the imperial cult. So you have the first beast, who comes from the sea; it has seven heads. Well, I wish John had said it here in 13, but he saves it to chapter 17, where he says the seven heads are seven kings. Well, who would that have been for people living in the Roman Empire, right? And then he says everyone, every nation, language, tribe, and tongue, falls down to worship the beast. Who can defeat the beast? And they fall before his throne and worship him. Well, how would they have understood that? Of course, you know, they understand that. And then the second beast comes along, and its whole job is to set up images and get the whole world to worship the first beast, who are the seven kings. What is that? That’s imperial cult.

We don’t have time to talk about this, but the number 666 is so clearly, I think, Nero Caesar. It’s sort of a reference to a particular king, and so receiving his mark is worshipping him. It’s bowing the knee to Caesar. It’s bowing the knee to these kings. It’s giving in to that imperial cult, so that is so very clearly here in this book. I tell my students ‑‑ I ask them, “Do you feel like the church is divided over politics?” And they say, “Absolutely.” And I say, “It’s almost as if ‑‑ what if we had a New Testament book that spoke directly to this,” you know? “Oh, yeah, we do.” We’ve just not read it or at least not understood it. And I believe that in the unveiling, in the revelation ‑‑ and I think that’s what Revelation is, is it pulls the curtain back and it shows us what’s really going on in the world, and what Revelation shows us, when the curtain is pulled back, is to say that one of Satan’s biggest strategies ‑‑ Satan ‑‑ if you follow chapter 13, it’s actually Satan’s throne, but he lets these other kings sit on it, and that is what it reveals to us. That is one of his biggest strategies in the world, is to use worldly thrones to distract us from our worship of the one seated around the throne. 

I see this all the time in politics. I see Christians today sharing things, like ‑‑ you know, one of the ones that I saw sharing was, obviously, recently. In recent American politics, building walls has been an important topic and controversial topic, southern border wall. And there was a prominent pastor from Texas, actually, who was going on TV and saying, “There’s even gonna be a wall in heaven; Revelation says so, and so this justifies building a wall.” Well, I don’t want to get into the politics of that, but as someone who cares deeply about interpreting Revelation well, did this pastor read Revelation 21:24‑26 that says the gates of the wall will never be shut and people will come into it day and night? It’s like people are even misusing Revelation in some of these conversations, and it concerns me deeply because I care about interpreting Scripture well. 

I think what Revelation is trying to do for us is to get the people of God to develop a kind of discernment so that we can see. It’s a go‑and‑do‑likewise strategy, so that in the same way that Revelation pulls this curtain back and shows its first‑century audience how to recognize what their gaze is being taken off of, you know, I think we’re supposed to see that same thing. And as I look around our church, you know, our culture, is there a more relevant text than a text that addresses complacency due to wealth, you know, assimilating to culture and, in particular, idolatry in the form of imperial cult worship, worshiping emperors and dealing with conflict with outsiders? That’s why I say I’ve been converted to believe that this is actually the most relevant text for our moment, and it’s trying to get us to cultivate those kinds of eyes of faith to see the world clearly, to develop this kind of discernment to see when this is happening, to see how the devil, Satan, uses imperial propaganda to lure people in, uses all of these visual and mythic and otherwise, you know, ways of drawing people in, to say, no, you can’t have your attention given from exclusive allegiance to the Lamb, and so we do that through our witness that our allegiance is only to the one seated on the throne and the Lamb. 

And so I think ‑‑ around election time, I think we actually are compromising our witness. We’re not showing that sort of faithful witness that’s expressed. So how do we do that? Well, one is prophetic resistance. It’s a prophecy. It’s speaking truth to power, and whatever politician on whatever side of the aisle, we ought to be the first people speaking truth. And I don’t know where we got this idea that we cannot speak up on one side of the aisle or [that means] we support the other side of the aisle. No. Faithfulness requires prophetic resistance and witness. That’s what witness is, is we speak for truth when there’s idolatry and injustice, and I think that’s the vision that Revelation actually cares about. 

I think the other thing that Revelation is trying to do is put us on mission. I know most people would not read this as a missional text, but just go through and circle every time that the book of Revelation mentions “the nations.” God cares what happens to the nations. And that passage I just referenced, you know, the tree of life shows up there again in Revelation 21 and 22, and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. The people of God now ought to be participating in the healing of the nations. So I could go on and on, but it’s so good. But yes, I think this is absolutely a message for our time, and it would save us so much heartache in our election season if we would imbibe this message even more.

WES: Yeah, absolutely. Amen. Not to go too far down this rabbit hole, but when you brought up about the idea of misusing Revelation in order to sort of support one side of the aisle or the other, I was asked by somebody not too long ago about the mark of the beast and what is the mark of the beast, and do you think ‑‑ I won’t even mention what it is that he was referencing ‑‑ “And do you think this might be the mark of the beast?” And I said, ironically, over the last 2,000 years, there have been so many Christians who have actually adopted the mark of the beast in their efforts to try to avoid the mark of the beast. They are so afraid of whatever they think might be the mark of the beast that they end up giving their loyalty and their allegiance to a worldly power in order to protect them from the so‑called mark of the beast, and that’s the very opposite of what Revelation is calling us to do. It’s give your allegiance and your loyalty to the Lamb, and when you do that, you don’t have to worry about what the beast is doing, so you are not controlled by the beast. You are not in danger from the beast. And we are so afraid ‑‑ and that’s why I always tell people, if you read Revelation and you walk away from it fearful and more apt to give your loyalty to some politician or some political party, you’re reading it wrong. You ought to read this and be confident of our victory in Christ, I think.

GARRETT: Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. That’s great, great advice.

WES: Well, Garrett, as we close, what resources would you recommend to people? If people want to dive deeper into the book of Revelation, where would you point them?

GARRETT: Sure. If someone were listening and they were, you know,

a minister or someone who really wanted to dig in or wanted a resource, I think Craig Koester’s Anchor Bible Commentary on Revelation is the best commentary that’s written. It’s funny, I heard on a podcast the other day ‑‑ I was listening to David de Silva, who’s a wonderful scholar, and he’s writing his own commentary on Revelation, and he said, “Even after I finish my commentary on Revelation, Craig Koester’s commentary will still be better.” He said it is just the best one out there. But helpfully, for those who aren’t scholars or ministers needing to read something that thick, he has written a book called “Revelation and the End of All Things,” which is his distillation, in 200 pages, of his massive commentary. It’s now in its second edition, and, personally, I do not think there is something better out there on Revelation than Craig Koester’s “Revelation and the End of All Things.” It still might be a hair dense for some folks, so if you’re looking for another book, I would say Michael Gorman has a book called “Reading Revelation Responsibly,” and he just does such a good job on the practical application. And a lot of the things we’re discussing, if that was interesting to you, about politics and kind of applying this message today, I think Gorman’s book is maybe the best on that. So that’s kind of a smorgasbord there for you, three different books, kind of depending on where you are. 

I’ll just mention one other interesting book lately. Dean Flemming has a book on Foretaste of the Future and reading Revelation as a missional text, and I think it’s really well done. It’s really interesting. For those who read the book with ‑‑ who leave with all this fear and trepidation and think that this is about, you know, just all the judgment and the blood and all that, read this text and you’ll, I think, leave with a very different view, that actually this is about God’s mission for the whole world, and I think it’s really powerful to see it in that light, as well.

WES: Fantastic. Well, Brother, thank you so much for this conversation, and thank you for the work you’re doing in the kingdom.

GARRETT: Thank you for having me. I always love nerding out about Revelation. Thank you.

WES: Thanks, Brother.

The post Reading and Understanding the Book of Revelation with Garrett Best appeared first on Radically Christian.

What is the mission of the church? This episode of the Radically Christian Bible Study Podcast tackles that crucial question. The discussion explores the common tendency for Christians to focus solely on replicating New Testament patterns of church life, while neglecting the larger theological framework of God’s mission. Wes McAdams and Steve Cloer delve into the biblical concept of God as a “missionary God” who sends his people to partner in redeeming a broken world, and how this should reshape the church’s identity and approach to ministry.

Missional theology can transform the way we view everything from Sunday morning worship to our daily lives and interactions. Wes and Steve encourage listeners to reconsider their understanding of the church’s role and calling, moving beyond mere religious obligations to embrace a holistic, kingdom-centered mission. The conversation also touches on practical challenges and opportunities that arise when the church seeks to engage its local community and context.

The guest, Steve Cloer, is an assistant professor of ministry at Harding School of Theology and the director of the Doctor of Ministry program. With extensive experience in urban congregational ministry, Steve brings a unique perspective on the importance of the church’s presence and witness in cities and neighborhoods. His insights challenge listeners to consider how they can more faithfully and effectively participate in God’s mission, wherever they may be.

Links and Resources

• Watch this Episode on YouTube
• The Missional Catalyst: Reimagining the Role of the Minister – Missio Dei Journal
• Loving Our Neighbors – Mission Alive Newsletter
• Reaching the Spiritual but Not Religious – Prestoncrest Class

Transcript (Credit: Beth Tabor)

Have you ever thought of God as a missionary? Have you ever thought of yourself as a missionary? Well, hopefully, you will after today’s podcast. Today I’m visiting with my friend, Steve Cloer, who’s an assistant professor of ministry at Harding School of Theology. Steve also directs the Doctor of Ministry program. He lives in Memphis, Tennessee, and in the fall of 2024, he’s going to begin leading a new initiative for Harding called the Center for Church and City Engagement. 

Before we begin that Bible study and conversation, I want to read from 2 Corinthians 5, starting in verse 17. “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ, God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.” 

I hope you enjoy this conversation and I hope it helps all of us learn to love like Jesus.

WES: Steve Cloer, welcome to the podcast, Brother.

STEVE: Thank you. It’s an honor to be with you.

WES: It’s been good to reconnect with you a little bit over the last couple months or so. You and I knew each other way back there before I had kids, I think, probably before you had kids. Did y’all have kids when we taught together?

STEVE: I think we didn’t have kids, either. Way back there, almost 20 years ago, maybe.

WES: Yeah, we taught Bible class at church camp together in New Mexico at Blue Haven. And do you guys still go to Blue Haven? 

STEVE: We still do. We go out fifth session to Camp Blue Haven, and it’s a joy. It’s a highlight of our year for our family.

WES: Us, too. We go to the first session, so, yeah, it’s fantastic. Well, I’ve been an admirer of your work for a long time, Brother. You do such great work, and I’d love for you to just kind of give us an introduction to what you have been doing most recently and then what you’re going to be doing as things transition a little bit. 

STEVE: Okay, sure. And thanks again, Wes, for inviting me on. So for 15 years I was the preacher at the Southside Church of Christ in Fort Worth, Texas, from 2006 to 2021. And Southside is a congregation located just south of downtown Fort Worth in the heart of the city, and we worked there and had a really good season of ministry. And then, in 2021, we transitioned to Memphis, Tennessee for me to work at Harding School of Theology, and so I’m an assistant professor of ministry here. I teach in the master’s programs. I teach courses in mission, leadership, and ministry, and then I also direct the Doctor of Ministry program. 

And there’s significant change going on here at Harding as the School of Theology is being relocated to Searcy, Arkansas, and so my role is changing slightly because I’m going to be staying in Memphis, and so I’m going to keep directing the Doctor of Ministry program and continue to be on faculty and teach somewhat, but I’m also going to be directing a new center for Harding that’s called Harding University Center for Church and City Engagement. And so the goal of this center is to provide resources and experiences and training for church leaders, as well as Harding students, to help them engage the city for the mission of God, so I’m excited about the future with that.

WES: That’s fantastic. I’m excited about that, too. And as we go, you may mention some of the other stuff that you’ll be working on, you know, as this becomes a reality. But you used the word “mission,” and I’ve listened to a few lessons that you’ve taught and I’ve read some articles that you’ve written, and that tends to be something that you talk a lot about, missional theology being ‑‑ what is the phrase that you use? 

STEVE: A missional catalyst.

WES: Okay. There you go. So that idea of the church and ministers being on mission is something that is incredibly important to you, and I was reading an article that you wrote. It’s called “The Missional Catalyst: Reimagining the Role of the Minister,” and here’s one of the quotes you said. I think that it will resonate with listeners. You said, “One of the deficiencies in the discussion of church leadership roles has been an absence of a theology of the mission of God. For restorationists, specifically those of us in churches of Christ, the focus has often been on the duplication of New Testament patterns. We determine what the early church did and then discern how to replicate in the present.” 

And so, so much of our focus, when we talk about ecclesiology or we talk about what is the church ‑‑ we’ve focused on this idea of, well, let’s figure out how to do Sunday morning worship. Let’s figure out how the church should be organized, elders and ministers and these kinds of roles, but there hasn’t been a lot on missional theology. So what is the mission of God, and what does that look like when a church really understands and is on mission?

STEVE: Yeah, sure, I can talk about that. Yeah, I think, you know, one of our challenges has been, when we focus on ecclesiology and we focus on, as you mentioned, just, you know, the forms and the patterns, we forget the larger theological framework that the church is situated within, and that framework starts with God and just who God is and what does God care about. And when we talk about the mission of God, we’re talking about the purpose of God, the purposes of God. What is it that God wants to do in the world, and then how do we fit into that? And at the very heart of who God is is that he is a missionary God, that he is a God who sends. And all throughout Scripture we see God sending, and then ultimately sending himself in the person of Jesus Christ. And in the Gospel of John, for example, over 40 times Jesus refers to himself as the one whom the Father sent, so there’s an element there within the very Godhead itself of God being a sending God. 

And so, if God is a missionary God, then at the core of who we are as his people is that we are to be a missionary people who are joining God in his mission for the world. And what is his mission? His mission, to put it succinctly, from my perspective, would be that he wants to redeem a broken world and he wants to make all things new, to restore all things both in heaven and on earth, to bring them together as one, and how we understand that mission is really tied to how we understand the gospel, and my understanding of the gospel is that the gospel is the good news that God is taking all the broken pieces of our world, putting them back together through Jesus Christ. 

And a scripture that’s really shaped my thinking on this is Ephesians 1. I’ll just read this. Ephesians 1:10, where it says, regarding his plan ‑‑ it’s talking about God’s plan, regarding his “plan of the fullness of the times to bring all things together in Christ, things in the heavens and things on the earth.” And, to me, that’s the essence of the good news, is God is bringing everything together in Christ through the cross and the resurrection and then the enthronement of Christ, that all things are being brought back together. So then the mission of God is to bring that about, and so if God is a missionary God and his mission is to restore all things or to redeem a broken world, then, as a church, our identity must be found in that. 

And so, in missional theology, like a key buzz phrase that’s often used is that it’s not that the church has a mission, but it’s that God’s mission has a church. And so you think about that, it’s a complete reframing. A lot of times when we think about mission, we think about action. We think about something that we’re doing, but, actually, mission is an attribute. It’s not an action; it’s an attribute of God. And so if this is at the very essence of who God is, to restore a broken world, then at the very essence of who we are as a church, as his people, is to restore a broken world, as well. And so we find a sense of identity within the mission of God that I think reshapes and reframes leadership roles. It reshapes and reframes just the way we think about church life. It just kind of reshapes everything. 

The illustration I like to use about this is, you know, when you go to a Christian college, nobody can major in love. Like there’s nobody who’s majoring in love, although that would be a good way maybe to get a date or something, like, hey, I’m majoring in love or whatever. Nobody majors in love. We don’t have ‑‑ typically, we don’t have love deacons at our church or love ministries, and the reason why we don’t is because we would say, well, that’s what every person is supposed to do. Every Christian is ‑‑ that’s how they know that we are his disciples, if we love one another, and that’s because God is love. Well, I would argue it’s the same way with mission. It’s not just for certain specialists to do mission. It’s that we are all a missionary people because we are serving a missionary God, that they all go together and it’s the very identity and essence of who we are.

WES: Man, I love that. And as you were talking, it occurred to me how many sort of theological points we could talk about. Ecclesiology, for those that don’t know, just the study of the church, or eschatology, the study of, you know, where’s all of this heading, what is this all going towards, what’s the end ‑‑ so much of that seems so heady and theoretical, but it’s so incredibly practical. If we think that God’s intention for us is just to sit here, be good, do church well until we die, and then we get to be whisked off to this ethereal realm in the sky, and that’s the end goal, that’s going to change the way, in very practical terms, we live out our life. It’s gonna change whether or not we see ourselves as being people on mission. But if we see ourselves as being recruited into the family of God ‑‑ not just the family of God, but the kingdom of God, and that we are a part of a kingdom, and that kingdom has a purpose ‑‑ and I love the way you said that this is an attribute, an aspect of who God is in that he is a missional God. I’ve never really thought of it that way before, and you could go all the way back to the creation, I suppose. In God’s creation of human beings to rule and reign with him, that this has always been God’s intention, to partner with humanity to do this great thing, and then, of course, sin got us off track, so I love that idea of putting the world back together.  

As you kind of framed it, you know, that there’s been a lack of understanding of mission ‑‑ I don’t want to get you in too much trouble, but I just finished listening to the lesson that you did at Prestoncrest a few weeks ago, and it was so good, and one of the things that you touched on was the things that we’re doing that actually undermine the mission in the community. You were specifically talking about how we reach people that are spiritual but not religious, or the religious “nones.” They’re sort of interested in spiritual things. They feel fine about their eternal destiny, but they just are not interested in church and these kinds of things, but the church is actually ‑‑ because we’re not being missional, I’m afraid sometimes we’re doing things that undermine some of the mission that we ought to be on. If you don’t mind expounding on some of those, what are some of the things that we might be unintentionally doing that’s actually getting in the way of being on a mission?

STEVE: Yeah, I mean, there are several things I can mention. One that immediately comes to my mind is sometimes we fail to recognize that God is at work in our world and in people’s lives to bring them to him. There’s a lot of talk these days about how we are functioning in an emerging secular paradigm, what some people refer to as the immanent frame, where we just don’t really see God active in our lives on a daily basis or in our societies, that we just kind of do everything on our own power and own ability and our own ingenuity, and sometimes that’s the way we think as Christians. We just kind of think, you know, God’s maybe at work in the church building when we’re there on Sundays, but then he’s not really at work the rest of our week, and I think that’s a big deficit. I think we need to have a spiritual perspective. God is a missionary God, and God is, right now, working in this world to convict people of sin, to open their hearts to him. He’s trying to put this broken world back together in Jesus. And so if we can have a heart that’s open to that and, like you said, willing to partner with God in that, we might be surprised at what we find. 

And so, as an example, just like in church services on Sunday morning, sometimes we approach that very selfishly. “Okay, I’m going. I’m kind of doing my good work and going to worship the Lord.” Maybe we could take a step back and say, “Okay, who is the Lord bringing this morning, and are we ready to receive them?” Because it could be that there’s someone who is meekly coming into the auditorium because they felt a sense of calling or that God’s been working on their heart and they’ve made this effort. And what are they going to find when they get there? Are they going to find people who are more interested in, you know, what are they going to eat for lunch, or are they going to find people ready to invite them into a community? A lot of times people who are spiritual but not religious, people who would check “None” on a religious affiliation survey ‑‑ a lot of times they’ve been to church. It’s not that they haven’t ever been to a worship service; it’s just that when they go, they haven’t been well received a lot of times.

And so that’s just one example of having a spiritual expectation, that as we come together on Sundays, who is the Lord bringing us, and are we praying about that? Are we ready to receive that? And then ‑‑ and that’s just on Sundays. We could talk about Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, you know, when we’re at school or a school activity or when we’re getting our oil changed or when we’re going ‑‑ running an errand at the grocery store. You know, who is God putting in our path? Who is God working on? When we’re waiting at the airport, could we have spiritual conversations then? All of that ‑‑ I mean, that’s just one example. If we create this spiritual expectation to recognize God is at work in this world and he’s working in people’s lives because he’s a missionary God, can I have a heart that’s open and eyes to see what he sees and seek to join in with him in his mission? 

WES: Yeah. I can’t tell you how many times I have had conversations with members of either this congregation where I preach now or congregations where I’ve been before and, specifically, it comes up a lot when a parent has a gay child and is afraid what might happen if they invite them to come to worship with them. The parent holds a traditional Christian sexual ethic, doesn’t believe that what their child is doing is right, but wants them to know Jesus, wants them to come to know Jesus, and they want them to experience their church family the same way they experience their church family. They want them to see this is a wonderful place and these people will love you and these people will not shun you, will not look down their nose at you, but they’re afraid. Will that happen? I don’t know how many times I’ve been asked that kind of question. Will I be judged? Will I be kicked out? Will I be whatever? And I want to say no, because that’s been my experience, that no, people are incredible. They’re welcoming. They’ll love you. 

You mentioned a woman in your class. You were talking about a lady who cut your hair, and you said something along the lines of do we stop and think that somebody like that might be coming to our assembly and we might affect the next five or 10 years of her spiritual journey? And that question was a sobering one. 

STEVE: Yeah, yeah, it is. It is. In that story that I told, I talked about her, that the way she described her religious journey is she said, “I felt a calling to go to church,” and we know where that calling came from. It came from God working in her heart. I mean, she didn’t understand that. She’s not able to articulate that, but she felt a calling to come to worship. And I believe it’s the same way with other people, and just in my experience of congregational ministry at Southside in Fort Worth, I mean, there were many occasions where people walked in our building and God brought them there. I mean, they just came, not knowing exactly what they were gonna find, and I’m always amazed at their courage to walk in the building. 

But as we’re moving into what I would call an emerging secular paradigm, what’s going to be very important for the church is to create a sense of belonging in order for people to believe, and that’s a flip‑flop from the way maybe we’ve traditionally thought about it, is, okay, we try to convince someone to believe in Jesus. Okay. Then we will welcome them into the church. But in a secular paradigm, people are trying to figure things out. A lot of times people who are spiritual but not religious, who are “nones,” they’re just confused and they haven’t had a lot of time to figure things out because maybe they didn’t grow up in a Christian family. They really have no spiritual guidance that’s been given to them. They’re not getting it from the culture surrounding them, and so they’re just ‑‑ they hear stuff, hear bits and pieces, but they’re just kind of confused. It’s gonna take some time to kind of figure all that out, and so creating a space of belonging and say, “Hey, you’re welcome here. We’re all on the same journey together. Maybe I’m a little bit farther down the road than you are, but we’re all on the same journey together of trying to learn about Jesus and to follow him,” so creating that space of belonging, and then, in time, people will come to believe. 

And I think that’s going to be an important shift for churches to make, but I think the way we can make that theologically is to recognize that this is God’s mission, and God’s Spirit is at work in the world to draw people to himself. And so it’s not my mission, it’s not your mission, it’s not even our church’s mission; it’s God’s mission. God’s trying to redeem a broken world, and so I’m just gonna try to be open. I’m gonna plant seeds, I’m gonna try to water them, and I’m gonna trust that God’s gonna bring the increase and I’m gonna have eyes that are open to see what God is doing.

WES: I don’t know how you feel about appropriating the word “missionary,” but I have a tendency to do that. I have a couple of sisters who were, quote‑unquote, “missionaries” in other countries, but I tell them all the time, you know, that’s how I think of myself, and I really think every Christian should think of themselves, as a missionary. And I think it changes the way that we think about politics; it changes the way we think about home. What is home? We can really embrace this idea of being an exile, of being a sojourner, a foreigner living in a foreign land, but also having a mission that I’m here by choice and I’m here on mission and I’m here because God sent me here. I’m not here simply because I just happened to be born in this place or because this is the best country in the world, but because God has sent me here to do his work, to do his mission. And I feel like if Christians across the board, whether they’re in paid ministry or not, would adopt that mentality ‑‑ whether they’re in their hometown or not, would adopt that mentality of being missionaries.

STEVE: I agree with you on several fronts. First and foremost, just the word ‑‑ the word “missionary” just means the one who is sent, or one who is sent, and if we’re a sent people, and if God’s a missionary God, then we are a missionary people. We are sent people, so just, theologically, it makes sense from my perspective. But I think, even in a practical standpoint, historically, when we’ve thought about missionaries, we’ve thought about someone who leaves a Western country, whether that’s America or some other country, and goes across the ocean, maybe to some other continent or to some other location to do church planting or evangelism or that kind of thing, and that’s typically the way we’ve thought about “missionary.” 

Well, there’s more churches of Christ in Nigeria than there are in the United States right now. There’s getting ready to be more churches of Christ in Ghana than there are in America right now, and the global South quickly has become kind of the majority of the church, and so I think we need to reframe that and not think about missionaries as people coming from America to go somewhere else. I think the way you’re describing it is better and healthier. And, actually, what missiologists are moving towards is to think about mission as something that’s done from everywhere to everywhere. It’s not from West to non‑West countries. It’s from everywhere to everywhere. So still we’re going to send out people from America to other places, but other places are going to send people to America, and it’s from everywhere to everywhere. And so, in the same way, in every town that I’m in, I’m a missionary in that town because mission is from everywhere to everywhere, so I think that’s a helpful way of thinking about it. 

And then maybe like a third piece to this would be a sense of calling. You know, what is the reason that I’m alive? Is the reason that I’m alive so that I can pursue life, liberty, and happiness? That’s what our American society tells us. But I think scripture calls us to something deeper and higher and wider and broader and gives us a sense of calling and vocation that is bound up in this grand mission, this redemptive mission of God. And I think every single one of us, every person, has to figure that out for themselves. What is my piece in this grand story of God? And it’s not simply just to earn as much money as I can earn and buy as much stuff as I can buy. It’s to participate in God’s mission in the world in some way, shape, form, or fashion. And some of that will be through being a paid minister ‑‑ and we need more of those ‑‑ but it’s going to be through other means, as well, and I think that’s the critical part. I can be a missionary wherever I am as I am participating in that sense of calling that comes from the mission of God in the world.

WES: Yeah. Well, specific to you and your calling in the world, it seems like so much of your personal ministry has been in cities. You were in Fort Worth for a long time and now in the Memphis area, and I suppose ‑‑ I don’t know. I’m guessing that you probably had the opportunity to leave Memphis and go to Searcy when the school moved there, but you’re choosing to stay in the Memphis area, I assume, and so I think that that city must mean a lot to you. So what is it about cities? What is it about that urban environment that you feel, theologically or philosophically, that that’s where you need to be?

STEVE: Yeah, that’s a good question. I think maybe two ways to answer that, one personally and then one theologically. So personally, I grew up in a small town, Searcy, Arkansas, you know, 10‑, 15,000 was the size of our town at the time, and a very good experience. Loved growing up there, very nurturing environment. Grew up within the Harding community. Was there, got married to my wife, Lindsay, right after we graduated from Harding University. We lived there one more year while she got her master’s. So the first 23 years of my life was in a small town, and then I moved to Memphis, Tennessee to get my Master’s of Divinity at Harding School of Theology. And so for three years I lived in Memphis, and it was just kind of like a wake‑up call in many ways as I saw racial tension that I had not experienced growing up. I saw the effects of poverty that I hadn’t really witnessed as much. I worked on a secular college campus at the University of Memphis, and I just was kind of shown a lot of the complexities within a city, a big city, a large city. I worshiped at the time at Highland Street Church of Christ, which Harold Shank was the preacher at that time, and they were very ‑‑ had a vision for the city, and that really influenced me, as well. 

So then, from there, I moved to Fort Worth, and originally, I wanted to get outside of the, quote‑unquote, “Bible Belt,” but when I visited the urban core of Fort Worth, I realized this really isn’t the Bible Belt where I am in the center of the city, and that drew me there. And Southside was a church that had committed to staying in the urban neighborhood and wanting to reach out to the neighborhood, and so we launched into that and felt that sense of calling. We moved into the neighborhood of our church building about halfway through my ministry and just really got connected within the urban environment. Again, eyes opened to things through that, seeing the inequities that often are very stark in a city. Inequity is everywhere, but sometimes they’re very stark in a big city. Our kids went to the public school in elementary, and the public school they went to for a period of time was academically failing, and I just saw the lack of advocacy for that school in the whole public school system and how the school was kind of written off and things like that. And so I just saw a lot of dynamics that are present in a city that really spoke to me. 

Well, I moved to Memphis, Tennessee. The neighborhood that I was in in Fort Worth had a poverty rate of maybe 18 to 19 percent, which is pretty high, especially for Fort Worth, but the whole city of Memphis has a poverty rate of 20 percent. The whole city does. And certain neighborhoods have a poverty rate of 30 percent, so one out of every three kids in Memphis are in poverty, so just a very high poverty element. And, you know, that starts to ‑‑ if we’re a people who are redeeming a broken world, if we’re called to join God in that, that pulls you there. So I think just that personal journey that I’ve been on has impacted me, and we came back to Memphis because I wanted to train leaders at Harding in an urban environment to go do some of the things that I was doing at Southside. That was my sense of call here, and I didn’t feel released from that call even when the school of theology was moving to Searcy and, thankfully, Harding has worked it out to where I can keep doing that, so that would be kind of a personal answer to that question. 

I think a theological answer is God loves cities. The story of Scripture begins in a garden, but it ends in a city. And I think about the story of Jonah, and he goes to Nineveh. Why does he go to Nineveh? Because God loved Nineveh, a city that had all sorts of problems and issues, and God loved that city and he wanted that city to know him. Or think about the story of Jesus when he comes into Jerusalem and he cries over Jerusalem. I was talking with Harold Shank recently, and he was telling me how he thinks about that story when he goes to like a football game and he sees 50,000 people or 60‑ or 70,000 people all in one location. He thinks, well, what would Jesus do if he was here? And he thinks ‑‑ he said, I think Jesus would probably cry. He would weep over the people just like he wept over Jerusalem. 

So, you know, God cares about cities. He cares about cities because he cares about people, and cities are dense locations where people are. And we live in an urban world. The majority of people live in cities, and that’s just going to continue, so I think God’s heart is always going to have a special place for cities and wanting the gospel to infiltrate every nook and cranny of that city, both personally and also socially and relationally and in every way possible.

WES: Yeah. Well, I can’t help but think that, when I hear your story, how it’s really easy for so many of us ‑‑ and I put myself in that category ‑‑ that I hear some of those things and I think, well, that sounds great, and I agree with that intellectually, but when my neighborhood starts getting more difficult for me to live in, for whatever reason, whether it’s because of crime or because of poverty or because just the socioeconomics of it are changing, whatever it might be, then it becomes really easy, especially people that can afford to do so, to abandon that neighborhood. You even mentioned about Southside, that they chose to stay, like it was a conscious decision to stay rooted in a neighborhood, and then you did the same personally; you’ve chosen to stay.  

And I can’t help but think that, so often, that’s what it comes down to. And it’s a different mentality because, to your point earlier, so much of our American DNA is trained to seek whatever makes for health and prosperity, whatever makes me the most comfortable. I need to live where I’ll be the most comfortable. I need to live where I can have the greatest pursuit of my own happiness rather than the child of God or the citizen of the kingdom of God who says, “I love the people that God loves and I want to be with the people that God is trying to reach, and I’m going to be a part of that.” And that’s not to say ‑‑ obviously, everybody has to be somewhere, which means that they’re not going to be everywhere else. We can only be in one place at a time, but I just can’t help but admire you and appreciate you for having the faith ‑‑ and I mean that in a very different way than most people use “faith” ‑‑ the faith to live out what you believe, because I think that’s exactly what faith is. You don’t have this theoretical thing over here that says, “Hey, it would be great to reach these neighborhoods” or “I’m going to preach about how we need to reach these neighborhoods,” but that you are willing to live there and stay there even if it gets challenging and difficult.

STEVE: Well, thank you. I mean, I appreciate your encouragement and support. I do think you’re right, though, and let me just say, too, everybody has a different sense of calling, and some of us are called to move to Nepal. I have a sister who lives in Nepal. Some of us are called to live in Nepal; some of us are called to live in Memphis or Texas or some other state, and we all have different seasons of life where we can do certain things and other seasons maybe where we can’t do certain things, and so, you know, we all have to kind of sort all that out for ourselves. 

Kind of my thought on that, and I have a little kind of principle in my life, and that is our big decisions affect our small decisions. And so we think about following Jesus. A lot of times we think about following Jesus in our small decisions. Okay, today I want to follow Jesus. I want to be kind to my neighbor. I’m going to, you know, read my Bible regularly. I’m going to pray for people that are hurting. I’m going to serve in this ministry. Today I’m going to try to daily follow Jesus, and that’s good, and that’s what we ought to do, but sometimes we forget that it’s the big decisions of our life that place us in certain contexts where those little decisions are actually lived out. And so those big decisions about where I’m going to live and what I’m going to do and what neighborhood am I going to reside in and what school are my kids going to go to ‑‑ those big decisions are going to shape a lot of those little daily decisions that we’ll have. And so instead of letting our financial security guide our big decisions or instead of letting, you know, what maybe a certain personal preference is guide our big decisions, let’s let the mission of God guide those big decisions and let’s see where we end up, ’cause it could be then our daily decisions are going to look much different than if we let something else guide those big decisions, and so I think that’s important. 

I think that you’re right, that we can understand that intellectually and in our mind, but then it’s something different for our heart. The biggest inhibitor to a church participating in God’s mission is fear. That’s the biggest inhibitor. And so when a church becomes afraid or when a person becomes afraid, that immediately stops the effort in participating in God’s mission, and so we have to realize Satan’s going to use that. He’s going to try to instill within us fear and worry and anxiety, just like he did with the people of Israel when they were on the cusp of going to the land of Canaan, and they said, “We don’t want to do that anymore.” Why? Because they were afraid. They were fearful. They didn’t want to continue on in God’s mission for them because they were fearful. And so we all wrestle with that, and we have to remember this, that when we are led by the Spirit, the Spirit is always gonna lead us to places that we don’t wanna go when we don’t wanna go there, and that line I got from Evertt Huffard, and that’s true. I mean, Paul wanted to go to Bithynia and the Spirit led him to Macedonia. And I don’t think that’s where he wanted to go, but that’s where God wanted him to go. 

And so we have to be prepared for that, that God may lead our church to a neighborhood, to a group of people, to a certain kind of ministry that makes us feel a little fearful and uncomfortable, but if the Lord is leading us here, we have to trust him and join him and participate with him and trust that God’s gonna bring good out of all of it.

WES: Yeah, for sure. Let’s talk a little bit about some of the challenges of, specifically, ministry in the city, and I think about things like poverty. I think about things like justice. I think about racial reconciliation and city transformation.  Back to the mission of God, if God’s intention is to pick up and put together the broken pieces of this world, what role would you say the church has in that? I think that there’s sort of some extremes where, on the one hand, some people look at it and they think the church ought to be, maybe even first and foremost, political and that we’re out there always pushing a political agenda or certain policies that need to be implemented. On the other hand, I think some people look at it and they agree and they say, “It’s a mess, but I’m overwhelmed. I wouldn’t even know where to begin. Let’s just wait until the Lord comes back to sort it all out.” And then there are other Christians that are sort of in denial, and they say, “Well, you know, it is a mess,” maybe, or “Whatever mess exists only exists because people have made bad decisions, so they just need to stop being bad. We don’t have any responsibility to do anything about that. I wouldn’t help them if I could.” So there’s kind of all sorts of extremes. Where would you say the church ‑‑ if we’re really going to be a church on mission, how do we help make the city a better place?

STEVE: Wow, that’s a good question. There’s so many ways we could go with that, and I wish we had more time to talk about it. The first thing that I would say is we have to recognize that the gospel that we hold to is a holistic and comprehensive gospel. God wants to redeem every part of this world, and we see that in the ministry of Jesus. We can see that in other places in Scripture, as well, where, yes, God wants to forgive people of their sins, but he also wants to help the sick and he wants to feed the hungry and he wants to show mercy to those that are brokenhearted and do justice with those who are in a place of injustice, and so God’s mission is to redeem, reclaim, restore all of that, and I think the more unified around all of those pieces, the better. And so, thinking holistically, in a unity standpoint, Jesus didn’t just do one thing or the other; he was kind of participating in all of it, and, you know, “Your sins are forgiven,” and “Stand up and walk.” I mean, he says the same things at the same time. And so if a church could think that way, I think is maybe a healthy step forward, so kind of a holistic gospel. 

There’s a book I read a couple years ago that talked about how wicked is very complex, and it’s true. There’s a complexity to wickedness, that it infiltrates in many different levels, and so if that’s what we see wickedness being, then the gospel should also be similarly complex, that can meet that complex wickedness, and so I think a holistic gospel does that. So that would be one piece. 

I think a second piece to your question would be ‑‑ maybe a simple thing is we need to get to know our cities. We just need to get to know them, spend time understanding our cities or our neighborhoods and what the challenges are. I think about Acts 17, when Paul was in Athens. And what was the first thing that Paul does when he’s in Athens? Well, it says that he walked around and observed the idols of the city, and, in fact, he references that when he speaks to the Areopagus. He says, “I’ve observed that you’re a very religious people,” so, obviously, he has spent some time walking around and learning about Athens, and that’s built a burden on his heart. That’s why he begins to preach the gospel in Athens because he’s burdened that they’re trapped in all these idols. But then, also, it shows a connecting point. He sees, “Oh, you have this altar to an unknown God. That’s a connecting point by which I can share the good news with you.” 

I think that model is something that could easily be followed. Let’s just get to know our cities. Let’s observe. Let’s talk to people. Let’s listen. Let’s learn what are the longings and the losses of our neighbors. As we do that, we’re gonna feel a burden. We’re gonna feel a burden for our city. While I’m here in Memphis, I want to develop a deep burden for Memphis. Like that’s something that I need to develop just like I felt when I was in Fort Worth, and that’s what we want every Christian or every church to feel, a burden for their neighborhood and their city. 

And then the second part is, as we get to know our city, we’re gonna find entry points, and one local church can’t do everything, and a part of kind of our discernment as a congregation is, okay, where can we put our resources the best? So we can’t do everything, but there is something by which we can make an impact and we can join God in his mission in this place, and I refer to that as missional vocation. We can have a missional vocation. And if I’m just by myself and I don’t know what to do and, you know, maybe a simple place to start is just get to know your neighbors. You know, just get to know the people on your street, in your cul‑de‑sac, the people in your circle. Get to know them, listen to them, learn about them, and just see what God does with that and see if there’s some great opportunity that comes from that by which you can serve that city. And part of that ‑‑ again, that could mean finding ways to proclaim the gospel, teaching scripture, Bible studies, or it could mean doing acts of mercy and justice, or doing them all at the same time. It’s not a one or the other; it’s a package deal, in my perspective, and so finding ways to do that would be important.

WES: Yeah, that is so rich. I’m going to link in the show notes an article that you wrote about just the difference that it would make if Christians would just be good neighbors in their communities. And I thought about the parables that Jesus taught about the nature of the kingdom of God. The kingdom of God didn’t come like other kingdoms did. Every other kingdom arrived on the scene with swords and spears, and it arrived with might and power and political influence and turnover, but the kingdom of God ‑‑ Jesus describes it like a little bit of leaven that’s hidden in the dough. It’s like a seed that’s planted in the ground. It takes time. And if we go in there and plant these seeds and become these people, not just as a project, not just looking at our neighbors as if they’re some sort of project, but that they are our friends, that we love them, that we feel for them what Jesus felt for them. And to your point throughout this whole conversation, it’s theological, it’s incarnational. We are becoming for them what Jesus became for us with our own flesh, and sometimes that means with our own money, with our own life, with our own being, being there for our neighbors and being part of God working through the Spirit to bring change in these communities, and I just can’t help but think, even just that ‑‑ you used the word “send,” and I love that from a missional standpoint, but sometimes the sending is staying, and it’s staying in a neighborhood and just stay there and be the people of God in that neighborhood and be neighbors to your neighbors.

STEVE: Right. Yeah, I like to use the phrase “sent and sending,” and so we send people out. As a church, we should send people out. Yes, let’s keep doing that, but let’s also be sent here now. And so can we be a sent and sending church? I think about the church in Antioch. They were a sent and sending church. They were engaging their neighbors, you know, as the gospel spreads ethnically, but then sending Paul and Barnabas out, too. And so could we have both of those elements? I think it’s really important. 

I appreciate you bringing up the incarnation. I think the incarnation shows us not only that God became man, but God entered a place and he had an address, he had a post office box. Jesus of Nazareth, he grew up in a village, he had neighbors, he had people around him, and we follow that pattern, and so we should be an incarnational people, a placed people, where we say, hey, this city, city of Dallas, city of Memphis, this neighborhood that I live in, this is my place. This is a place where I can try to contextualize the gospel here, embody the gospel here, be a witness for Jesus here. And I think if we can have that mentality, our churches will be vibrant and exciting places to be because we’ll see God working in us, through us, and around us, and it’ll be a place of expectation and joy because we know we’re joining God in this mission and God’s working through us.

WES: Yeah, amen. Steve, I mean this from the bottom of my heart; you make me want to be a better missionary. You inspire me, you convict me, and I so, so appreciate the work that you’re doing in the kingdom, Brother.

STEVE: Well, thank you, Wes. I appreciate you. Appreciate the work you’re doing for the Lord, as well. It’s an honor to spend this time with you.

The post God’s Mission for the Church with Steve Cloer appeared first on Radically Christian.

“Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God” (Romans 10:17, NKJV). In this episode of the Radically Christian Bible Study Podcast, Wes McAdams and Willie B. Williams delve into the profound concept of faith and its pivotal role in the Christian life. They address the common struggles many believers face, such as discouragement, cynicism, and a defeatist attitude, which can hinder their faith. The discussion explores how these mindsets can limit our understanding of God’s promises and our ability to witness His mighty works. Additionally, they tackle the crucial issue of unity within the church and how a lack of faith can impede the body of Christ from experiencing the oneness for which Jesus prayed.

They emphasize the importance of consistently feeding one’s faith through the study of God’s Word and meditating on his promises. They highlight the necessity of believing in God’s ability to overcome any obstacle, whether it’s physical, emotional, or spiritual. The discussion also underscores the relationship between faith and love, emphasizing that true faith leads to a deeper love for God and a greater capacity to bear all things.

The guest for this episode is Willie B. Williams, III, the evangelist for the North Colony Church of Christ. As a passionate and enthusiastic proclaimer of the gospel, Willie brings a wealth of wisdom and experience to the conversation. His journey began with a humble church plant in his living room, and through unwavering faith, he has witnessed God’s mighty works unfold. Willie’s testimony serves as an inspiration, reminding listeners that faith can move mountains and that God’s promises are accessible to those who believe.

Links and Resources

• Watch this Episode on YouTube
• Book: To Dream Again: How to Help Your Church Come Alive by Robert D. Dale
• North Colony Church of Christ

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. How do you live a life of faith? That’s what we’re going to talk about in today’s Bible study. And just to give you a heads up, one of my favorite parts of the conversation is near the end when we talk about the relationship between faith and unity in the church. My guest today is Willie B. Williams, III. He is the evangelist for the North Colony Church of Christ. He is a good friend and a passionate, enthusiastic proclaimer of the gospel. 

I want to start today by reading Hebrews 11:1‑6. It says, 

“Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. For by it the people of old received their commendation. By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible. By faith Abel offered to God a more acceptable sacrifice than Cain, through which he was commended as righteous, God commending him by accepting his gifts. And through his faith, though he died, he still speaks. By faith Enoch was taken up so that he should not see death, and he was not found, because God had taken him. Now before he was taken he was commended as having pleased God. And without faith it is impossible to please him, for whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him.” 

I hope that today’s Bible study is an encouragement to you, and, as always, I hope that it helps all of us learn to love like Jesus.

WES: Willie B. Williams, III, welcome to the podcast, Brother.

WILLIE: Wes, it is wonderful to be here. 

WES: It is wonderful to have you. This is long overdue. I’m so glad to have you, Brother.

WILLIE: Yeah, that’s my fault, but God gives grace. It’s a blessing.  

WES: No, no, I’m just glad it finally worked out, so thank you so much for being on the podcast. You and I have all kinds of great conversations. I’m excited for other people to get to listen in on the wisdom that I get to sit at your feet and hear all the time.

WILLIE: You know, it’s mutual, so… We both like to eat the bread. 

WES: I love it. I love it. Well, when we texted back and forth about what we should talk about, you brought up the idea of faith, and I was so glad that you did because this is something that ‑‑ obviously, this is something that every Christian ought to be thinking about all the time, but it’s one that we’re particularly thinking about at McDermott Road this year, where our theme is ‑‑ we phrased it as “Loving Loyalty,” but I’m trying to help people to understand that faith really is about loyalty; it’s about allegiance; it’s about commitment. So I was so happy that you brought up the idea of faith, so let’s talk about faith.  Particularly, what passages or what ideas have you been thinking about, meditating on that have moved you recently?

WILLIE: I think one of the things ‑‑ I think there’s a quote ‑‑ or there’s a saying about finding God, right? And so this man went to the deepest of the sea, he went to the highest mountain, he searched throughout all the world looking for God, and what he failed to realize is that God was in the flower. And the thought behind the writing was that God is in the simple things, and because you’re looking for the deep things, you end up passing up God when, actually, he was right there waving at you in the wind. He’s in the song of the birds. He’s in the wind of the trees. He’s literally right before us, but we’re looking for something so deep, and so sometimes we’re so familiar with scriptures that we fail to realize how awesome he is in that text. 

So there’s a scripture we quote all the time. A lot of people know it. Romans 10:17, right? “So faith comes by hearing.” There can be no relationship ‑‑ matter of fact, before you can have a relationship with anyone, there has to be some remnant of faith.  And so faith comes by hearing, which lets me know that my faith has to be fed. It’s an organism; it has to be fed. And so I started to meditate on one of the things that causes many Christians, including ourselves, as ministers, is we sometimes struggle because we’re good at feeding. We’re not good at receiving, or we don’t feed our own faith. And so, you know, as ministers, sometimes you will have so many Bible classes, so many lessons, you have so many people asking you for advice or they want to know what your thoughts are. They want you to speak into every subject. They want you to speak on marriage. They want you to speak on demons and the afterlife and what happens when you have anxiety, and you’re constantly trying to feed because you care about the people, not realizing you give more than you receive. You have to feed your faith, and faith comes by hearing. 

In Hebrews 11:6, he says, well, “Without faith it’s impossible to please him, for he that comes to God” ‑‑ God is basically saying, I won’t let you get close to me unless I see that you have faith. And sometimes I feel, even sometimes within the body of Christ, that our faith is getting low, and I can point that scripture to certain people and they’ll be like, yeah, I know that scripture, which means they’re not hearing it because we believe we already know it, but we don’t go back and meditate and really build our faith. Then you start looking at all of the other scriptures about what faith does. And so here’s an indictment on our individual walk, and here’s an indictment as the church, as a whole, are collected. If we say we’re going to do something great for God, you’ll hear laughter and sniggling and jokes because we preach faith, but very few people have seen a mighty move of it. We talk about how God created everything, and we cry over bills. We talk about how God ‑‑ he put molecules and atoms in flesh. He thought of that. He thought that maybe one day I will cut my skin, and he thought about the mechanisms of the body, how it can heal itself without outside interference. I can break my leg and ‑‑ which I did when I was in college. I broke my leg, and the doctor said we can do surgery. And I asked the doctor a question. I said, “Can it heal itself?” And the doctor said, “Hmm.” It was almost like, well, yes, it can. I said, “Well, let’s give God a shot.” I literally said that when I was in college. I said, “Well, let’s give God a shot.” He said, “Okay, we’ll just put a cast on,” and I’ve been fine ever since. I run, whatever. My bone completely broke, you know, in half. 

But, you know, faith has to be fed, and if faith is not fed ‑‑ so Romans 10:17, it is such a simple scripture. It is a scripture that is repeated constantly, but “faith comes by hearing,” which lets me know that faith can grow. Even though me and you may worship together, we don’t have the same level of faith, and if we look at what faith can do, there may be some things that are accessible to me because I hear and I’m constantly hearing; you may have just heard. And so sometimes there are some people who walk away and say, “The word didn’t do anything for me,” and then there’s another person that has a completely different testimony and they enjoy the word. They say, “Oh, God’s word is so powerful.”  It really depends on how ‑‑ you know, there’s an i‑n‑g at the end. Faith comes by hearing. You never stop. And so that ‑‑ when we were talking, that resonated with me because everything we do has to be done on faith.

WES: Yeah. Man, that’s so rich. I love how you’re framing it as a relationship with God, that faith is this relational type of commitment to God, and about this hearing. So many passages and ideas were going through my head as you were saying that. I was thinking about how the pivotal scripture in the law, the one Jesus went to when he said what’s the most important commandment in the law. Of course, he said the second was like it, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” but the first was “Hear, oh, Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one,” and in Hebrew, that first word “hear” is “Shema.” In my family, we say this with our kids every night. We try to say it every night. We start with that idea, “Hear, oh, Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one,” and that Shema idea of hearing is something that is active. It’s not just hearing as in “I heard a noise outside.” It’s listen. Listen to what is being said. Listen to who your God is. Your God, Israel, is one, and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and your soul and your mind and your strength. 

And you’re so right that we can hear, in a sense, the preaching, we can hear the scriptures, we can hear the promises, but sometimes we’re not really listening to them. And two people can be sitting in the same room and, in a sense, they can hear the same things, but one is listening and the other one isn’t, and we’re not internalizing not only the things we’re told to do ‑‑ and I think sometimes we have reduced faith to rules we’re supposed to follow or a way we’re supposed to live, and that’s certainly a part of faith ‑‑ or part of the response of faith, maybe I should say, but faith starts with who is God. 

And I love that you said, you know, all the things that God has done, both in the scriptures, the things that he has revealed to us by special revelation, but then there’s this general revelation, how God has revealed himself in the created world.  The way that he heals the body ‑‑ the body is created to heal itself. The way that God reveals himself in the flower. And you’re so right that sometimes we look at the things that we’re going through and we say, “Well, yeah, I know God brought down Goliath, and I know God parted the Red Sea, and I know God delivered the Israelites, and I know God created this and God created that, but this problem that I have right now, it’s too big for God.” And we wouldn’t say it that way, but that’s essentially the way we’re living our lives.

WILLIE: And if we look at faith ‑‑ you had mentioned something, the greatest commandment. The greatest commandment in the world ‑‑ the greatest commandment in the world ‑‑ cannot be accomplished without faith. You cannot love God with all your heart, soul, and mind because faith allows you to begin the relationship. I’m so glad that you brought up that scripture because ‑‑ and we’re wrestling with this concept that faith comes before love. If faith has to come before love, I cannot love you with all of me unless there’s first trust, because I’ll never jump. I can love you intellectually. I can love your gifts. I can love you in categories, but to fulfill that commandment, you have to jump off the ledge. You have to love God with everything. Most of us, we love people on reserve, so I’ll give you this love, but you won’t have access; I’ll hold back. And if you say, “Hey, I thought you loved me” ‑‑ I do.  “But why did you keep that secret?” Because I don’t love you completely. 

The greatest commandment in the world is loving God completely, but before there can be love ‑‑ if you think about any relationship, even if we just look outside of spirituality, if I’m going to love somebody ‑‑ right? If I’m gonna love you for who you are ‑‑ and I’m not just talking about agape love because I don’t need to know your name to have agape love to you, right? I love you through Him. But let’s just say, in a human perspective, I wanted to really just love you wholly. That means your past, your present, your future, your gifts, your ups, your downs, whatever the case may be. The first thing is, I have to listen. I have to start asking you questions. I have to get to know you, and the only way that my trust and my faith can be built is that I have to be quiet and you have to share. If you refuse to share, then we’ll never have that level of intimacy, and God wants to have intimacy with us. 

And the reason why we don’t shout about how great the church is and the great moves of God, like on the level that I believe we should, is because, somewhere along the line, we’ve stopped hearing the wonderful words of God. “Oh, he’s wonderful. Did you know he did this? And did you know he did that?” Not just in the Old Testament, but “Do you know what he’s doing in my life? And do you know I shouldn’t even be here? I should have died. The doctor said” ‑‑ “Hey, do you know ‑‑ I thought my family was over; he restored.” “Do you know my child came back to the church?” “Do you know my mother got baptized?” Like our testimony ‑‑ I know we don’t have testimony portions anymore, but I think the purpose of the testimonies was to remind people God not only did it for David, God not only did it for Peter, God not only was patient with Thomas, God was patient with me and he did it for me. And when your faith is built up, your relationship changes. So you don’t talk to your wife on Monday and say, “All right, I’ll see you next month.” In order to have a healthy relationship with your wife, your husband, your children, it is deposits. It is consistent deposits that you have to make, and I think that’s ‑‑ when it comes with reading and studying God’s word, it is deposits that we have.

WES: As you were talking, I was thinking about Psalm 1, and this is a great introduction to the Psalms. It’s also a great introduction to the Scriptures and to the life of faith. The psalm says, “Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers; but his delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night. He’s like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither. In all that he does, he prospers. The wicked or not so, but are like chaff that the wind drives away.”

So there’s that idea that if we want to have this fruitful, healthy life, we are like a ‑‑ we have to meditate on the law day and night, and the more we soak it in, the more we drink it up, the more we devour it, the more we meditate on it and chew on it, we’re like a tree that doesn’t ‑‑ it doesn’t have seasons. There’s no like, well, it’s fall now so there’s no fruit on this tree. This tree is bearing fruit year‑round because it’s always drinking in that living water. And you’re so right; if we want to have that kind of life, we just have to constantly be listening to and meditating on the promises of God.

WILLIE: It’s literally like the body. Many people are sick and they start to realize I’m going to the doctor because of the food that I eat, right? So there are certain things that are put in our food. There are certain toxins in our meat, and so people are realizing they are consuming so many calories per day. This is why their body is having these reactions; you know, their vision, their eyesight, their blood pressure. And so one of the first things, when somebody gets sick, is they say, “You gotta change your diet. You gotta change what enters in.” Somebody says, “My computer’s not working right. It’s starting to slow down.” They say, “Hey, listen, you got too many files. You got things that are lagging on ‑‑ it’s not able to run like it should because of the stuff that it’s being fed. You’re gonna have to clear your hard drive. You’re gonna have to remove some weight.” 

So you can imagine, when people wake up in the morning, the first thing they grab is their phone. They spend an hour on social media. I was telling some members, I said, hey, an hour of preaching can never compete with three hours of Netflix, two hours of Instagram, three hours of TikTok, and an hour on Facebook. Like, you know, we may have Bible class and you may preach your heart out doing Bible class and lay out all of the points. It’s only intellectual. It is the meditative part. So I can read the chapter. I tell some people sometimes ‑‑ they say, “Hey, what are some suggestions that you have in studying the Bible?” I say, “Don’t read for completion. Read to swim. Read to wallow in it.” They say, “Well, what does that look like?” And I have a scripture that I wanted to read. We were talking about just living in that abundance, living in that victory of God. One of the scriptures that I enjoy is Mark 9. In Mark 9:23, “Jesus said unto him, ‘If you can believe, all things are possible to him that believeth.'” What if, for the rest of the day, I read no other verses and I just ‑‑ I went swimming in that one verse? Jesus says if you would believe, things will now become possible to you. 

One of the issues that we have ‑‑ we don’t have a resource problem in the church. We don’t have a communication problem. We may have, you know, on a small level. I think one of the biggest problems that we have in achieving great things for God is that we got discouraged along the way. So the reason why you quit school or the reason why you quit on your family, the reason why you walked away from your children, the reason why you quit on church, the reason why you quit on God, the reason why you quit your job are you just literally ‑‑ you know, there are some shows ‑‑ they call it The 600‑Pound Life ‑‑ and at the beginning of that show, everybody has a story that they told where they became ‑‑ it was a point where things were maybe okay, but it was at a point where they gave up. I believe one of the biggest tools of Satan that he has consistently used, especially to ministers, “I want to discourage you. I want to discourage you. I want you to feel so bad that you walk away, that you let go. I want you to quit on the ministry. I don’t care what your degree is; you know they’re never gonna listen to you. You know you’re gonna always be fighting. You know this church is never gonna grow. You know sin will always be here. You know you’re not appreciated. You know stuff keeps happening. Hey, what’s the point? It’s always gonna be like this. Hey, you know this is all a facade. You know nobody’s life is really being changed. You know there’s been sin the whole time. You know you’ve been getting up preaching every Sunday; you know they’ve been sinning the whole time. You know you really wasn’t effective.” And those messages get in our head and we start feeling unworthy. We start feeling like God can’t use us. We start retreating. And, you know, the apostle Paul says we need to come boldly to the throne. We were supposed to come up, but then what happens is we got discouraged and we started to retreat. 

And so imagine if we fed our spirit. Imagine ‑‑ for those who will be listening, imagine you waking up every morning, and you don’t miss a day and you read Mark 9:23, and Jesus said, “If you can believe, all things are possible to him that believes.” The person that doesn’t believe, it won’t be possible. There will be doors that are closed. You will face some difficulties. But the Bible says for the one that does believe ‑‑ because if you can believe, you can endure the conflict. If you can believe, things can turn around. If you can believe ‑‑ you may think nobody ‑‑ none of your family members are coming to Christ. You’ve been trying for years, but if you keep believing ‑‑ the thing is, you just can’t quit. Faith doesn’t allow you to quit because love ‑‑ faith will bring you to love, and then love bears all things. If you don’t have faith, you will never get to love, and God is love, but in order to please God, you must have faith. So if you have faith, you can begin your relationship with love, and once you have a relationship with love, love can bear all things. It will endure all things. Love can get you to the end. But if you don’t have enough faith, you’ll never get to love, and if you can never get to love, you can never get to God because that’s who God is. And if you can’t get to God, we’re most miserable. We’ll never make it. 

So I love the idea of ‑‑ I think sometimes if we are in a state where you’re feeling stuck, you gotta go back to those first principles, and I believe one of those first principles is where is my faith right now? Where is my faith? You know, how do I see God? Am I limiting God? And the reason why I shortened my prayer last night is because, actually, my faith was getting low. The reason why, after I finished my sermon, I ran to the car is because my faith is getting low. And the reason why I’m avoiding people and I keep saying I’m tired is maybe because my faith is getting low and I just don’t feel like I have ‑‑ I need to go replenish. I need to go find an assembly and sit with God and refuel my tank. Because all things are possible if you believe. Everything is possible.

WES: Well, to go back to what you were saying earlier about our tendency to scroll on social media, our tendency maybe to binge‑watch a TV show or to maybe even get on cable news and watch cable news nonstop ‑‑ I was thinking about the way that you’re framing those ideas of faith and encouragement, this boldness, this confidence in God and what God can do on one side, and on the other side, you keep using the word “discouragement,” and I can’t help but think about something that’s common, and we just read it in Psalm 1. But in Psalm 1 he says that this blessed man is the one who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, and we’re pretty good about watching out for those. As Christians, we watch out for the wicked, we watch out for sinners. But the next one says, “nor sits in the seat of scoffers,” and that’s the one I think that we are ‑‑ we’re just oblivious to the impact and the influence of scoffers in our life, and social media is filled with scoffers, cable news is filled with scoffers, our own mind and heart is filled with scoffing. It’s cynicism. It’s this ‑‑ I was trying to think of how to make the sound, but this idea that ‑‑ “Come on.  Come on, you know better than that.” It takes an idealistic view, a hopeful view, a confident view, a faithful view, and it says, “You know better than that. It’ll never work out. God will never do that.” And we surround ourselves by scoffers who discourage us, and we’re listening to them 90% of the day or 90% of the week, and maybe 10% we’re trying to make up for that with a little bit of scripture or a little bit of preaching, and you’re right; there’s a deficit of promises of God and the word of God in our life. There’s a deficit of listening to God and, instead, we’re listening to the scoffers.

WILLIE: What we call being realistic is really a shot at faith. And so some people hide under the umbrella that “I’m just being realistic,” and I don’t want to be realistic; I want to be faithful, because you can be realistic and then God will let you reside on that level, right? But if you’re willing to raise your faith, if you’re willing to feed your faith, what is not possible for you can be possible for me. 

But I like what you said, that sitting in the seat and exposing ourselves to ‑‑ you know, it’s amazing. You can be surrounded around people who say that they believe in God, but nobody speaks the wonderful works of God. I know you’ve probably experienced it as well as I have. Have you ever stood up in front of a church or a congregation and you’re about to get ready to preach, but you pause for a second because everybody looks sad? And you try to kind of look around as like, is everybody okay? You almost have to look, like, where’s the sadness coming from? And you realize they’re carrying the world into worship. And have you ever noticed, like sometimes halfway through worship, people start waking up? Like people ‑‑ you know, you have to kind of get it off. And what they don’t realize, just even in the role of ministers, our job is to feed people’s faith. It’s to take the word of God and feed their spirit and feed their soul. We’ve just got to make sure that we don’t neglect ourselves after feeding ‑‑ you know, feeding everybody. 

But we also know, with the weight and the burden, that if you don’t have a steady regimen on your own, our preaching is not enough. You’re not necessarily ‑‑ you know, we may record something and that may be a blessing, but they’ve got to have their own regimen. They’ve got to have their own system of ‑‑ you have to feed your faith. You have to feed your faith, and the altitude in which you fly and the intimacy in which you have with God, and the resources of God are not available at certain levels of faith. 

I have this ‑‑ as we were talking, I had this imagery I want to show. And so I can ‑‑ God has given me this much capacity [illustrating]. He’s given me this much capacity, but I was so busy this week because I was running errands and I was taking care of business and I was helping people, I didn’t feed my faith. So I only have ‑‑ even though I have a lot more room for faith ‑‑ 

WES: For those that can’t see Willie, he’s got ‑‑ for those that are listening and not watching, he’s got a water bottle that’s 90% empty, or only 10% full, depending on how you want to phrase that.

WILLIE: And so with this little water, I’m over here trying to obey God, and I may have another storm in my life that’s coming, and the next storm requires at least a half. I don’t even have enough faith for my next storm, and I’m a Christian. I don’t have enough faith to deal with the next attack because I’ve been consuming my faith. And I think what a lot of people don’t realize about faith is that you use faith every day, which means it has to be replenished. So I think if we can start looking at faith like we look at our gas tank ‑‑ I need enough gas to make it from A to B. And if I make it to B, I’m gonna come back home, which means, at the end of the day, I’ve used up so much gas. We automatically know, in the next day or two, I’m gonna need to find a gas station. 

If we look at our faith the same way, you have to feed your faith every day because you use it every day. Now, if you decide not to read your Bible on Monday, you probably won’t notice it. And if you don’t read it on Tuesday, you’ll probably, you know, start to slip. By Thursday or Friday, you’ll start to be a little bit more carnal. It’ll be harder to control your thoughts. Certain emotions will get out of hand. Little things that you were able to just kind of move off your shoulder, all of a sudden, it’s harder to deal with, and then you won’t know what’s going on. You’ll say that you’re being stressed or, you know, somebody asks you, “Hey, how are you doing?” And you say, “Well, I’m just kind of ‑‑ you know, I’m okay,” but, really, you’re not okay. Your tank is getting low. It’s time for an oil change and you don’t realize it because you’ve gone 3,000 miles and you need to pull over, but you won’t, you know, or you’re resistant for some reason. 

WES: I’m glad you’re bringing up all of these struggles. And like you said, when people come to worship and they gather in the assembly, sometimes you can see it all over their face that they’ve been dealing with all kinds of things through the week and they’re struggling to see the realities that God is bringing to them through the gospel. And I think that’s the way that the Hebrew writer frames faith, is that faith is this ability to see the unseen, to see things ‑‑ to see the world to come, to see the age to come, to see the kingdom of God even while it’s still invisible to our physical eyes, to our mortal eyes. 

And so faith is this ability to see what is really real. Death is real, sin is real, injustice is real, debt is real, financial struggle is real, but the promises of God are more real. They are more true. And so, like you said, our job as preachers, as evangelists, as those bringing the gospel, we’re trying to help people to see the things that are more real than the things they can see with their eyes, more true than the things they can put their hands on and so that they can get through those things that are hard, those things that they’re struggling with. And like you said, the best we can do sometimes is whet their appetite for those things, but we have to constantly be feeding ourselves with the gospel. We have to be listening to the gospel, hearing the promises of God so that we can set our minds on ‑‑ as Paul says in Colossians 3 and 4, set our minds on things above, not the things on the earth, because these things ‑‑ they are real, and I don’t want to diminish those things. I don’t want to make it seem like the struggles that people deal with aren’t real. Of course they are. But the promises of God are more real. They’re more solid, they’re more lasting. These things are just temporary and they’re gonna fade away, but if we’re not feeding ourselves on the truth of the gospel, then we’ll be overwhelmed and distracted by and discouraged by the struggles that we’re dealing with.

WILLIE: I think when you said those things are real ‑‑ those things are real, but when he says if you would just believe ‑‑ I can see something that’s real, but I can see the power of God that is also real. So whatever I’m facing, right, if it’s within God’s reach ‑‑ there’s no sickness, there’s no trouble, there’s nothing that Christians, or the body of Christ, that we’re facing today that God can’t blow our mind. We have settled back on trying. Our prayers have shifted from “God, do a mighty work” to “Lord, help us to make it through this week.” This week? “Lord, you know, we’re just kind of holding on.” Holding on? He told us we had the victory, and the victory is in him. 

We have to get around enough believers because ‑‑ there’s a book ‑‑ when I first started ministry ‑‑ I’m gonna tell you that when I first started ministry, I was so excited. You know our story. It started in my living room, and I didn’t know how it was gonna grow or whatever. This is my first church plant. And we raised up enough money to get out of my home and we got into a rented building, and we did the demolition because we couldn’t afford contractors. So we did the demolition, sledgehammers, we did the painting. And then the little money that we had set aside, they were able to come in and put the roof ‑‑ the ceiling in and put some walls up. We were so excited. And so there was a preacher ‑‑ he’s passed away now, but there was a preacher that I had invited to come ‑‑ after we finished opening, to come do a gospel meeting, and I think, after the second night, I said, “Hey, I kind of just want to get some feedback.” He said, “Well, let’s go across the street,” and across the street was like a McDonald’s. He said, “Well, let’s just go across the street. We’ll talk.” So we just walked across the street, and I’m sitting in the booth and he’s just sitting there, and I’m sharing the vision. I’m saying, “Hey, I think we can really do some ‑‑ and this is the vision for this place.” And he’s just kind of looking at me, and I’m thinking like, hey, I just came from the living room. We came from a living room; now we’re in a building.  Like, we’re a real church now. We got chairs. You know, listen, we got chairs. We ain’t sitting on my couch no more. Like we got chairs. I’m excited. 

And he looks at me, after I shared the vision, and he said, “Is that it?” I said, “Yeah, that’s kind of it.” I said, “But it took a lot of work.” He said, “Please don’t get me wrong.” He said, “It took a lot of work for you to do ‑‑ for y’all to get here, and I commend you for that.” And then he said something I never forgot, and I pray that people who are listening, they hear this, too. He said, “But God is much bigger than how you’re talking.” He said, “There’s nothing wrong.” He says, “Y’all can accomplish everything that you just laid out.” He said, “But what I want to encourage you is, God is bigger than that. He can do greater work than this.” He told me to get a book. It’s called To Dream Again. I forget the author’s name, but it’s called To Dream Again, and it details a preacher or a church who got discouraged or whatever, and the church was just existing. They were just kind of puttering along, and they basically got to a point where they needed to dream again. 

I think some of us, we’ve stopped dreaming. We feel like we’re too old. We feel like we have made too many mistakes. We feel like too much stuff has happened. Some of us, we feel like our window has closed on us and we’re just trying to wait for Jesus to return. And we’re not realizing, if the Lord woke you up today, there is an assignment that he wants you to accomplish. If you still have breath in your lungs, there is still a mighty work that God can still do through you. And some of us, we have ‑‑ I don’t know if you’ve ever heard some Christians say, “Well, we’re gonna let the young people do that now. I’m retired.” And I had to tell them, you don’t retire from Christianity. You may shift your role; you may make an adjustment, but you don’t retire. You don’t give God a good 30 years and say, “All right. Okay, Lord, I’m ready for you to come get me.” No, no, no. If he wakes you up the next day, there’s still something that he wants you to accomplish, and it can be a mighty, wonderful, beautiful work in the Lord. 

But to dream again, I had to take that vision and ball it up and throw it away. And he was right; God was bigger. You know, I look back on that now. That was over 10 years ago, and he was right. God was so much bigger than I could have imagined. Matter of fact, to just do that would have been limiting God. There’s a scripture ‑‑ there’s another scripture that comes to my mind, which is Mark 11. Mark 11:22 and 24.  “Jesus answered and said to them, ‘Have faith in God.'” Have faith in God. Verse 24 says, “Therefore I say unto you, what things soever you desire, when you pray, believe that you will receive them and you shall have them.” 

What if, in the body of Christ today, we said, hey, it’s time for a revolution. We believe that before the year is out, we can bring a thousand souls to Christ collectively. Hey, we believe that we can get this gospel ‑‑ they are spewing ungodliness through the radio waves and through the television, and you see everything of filth under the sun that’s coming through the tube. Hey, what if we could start a revolution and get this gospel out to all four corners of the world? What if we can transform our city? And as they said, these men have turned the world upside down. [Acts 17:6] They entered into the city and they said we will never be the same because of a few individuals who really believed in God and they really saw the potential of God. They spoke it because they believed it, and when God saw that they believed, he gave them those things that they asked for. 

Jesus said it like this in Luke 18:8, “Shall I find faith? I wonder, when I come back, is anybody gonna believe? Shall I find faith on earth?” And I think we’re worshiping God ‑‑ we’re worshiping discouraged. We’re worshiping God, but we’re worshiping him with limitations and restrictions, and we need to believe again. As Christians, we need to believe again. We need to dream again. For everybody who’s listening, hey, go back to the word of God and dream a bigger dream for your family. Dream a bigger dream for your children. Dream a bigger dream for your health. You don’t have to stay sick. You don’t have to stay on those pills. God is a healer. God is a way‑maker. You don’t always ‑‑ you don’t have to be in that financial debt. God can deliver you from that. That can be paid off. Hey, listen, you don’t have to fight with those addictions or those temptations. Do you know that God can deliver you from temptation? There are some people who sit in our congregations week in and week out, thinking, “I’m always gonna have to struggle with this sin.” No. God can deliver us from darkness, but we gotta believe again. We don’t have to remix Christianity to incorporate our weaknesses. “I love God, but I’m gonna have to deal with this. I love God, but I don’t think he’s gonna deliver me from this sadness.” 

I want to let people know, if you believe in God, you don’t have to live in depression. And I know there are some cognitive and medical things that are going on, and I’m not here to speak on any of those things, and you may have things that may have been prescribed, but don’t stop praying. Don’t stop praying. Don’t let a doctor, don’t let a friend, don’t let anybody come to you and tell you that your marriage can’t be restored, your health can’t be restored. Don’t let anybody tell you ‑‑ matter of fact, there are too many testimonies from individuals who literally heard messages that it was over, and then things got turned around. God is a way‑maker.

WES: See, this is what I think is so powerful about believing the promises of the gospel, is that we hold in both hands sort of the current age, the realization of sin and death and disease and heartbreak and all of those sort of negative things, but we also hold, in the other hand, this hope ‑‑ not this wishful thinking, but hope, as in confident expectation that we know that all of those things will be healed. All of those things will be taken care of. We don’t know when. They could be in this moment, they could be today, they could be when Jesus comes again, but all of those things are gonna be taken care of. It’s not a matter of if; it’s a matter of when. And we’re not gonna stop praying for them to happen right now. We’re not gonna stop praying for them and believing that God can do them right now. I think you’re so right that we ‑‑ so many Christians have adopted sort of this defeatist attitude and this cynicism about the current realities, and those things have become more real to them, bigger to them than the realities of the gospel. 

One of those things that you and I have talked about recently is the unity of the church. The divisions that exist and the reason that they exist is real, and we’re all aware of those things. We’re aware of the divisions that exist because of differences of opinion, but also because of ethnicity, because of a history of racism, because of whatever has caused the divisions that exist, but we can’t adopt a defeatist, cynical attitude that says, “Well, that’s always the way it’s gonna be. We’re never going to be unified. We’ll never get together.”

WILLIE: I would say stop; don’t even feed that to me. Yeah, don’t even feed that to me.

WES: Right. And we’ve got to believe what you’re saying, that Jesus wants his church to be one. He prayed for his church to be one. The Spirit can make us one, so we’ve got to live into that. Our scoffing and skepticism and defeatism is standing in the way of the work of the Holy Spirit.

WILLIE: What if we all started repeating ‑‑ because there are words of faith. There are wonderful words of faith, and you have to repeat that daily. You have to speak the words of faith. What if we started saying, “I love the church of Christ”? When was the last time we heard that? People don’t talk like that. It’s kind of like a ‑‑ we should ‑‑ “Hey, I love the church of Christ and I love what the church of Christ is doing, and God is doing a mighty work through the body of Christ today. Hey, thousands of souls are about to be saved.” I want to let you know, just even where we are, there’s a mighty movement that is happening right now, and I want to let you know people are getting excited about coming together. People are excited about the unity that is in the church. Don’t let anybody tell you that the church is forever broken or we are so divided that we can’t do something. That’s a lie because we’ve just seen evidence, not once, not just twice, but we are seeing it on small levels and on grand levels, that, hey, we were putting limits on God. God could have always done this. We had to believe that this is possible and we have to make sure that we don’t entertain messages. You don’t put oil and water in the same ‑‑ it doesn’t mix. So when negative speech starts being spewed, we have to mark it, identify it, and say we don’t talk like that in this place. This is a place of faith. So the things that’s going on in the body of Christ today, really ‑‑ all of these obstacles of unity that we’ve been trying to achieve for years, it’s really going to come down to a group of individuals who believe that, actually, it can happen. 

Now, if I’m in the room and I don’t really think it can happen, I may go along, but I’m slowing the train down, because I’ve realized, through my studies, that God moves by faith, not by evidence. Thomas wanted evidence, but Jesus told him, yeah, you believe because you saw. You believe because you touched, but blessed ‑‑ the blessing is in the faith, not in the evidence. So there are some people who say, well, I’ll believe it when I see it. God doesn’t move that way. God moves by those groups who say, “Hey, I believe God is moving and I’m going to quiet the noise so that I can hear.” 

When we was talking in the beginning about how faith comes by hearing, how many of us are really hearing what God is saying in this season? How many of us are really in tune for what he desires for us to do? Look, as men ‑‑ for the men, for their families, how many husbands or head of households are hearing the voice of God? How many of our women, who are doing great things in the body of Christ ‑‑ how many of them are really ‑‑ instead of just completing projects and activities, what if we all, as brothers and sisters, as men and women, as the children of God ‑‑ how many of us are really hearing and building up our faith for the next great move of God, which I believe is in this season? 

But I also realize this. Just because Joshua was ready to go over ‑‑ God looked and seen that he didn’t have enough believers to go over with Joshua, so you know what he did? He preserved Joshua and he built up a new generation of believers, and when that new generation grew and became strong enough, then God said, “It’s time. Now it’s time to go over and take what I’ve been promising you.” Here’s the sad thing. God’s promises have been available for us. They’ve been available. God is a wonderful father and he wants to bless his children. He doesn’t withhold his gifts and he doesn’t take pleasure in seeing us lacking. The church is the light of the world. The church is the body of Christ. We are the light of the world. God’s not trying to hide that light. He wants that light to shine bright, but he moves on faith.  

WES: And so much of it is just believing that that’s true, that the church is one. The Lord our God, he is one, the church is one, the church is the light of the world, the church is the salt of the earth. If we believe that that’s true, we don’t have to make it true. Jesus has already made it true. The Holy Spirit has already made it true. We just have to live into it. We have to believe that it’s true. 

WILLIE: Say that again.  I love that. 

WES: Yeah. We don’t have to make this true. This isn’t by works. It’s not by our own efforts. We simply believe that the promises of God are already true and we live into them and we live them out even when it seems ridiculous, even when it looks like people are looking at us, thinking, “What in the world are you people thinking? You’re foolish; you don’t understand what you’re doing.” That’s what faith has always looked like to the scoffer. That’s what it’s always looked like to the unbeliever. It always looks like we’ve lost our minds, but we simply believe that the promises of God have been true, are true, and will forever be true.

WILLIE: Look at what you just said. Me and you are already unified by the gospel of Jesus. 

WES: That’s right. That’s right. Amen.

WILLIE: We don’t have to do anything this evening. This conversation is not for us to get together. That’s what the world is trying to do. But if you’ve obeyed the gospel, we’re already unified. The problem is we have not recognized what has already been given to us, which is unity. Scripture tells us we need to fight to preserve it, but it has already been given to us. So then our conversation is not what can we do to come together, because we’re already together in Christ. Then our question is, how do we want God to use us? Lord, I want to remove everything in my heart ‑‑ Lord, I want to remove everything in my spirit that’s hindering you from using us. So we’re only coming together to pray, to empty ourselves so that the Lord can be filled in us to do his wonderful ‑‑ and he says, “and greater works will they do.” He said, “You think I’ve done something? Greater works that they will do to those who will believe.” We have to be ‑‑ are we really believers? And when a person is really a believer, then it’s literally ‑‑ when the church believes, it is like a man that sets himself on fire. The world will watch and come to see him burn. When somebody’s on fire, you can’t help but look and stare. You don’t even want to stare, but you can’t help but look and stare and say, “What is that fire?” 

I had a gentleman one time posted a lesson or sermon. He said, “Hey, I appreciate the passion.” It’s more than just passion; it’s faith. Passion dwindles. I can get excited about God, and then I get some bad news. Somebody may pass away. My faith doesn’t disappear because of tragedy. Actually, tragedy intensifies it. If I go through trouble ‑‑ you see stars at night. If I’m going through a dark season in my life, you’re gonna see the stars because stars shine brighter in the night. So I tell people, I say, hey, I believe in God not just because of what I read. Everybody has a testimony. I have a testimony. I have seen some dark moments. It was God that brought me through. Now, if he can bring me through that, you can’t tell me about nothing else. If I have seen the darkness and if I have seen evil, and God delivered me when I was at a place where I thought I had no more hope and he gave me hope, he set me back on my feet, he put me in places that I don’t deserve to be in ‑‑ I have no business representing him, and he allowed me ‑‑ as the apostle Paul said, I was the chief of sinners. I shouldn’t even be doing this. And for God to have enough grace and mercy to extend to me, how ‑‑ if God gave me that much grace, how am I not gonna be forgiving to somebody, show grace and mercy to somebody? How will I withhold the goodness of God? Why won’t I speak it on every corner? If he brought me out of that lion’s den ‑‑ anybody who’s ever been in a place where you thought it was over and God let you see another day, you should come out of that lion’s den saying, “For the rest of my life, I’m going to tell people about Jesus Christ. I’m going to tell people about the wonderful works of God. I want to tell people about how he makes a way in deserts and how he brings rain in a drought, how God can make a bridge over troubled waters, how God can remove the storm and allow you to see the sun again.” 

There are so many people who lived in depression for so long, and God came through and let them see the sun. Some people thought they were never gonna laugh again. Some people thought they were never gonna feel joy again, and now they’re sitting in a season of their lives and they’re laughing and they’re giggling, saying, “I never thought I would have these emotions.” I mean, God is so awesome, and he’s doing his work through the church. And I love what you just said. We’re not working to be unified; we are unified. We just need to identify the voices of Satan that’s trying to convince us that the hurdle is too high. The hurdle is not too high. Literally, whatever we want to accomplish in the body of Christ, if we submit to the will of God, that thing is already done. 

That’s what faith ‑‑ that’s how faith talks. Faith has a language. That thing is already done. Souls will already be saved. I’m excited. Matter of fact, I’m excited even now. There’s a study I’m supposed to have. Somebody’s gonna get saved this week. Like God is moving and we got to talk like that. We got to talk like that more. That’s why I love conversations like this because it makes me want to even get back to work, and iron does sharpen iron. We’ve got to have irons in the room.

WES: Amen. Well, Brother, thank you for this conversation. You have lit me on fire. You have encouraged me, and, Brother, I thank you for your faith. I thank you for the work you’re doing in the kingdom. 

WILLIE: Bless you, as well.

The post Faith Comes from Hearing the Word of God with Willie B. Williams appeared first on Radically Christian.

Are you struggling with how to share the gospel without coming across as weird, awkward, or pushy? Many Christians want to reach their neighbors with the gospel but don’t know the best approach – especially with successful or wealthy individuals. This episode tackles those tough evangelism questions and dilemmas head-on. If you’ve ever felt intimidated talking about Jesus, you’ll want to hear the insights shared here.

The discussion delves into biblical principles around respect, humility, relationship-building, and embodying the incarnational love of Christ. It examines Jesus’ own interactions with tax collectors, the wealthy, and the marginalized – highlighting how he met people with authenticity, not condemnation. You’ll learn a practical framework for having spiritual conversations that open doors rather than putting people off. Powerful examples illustrate how vulnerability and sharing your personal story can be an effective bridge to the gospel.

The guest for this episode is Matthew Morine, a minister who has a gift for relatable, non-cringeworthy evangelism. Matthew preaches for the Castle Rock Church of Christ in an affluent area of Colorado. Despite living among plenty of wealth and success, he has found remarkable inroads for sharing Christ. His tested insights come from real-life experiences in his community.

Links and Resources

• Watch this Episode on YouTube
• Matthew Morine Evangelism Class from Telling the Story Conference

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. How do you share the gospel without being weird, awkward, or icky? That’s what I’m going to talk to my guest, Matthew Morine, about today. Matthew preaches for the Castle Rock Church of Christ in Castle Rock, Colorado. He loves chess, mountain climbing, hockey, and reading, and he is fantastic at sharing the good news about Jesus. 

But before we get to the conversation, I want to read from Romans 10, starting in verse 8. Paul writes, “The word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart (that is, the word of faith that we proclaim); because, if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved. For the Scripture says, ‘Everyone who believes in him will not be put to shame.’ For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; for the same Lord is Lord of all, bestowing his riches on all who call on him. For ‘everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.’ How then will they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching? And how are they to preach unless they’re sent? As it is written, ‘How beautiful are the feet of those who preach the good news.'” 

I hope this conversation is a blessing and an encouragement to you, and I pray it helps all of us learn to love like Jesus.

WES: Matthew Morine, welcome to the podcast, Brother.

MATTHEW: Thank you, Wes. I’m glad to be here.

WES: Excited to have you, Brother. We just got back ‑‑ or you just got home. I just drove across town to the evangelism seminar that they had at Prestoncrest a couple weekends ago, and I sat in your class on evangelism, and I told you offline, and I may say it more than once in this recording, but your class on evangelism was probably the best class, the best message on evangelism that I’ve ever heard, and I can’t even begin to tell you how much I appreciate the thoughts that you shared.

MATTHEW: Thank you, Wes. That’s very kind. I’ll take any positive feedback.

WES: Well, one of the things that you talked about ‑‑ and it was the first time I’d really ever heard somebody sort of frame it this way ‑‑ was that we have this tendency to be really good at sharing the gospel with people that are ‑‑ you may have said at our socioeconomic level, but especially those that are below our socioeconomic level, but we sort of have a hard time, or may just don’t do it at all, share the gospel with people that are above our socioeconomic level, with people that we consider to be rich or people that we consider to be successful. Maybe, first, why is that, and then, you know, what can we do about that?

MATTHEW: Maybe we just have this assumption that, you know, Jesus said it’s so hard for the rich to make it into heaven, so we just think, oh, you know, rich people don’t care, and I think that’s just us kind of bringing our preconceived ideas to it, because if you look at the reality of it ‑‑ and we’re two preachers in this podcast right now, and I would say, very much, I consider myself rich. Like I ‑‑ when Jesus was talking about the rich people, he was talking about me, and I still love Jesus. I came to the Lord. And so I think, as culture has changed, our definition of rich is just anybody who we think makes more money than us. 

One of my dear mentors said he lived with a very wealthy family in Nashville, and he was a foster child, and he said that this family ‑‑ and these are ‑‑ if I was to say the name, everybody in Nashville would know this name. That’s how well off they were. He said the rich people had a TV in their house…until they got a TV. The rich people had two cars…until they got two cars. And so our idea of rich keeps going higher and higher, but we’re not talking about reaching Bill Gates. We’re talking about reaching Bill, our neighbor, who lives in a very nice house right next to our very nice house. And we kind of ‑‑ because of our kind of church dynamics, a lot of our ministries through the years have been benevolence‑based, where we have food pantries, we have clothing drives. Wes, I almost feel guilty to say this, but I’m not driving to any church in this town for food or a used jacket. I’m just not. And in Castle Rock, we are the fifth wealthiest county in the nation. If our strategy for connecting with our community was benevolence, we’d have nobody.

WES: So how do we go about addressing this, and maybe even what Biblical framework do we have? What Biblical ideas? You even brought one out in the class that you taught. What Biblical framework do we have for sort of looking at our neighbors ‑‑ our wealthy neighbors, our successful neighbors ‑‑ and sharing the gospel with them?

MATTHEW: So I had this realization ‑‑ so, you know, I do my class on the woman at the well, and I noticed that everywhere I went, when we talk about evangelism, we always talk about the woman at the well. And I asked myself, why is that? And I realized it’s because we feel comfortable reaching lower on the social hierarchy, and we all have that construct in our mind.  And I thought, we all can go to the woman at the well. You know, maybe she doesn’t have the best reputation in town, she’s not well off, and we’re willing to speak to people that we consider to be ‑‑ you know, I hate to say it, but somehow lower in the social hierarchy. 

So I sat there and I thought ‑‑ in my mind, I said, you know, I’m a poor preacher in Castle Rock. If that’s the case, everybody’s going to try to evangelize me. So I thought most of the people I talk to are ‑‑ they’re all high executives, they’re all well off, they all live in nicer houses, so I better get over this or I can’t talk to anybody. And I thought, who has ever heard a lesson on reaching Cornelius? And then I thought about it, and I was like, I’m going to think about this. I just had this [demonstrating mind being blown], you know, with my bald head, like that’s why the hair’s off. And so I just realized it, and I thought, I’m going to study Cornelius and how do we reach Cornelius? Roman Centurion, very influential, very powerful, and he’s well off enough to be giving alms to the community, so how do we reach him? 

And I came up with a couple principles. One was role reversal. You’re not going to go to Cornelius and say, “Cornelius, do you need food?” He’s going to be like, “No.” In fact, he may be insulted, so that’s not going to work. You’re going to go to him and you’re going to put yourself in the position of weakness. You are going to be the one in need. And a lot of our Christian people ‑‑ you know, as they say in the South, bless their hearts ‑‑ they’re doing good things. Christian people love people. Like, we have amazing churches and they want to do good, but our wealthy people, our socially affluent people, don’t need good. If they need something, they’ll just buy it, so you have to come and ask them for something and you’ve got to partner with them. 

So think about this, Wes. If churches want to reach our communities, what can you do in the community that all people can get on board with? In my community, I’m a tennis coach and I can reach ‑‑ I can connect with non‑Christians who are of the social status middle class, upper middle class, ultra rich, doesn’t matter, and say, “Can you help me develop character in my tennis program and can you help fund my tennis work?” Well, fortunately, rich people play tennis, and they say, “Yeah, I’d love to do that. I want to make a difference in this community. I want to help young people.” But a lot of our ministries in the community have been very kind of Christian‑centric. That means, well, it’s all about just trying to reach them for Jesus, but the way to partner with them is to do good works in the community that all people can get on board with. We don’t usually do that, but that’s kind of your gateway to getting your affluent neighbors into kind of your circle of doing good. So that’s one approach, so place yourself in the weak position. Ask. Say, “You know, I really need some help with this.” They’ll show up to speak to your kids. They’ll give like a good talk about their background, and all of a sudden, now you’ve got reasons to connect and build that relationship over a good work, and I think that’s very successful. 

Another thing that ‑‑ if you look at Cornelius, when Peter shows up, what does Cornelius do to Peter? 

WES: They say that they’re there to listen and learn.

MATTHEW: Yeah, but Cornelius bows down. Like he bows down, and Peter’s like, “Cornelius, get up, man.” I think sometimes people in our communities have more respect for people of God than the people of God have respect for people in the community, and I think the people in our communities have more respect for ministers than sometimes the people in our own congregations. And when we, in our churches, kind of make, like, off‑putting remarks about ministers ‑‑ I’m starting to see a change, because in the community and with the affluent, they say, you know, “In my world, people do a lot of stuff for money. I respect you because you’re doing stuff for a bigger purpose.” They’re so surrounded by materialism and wealth that they’re saying, “I respect the people who got out of this treadmill and are doing something that is not financially rewarding to them.” They’re very complimentary. And so when you partner with them, they’re like, “Hey, I just want to do good.” 

One of my friends, how I got involved in tennis ‑‑ he’s a non‑Christian. Total non‑Christian, doesn’t come to my church, doesn’t go to any church, not interested. He comes to me, and he says, “Can you help build character on our tennis team?” He still saw the values of God as helpful for helping young men and young girls be better citizens, better husbands, better wives, better employees. And so great respect for what I do even though he doesn’t believe in the Lord that I serve.

WES: Wow. When you were saying all this today, and in your lesson a couple weeks ago, my mind went to a couple of different places. One is that I think it’s kind of similar to one of the ministries that we have here at McDermott Road. We also live in a very affluent neighborhood. And I want to be clear. What I hear you saying is that ‑‑ I don’t think that we’re saying that you shouldn’t be reaching out to poor people, you shouldn’t be helping the poor in your community, but that we could ‑‑ we shouldn’t exclusively focus on just helping and reaching those that are poor and struggling financially. But one of the ways that we’ve done, I think similar to what you’re describing, is that we have a trailer here at the church parking lot. It’s actually manned every day of the week by an organization that they collect used goods. It’s kind of like a secondhand‑store trailer. So they collect donations from the wealthy people in our community, things like furniture, things like clothing, all of these used items, and then those used items are sold at their secondhand store, and the church receives the financial compensation for that, and then we take that money and use that to buy fruits and vegetables for people that live in a different neighborhood that are struggling to eat. And so we’re actually partnering with the wealthy in our community to reach the struggling, the hungry in another community. 

And one of the things that ‑‑ as you were talking, it made me think about Philippians 2, so many principles in scripture about considering others more significant than yourselves. It is this showing respect, this mutual respect. And like you said, there’s actually sometimes a great deal of respect that unbelievers have, non‑church people, non‑Christian people have for religious people, even for ministers, but that mutual respect needs to go both ways, and that we need to show that respect and show that deference to other people. I love the idea of putting ourselves in a weaker position and approaching them and saying, “Hey, we need your help and we could really benefit from your help in this area or another.” 

Do you think that we tend to be ‑‑ I know, speaking personally, I think another aspect of this is sort of an intimidation factor that people that have wealth and that have money or, you know, that we would deem to be successful in their career, or whatever area it might be, even just physical beauty ‑‑ I think sometimes there is an intimidation factor, that we have a hard time talking to them about the gospel because we’re just intimidated by them. We feel inferior to them. Do you think that plays an aspect in our hesitancy to reach our neighbors that are a little bit above us in the socioeconomic ladder?  

MATTHEW: Oh, yeah. I think everybody has that basic ‑‑ maybe you get it from high school. You know, somehow the cool kids, you were scared to talk to, and I think we all have that. I think it’s very natural for us. And I love what you guys are doing at the congregation, too. It’s like, in our Christian minds, we’re thinking, you know, the people who have, you know, are going to give, and then we’re going to reach the people in the community and try to share the gospel with those who need the handouts.  But the people who are bringing the stuff, they’re your mission field, as well. We don’t even ponder that thought. You know, rich people are lost, as well, but it’s almost like we assume they’re not interested. And maybe it’s ‑‑ I don’t know if it’s a lack of self‑esteem. I think maybe we just ‑‑ we don’t like the rejection, but that’s why I like to highlight that Cornelius was respectful. The people we talk to who are very successful in their careers or financially or whatever ‑‑ however you measure that, they are kind people. You know, we have almost turned this kind of demonization of wealth in our society, that they’re looking down on somebody. I don’t find that. I think they’re looking for purpose just as much as we are. They’re looking for kind of a bigger meaning as our society has moved away from Christian values, but the value of contributing to this world is human, and when we tap into that, they are receptive to it. If they’re not, they may not have that good heart. We’re looking for the good heart, but I think we almost self‑select. We have said no for them before they had a chance to even respond. 

WES: Maybe part of it is our approach and the approach that we even assume that we have to take. I think ‑‑ I was always told, and I probably always approached evangelism in the mindset that you have to make people feel bad before you can make them feel better. You have to convict them of their sin first. Like that needs to be your out‑of‑the‑gate approach. You need to let them know and convince them that they’re sinners and that they’re bad people and that they need to be saved, and that’s how you need to go about it. And I think that we feel ‑‑ I think because we maybe are already looking down on poor people, we assume that we have a right to sort of put them in their place and tell them that they’re sinners, but we have a hard time doing the same thing to people that we feel like are above us. And so we’re intimidated by them and we don’t want to approach Bill Gates and tell him he’s a sinner because we’re intimidated by Bill Gates, but we’re not intimidated, because we’re actually looking down our nose at our poor neighbor, and we don’t mind telling them that they’re sinners because we don’t care what they think of us. And maybe that aspect of our evangelism ‑‑ maybe that’s backwards anyway. 

So you shared a great story ‑‑ I don’t know if you want to share that today or not, but your story about the bus and your approach sort of in the beginning when you first learned the gospel and how you addressed people and tried to share the gospel with them. Why is that not the best approach, to just try to tell people that they’re sinners right out of the gate?  

MATTHEW: Well, maybe I ‑‑ I didn’t grow up in the church, but somehow I drank the water of shame, because you’re right; I tell the story ‑‑ I go back home from being baptized. I’m going to school every day, and I get on the same bus to head to the campus to go to school, and there’s these two girls that I would see every single day, every morning. And this one day, one of them was telling the other one about how she cheated on her boyfriend, and I overheard this. So I was like, yes, this is my opportunity, because I don’t have to convince her that she’s a sinner; she confessed to it. So I leaned in and I said, “Do you know that fornication is a sin?” And they looked at me ‑‑ and I don’t think Christian people know that non‑Christians don’t

know what that word means. So I defined the word and then I gave them a good talking to. You know, I let them have it. I preached the gospel to them, telling them about how they shouldn’t be sleeping with their boyfriends, and they certainly shouldn’t be cheating on their boyfriends and sleeping with somebody else. Well, the next ‑‑ that afternoon, the friend, not the fornicator, got on the bus. So I thought, okay, the fornicator has a hard heart, but the friend, she’s going to respond to the gospel. She came and sat right in front of me and she chewed me out. “You judgmental” ‑‑ she had a few choice words for me. And, you know, they never spoke to me and you could just tell they hated me. 

And so, in our society, it’s almost like we had this preconception that we needed to shame people into the gospel. Once you give a person ‑‑ that you are prejudging them, judging them, and they feel an ounce of shame, that you’re shaming them, they’re out. They are done. And so I know our church members, Wes, don’t believe in that approach. You know, if you were to ask them, they’re like, “I would never do that,” but it’s almost like the water we have drunk, that we got to convince them that they’re sinners first, and I don’t think that’s the approach. I know that’s not going to work. I want to partner with people and affirm that they are somebody who wants to do good, that wants to do good, and then you influence them by saying, “I want to do good, as well. My motivation is to do good because of Jesus Christ.” At the essence, it opens up this space ‑‑ “What’s your motivation?” ‑‑ and it gets them thinking through it, and then, all of a sudden, they’re kind of more willing. They want to explore, “Hmm, you want to do good; I want to do good. We can partner on this together.” But then, when they start to kind of think through it, they’re like, “There’s more to this than me just doing good. I need to have a bigger purpose.” Because I do think people have that spiritual intuition that they connect with, and that opens continued doors. I think that’s the approach ‑‑ like that’s the wagon I want to be bringing into town. I’m not bringing the wagon of shame.

WES: When you think about most of the harsh ‑‑ there is a time for harsh admonishment, but most of the harsh admonishment that we find in scripture is not for the world; it’s for religious people. Jesus had all of his harsh criticisms for the Pharisees, for the Sadducees, for the people that knew better, and it was the tax collectors, the so‑called sinners, that ‑‑ people were shocked. Jesus is eating with them, which, to your idea and to your point about partnering with, that was seen as partnering with, as being in fellowship with, and people were just absolutely flabbergasted that this rabbi would be partnering with, having fellowship with, eating meals with these people that they had nothing to do with, and then he harshly criticized the religious people. Now, that’s not to say that Jesus didn’t take sin seriously. He did, but he understood that in order to reach these people, you have to love them and you have to show them respect and that you see the image of God in them. 

And I think, so often, we haven’t approached that way, and I think you’re right that so many of our church members, they know that’s not the right approach, but they’ve never been shown another model of evangelism and so they just don’t evangelize. They don’t share the Good News with their neighbors, with their family because they don’t know any other way to do it. They think, “If I’m going to do it, this is how I have to do it. I have to tell them off first,” and they’re not willing to do that, so they say, “Well, I feel guilty about it, but I guess I’m just not good at that. I can’t do that. I’m not going to go down that path.”

MATTHEW: Well, think about ‑‑ this is so Biblical. Like this is the methodology of Jesus. Matthew, tax collector. Is Matthew a poor guy? He is not. You know, if you know one thing about tax collectors, they are taking a little off the top. He is a wealthy man. Okay? As soon as Matthew is called, he chooses to follow Jesus. Jesus doesn’t pull Matthew from his people. Jesus goes to the party that Matthew hosts, and you know, if you’ve been to some of these, you know, well‑off parties, it’s a nice party, like we’re eating some good food. That’s Matthew, and Jesus connects to his group of friends. Pharisees are like, “I can’t believe he’s doing that.” No, he’s partnering with him. 

Zacchaeus. Sees Zacchaeus. What does Zacchaeus do? He’s like, “I’m coming to your house today, Zacchaeus.” Okay. Zacchaeus is like, “This is fantastic. This guy’s going to show up to my house.” And what does Zacchaeus do? “I’m going to give back fourfold of everything I’ve taken.” Who was Zacchaeus? A very wealthy man. And what does Jesus do? He allows Zacchaeus to use his resources to do good for those and to bring more people in. But in both cases ‑‑ we almost never talk about the wealth in the Bible ‑‑ these people were very receptive, very receptive to Jesus. And then when they bend, Jesus is like, “Yeah, let’s use this to continue to build the kingdom and spread the word.” Don’t you love that model?

WES: Yeah. And you’re so right; that doesn’t get talked about very often. And when Jesus does approach these men ‑‑ you know, I think about ‑‑ I was thinking about that scene of Zacchaeus even before you said that, that here he approaches the tree where Zacchaeus has climbed up in that tree. He doesn’t point his finger and wag his finger at him. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself. Do you know how many people you’ve taken advantage of? You’ve robbed so many people. You ought to be ashamed. You’re a horrible person.” He says, “I want to go eat with you,” and that dignity and respect and love that he showed Zacchaeus, it transformed him. It changed him. It drew him into relationship rather than pushing him away. 

And I think sometimes we ‑‑ those that do practice this harsh version of evangelism, I think they ‑‑ sometimes we have a tendency to wear the rejection as a badge of honor, that, “Well, I told them the truth and they didn’t want to hear it, and I did what I was supposed to do,” and we’re pushing people away rather than helping bring them closer to Jesus.

MATTHEW: Well, Wes, it’s because we ‑‑ okay. You know, church members are fantastic people. They love Jesus. They want to share Jesus. But sometimes they go launching in too quickly and they don’t know when it’s time to then take it to the next level. So I always do like ‑‑ it’s kind of like the three levels of interaction, and you have like the first one: Fake. You meet somebody, you get to know them, and it’s just kind of a fake relationship. “How are you doing today?” “Oh, I’m doing great. How are you doing?” “I’m doing great, too.” You know, everybody’s doing great because that’s our society. If I launch into a conversation about your faith, your beliefs, or share my faith, they’re like, “This is icky. This is like ‑‑ I don’t want to be here right now. This is too much. It’s like we’re talking politics. I don’t want to talk about politics.” So you launching in is ‑‑ you’re going to get a written, automatic no. 

So then you wait and then you move to Facts, and that’s kind of on the relationship. You talk about weather, you talk about sports, you talk about your kids, you talk about what’s going on at school, you know, community, just stuff that everybody feels comfortable talking about. And then you think, “Well, should I launch in?” No, no, no. You are waiting until you can express emotion to them, and they have an emotion expressed to you. 

So if you say, “I got so angry last night when my son came home.  He came home late, and I yelled at him. I shouldn’t have been yelling at him, but I was so mad. I told him ‑‑ and I was frustrated with him,” and then you listen to their response. If they say, “Yep, that can happen,” don’t ‑‑ they’re not ready. They’re not ready for that level of interaction with you. But if they say, “You thought you were mad? Let me tell you what I did. I wouldn’t call it anger. I would say it was like pouring Red Bull and Monster on anger because I launched into my boy and I was super mad!” Now you know the relationship can be evangelized. So don’t come jumping in there too quick. Like, slow your roll and say a Feeling. Test it out and see if they give you back a feeling. If you do, that’s when you know you can share your faith. 

Now I’m going to say why. Okay? And everybody’s going to be like that’s the weirdest words I’ve ever said, but it’s because of the Kantian Noumenal/Phenomenal divide. So Wes, in the first century, all knowledge was in one bucket. One bucket. So if I said, you know, “Seuss is great,” everybody would be like, “Okay, that sounds great to me. You know, like that’s fine.” And then if I said to the same guy, “Seuss is great, and 1 plus 1 equals 2,” they’d be like, “You have spoken knowledge,” but that’s not in American society. So Immanuel Kant realized, after the Enlightenment, our society separated knowledge into the noumenal and into the area of the phenomenal. Noumenal is values, ethics, is there love? The phenomenal is the measurements. You know, the sky is blue; water boils at 100 degrees Celsius. So when you switch over into kind of the realm of God, people can feel awkward with it, but if you test it out by sharing a feeling, that’s what you’re doing. Now you know you can kind of take it to the next level with your faith.

WES: This was incredibly helpful. This was probably my favorite part of your class, was this idea of a Fake and then Facts and then Feelings and testing out the relationship to see if you’re at that point where you can share feelings with that person. That was so helpful because it articulated what I think every single one of us have experienced, that either we’ve been the icky, weird person and we have shared our faith and people have treated us like we’re icky and weird, or, more likely than not, we know people like that and we just don’t know why ‑‑ like there’s a level at which we admire them and we think, I wish I could do that. I wish I could get on the elevator and say, excuse me, sir, can I tell you about Jesus? You know, we wish we could do that, but we’re like, ah, I just can’t do that. It seems so weird. It seems so strange. We think it’s noble, to some degree, but at the same time, we realize that it’s just socially awkward, and it’s unsuccessful and people don’t respond well to it. You’re very seldom going to enter into a long‑term friendship, much less teach that person the Good News about Jesus, just through this brief interaction. You are so much better off waiting until you have built some level of rapport. 

And I think, putting it that way, where you’re at the point where you can share feelings with one another, it gives us a really practical litmus test to know am I at a point where I can share about Jesus and it won’t feel like I’m being emotionally manipulative; it won’t feel like I’m being strange or weird or just socially awkward? And I think that’s incredibly helpful, Matthew. Thank you.

MATTHEW: Yeah, I think people like it because we feel like we have very little control in evangelism, and in this way, you kind of ‑‑ when do you have that conversation? When do you start to share your faith? And I wait till Feelings. And it’s just ‑‑ they may not be saying “Where’s water,” but they’re going to be open to it. And so one of the ways I do it is the AIM approach ‑‑ the AIM approach. So I’m Authentic, I try to create Interest, and I talk about the difference that Christ has Made in my life, so that’s my entryway. And so once they express a feeling, I’ll say ‑‑ I’ll try to share something like ‑‑ if it’s a young father, I’ll be like, “Man, I’m really struggling with trying to be a dad. I do not have this dad thing down,” and I’ll kind of just open with that. You know, “Do you ever feel like you just can’t do dadding?” And then the person may kind of be like listening, and they’ll be like ‑‑ if they’ll say, like, “I just feel inadequate,” now I know ‑‑ I’ll say, “But you know what I’ve found? My faith has really helped me with that. It seems like I just ‑‑ I don’t know what it is, but Jesus has made me a better dad. Like I don’t know if that seems odd to you, but it’s really been impactful for me, and I’ve learned like even how to love my kids and express it, and, really, it all goes back to my faith.” Like I remember in my family ‑‑ my family never said I love you. I didn’t hug my dad. But I remember being at the airport, and I was like, I’m going to lean in, and I remember hugging my dad, and my dad’s like super awkward, and I’m like, “Dad, I love you,” and my dad’s like, “I love you, too,” and that was the first time my family said to one another “I love you.” You know why that happened? Because of Jesus Christ.

Now, I’ll share that little story if I think it will connect with them. I’ll go with my AIM approach: Authentic, create Interest, try to connect it to a need that they have, and then I’ll end it with a Made‑the‑difference story. All of a sudden, I have planted a seed in a way that they don’t feel judged. You know, like, hey, that’s just something I’m sharing. But if they’re dealing with that, too, they may sit back and think, hmm. They may go home and, all of a sudden, they may ‑‑ they’re not going to call me up and say, “I’m coming to church,” but I remember when I was a non‑Christian, I was given a Bible, and I remember being at work and I got into some fight or something. I was just struggling. I remember opening up the Bible and reading it. I don’t even know what I was searching for, but I was searching for God, and it opened up that opportunity. They will do that, and then that starts planting that seed, and you’re going to start seeing them asking you little questions every now and then about your faith, and I think that’s how we do it. That’s how we bridge that, and that’s not icky. In fact, the person is like, “Man, I appreciate him sharing that with me.”

WES: Yeah. I love ‑‑ sort of tying all of it together, I love the idea of sharing your story and doing so from a position of vulnerability, where you’re not just sharing a feeling; particularly, you’re sharing a struggle, and I love that you pointed out that it has to be authentic, that that sort of idea of authenticity ‑‑ it kind of has become a buzzword and could probably be used in ways that probably aren’t healthy and aren’t really authentic, but there’s a lot of truth to that, that we can’t be fake. And I think so many of our evangelistic efforts, they come across ‑‑ they at least are perceived as being fake. They seem manipulative. They seem like you’re trying to sell somebody a used car ‑‑ nothing against used‑car salesmen ‑‑ but it seems like you’re trying to twist people’s arm. But when you’re just genuinely, authentically sharing your own struggle with somebody ‑‑ and even going back to the idea of asking for help, not just help like, “Hey, could you help us to reach the poor?” But “Do you have any advice for me? Like I’ve got a 15‑year‑old son, and, man, I’m really ‑‑ I’m struggling to be a dad, and I would ‑‑ I know you’ve got kids.  Any advice you have?” You know, and if they say, “Man, I don’t really have any advice. I’m struggling, too,” you know, then that builds this type of relationship where it doesn’t seem strange or manipulative. It’s real. It’s genuine. It’s respectful. It’s loving.

MATTHEW: Yeah. And there’s camaraderie with that. It’s like, “I’ll tell you what; let’s just try to keep doing this together.” Everybody can get on that page. You know, Christians and non‑Christians, we’re all just trying to figure out this life, and I think once you kind of show that respect, it’s like, “Hey, I’ll take any good insights you’ve got,” and all of a sudden, they’re like, “Hey, I’ll take anything, too.” Two strugglers are always friends. You have never seen somebody who has started freezing, won’t huddle up. And if there’s one fire, strangers freezing no longer are strangers. I will get close to anybody around a fire that gives me advice. Now think about that, that analogy about Jesus Christ. If Jesus is the answer, and we believe that, there’s always room around that fire for mutual strugglers seeking help.

WES: Yeah. And I love that this is not just pointing people to Jesus; it’s actually embodying ‑‑ I keep coming back to Philippians 2 ‑‑ it’s embodying the cruciform life. It’s embodying the incarnation because this is what Jesus did. Jesus didn’t look down from his throne, didn’t look down from the glory of heaven and say, “Hey, y’all need to shape up down there.” He lowered himself. He considered others as more significant than himself. He washed their dirty, nasty feet. He served them. He suffered with them. He empathized with them. And if we’re going to reach people, we don’t need to just tell them a message. We need to embody that message. And I love the way that you’re framing this because it’s exactly what that’s doing. It is loving our lost neighbors the way Jesus loved us, and this is the way Jesus brought us into his family, and that’s what’s going to reach the lost.

MATTHEW: Wes, I’m going to illustrate our method of evangelism. Okay? So my grandmother would make homemade bread. Oh, my grandmother had fantastic homemade bread. She’d make it. I’d live with her, I’d do the chores, I’d look after the cows, and on the way into that house, I could smell the homemade bread. Okay? Now, if I was to write down, you know, on a piece of paper the recipe for the homemade bread ‑‑ I wrote down, you know, flour, yeast, you know, sugar, salt, and I had that, and then I took it and I waved it at you ‑‑ okay. Are you getting hungry yet, Wes? No. You think I’m foolish. You’re not enticed by the recipe; you’re enticed by the bread. 

We have taken the plan of salvation and we have waved it at people and said, “Here’s the recipe. Here’s the recipe. Don’t you want to be a Christian?” And people are like, “I don’t care.” But when you give them the bread of life, when we’re incarnational, when we are like ‑‑ I love how you’re really fleshing out Philippians 2 ‑‑ we’re in there and they smell the fragrance of Jesus on us, they smell the bread on us, they want the bread. We’ve been flapping the recipe, but we haven’t been flapping Christ.

WES: Amen. Well, Matthew, thank you so much. I could talk about this all day. I appreciate you not only having this conversation with me and teaching this class, but thank you for living this out. Thank you for sharing Jesus the way that you do and for helping us to better share Jesus with our neighbors.

MATTHEW: Thank you, Wes. I was looking forward to this, to be on the podcast of Wes McAdams. I told my wife ‑‑ I literally showed up, and I said, I gotta be on this podcast. I said, it’s a big deal. It’s a big deal.

WES: Well, it’s a big deal for me to spend time with you, Matthew. Thank you. Thank you for your work you’re doing in the kingdom, Brother.

MATTHEW: Thank you, Wes.

The post How to Share the Gospel without Being Weird with Matthew Morine appeared first on Radically Christian.

Why is baptism such a big deal in the New Testament? Many Christians understand that baptism is important, but they may struggle to articulate the deep meaning behind this sacred act. In this episode of the Radically Christian Bible Study Podcast, Wes McAdams and his guest Marcus Stenson dive deep into the topic of baptism, addressing questions and concerns that many believers have. Whether you’re new to the concept of baptism or have been a Christian for years, this episode will provide valuable insights and clarification on this crucial aspect of the Christian faith.

Through an examination of various biblical passages, Wes and Marcus explore the rich symbolism and spiritual significance of baptism. They discuss how baptism represents dying to our old sinful selves and being raised to new life in Christ, echoing the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus himself. The episode also delves into the relationship between baptism and the Holy Spirit, shedding light on how the Spirit works in connection with baptism. Additionally, the conversation touches on the communal aspect of baptism, highlighting how it relates to being welcomed into the family of God and the body of Christ.

Marcus Stenson is the preaching minister at the Leander Church of Christ, located just north of Austin, Texas. He is a co-founder of Christians for Kenya, a non-profit organization dedicated to equipping Kenyans to spread the gospel through education and humanitarian aid. Marcus is also a member of the team at Be1Make1, an organization that empowers people to fulfill their disciple-making purpose. With his deep knowledge of Scripture and passion for the kingdom of God, Marcus brings valuable insights and perspectives to this discussion on the importance and beauty of baptism.

Links and Resources

• Watch this Episode on YouTube
• Leander Church of Christ
• Be1Make1
• Freed Hardeman University Graduate School of Theology

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 baptism. Why is baptism important? Why is it significant? Why is it beautiful? I’m going to talk to Marcus Stenson, who is currently the preaching minister at the Leander Church of Christ, just north of Austin, Texas. He’s a co‑founder of Christians for Kenya, a kingdom‑facing nonprofit 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 so appreciate Marcus and the things that he has to share. I know that you’re going to be encouraged, as well. 

I want to start by reading Romans 6, starting in verse 1. Paul says, “What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it? Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.”  

I hope that you enjoy this conversation, and I hope that it helps all of us learn to love like Jesus.  

WES: Marcus Stenson, welcome back to the podcast, Brother.

MARCUS: Hey, man, thank you so much for having me. It’s always a great time.

WES: We have spent far too long already having a pre‑podcast conversation, and it’s been so rich, so I’m excited now to hit the record button so everybody can join in on our talk.

MARCUS: Absolutely. Maybe you can cut that as some bonus content for subscribers in the future, put together a little package for them.  You never know.  Something special.

WES: No doubt. Well, it’s good to have you back, Brother. I’m excited to have this conversation. Let’s start with the question that I received from one of our listeners, and then we’ll kind of see where the conversation goes from there. So somebody wrote in and said, “I’m new to listening to the podcast. I’m really enjoying it. Do you have anything on the topic of Holy Spirit baptism? I’ve been in discussions with others about baptism, and they say most of the baptism references after the book of Acts are referring to Spirit baptism and not water baptism. Could you lead me in the right direction to better understand and teach others? Thank you.” 

So let’s kind of broadly discuss that idea, specifically, about water baptism. I think that there are multiple, you know, bad directions that people can go when they talk about the theology behind water baptism, but, you know, why is it a big deal? Is it a big deal? Do we make too big a deal of it? Do we not make a big enough deal of it? What are some of your preliminary thoughts on that?

MARCUS: Oh, man, I agree. There are a lot of wild roads you can go down when it comes down to the topic of baptism, but ‑‑ I don’t know if this will surprise you; I actually think we probably don’t make enough of it. I think, in so many instances, especially in our context, and probably, I assume, for most of the listeners to this podcast, the question has always just come down to “Is it necessary?” We spend a lot of time defending that, and we spend a lot of time proving that and demonstrating that from scripture, but the practice of baptism, even back for the Jews, leading up to the New Testament and then in the New Testament period, is incredibly rich. There’s a lot there. And then it’s so deep and rich with meaning and symbolism for us that, I think, unfortunately, sometimes we leave a lot of that by the wayside in the discussions of its necessity. So it’s absolutely important maybe, in some ways, on a level greater than we realize, so I’m excited to kind of step into some of those spaces in this conversation and hear what you think, too.

WES: Yeah, amen. I think that’s a great way to put it. I think that we have focused in, almost myopically, on the idea that baptism is necessary ‑‑ this is necessary for salvation ‑‑ and we have disconnected that from the beauty and the richness of this ceremony, however you want to frame what it is, and we’ve really ‑‑ I think that we have really made a mistake in making this all about, you know, works and ‑‑ you know, is this salvation by works, and we’ve sort of fallen into the trap that I feel like the evangelical direction has laid for us on baptism, because so many on sort of the broad evangelical side would say it’s not necessary for salvation, and I think they’re pushing back against the Catholic idea that baptism disconnected from personal faith ‑‑ so let me kind of frame it this way. I think that, for the longest time, you had the Roman Catholic Church that was practicing infant baptism and connecting this ritual of water baptism, and we could define that, you know, the sprinkling, but they were practicing water baptism as a sacrament that was the church bestowing salvation on these families, on these children.

And then the reformers came along and the Protestant movement came along and said, no, no, no, salvation is about personal faith in Jesus, and it’s really not about you going through this ceremony that you didn’t have anything ‑‑ you didn’t decide this, you didn’t participate in this; this was something the church was doing to you or for you, but not something that you’re participating in. And they pushed back against that and made it about, they would say, faith alone, that salvation is by grace through faith. And I think where I would come in, and I would say, well, you’re both right. You know, I do believe scripture teaches that it is a sacrament. This is the church giving salvation, through Jesus, to the world. This is the church baptizing people into Christ, so it is sacramental in a sense, and we do believe something is actually happening when a person is baptized.  

But the Protestant reformation was also right, that it is also about personal faith in Jesus, and it is about people deciding to put their faith in Jesus, and we are saved by grace. It’s a gift, through faith, through putting your trust, giving your allegiance, pledging your loyalty to King Jesus, but all of that comes together in baptism. And I think that the Catholics are so quick to say the Protestants are wrong, and the Protestants are so quick to say the Catholics are wrong, and I kind of want to come along, not necessarily in the middle, but to transcend that argument and say, well, you’re both right, and yes, it is sacramental in that something is actually transpiring in the act of baptism, but it’s also about salvation by faith.

MARCUS: I love that idea. Let’s come along and say “yes, and” and let’s not clip off some of the meaning that is actually built into this practice and into this ritual or this sacrament, whatever you would like to call it. Just to echo some of what you’re saying, one of the interesting things that I’ve found in that argument that has taken place for so long is many of the Protestant reform traditions retain infant baptism, and yet it would seem to conflict with their claim of faith alone and this is totally divorced from anything to do with salvation, yet they have this impulse to baptize infants in case something happens before they can make that profession of faith. And so there’s a little bit of cognitive dissonance built into that practice there. 

I would say that one of the best ways for me to understand some of the fullness of what baptism represents is going back and looking at the parallels and the allusions between the circumcision given to Abraham and the Israelites, and how it’s described like circumcision in the New Testament in the book of Colossians and elsewhere, and that signifies that we have something much deeper going on than just the church doing something to somebody or just this single individual act, so I like where you’re going with that.

WES: Yeah, yeah. Let’s talk about that idea of water. How do we know that it’s water that ‑‑ you know, for instance, Colossians 2 that you’ve already brought up; Galatians 3, Paul says we’re all one in Christ; everybody who’s been baptized into Christ, we’re all part of Abraham’s family. How do we know that when these passages are talking about baptism as being this moment that you are clothed with Christ or you are in Christ, or, Romans 6, you’re buried with Christ ‑‑ how do we know that we’re talking about water baptism as opposed to what some would claim that, no, no, no, this is Holy Spirit baptism, this is something that God is doing to you, not something that you’re doing, sort of an outward work, as they might put it. So how do we know that it’s water, and why water? Why is that significant, you think?

MARCUS: There are a number of practical examples throughout the entire New Testament of this being clearly demonstrated as water baptism that is taking place. Now, there are those iconic passages where there is the presence of the Holy Spirit coming on somebody. The day of Pentecost, of course, is famous for that reason. Then, of course, you also have the conversion of Cornelius and his household, but in those instances, they are more outliers or exceptions to the rule. In both cases, the Holy Spirit manifested in a way to signify that God was doing something miraculous in that moment, and it was communicating something specific. I think it would be a mistake to take that understanding and apply it broadly across the other incidents of baptism in which there are other factors and variables in play, very clearly in the text, that show us that, hey, this is the Ethiopian eunuch going down to the water to be put physically in it. Or even, at the end of that Acts passage on the day of Pentecost, these are 3,000 people that are going down into the water to be baptized in response to what they’ve seen of the Holy Spirit appearing with the apostles. So I would be very wary to disregard all of the other factors in play in these passages that show us that we’re very really, practically, talking about someone going down into the water and reenacting the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus.

WES: Yeah. And I think that it’s important to recognize ‑‑ and you’ve already kind of pointed this out ‑‑ that “baptize,” that’s an English word. It’s a transliteration of a Greek word, but the word that’s being used, this Greek word of baptizo, it was a very common word. It was not a religious word. There were religious usages of the word, but baptizo was not a ‑‑ it was not specifically a religious word. So when they thought of baptizing something or someone, they weren’t necessarily thinking about a religious ceremony. It depended on the context. 

You could talk about ‑‑ Josephus even talks about whole ships being baptized. He talks about people being drowned; they were baptized. I think a good equivalent ‑‑ and maybe it would be helpful if we used English words that actually mean what we’re trying to talk about. “Plunge” is a great word. We tend to use the word “immerse,” but “plunge” is a great word. I think sometimes when we think about “immerse,” we get worried about, well, what if there was a strand of hair that was sticking up from the water? Or what if there was a toe that poked up from the water? That’s not the point. The point is, something is being plunged, dipped down into something, but the implication is always water. Like, that’s what the word implies. When we say the word “plunge,” we automatically think of water. 

Now, we can use the word “plunge” metaphorically. We could talk about somebody getting married and say, you know, “Did you take the plunge?” You know, “He took the plunge.” But it’s a metaphor and we understand that, and the context has to bear that out. But if you just hear the word “plunge,” you automatically think, oh, we’re putting something, almost by force, into water. And the same is true with the Greek word baptizo, that the automatic assumption with the word “baptize” is putting something into water. Now, John the baptizer used the word metaphorically to say that Jesus is going to baptize you in the Holy Spirit, meaning Jesus is going to plunge you into the Holy Spirit or he’s going to pour out the Holy Spirit on you; you’re going to be washed in the Holy Spirit; you’re going to be overwhelmed by the Holy Spirit; you’re going to be immersed in the Holy Spirit. But it was obvious, because he attached the phrase “with the Holy Spirit,” that it was a metaphor and he was using it metaphorically. But if we just see the word “baptized” by itself, it can’t be that. We can’t make the assumption that it’s a metaphor. We have to assume that it’s water because that’s the most natural use of the word.

MARCUS: And it’s the most common use of the word throughout the entire New Testament, as well. You bring up John. John is literally standing in the Jordan, putting people down in the water, plunging them, dipping them, immersing them, however you want to render it, when he makes this statement and when he draws this metaphor. So I think that’s very well ‑‑ very well said there.

WES: And when you ‑‑ in some of the passages that come into question ‑‑ I think about Acts 22:16. Paul is retelling his conversion story and he says that Ananias said to him, “Why do you wait? Arise and be baptized, wash away your sins, calling on the name of the Lord.” So it’s obvious that baptism always is tied to this idea of forgiveness of sins, the washing away of sins, the salvation of the person. It’s always tied together with that idea. And when someone is told to do it, be baptized, of course that’s a passive ‑‑ it’s a passive commandment. It’s not something you do. You don’t arise and baptize; you arise and submit to baptism. You allow someone else to baptize you ‑‑ and I think there’s an important part of the picture there ‑‑ but you can’t do that if he’s talking about Holy Spirit baptism. You can’t arise and make the Holy Spirit baptize you. Like that’s not how it works. Like when the Holy Spirit is poured out on people, that’s something that Jesus does. That’s not something that you have any control over. When that happened to Cornelius’ household or when it happened at Pentecost, that wasn’t something that they were commanded to do. And so Paul couldn’t be commanded, “Get baptized with the Holy Spirit.” He could only be commanded to be baptized in water, and so that has to be the assumption that we make when we see baptism in Paul’s letters, is that he’s talking about water baptism.

MARCUS: That’s such a good point. There’s no sense in which I could stand up and “I’m going to pour the Holy Spirit out on myself now.” It’s not really a decision that I get to make. It is a gift that is promised to me, but it is tied in conjunction with that other baptism, that water baptism, so yeah.

WES: So what do you think ‑‑ if you were just going to explain baptism to somebody, if somebody just said, Marcus, what is this thing? You Christians, I see you in your assembly, like you’ll get up in the middle of the night and you’ll go up to a church building or you’ll go to a swimming pool or you’ll go to a lake and you plunge somebody in water. Like what does that have to do with salvation? Why would God care about that? Why would you care about that? Why is this important? If you were just going to explain this to somebody that had no concept of baptism, how would you sort of frame it in a way that brings out the beauty of it?

MARCUS: This is where, I think, if we spend some time ‑‑ or if we spent more time, maybe I should say, there’s so many levels where I think beauty is a really good word for it. Somebody who is familiar with the Old Testament and the children of Israel and the sign of circumcision that they had, I would have the conversation with them that our baptism, as Christians, is like circumcision in that it’s a reminder of God’s supernatural intervention and his providence. 

Also, baptism is the point at which a person is granted access or admittance into the community of God’s people and thereby gets access to the oracles of God or the promises of God, as well. Baptism is signifying in that it’s a sign of a covenant that we’re entering into, just as that circumcision was for the children of Israel. One of the things about that covenant that was a change from covenants at the time, where there was usually a token or a trinket between a suzerain and a vassal which you had to produce in order to show that this covenant was in effect and you were under protection of the suzerain ‑‑ God gave circumcision as a covenant that could not be lost. It stays with you forever, so to speak. 

But just like that, in the New Testament, we have our baptism written of as a circumcision of the heart, and there’s not much more intimate that you can get than physical circumcision of the body, but if there is a way, that would be the circumcision of your heart. Baptism’s effectual in that it changes everything that we do. We don’t just carry it with us. We now see life through what it represents, and so it is an image of us stepping into or being put into the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ and then walking in newness of life on the other side, just as he did. So that’s one of the ways that I might explain it, especially that last bit there, I think, is the most important thing for someone to understand about what we’re doing with baptism.

WES: Yeah. Let me read the passage that you’ve referred to a couple of times in Colossians 2, because I read it just a little bit differently than you do, and so I’m curious to hear ‑‑ let me kind of lay out the way I read it, and I think maybe ‑‑ you can correct me if I’m wrong in the way I’m reading it, or we may find kind of a happy medium between us. 

So Paul says, in Colossians 2, starting in verse 8: “See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ. For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily, and you have been filled in him, who is the head of all rule and authority. In him also you were circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, by putting off the body of the flesh, by the circumcision of Christ, having been buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through faith in the powerful working of God, who raised him from the dead.” 

It’s beautiful stuff. I love it. And in true Paul fashion, it is quite the run‑on sentence. And there’s so many different ideas, and so how to parse it is really interesting, but it seems to me that what Paul is saying is that these are the things that happen in Christ, that in Christ, in him, we are filled. This is verse 10: “You have been filled in him, who is the head of all rule and authority. In him also you were circumcised with a circumcision made without hands.” 

So the way I read that is that this is something that Jesus does to the people who are in him, and so where I would kind of separate it out is to say that baptism isn’t exactly our circumcision, but it is the act by which, the ceremony by which, the moment at which we enter into a covenant relationship with Jesus, and by being in him, by being so associated with him, that we actually dwell in him, that he circumcises us, he cuts away the flesh. 

And I think that the way that the New Testament tends to talk about that symbol, that sign, that token, as you talked about, is that the Holy Spirit is that token, that sign, that symbol. And so I would put it ‑‑ I tend to put it as the Holy Spirit is the equivalent of circumcision, that the presence of the Holy Spirit in our lives is our token. The beauty of that is that it is this unseen token. It is this invisible token that is only seen through the fruit that the Spirit is living in our life: love and joy and peace and patience and kindness and goodness. That’s the evidence that we are covenant children of God, that we really belong to him, and that that comes about by being in Christ. 

Now, when that happens is in baptism, and that’s what Paul says, that, in baptism ‑‑ “having been buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him,” so in baptism you were raised with him through faith in the powerful working of God who raised him from the dead. So I might just kind of nuance that just a little bit to say the Holy Spirit is our token, but that that Holy Spirit is given to us at the point of baptism. So, to me, the equivalent is so much like the crossing of the Red Sea. Paul puts it that way in 1 Corinthians 10, that the Israelites were baptized into Moses, and so, in our baptism, we cross through the Red Sea, and just like the children of Israel were circumcised to show that these delivered people are my covenant people, we are circumcised with a spiritual circumcision in the giving of the Holy Spirit, and we begin to show the signs of our covenant relationship with him as we walk in the Spirit. What are your thoughts on that? I hate to kind of throw that at you.

MARCUS: No, no. Actually, I’m not sure there’s much clarification that I would want to add to that. I’m thankful for the nuance that you’re bringing in there, and I’m actually really glad that you go somewhere like the Exodus account and crossing the Red Sea, too. I think one of the most interesting things about the rite of baptism is how often we find types of it in the Old Testament that point forward to what our ultimate state is going to be and how God’s going to work that out. I don’t disagree with the way that you break down that passage at all. I see more of a type in circumcision to the process of being baptized and receiving the Holy Spirit, and so I think you’re actually right on the money with the way that you deconstructed that and discussed it in a little bit more nuance there, so I appreciate that perspective.

WES: Well, but, I mean, I think that that’s really ‑‑ I think bringing out that idea of circumcision ‑‑ I mean, what if we thought of it that way? What if we taught it that way, that when you are baptized, you are submitting to Jesus to circumcise your heart? Not necessarily that the baptism is your circumcision, but that that is the ceremony that’s happening spiritually when you go through this process, to say, in this process, God is cutting away the flesh. He’s giving you a brand‑new heart, a heart that isn’t hardened by the deceitfulness of sin, and when you’re raised up, you are now bearing the marks of a covenant child of God. And, I mean, to me, that’s just a totally different way of saying things than saying, okay, this is one of the steps that you have to do in order to get saved. It’s just so much different because what we’re doing is we’re saying this is a work of God. This is a work of God to which we are submitting when we put ourselves under the authority of Jesus and pledge our loyalty to him.

MARCUS: Amen. And very much so that community aspect that you point to, I think, is lost sometimes. It is the moment where we get brought into the special people of God, and that was a big deal for the ancient Israelite. It should be a big deal for us, too. That meant everything for them. They were the people who possessed the promises. They were the people who had the truth amidst all of the peoples and different societies around them, and so their token, if you will, with something that identified them in that community, and the presence of the Holy Spirit does the same thing for us. I love the way that you put that, submitting to allow Jesus to circumcise your heart and you arise bearing the marks of a child of God. That one needs to go on a t‑shirt somewhere, Wes. That’s a good one.

WES: It sounded better when you said it, though. But I love that you bring out the community aspect of it, and this is where I think it’s really important to sort of think through the implications of salvation is brought about through a people. Jesus, yes, but that the church becomes the body of Christ and that the church becomes the pillar, the buttress of truth, that we get to be the ‑‑ I don’t want to say arbiters; that’s probably not the right word, but a royal priesthood, and we get to be the ones through whom Jesus brings these blessings to the world. 

I’ve often heard people ask questions ‑‑ and, again, it comes about because of our individualistic nature, our obsession with, you know, what steps do I need to take to get saved, and these hypothetical situations, like what if I’m in the desert and there’s nobody else around, and there’s an oasis of water and I read my Bible and I say ‑‑ or I’m on an island and nobody else is around, I read my Bible, I figure out that I need to be saved, and I figure out that I need to be baptized, and then I baptize myself. Could I baptize myself? And I just think that the New Testament never talks about baptizing yourself because there is an assumption that you are being taught by someone, you’re being discipled by someone, you are being brought into the family of God through the receiving of the word, which, again, is another reason I don’t think that an infant can be baptized because it implies you are being taught about what Jesus is offering, what discipleship will cost you, and you’re being taught by someone else who is making this logical, this verbal invitation to you about who it is that you are being invited to follow, and that that person, or someone associated with them, is baptizing you into Christ. You don’t baptize yourself. Again, we’re not told to baptize for the forgiveness of sins; we’re told to be baptized, to submit to it, to surrender to someone else doing this to us.

MARCUS: I think that’s a really important point to make out. I would say, to those theoreticals, a wise person once told me, never base your theology off of theoreticals. And you can get into a world of pain if you do that because that will be an endless endeavor and you will never come to the end of it. There will always be another “what if,” but there are a lot of things that can be known under normal circumstances, and that’s, I think, where we ought to base our practice from.

I love the idea of talking a little bit about the new birth in this because it is the process of becoming a newborn again. That’s how Jesus talks about it, right? That’s how Jesus refers to entering the kingdom. It’s how Paul talks about it when he’s writing to Titus, as well. So this concept of being born again, or that restoration of all things, necessitates that this is a person who has already lived and already understood. It makes it very hard to make the argument for someone who has literally just been born to be able to be born again immediately right after. And maybe that’s something you want to jump into a little bit here for a few minutes, but I think that what Jesus is talking about in that new birth is a really important aspect of our baptism, as well, so…

WES: Yeah. No, that’s a great point, and I think it brings out how important eschatology is ‑‑ kind of a throwback to one of our previous podcast conversations ‑‑ but how important eschatology is, in that what Jesus wants to do with the whole world by remaking the whole creation, he begins to do in us. That’s what Paul says in 2 Corinthians 5, that if you’re in Christ, you are a new creation. You are this little piece of new creation walking around, and, in yourself, you have a past, you have a broken past, a sinful past, a distorted past, a warped past, a perverted past. We all do. And then Jesus remakes us through the power of the Holy Spirit, and when we submit to baptism, we undergo this death to who we were and this rebirth into who we are and will be for all time. And what Jesus is doing in the individual convert, transformed person, he wants to do to all creation, and I think that’s such an important ‑‑ that’s why eschatology is so important to understand on a cosmic scale. That’s what God wants to do, but he’s begun that cosmic work in every single individual.

MARCUS: I love that. This might be a strange thing to think of, but I think about the frequently discussed passage when it comes to baptism. We’re always talking about 1 Peter 3, and it’s because Peter’s talking about baptism as an anti‑type when he’s talking about how the world was saved through Noah. I want to think about it from a different point of view, given what you just discussed, and that’s that there’s this really cool thing that God is doing at the end of the flood where it parallels perfectly with the days of original creation. And so there’s a

recreation happening as the rain ends and light enters the ark again and then, of course, culminates with animals leaving the ark and being back on land again, and then Noah being on earth again. You’ve got all six days replayed there in Genesis. God’s doing a recreation. 

So when Peter talks about us being saved in that same way, and then we read Paul writing about becoming a new creation, it’s really a way of saying that our baptism is this deep, rich, personal enacting of the reality of God’s redemptive power in his creation and making us a new thing, like he will restore all things in that day. So I love that you bring up the eschatological viewpoint there, too. I think it’s all over the place in the New Testament. It’s beautiful.

WES: And that’s a really ‑‑ I’m glad you went to 1 Peter 3. In context, there’s so much that ‑‑ that’s such a difficult passage, and I hate that we just kind of use it as a bullet in our gun because it really is a very difficult passage about what does he mean about Jesus going to and proclaiming to the spirits in prison. What is that all about? But in context, Peter is saying ‑‑ this is verse 13. He says, “Who is there to harm you if you’re zealous for what is good? But even if you should suffer for righteousness’ sake, you will be blessed. Have no fear of them, nor be troubled, but in your hearts honor Christ the Lord as holy, always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks a reason for the hope that’s within you.”

I mean, he’s talking about ‑‑ he says in verse 17, “It’s better to suffer for doing good, if that should be God’s will, than for doing evil. For Christ also suffered once for sins.” So he’s talking about this sort of suffering in the present moment, and I think you’re exactly right; this deconstruction of the world through the flood and this reconstruction of the world in the world to come ‑‑ for Noah, that’s the world we live in now. It’s Earth 2.0. And so we have already ‑‑ Peter is saying we have already begun to enter into the world to come through baptism, 

that baptism is saving us. In this context, I don’t know that he’s saying saving us from our sins, like forgiveness. That’s certainly a part of baptism, and it is in Acts 2, it is in Acts 22 ‑‑ it’s all over the place. But in this context, he seems to be saying that baptism is saving us from this world of suffering and death and that it’s bringing us into this new world in which we’re already beginning to experience. And so, I think sometimes when we just pull it out of context and say, see, baptism saves you ‑‑ it’s true, and it does on multiple levels, but I think, in this context, he probably means something more like baptism is saving us from the world that we’re suffering in right now.

MARCUS: Yeah. I think you’ll find support for that idea if you look at the verbiage that’s used by Jesus when he’s talking to Nicodemus, by Jesus when he’s talking to his disciples in Matthew 19, as well, and the same word that Paul uses in Titus 3 is that word palingenesia, which is a Greek word that is talking about the cyclical ‑‑ what they believed was the cyclical nature of the Earth and things would get destroyed and recreated. So when Jesus says to Nicodemus, “You have to be born again,” he uses that word, so he’s referencing this concept of a total teardown and a total recreation, right? A total redemption. But the difference with Jesus’ use of that word was that this one’s final. You guys are right; there is a palingenesia, but there’s only one, and it’s when I come, and it’s in the new heavens and new earth. But you, when you become a Christian, when you receive the gift of the Holy Spirit, baptism being a part of this process, you get to live out part of the future kingdom right now. It’s personal in your life. And that word you used, “arbiters,” a few minutes ago, we proclaim that. Baptism is a proclamation of that, and our lives ought to be a proclamation of that, as well, as we go along.

WES: Yeah. Well, and I love that you pointed out about that rebirth that Jesus says to Nicodemus, and he says it’s by the water and the Spirit. And I think that’s ‑‑ back to our original question of is it the water or the Spirit, it’s like yes, it’s both. 

MARCUS: It’s “yes, and.”

WES: It is. It’s “yes, and.” And so I think, in a way, the Catholic is right, and the Protestant that believes that baptism is this moment of entering into the covenant and being forgiven, those that claim that, it’s like, yes, it is sacramental in that sense. The evangelical says, no, no, no, it has to be about personal faith in Jesus. It’s like, yes, you’re also right. The person who says it’s about the Holy Spirit and about being baptized in the Holy Spirit, it’s like you’re also right. And the one who says it’s about water, it’s like, yes, you’re also right. 

And I want to kind of stand in the apex of all of that and bring all of those ideas together and say, you all are hitting on different elements of this reality, and they’re all there and they’re all valid, but I think when we try to invalidate what everybody else is saying, that’s when we go ‑‑ we get wrong and we want to pit one passage against another. It is yes, this is a work of God through the Spirit that is mediated by the church. It is a moment of actually passing out of death and into life. It is about faith in Jesus. When you’re baptized, you are being saved by grace through faith. You’re being born again. You’re experiencing this regeneration of yourself just like the cosmic world will experience. And so it’s all of those things, and I think, so often, we just ‑‑ we get myopically focused on one thing to the exclusion of others.

MARCUS: And it’s really a shame how much more rich and full and meaningful ‑‑ and this is not to detract from the meaning of anyone’s baptism or anyone’s experience or understanding, but if we were able and willing to hold space for all of these different facets of this beautiful thing, this act of God that he does in each one of us individually, and at the same time, within our community of believers together, within our family, I just wonder if a lot of these conversations and arguments, and, unfortunately, a lot of the division that exists over it would disappear into something that’s much more meaningful and much more beautiful. I don’t think you have to cut off your nose to spite your face. I don’t think you have to invalidate some of these other aspects of what baptism is and what it means and what it accomplishes, so I really appreciate how well you tied that together. I really do.

WES: Well, I think that phrase you used, cut off your nose to spite your face ‑‑ I think that that’s so true when it comes to this conversation, that when we take what scripture says about baptism and we twist it to use it in a militant way against other people, we’re really hurting ourselves. We’re trying to tell somebody else they’re wrong, but so often we end up hurting ourselves and we get worried about our own baptism. We get worried about our own salvation. We get fearful. We emphasize the wrong things. I did a series not too long ago on baptism and focused on the fact that most of the passages in the New Testament, in the epistles, of course are written to Christians about their own baptism in this very practical admonition to live out their baptism, that baptism is very practical, and it should be something that we were intentional about committing ourselves to Jesus when we were baptized, something we remember ‑‑ so I think that does nullify the idea of infant baptism ‑‑ but it should be something we remember, pledging ourselves to Jesus, because Paul and the Hebrew writer, they keep drawing on “This is what you committed yourself to. Do you remember when God did this for you? Do you remember that you are the recipient of these blessings because you experienced this?” 

Let me just ask you, like what practical difference do you think it would make in people’s lives if they really understood the biblical teaching on baptism?

MARCUS: Good question. I’ll say this. I think building off of what you just suggested a few seconds ago is a great place to start with this. I don’t hate the militant aspect of baptism. I do hate that we get militant with each other about baptism and we use different verses to fire bullets at each other, like you mentioned before. I think one thing that has changed for me is I do see our baptism as an act of spiritual warfare. 

WES: That’s right.

MARCUS: I look at all of the passages in the Old Testament that point towards our baptism that are tied to our baptism later. We talked about crossing the Red Sea. The entire Exodus campaign was about God establishing his superiority over the gods of Egypt and then even turning them to look at a mountain named after Baal who they were about to go into his territory in Canaan. He’s the god of the sea and the storm god, and then God says, hey, look at his high place and then march through the dry ground so that you know that I was the God of where you were and I am the God of where you’re going. 

And then there’s all this language in the New Testament, as well. And some of the passages that we’ve already hit always end talking about Jesus being at the right hand of God, with angels, authorities, and powers having been subjected to him, or him triumphing over authorities that he put to an open shame. And so, in that view, I have this rich, deep understanding of an act of God and what he’s doing for me. But this view of baptism especially comes out in 1 Peter 3 as a pledge or an appeal. Every single time someone is baptized, it’s a rehearsal and reminder to darkness that they have been defeated, and it is a public declaration of whose side of the war a person is on, and it’s another shot fired at the spiritual host of wickedness in which Paul says we’re at war against. This way, I think, like we can accurately position baptism as an act of spiritual warfare. And when I remember that, that my life, if I’m living out the baptism, as you said, is a declaration of the victory of Jesus, it changes the whole dynamic and paradigm that I see it through. So I hope that makes sense to you, but that’s something I get very fired up about, actually.

WES: Amen. Great stuff, and I’m so glad that you framed it that way. And I think that’s Paul’s point in Romans 5 and 6, that, before Christ, we were slaves. And he kind of puts it in terms like sin and death is this pharaoh, this ruler over us, and as you were talking ‑‑ you have such a beautiful way of expressing these thoughts ‑‑ I was thinking of the way that, like, the Bible Project videos express these thoughts in visual form, you have a poetic way of speaking, and so I could picture what you’re saying as you’re saying that. 

But I would encourage people to picture what a life without Jesus is like, that it very much is a soul that is wrapped in darkness. Like you can almost picture these demonic forces that are holding and binding a person. You can’t see it, and the person may walk around like they’re happy and carefree, but at some level, they know it. They know that their soul is in bondage to demonic forces and powers and authorities in the unseen realm, and that when that person is baptized into Christ, that life ‑‑ that life that is entangled and enmeshed in demonic forces dies and is crucified with Christ and they are buried with Jesus and then they’re raised up. And the person who comes up out of that ‑‑ as we often say, that watery grave of baptism, that person who is raised up is now emanating with light and has already, in a sense, been glorified with Jesus and is sealed with and circumcised by the Holy Spirit of God, and now they’re walking as a warrior of light and they have this helmet of salvation and this breastplate of righteousness and they can go to war against the forces of evil and darkness.

And you’re right, baptism is ‑‑ I’m so glad you framed it that way, as an act of spiritual warfare, and we are declaring war against the forces that used to bind us and hold us. And that’s why Paul says, in Romans 6, “Can we go on sinning? Should we go on sinning so that grace may abound?” What a ridiculous claim that anybody would say, well, if you say you’re saved by grace ‑‑ you people who say you’re saved by grace and not by works of the law, you know, you’re just encouraging people to go on sinning, Paul’s like, no, you were in bondage to these forces. How could you keep living in that? You died to that. This is ‑‑ you’re a brand‑new person, and that’s what happens at baptism.

MARCUS: Oh, absolutely. I’ve heard it said this way before. I was thinking about this as you were talking about a soul and a life that’s just entangled and enmeshed and then set free. Essentially, our entire lives, up to our point of baptism and that declaration, are ‑‑ you know, we’re told that our lives are defined and our value is defined by what we do, but at that moment, the script flips and it changes. We know, at that point, that our value and our lives are defined by what God has done for us and what Jesus has done for us. And so it is a real reversal and upheaval and overturning of the entire way that we look at life, and that is probably the best understanding of why Paul speaks the way he does when he says we’re not going to keep living like this. There’s no reason to. I’m not confined by this anymore; I’m not defined by this anymore, so yeah, it’s a good one.

WES: Yeah. Amen. What a great place to stop. Marcus, I miss you. I love you. I so appreciate this conversation, but more importantly, the work you’re doing in the kingdom.

MARCUS: Thank you so much, man. It’s an honor every time I get to spend some time with you, and, hopefully, I’ll get to see you soon, Brother.

WES: Thanks, Brother.

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The post Why is Baptism Important and Beautiful? with Marcus Stenson appeared first on Radically Christian.

Spiritual warfare, what is it and how do we engage in it? The Bible has a lot to say about spiritual beings, both good and evil. However, many of us are very uncomfortable thinking about spiritual forces, especially demons and “the satan.” This episode of the Radically Christian Bible Study Podcast aims to address these perplexing issues and provide biblical insight into this often-misunderstood aspect of the Christian faith.

Eric Ramsur and Wes McAdams the biblical narrative, starting from the creation account in Genesis, and explore the concept of the divine council, where God interacts with other spiritual beings called “Elohim.” The conversation also examines the rebellion of some of these beings against God’s authority and their subsequent influence on humanity and the nations. Furthermore, the episode sheds light on the role of Satan, the accuser, and the reality of demonic forces as presented in both the Old and New Testaments. Practical guidance is offered on how we can engage in spiritual warfare by aligning ourselves with the Holy Spirit.

The guest for this episode is Eric Ramseur. He and his wife, Brianna, have four children. They reside in Virginia Beach and love working with the church for its growth and mending relationships in their community. Eric’s deep understanding of Scripture and his passion for exploring the often-overlooked aspects of the biblical narrative make him an excellent guide through this complex and fascinating topic.

Links and Resources:

• Watch this Episode on YouTube
• drmsh.com – Michael Heiser’s website
• The Unseen Realm by Michael Heiser
• Angels by Michael Heiser
• Demons by Michael Heiser
• Supernatural by Michael Heiser
• The Bible Unfiltered by Michael Heiser
• The Divine Council in Canaanite and Early Hebrew Literature by E.T. Mullen
• The Bible Project podcast series called “God”
• Celebration of Discipline by Richard J. Foster

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. On today’s episode, we’re going to talk about spiritual warfare. What is it, who are we fighting against, and how is it that we go about engaging in spiritual warfare? My guest today is Eric Ramseur. He and his wife and four children live in Virginia Beach. They love working with the church for its growth and mending relationships in their community. I know that you are going to be incredibly blessed by the things that Eric has to share. He is a brilliant theologian and a wonderful disciple of Jesus, and I know that you’re all going to be blessed by his thoughts. 

I want to start today by reading Ephesians 6, starting in verse 10. Paul says, “Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might. Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil. For 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. Therefore take up the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand firm. Stand therefore, having fastened on the belt of truth, and having put on the breastplate of righteousness, and, as shoes for your feet, having put on the readiness given by the gospel of peace. In all circumstances take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming darts of the evil one.” 

I hope that you enjoy this conversation today and, as always, I hope that it helps all of us learn to love like Jesus. 

WES: Eric Ramseur, welcome to the podcast, Brother.

ERIC: Thanks for having me. Glad to be here.

WES: I am so excited to have this conversation. We were talking before we hit record, and we could have just, I think, kept on talking. This is a subject that I’m incredibly fascinated by, I have a growing appreciation for, but I feel like my mind is constantly being bent by some of these factors. In fact, we started this conversation via message because I wrote an article on idolatry, and that kind of ‑‑ I used the phrase “false gods” and you wrote to me. We kind of went back and forth on some of that, and I said, hey, let’s get on the podcast and talk about it. So let’s kind of paint a picture for people about the story of the Bible and the worldview that we should have when we think about not only scripture, but when we think about life and the world.

ERIC: Yeah, sure. So I think we have to start at the beginning. I think most stories work out better that way. So what I want to do is paint a picture of what God’s intention was for creation and then bring it forward to where we are and then, ultimately, where it’s going. So God’s original intention, from Genesis 1, was to work with a partner. And so, in the first chapter of Genesis, we have the creation story, and you’ll see that creation story mirrored in other places and told in different ways. One thing that I think people should really look into is Psalm 104 and how the creation narrative is kind of flipped on its head and it turns more into an anti‑Babylonian story. 

But we start in Genesis 1 and we have the creation, and we find that we have the creation of the light first, but then we’re going to have the creation of the stars and the moon and the sun, but they’re called the great light and the lesser light, and so those lights are to rule in the skies. And so whenever we see that ruling language, that’s kingship language, and that’s going to also follow on to the creation of mankind, and so male and female, we are to rule, but we’re all delegates of Yahweh, of God the Creator. We don’t have rule of ourselves; we’re delegated rule. And we ‑‑ most of us know the story of what happens in Genesis 3 with what we call “the fall,” but there, there’s a spiritual and a human rebellion that take place, and we find that there’s an exile. And the story of the Bible turns out to be that God is trying to bring us back from exile to what Isaiah and what Peter are going to call the new heavens and the new earth.

And so we have another rebellion in Genesis 6, and we’ll probably get more into this, where the sons of God see that the daughters of men are beautiful, or they see that the daughters of men are good, and they take them for themselves, and from there, chaos ensues. God says I’m wiping everything clean, and there’s another exile that ends up taking place, but it’s an actual death. And so we have Noah, whose name literally means “comfort,” or “rest,” and God wants someone to bring rest to not just the land ‑‑ it’s the reason Noah is named Noah, according to his father, and God wants someone who can finally bring rest. 

And so we find this narrative throughout the Old Testament of David, Solomon, even Daniel ‑‑ these are all people who are supposed to bring rest to the land, but there are these players in the background, and we’re going to see them every once in a while. We’re going to refer to them as maybe those things that are unseen. We’ll call them sons of God, things like that. And so you have these players in the background, both on God’s side and the side of who we’re going to call “the Satan” or just some kind of spiritual evil. And so this story, of course, progresses, and the people of Israel go after these other gods, these other sons of God who were delegated authority all the way back in Genesis 1, but they’re also going to be given authority in the Tower of Babel story, and we can look more into that. 

And so the story of the Bible is bringing us back from exile, but also God reclaiming what he had let go, and I know that’s a strange thought for people, so hang on ‑‑ we’ll get to it ‑‑ but that’s ultimately what Jesus is about whenever you get to the Great Commission. He says go into all the nations. Why do we need to go into all the nations? Because we’re going to make disciples. And then Paul’s going to pick up on that and talk about the principalities and the powers and how the Gentiles are under them. And the message of the gospel, the good news, is to bring those people back into the fold of God. When Jesus says, I have sheep that aren’t of this fold, that’s who he’s talking about, but they’re under powers that have to be taken out of the way, and we do that through spiritual warfare, which we can talk about more.

WES: Yeah. Oh, you laid it out so beautifully. And I think where I was struggling until fairly recently was the idea ‑‑ not necessarily the story or even how we play into the story, because as anybody who’s listened to this podcast for very long knows, I don’t subscribe to this God’s going to destroy everything physical and whisk us away to some spiritual, ethereal realm, and

God doesn’t care about this physical planet and all of his creation. I very much have always believed ‑‑ or not always, but for a very long time have believed in the redemption of creation and that we were created to rule and reign with God over creation and all of these things. But what I have dismissed or ignored in the storyline is the forces of evil that have been aligned with the Satán. And you pronounced it that way, so maybe give people an idea of what is the Satan, and why add the word “the” in front of it and, you know, who is this character and how does he play into the story?

ERIC: Yeah. So this is one of those things that I wish I had learned all the way back in preaching school, but it’s a wonderful discovery along the way, and it just deepens your understanding of the forces that are against you but also the forces that are for you, per Elisha. So the Satan ‑‑ the reason I say “the Satan” is because I think only one time in the New Testament are you going to find the word “Satan” without the definite article. And so what happens in the Hebrew language, also the Greek language, is that you never find a personal name with a definite article, so I wouldn’t be referred to as “the Eric” or “the Chuck.” You would just call me “Eric” or “Chuck.” And so the question is, why does this word, “Satan,” have to have a definite article? And, really, the answer is plain. It’s because he is an accuser, and so that’s the role that this spiritual being, who John is later going to tell us it’s the dragon, it’s the serpent that was in the garden ‑‑ that’s the accuser. And we later find this accuser, the Satan, actually performing this role in the book of Job, in Job chapter 1, where we have this divine council there, the sons of God coming up to Yahweh, and the Satan also comes and accuses Job, and from there, you get the story of Job.

WES: Yeah. So let’s ‑‑ you’ve mentioned this phrase “the sons of God” several times, and this is where it may get a little controversial for people, and this is one of the ones that I’ve really struggled with. You have this sort of bizarre story in Genesis, and you’ve already kind of alluded to it, that the sons of God have children with the daughters of men and there’s the Nephilim and, you know, what is this all about? I have tended towards interpretations over the years, although obviously I’m getting away from that ‑‑ but I’ve tended towards interpretations over the years that define “sons of God” as just, well, these were the spiritual descendants of Seth as opposed to the descendants of Cain, and these were the good men having children with, intermarrying with the bad women, and that’s what the story is about. But there is a very longstanding tradition that there’s a whole lot more going on here, and what we’re talking about is spiritual beings and not human beings.

ERIC: That’s right. Whenever you get into books like First Enoch ‑‑ I’m not claiming that First Enoch is inspired, but I do believe that it’s important. Jude seems to think that it’s important. Paul regularly references it. Jesus quotes from the book of Enoch, as well as the book of Hebrews. And so I’m not claiming that it’s authoritative or inspired, but it seems to pick up on something that Peter’s going to say, “You know, you’re right about that.” And then we get 2nd Peter 3, where Peter alludes to both the book of Enoch, but also Isaiah, with the destruction of the elements. I know that it’s often taught ‑‑ and there may be some recordings of me in the past where I’ve taught ‑‑ that it was the elements of this earth are going to be burned up. But Enoch and Isaiah seem to be saying that, per Isaiah 34, it’s actually those hosts of heaven who had rebelled against God who are going to be destroyed. 

And Enoch talks about, you know, there’s this pit of fire that’s been prepared for Azazel. We also get Azazel back in Leviticus 16, and that’s a real interesting story. And so this pit’s been prepared where he’s going to burn and be ultimately destroyed, as well as all of the angels who rebelled with him and taught men all things like metallurgy and music and things of that nature. And so Peter picks up on that and uses that to talk about the rebellion in Genesis in 2nd Peter 3, and John does the same thing with the Satan, putting him in the Azazel seat.

WES: So when we hear this phrase “the sons of God,” we’re supposed to picture ‑‑ I think that most people would say angels, although that’s probably not the best word. So how should we think of the sons of God?

ERIC: So whenever we say you are ‑‑ let’s just take Jesus with the Jews in John 8. That’s an easy one for us to wrap our minds around, and then we can apply it back to sons of God, where they say that “We’re children of Abraham,” and Jesus looks at them and tells them to examine their works. And he tells them, “No, you aren’t a son of Abraham. If you were a son of Abraham, you would do the things that Abraham did, but instead, you are a son of the devil because of your works.” And so the sons of God ‑‑ it’s not that God procreated with women, as the sons of God do in Genesis 6, but it’s that they are of a like nature with God. They are also called Elohim, and “Elohim” is just the Hebrew word for god, but it’s also a plural word for god, or gods. And so whenever we see the words “Son of God” in the New Testament, it’s mostly referring to Jesus as the Son of God in the sense that he’s the one who was given kingship, per Psalm 2:6‑7 and other places, but “the sons of God,” it’s that they are of a like nature with God. 

There are also spiritual beings, and kind of an interesting side note ‑‑ and we can go there if you want ‑‑ in Exodus 24, where Moses is giving the law ultimately to the children of Israel and they say, “All that the Lord has spoken we will do and we will be obedient,” and then he writes them down and they say, “All that Yahweh has said we will do, and we’ll be obedient” ‑‑ after that, Moses, Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, and 70 of the elders, they go up onto this mountain, and it says that they saw Elohim of Israel, and we know that’s God, that’s Yahweh.  But then it says that they saw Elohim. But you just told me that before. Why are you telling me again that they saw Elohim?  And the answer actually lies in Deuteronomy 33:1 and 3, but particularly, in the Septuagint, it lays out that it wasn’t just Yahweh up there on the mountain; there were also myriads of angels. And so whenever they see Elohim, or the sons of Elohim, they’re actually eating and dining with Yahweh and angels, which is how covenants in the ancient Near East took place. The people would agree to a covenant, and then it wouldn’t be just normal people, it would be the king who would go up on a mountain and eat with the god and his divine council in order to ratify the covenant, and then the people would get one of the tablets with the law on it and then the god would keep one. And it’s interesting that both tablets end up in the Ark of the Covenant because God wants to have that free‑flowing relationship with mankind. 

So we shouldn’t be afraid when we see the words “sons of God.” God isn’t doing something underhanded. It’s just that the sons of God are of a like nature. So that’s a long way of answering your question.

WES: No, I think that’s really helpful. So kind of to sum up where we are, I think, so what you’re saying is that, in the creation, that there is the world that we can see, there’s the earth, but there’s also the heavenly realm, the unseen realm, as Michael Heiser puts it in his book.  And in the unseen realm, in the heavenly places, there are Elohim, plural. There is the chief Elohim, the Elohim, the Lord of Lords, the God of Gods, and so Yahweh is the Elohim who is unlike any other Elohim. He is in a category of his own. But scripture doesn’t dismiss the idea that there are other Elohim, and I think that that’s what is really kind of shocking for a lot of people, because sometimes people, I think, use or think Elohim is specific to Yahweh rather than this general word similar to our English word “god.” We could talk about “the God,” and for Christians, we worship only one God, but we also acknowledge that other peoples worship gods, lower g, but it’s different because our word “God” is singular, whereas this word Elohim is ‑‑ in its natural state, it is plural. And I think what is interesting is you have to pay attention to the context ‑‑ the translators, rather, have to pay attention to the context in interpreting is this the Elohim, singular, or is this Elohim, plural? And sometimes there’s disagreement. 

I was thinking about a passage, Deuteronomy 32:17. It says, “They sacrificed to demons that were no gods,” that were no Elohim. Now, that’s how the ESV translates it. It translates it “that were no gods, to gods they had never known.” So the ESV is kind of self‑contradictory because you stop and say, well, wait a second. “They sacrificed to demons that were no gods, to gods that they had never known.” Well, wait a second. Are they Elohim or are they not Elohim? Well, the other translations probably do a better job with it. NIV, New American Standard say, “They sacrificed to demons who were not God, to gods they had never known, to new gods that had come recently whom your fathers had never dreaded.” 

So the Bible affirms that there are other gods, that there are other Elohim. Not to say that they are ‑‑ that they are God in the same way that Yahweh is God, but there are other spiritual beings in the unseen realm, and our worship and devotion belongs exclusively to Yahweh, just as Israel’s was supposed to belong exclusively to Yahweh, but that there are other Elohim in the heavenly realms. Kind of walk us through that. Maybe expand on that or clarify anything I’ve gotten wrong.

ERIC: Okay. Well, I think you got all that right, but I think the thing to remember here is, one, that even passages that say ‑‑ and I know people listening are thinking, well, doesn’t it also say that Yahweh is God and there is no other? And yes, absolutely. Whenever we look at phrases like that ‑‑ and we also have phrases that say Yahweh is the God of gods ‑‑ what happens is, especially when I was in preaching school, we would just kind of wave that away and say, well, what they mean is idols, and idols aren’t really a thing, there aren’t really other gods. But ask yourself the question: Would I say that God is the God of nothing? Absolutely not. And so there has to be some kind of way to rectify those two things that seem opposing. 

And so phrases like “there is no other,” that’s also what Babylon says about itself as far as being the city above all cities in Isaiah 47. And Yahweh is actually saying this is what they say about themselves, and they’re not just placing themselves as the city of all cities, but they’re also placing themselves in the place of Yahweh. And so what we see there isn’t necessarily that God is saying “I am the only Elohim,” but it’s that “I am above all other Elohim,” and that’s the claim from chapter 1 of Genesis to the very end of the Bible, when we get to Revelation.

I find Deuteronomy 32 very interesting because it’s kind of the summation of Moses’ life, but it’s also a song. It’s him writing poetically about something that has already happened in the past and is going to be the narrative of the book of Joshua, where, in Deuteronomy 32:8‑9, if we back up a couple of verses ‑‑ and we’ll probably get more into this ‑‑ it actually lays out that Yahweh gave possession of the nations to these sons of God, these other Elohim, so that they would rule, but there was a way that he wanted them to rule that they didn’t. They didn’t rule with mercy and with good judgment. And so it lays out that Yahweh’s portion ‑‑ or out of all of the nations, out of all of the 70 nations that were named in Genesis 10, Yahweh’s portion is Israel. And so, if you want, we can dive more into that.

WES: Yeah, yeah. I think, just to kind of clarify just a little bit and to kind of go back to what you said, the way that you read it in preaching school ‑‑ and it tends to be the way that I’ve always read it ‑‑ is I’ve read it, you might say, as accommodative language, where the authors, whether it be in the Psalms, or whether it be here in Deuteronomy, that they were just accommodating the idea of these, quote‑unquote, so‑called gods, and that they weren’t actually affirming that these gods existed.

There’s actually a scholar, John H. Walton ‑‑ I tend to really appreciate Walton’s work and I really appreciate his perspective on things, but he and his son did a book on demons and on these other Elohim and just spiritual beings in general, and he and Heiser kind of went back and forth on these different perspectives. And, at first ‑‑ I kind of went down a rabbit hole, and, at first, I really thought, yes, Walton, he’s saying what I’ve always said, is that these gods don’t exist. These other spiritual beings don’t exist, that God is really the only spiritual being, other than these lesser beings of angels and, you know, whatever. But he almost went so far as to deny the demonic forces, and I think that that’s where I was like, okay, well, I can’t hang with you anymore, and I really ‑‑ I’m starting to see things more from Heiser’s perspective, that there really is something going on, that when these nations, or Israel themselves, are sacrificing to these other Elohim, they’re sacrificing to ‑‑ Deuteronomy says to demons, and Paul agrees in 1 Corinthians.  He says in chapter 10 that they are sacrificing to demons. There are actual spiritual beings. Satan is an actual spiritual being. These other angels, demonic forces, these other Elohim are actual spiritual beings, and we have to be really careful that we don’t so demystify the world and the story of scripture that we deny the existence of spiritual forces and powers and rulers in the unseen realm.

ERIC: That’s right. One of the things that I like to do ‑‑ it’s kind of a social experiment within the church ‑‑ is talk to preachers and see, “How many times have you preached on the armor of God?” And everyone will say “Yes.” And I say, “Well, what is it and why do you need it?” Like, “Well, uh, I don’t know.” But whenever you look back in Isaiah, at Isaiah 59, it’s God’s armor, and it’s not God’s armor to go to battle with just Babylon, physical people in Babylon; it was about a spiritual battle that was going to take place between himself and the other Elohim. And so back in chapter 58 the people needed to take up fasting and Sabbath again, and God says I’m going to be the rear guard for you as you exit Babylon. And then chapter 59, he says, there’s no one to go to war for you and so I’m going to do it myself. I’m going to put on the helmet; I’m going to put on the chest plate. And from there, there’s really no question that God saw a real battle in the spiritual realm that was going to affect what goes on on the earth. 

And then Paul picks up on that, and he says, you know, you families, husbands and wives, you need to love each other and respect each other and be subject to each other. You need to be singing and making melody in your hearts, and you need to be filling yourselves with the Holy Spirit so that you can take up this armor. Fathers, don’t provoke your children to anger.  Children, you need to make sure that you obey your parents.  Masters and slaves, all of that, that’s not just so that we can have good lives. It’s because there is a spiritual battle that’s going to take place, and he says the battle isn’t with anyone who looks like you. It’s not flesh and blood. It’s a spiritual battle.

WES: Yeah. Let’s come back to that in just a second. Let’s kind of flesh out just a little bit about this idea of the spiritual rebellion, that there was or is a divine council. Even that phrase we could kind of work on if we wanted to, but that God is in the midst of this divine council. I like the way that Heiser specifies God doesn’t need a council, you know, but God also doesn’t need human beings. He doesn’t need us, but he chose to partner with us and work with us just as he chose, apparently, to work with a divine council and often he asks their opinion. He asked for them to weigh in on how he goes about things. He allows them to participate. But, apparently, there was a rebellion in this divine council. There was a rebellion with these Elohim that rebelled against the rule and reign of God. So kind of walk through maybe the rebellion and the dividing of the nations amongst these other Elohim.

ERIC: Okay. So, again, let’s go back to Genesis 1. Yahweh says that there needs to be a light in creation, and he divides the day and the night. But then he says, you know, there needs to be something to rule the day and the night. And so, from there, we see the stars and the great light and the lesser light. And what these stars end up being is a representation. He says let them be for a sign, signs of festivals and of seasons. Whenever we see the word “season,” sometimes we think of spring, summer, fall, winter, but seasons are actually having to do with the seven festivals that Israel is going to celebrate, and so these lights in the sky, essentially astrology ‑‑ I know that’s kind of a sore topic, especially within the churches of Christ ‑‑ but for Israel, it was how they made their living. It’s how they knew when the seasons were going to change. It’s how they knew when to harvest, when to stop, and things of that nature, when to celebrate, and so that’s what these stars are going to do. 

But Jeremiah, as well as Moses, are going to say the stars are not just signs for those things, but the nations are going to look at the stars as something to fear, as something to worship, but Israel, you don’t do that.  And we find this in Deuteronomy 4, verses 15 through ‑‑ I think it’s 15 through 17, where Moses says don’t look up there, don’t look under the sea, don’t look at any of the animals, don’t pay attention to the stars because there’s something there that you all want to worship, but Yahweh is your God. Those other things in the sky, those are for the other nations. And so we find this rebellion, not just on ‑‑ I like to call them pages ‑‑ page 6 and Deuteronomy ‑‑ or, sorry, Genesis 6, with the sons of God. As Peter is going to say, they left their proper abode.  They saw that ‑‑ well, let me not speculate. There’s something that they saw that they wanted that God wasn’t giving them, and so it’s this abundance‑versus‑scarcity theme that happens throughout the Bible. It’s not just a human problem; it’s also a divine problem, and so they take on responsibility that wasn’t given to them. They take the place that man had to reproduce and to fill the land, and they take it upon themselves. 

And then we find, in Genesis 11, another rebellion. This is the third rebellion, where ‑‑ there are different theories on this, whether or not the tower of Babel was being built so that gods could come down, so that man could go up, so that man could ascend back to this garden‑like existence ‑‑ because at the top of mountains were gardens; that’s where the gods lived. But there’s also a theory that this mountain, or this tower, was supposed to be more of a watchtower because that’s the word that’s used. It’s a tower for watchers, which is interestingly another name for the sons of God that we’re going to find in the book of Daniel, as well as in Enoch and other second‑temple literature.  

But all of these rebellions ‑‑ we have human rebellion and then we have spiritual rebellion, and then, at one point, in Genesis 11, there’s a co‑rebellion where it seems like man wants to go up and the sons of God want to come down. And so Yahweh says, let us go and see what’s going on. And the whole “let us” thing, that’s another conversation. Is it the Trinity talking to itself or is it Yahweh talking to his divine council? I’m not necessarily decided on that one, so I don’t want to go too far into that. But all of these rebellions point to mankind disavowing our own place in creation, where God wanted to rule, with us, the things on the earth and in the skies and under the water. And the divine council, or at least the sons of God, those who are ‑‑ we might call them angels today, but we can talk more about that language ‑‑ they saw that there was something God was holding back from them, and they wanted to take it for themselves, and Yahweh punishes them.

WES: Yeah. Well, then even when you get to the New Testament ‑‑ I’m preaching a series right now on the kingdom of God, and it’s really occurred to me here recently how, again, we have sort of taken the rulers and powers and authorities of evil out of the story of the Bible, out of the story of the gospel. But if you just read the gospel accounts, just sit down and read the gospel accounts, you will see how, over and over again, it begins with Jesus’ temptations in the wilderness. He goes head to head with the Satan. And then, throughout the entire gospel account, he is casting out demons. He is healing people who are said to be in bondage to the devil, in bondage to the Satan. And so over and over again, what he’s doing is going to war against Satan’s kingdom in order to reclaim territory for Yahweh so that Yahweh can rule and reign. This is kingdom language. It’s ruling and reigning language. And then he gives that authority to his disciples to step on the scorpions, to crush the head of the serpent, to go and to cast out demons, and he gives that authority to them. And then we see that even carrying on ‑‑ you mentioned Ephesians 6 earlier ‑‑ in Paul’s language, that we are now ‑‑ and it’s amazing when you go back to Isaiah, as you pointed out, that God allows us to wear his armor and to also participate with him in wrestling against the authorities and the powers and the principalities of darkness, that we’re not going to war against human beings, but we very much are in a spiritual battle with demonic forces. 

I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on how do we engage in spiritual warfare, and sort of, maybe, what are the extremes that we want to avoid? Because I do think that there are sort of the extremes of, on the one hand, just some pretty bizarre ideas about how you engage in spiritual warfare, and then, on the other hand, just a total dismissal that there is any spiritual warfare in which to engage.

ERIC: Yeah. So something ‑‑ or a book that I would recommend is the Celebration of Discipline. Let me see. I have it on my shelf.

I can’t reach it, but it’s the Celebration of Discipline by ‑‑ I can’t remember his first name. His last name is Foster. But if we’re going to fight a spiritual war, we have to be in tune with the spiritual disciplines. And my family, every single week, we gather around the table for Sabbath. And it’s not a ‑‑ it’s not about following law. I want to make that clear. I don’t believe that we’re receiving any kind of grace through keeping something that we see as law, as Torah. It was a gift given to Israel where they got to commune not just with each other, but also spend that time with God reflecting upon the Exodus, but also the creation and the new creation to come. 

And so, as a formative sort of thing, my family, we engage in this Sabbath where we reflect upon our previous week, those times where we fell victim, where we gave ourselves up as prey. And then we talk about the things that we want to do in the next week and how each of us is going to be a part of that spiritual warfare for the others. And that was a journey with kids, let me tell you. They didn’t necessarily see the value of it until we actually got into a rhythm of it. 

So, you know, not just Sabbath, but also prayer, silence and solitude. That’s a huge one, where it’s just you and God having a conversation, and you may not hear him audibly, but as you go throughout your week, after talking to God, and you find those moments where you’re confronted with the thing that you were fearing in your prayer, you know that God was there and that God’s with you in that moment. And so, you know, reading scripture, reading scripture communally, that’s huge. I love sermons, I love classes, but I would replace it all in a heartbeat to listen to scripture and to read scripture with my brothers and sisters. No sermonizing on top of it; just listen. We’re listening for not just context, but also the content that’s going to walk us throughout our Christian journey together. 

The communal aspect of the church ‑‑ I believe we could do better, where we’ve become so individualized. We take Paul’s words, “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling,” and we say, oh, that’s just me. But we forget Philippians 4, where he’s talking about these two women that the whole church has to help get right. It’s not an individual endeavor; it’s a communal experience. And so I really believe that if we were all dedicated to those spiritual disciplines, if we had ‑‑ I’ll say the dreaded two words ‑‑ small groups that were dedicated to walking daily with each other, searching the scriptures together, praying, breaking bread together ‑‑ I think that’s a very biblical concept, where we can extinguish the fiery darts of the Satan.

WES: Eric, man, this can’t be the last time I have you on the podcast because this has just been so rich, and I can’t even begin to tell you how much I appreciate your thoughts. I remember I was speaking to some college students recently and I was talking about some of the same stuff that you were just saying about spiritual warfare and alignment with the Holy Spirit, that we have to ‑‑ yes, the Holy Spirit comes to dwell in us when we become Christians, but over and over again, the apostles tell people to walk by the Spirit, to keep in step with the Spirit. There is this language that you have to be intentional about aligning yourself with him, and you have to be intentional about engaging in this warfare so that you don’t give Satan a foothold, so that you don’t give him space, so that he doesn’t tempt you. 

But the things that we actually do to engage in spiritual warfare, as I went through the list of Ephesians 6, I kind of

jokingly said, well, Wes, it sounds like what you’re saying is, you know, go to church, read your Bible, say your prayers. Really? And it’s like, yes, really, the things that we’ve been doing for 2,000 years. It’s not any of this sort of wacky stuff that you might think of when you think of spiritual warfare. It is these disciplines, it is this rule of life where we are walking with Jesus. And I think, so often, even the spiritual armor that we see in Ephesians 6 ‑‑ when I was a kid, in Bible class there was often a poster on the wall that would have, you know, somebody in armor, and I think, so often, we focus on the metaphor rather than what Paul was saying. We focus on the helmet and the breastplate and the shield and the sword and the belt, and it’s like, wait, but what he’s talking about is the word of God and prayer and salvation and the gospel and righteousness. These are the things that protect you from the evil one, and it’s the gift that God gave you. And when you have this spiritual armor, you don’t have to fear evil. You can resist the devil and he will flee from you. You don’t have to be afraid of him. And I think if we read Ephesians 6 and we walk away from it afraid of the evil one, we’re reading it wrong or we’re just not practicing it, because if we’re walking by the Spirit and we’re practicing these things, then we don’t have to be afraid.

ERIC: That’s right. My mind often goes to Hebrews 10 as far as what the gathering actually does and what we’re supposed to be doing in our gatherings, whether it’s Sunday or Monday morning, getting together for coffee with a brother or sister who’s struggling, or maybe they’re at the highest place they’ve ever been spiritually and I’m not. It’s about stirring one another up to love and good works and encouraging one another all the more as we see the day drawing near. And when we read through Hebrews ‑‑ Hebrews is kind of my preaching hobby horse so I have to be careful, but back in chapters 3 and 4 he’s talking about this ultimate Sabbath that’s going to come this day. He says today, as long as it’s still called today, we need to be convicted. We need to be watching out for each other. Don’t fall into the same temptation that Israel did in the wilderness. And that’s also kind of along the lines of this spiritual warfare that Israel fell prey to. He says, but there is a day coming, a day of rest, that you all need to be prepared for, and that’s what our coming together is about. It’s about this future day. It’s not just about, you know, punching the clock. “Well, I’ve led this many sermons this year; therefore I’m good.” Or “I made it through my sermon series,” or “My kids sat perfectly, like little angels.” It’s about what we do in that moment to prepare us for the eternal rest, and that begins with week after week. Sometimes it’s a drudge, but once we get into a rhythm with each other, it’s a blessing.

WES: Yeah, amen. I think that’s a great place to stop because you have stirred me up. You have encouraged me, Brother. Thank you for this conversation. I hope that people find it encouraging.  What resources, maybe Michael Heiser or others, would you recommend? If people want to study this more, where would you encourage people to turn?

ERIC: I would go to UnseenRealm.com, as well as pick up Michael Heiser’s book. I’m not being paid to say this. Unfortunately, Michael Heiser passed away almost a year ago today. So pick up his book, The Unseen Realm. That’s more of his scholarly take. It more aligns with his dissertation. He also has more accessible books called Angels; he has a book called Demons, and a book called Supernatural. I have some of his other books here. One’s called The Bible Unfiltered. It’s really accessible. It’s three pages about one topic, and he’s really just asking us ‑‑ and this is something that I think we could do really well, is let the Bible be what the Bible is. Don’t try to color it with our modern interpretation, with our interpretations of science today, or even our understandings of science, because that’s not what the Bible was trying to convey. And then one last one, it is a dissertation. It’s called The Divine Council in Canaanite and Early Hebrew Literature. It’s by E.T. Mullen. This is his dissertation, so it’s difficult, but if you want to see how Israel’s divine council ‑‑ how that idea is also found in Canaanite cultures and Ugaritic cultures, Assyrian cultures, it’s a fantastic book.

WES: Awesome. I’ll link to all of that in the show notes so that people can access it. And I would say, too, that the Bible Project has some very simple videos that are really helpful explainers that, even for kids, could help them to understand exactly what we’re up against, I want to say, but also, at the same time, the power that is with us. Jesus has overcome the world, and so we have nothing to fear, but we do need to know what Jesus has done, what he is doing, and what he will do.

ERIC: Yeah, absolutely. Those Bible Project videos were very helpful for our youth group. They have a podcast series that’s just called God ‑‑ if you download the Bible Project app and find their series called God. 

But also, if you don’t mind, I want to encourage people to really dig into their Bibles, not just for quirkiness, but this has real‑life, everyday consequences because we’re talking about your spiritual life, which isn’t separated from your work life, it’s not separated from your family life. Paul is very clear in Ephesians 5 and 6, that it’s your whole life, and if our whole life is spiritual warfare, we need to be looking in scripture for examples of how Jesus dealt with spiritual warfare, how Daniel dealt with spiritual warfare, with the princes coming to him ‑‑ the princes over the nations. That ought to cause us a little bit of pause whenever we are talking about the world powers and how all of that works. God is over all, so our everyday life matters. Every decision we make is spiritual warfare.

WES: Yeah, amen. And in addition to dig into your Bible, don’t skip over the parts that seem weird or the parts that you don’t understand or that don’t line up with where you currently are or what you currently understand. I think we have such a tendency to do that, to say, well, that seems strange or I don’t know that I understand that, or that doesn’t fit with the paradigm that I already have, and so we just dismiss it, and we’re leaving a lot on the table. A lot that we don’t understand, we do that.

ERIC: That’s right. Heiser said, “If it’s weird, it’s important,” and that has guided me through my Bible study.

WES: I love it. Well, Eric, thank you so much again, Brother. Thank you for this conversation and for all you’re doing in the kingdom, Brother.

ERIC: Thank you so much. This was awesome.

The post Understanding the Satan, Demons, and Spiritual Warfare with Eric Ramseur appeared first on Radically Christian.

In this episode, Stuart Peck and Wes McAdams discuss the Exodus account and its relationship to the Gospel. They discuss how understanding the historical and cultural context of the ancient Israelites can deepen our appreciation for scripture and make it even more relatable to our lives today. Biblical characters grappled with very real issues in their specific historical setting, which can mirror our own struggles if understood properly.

As Stuart and Wes discuss the Exodus, they reflect on the ways it is used as an archetype throughout the New Testament to illustrate the gospel message. The hosts dive into how the Exodus foreshadows Jesus’ deliverance of God’s people from bondage to sin, the wilderness testing period, and ultimately being led into the promised land. They examine how New Testament writers frequently drew parallels between Jesus and Moses, as well as Jesus and the nation of Israel itself, to show Jesus as the fulfillment of the Exodus story.

The guest for this episode is Stuart Peck is the co-founder and CEO of Appian Media. He leads a team of creatives who make videos, podcasts and printed study material about the Bible. Their latest documentary “Out of Egypt” digs into the world of ancient Egypt and the culture that surrounded the Israelites as they were slaves in Egypt. The documentary follows a possible route out of Egypt to the border of Israel. Through their journey they explore the concept of the Exodus story being our story today.

Links and Resources

• Watch this episode on YouTube
• Appian Media
  • Out of Egypt – Premieres March 16, 2024
  • Following the Messiah
  • Searching for a King
• Freed Hardeman University Graduate School of Theology

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 story of the Exodus, how God brought the people of Israel out of Egyptian slavery and brought them to the Promised Land so that he could dwell with his people. We’re going to talk about how the Exodus story points forward to Jesus and how it teaches us what the gospel is all about and our place in the story of God and his people. 

I’m going to be talking with Stuart Peck, who is the co‑founder and CEO of Appian Media. He leads a team of creatives who make videos, podcasts, and printed study material about the Bible. Their latest documentary, “Out of Egypt,” digs into the world of ancient Egypt and the culture that surrounded the Israelites as they were slaves in Egypt. The documentary follows a possible route out of Egypt to the border of Israel. Through their journey, they explore the concept of the Exodus story being our story today.

I know that you will be blessed and encouraged by this conversation, but before we get there, I want to read Deuteronomy 18:15. This is Moses speaking to the people of Israel, and this promise points forward to Jesus. Here’s what Moses said. He said, “The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you, from your brothers. It is to him you shall listen.” I hope that you enjoy this conversation, and I hope it helps all of us learn to love like Jesus. 

WES: Stuart Peck, welcome to the podcast, Brother.

STUART: I am so glad to be here. Thanks, Wes. 

WES: Man, it’s great to have you. I’m excited about everything that Appian Media does. You guys came out to our house several years ago and interviewed my son because my family has really enjoyed the ministry that you guys have, the work that you guys put out for a long time, but I want to hear about this new project that you have going on. Tell us about what’s new.

STUART: Yeah. I would love to see your sons now. I’m sure they are a lot taller. 

WES: Yeah, my oldest is taller than I am now, so…

STUART: Oh, my goodness. Yeah, so this has been about a two‑year process, but we actually created a documentary called “Out of Egypt,” and it basically looks at the biblical account of the Exodus, and it’s kind of an exciting piece because it’s new for Appian Media. And I’m not sure if your listeners are familiar with Appian Media, but we have typically made documentaries going to the Bible lands and looking at the places where these events occurred. And while you can do that with the Exodus, there isn’t a lot ‑‑ or any material evidence of the Exodus when you go to Egypt or when you go to the Sinai Peninsula, so that kind of made it an exciting adventure. But we follow one of the possible routes that the Israelites took out of Egypt through the Sinai Peninsula to one of the locations that is believed to be Mount Sinai and then up into Jordan, and then we ended at Mount Nebo, looking into the land of Israel. 

So it was an exciting journey, and we hit our own roadblocks along the way. It’s trivial compared to what the Israelites had to endure when they were in the wilderness, but it really helped open our eyes, and we hope it helps open the eyes of our viewers to the fact that, you know, we all have our own Exodus story, and that’s a powerful motif that we see in scripture and, I think, one that we just ‑‑ we can’t overlook when we talk about the Bible. The Exodus is such a huge, pivotal moment in this nation’s history, and it’s a pivotal moment in our history, too.

WES: Yeah, for sure. So I want to come back to some of that, but let’s just kind of ‑‑ real generally speaking, it’s not just maybe about the Exodus project that you’re doing now, but even with all the things that Appian Media has done over the years, why do these kinds of projects and how do they help us to understand scripture better? I think one of the goals of this podcast is that we be better students of scripture, and I know that that is one of your goals, as well. So how does history and culture and location and all of the things that go into what you’re communicating to people ‑‑ how does that help form us and shape us into better Bible students?

STUART: Yeah, that is such a great question, and it all points back to scripture. And, you know, I can talk about my personal journey over the time that I’ve been working with Appian Media is ‑‑ you know, I read the Bible the way I think a lot of Western Christians read the Bible. We read the words and we see the stories and we, in our heads, make mental pictures of what that looks like. And while that’s fine, you know, sometimes those mental pictures can be inaccurate, especially being separated by an ocean and, you know, 2,000, 3,000‑years‑plus difference in different cultures and all of these things. And so it’s helpful, I think, to get to these places and show people these things so that way, they can hopefully have a more accurate mental picture. 

And we hear all the time from people ‑‑ for all of our content, whether it’s our series on the life of Jesus or the united kingdom ‑‑ that they never pictured it that way or it’s changed the way they see ‑‑ you know, fill in the blank, and, to me, that’s exciting to see because what it is is it’s helping people get a more intimate knowledge of their Bible. And you flip through the Bible and, on any page, you get these little windows into the world that surrounded these people and these cultures, and, to me, that’s where I like to go. I like to go down those rabbit trails and explore these different places and these different cultures. And what it does is it helps us get a more well‑rounded picture of who these people are, whether it’s the first‑century Christians who are living under the Roman government, or whether it’s the ancient Israelites who are living in a land full of deities ‑‑ you know, the Egyptian deities. 

I think ‑‑ having this picture that helps show us the surroundings of the Bible, I think, helps us ‑‑ it helps make it more relatable to us, and for a long time, what I was noticing is that people, you know ‑‑ and, specifically, I was looking at high school students when Craig and I first started Appian Media. We were seeing that people were disconnected from the scripture. They weren’t studying it for themselves, and they were kind of looking at it as like, why does this even matter to me? Like this is so removed from my life and my culture. And we want them to see that, no, no, no, these people are very much like you and they have the same struggles. They have the same things that you are enduring. It’s just that we’re told their story, and it’s ‑‑ I don’t know, it’s quite fascinating. And so I think ‑‑ you know, to answer your question, I think that having these videos and creating these images for people to see the Bible in this way helps build a more intimate relationship with their Bible, or that’s what we hope anyway.

WES: You know, it’s interesting, as you were talking, it made me realize that there’s almost a paradox here in that I think that sometimes, when it comes to scripture, we’ve had this tendency to just read it devotionally and jump so quickly to application without interpreting it in light of the culture and the time and the history that was going on when it was written, what did this mean to the original audience, and then, and only then, trying to apply it to our lives. And so we’ve almost tended to read the Bible, at times, as sort of being this cultureless document, as if it just dropped down out of heaven from God and landed in our lap and here it is. 

But ironically, reading it that way actually makes it less relatable to us because nobody is cultureless. Nobody is languageless. Everyone is deeply enculturated. We live in a culture. And even though the biblical characters, the people in scripture, they lived in a different culture than ours ‑‑ they spoke a different language, they had different things going on ‑‑ it does become relatable when you understand that they had very real problems. They had very real questions. And even though their problems and questions may be different than ours, like us, they also had problems and they also had questions and there were things going on in their place and in their time. 

And I think, so often, when we don’t appreciate that, we don’t understand scripture, and then it becomes less relatable. And it really ‑‑ we can get into it when we understand that this is a real nation. You used that word earlier. This is a real nation, a real ethnic group that God chose. Now, if we were writing the Bible, we might choose a different way, but God chose to work through a very specific people at a specific time and to walk alongside them in this very real story.

STUART: Yeah. I like to tell people the Bible was not written to us. It was written for us, but it was not written to us. And context ‑‑ I mean, that is so key in any passage in the Bible, is what is the context of that passage. And, you know, one of the most dangerous things I think we can do as Christians today is pluck a verse out of context and use it and in some ways weaponize it because we think that this applies to me in my current cultural context. Well, the Bible was not written in our current cultural context, and so we have to make sure that when we do look at the Bible ‑‑ I mean, I hold it up as this is a historic document, and we hold this document to be true and inspired. But there’s other documents out there that even were written around the same time and they were written by different nations or different cultures, and the Bible, in some ways, falls into a category of that historical document. And I think if we can look at it that way and then look at those people and see how we are similar to them, it can really help us relate to them, as you said.

WES: Yeah. In a lot of ways, it’s much like the incarnation in that Jesus is fully divine ‑‑ he is 100% God ‑‑ but he is also fully human ‑‑ he is 100% human, he is 100% man. And the Bible is both a divinely inspired collection of writings and it is a human‑written collection of writings, and sometimes we don’t appreciate both aspects of that. Some people don’t appreciate the divinely inspired aspect of it, and some people don’t appreciate the human aspect of it, that these are people that were speaking a language and having a conversation with their contemporaries that would have been understood by their contemporaries. They had a specific agenda of what they were trying to accomplish, the questions they were trying to answer.  And the more we can understand that time and place, the better we can apply it to our time and place and understand, okay, if that was true for them, and this is what God was doing with them and for them and, you know, through them, then what does that mean for us in our place and our time?

STUART: Yeah. You know, we were talking before the podcast that, you know, those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it, and it’s kind of that way in the sense that, like, we should be looking at the Bible and looking at the historical validity of it and the stories and go, okay, I need to learn from this group of people or this nation, or whatever the case is, and so that way, I don’t make those same mistakes, because there’s nothing new. Like we’re not in a new time. And I think that a lot of people think, oh, this is the worst time it’s ever been. No, no. If you look at history, if you look at the Bible, there is a lot of times where things were really bad, and we need to be able to glean from that, but also realizing that this is a historical document, so yeah.

WES: Yeah. Well, to that point, I think it’s interesting how the Exodus specifically is used as an archetype, and throughout the New Testament they draw on this picture of what happened, what God did in the Exodus in liberating the people of Israel out of slavery and bringing them to the Promised Land, and there’s so many pictures in the New Testament that are drawn from and using language and images that are drawn from this story of Israel. In fact, even ongoing generations, of course, of Israel celebrated, and continue to celebrate, the Passover. So this story of the Exodus is incredibly pivotal, not only for the people of Israel, for the Jewish people, but for us as Christians and in understanding our story in light of that story. 

So how would you say that this project that you guys are doing, or the Exodus story itself, can help us understand the gospel better?

STUART: Well, so the Exodus story ‑‑ it’s such a beautiful story, and, you know, I think ‑‑ I’m also currently teaching a class on the law of Moses, which, you know, when you really dig into the law of Moses, you see Jesus throughout the law, and it’s amazing. And so I think, in the documentary, we really work to bring out these points of God delivering his people from slavery and into ‑‑ where did they go? They went into the wilderness and they had their testing in the wilderness before they were actually led to the Promised Land, and how for us today, you know, we ‑‑ all of us, at times in our life, are enslaved to sin and we have to be delivered from that, and only God can do the delivering from that. And that doesn’t mean we’re going to be on easy street. It doesn’t mean that all is going to be well. We’re going to have to go through our wilderness testing. And then, you know, if we make it through, we’ll see that Jesus is there to lead us into the Promised Land. And so I think those themes, they resonate in the documentary and in the story of the Exodus. 

And then, we don’t get into it quite as much in the documentary, but I think, you know, we’re talking about making some other ancillary videos to kind of go along with it, but the discussion of the law and the giving of the law at Mount Sinai, it is very, very detailed and very, very intricate in that ‑‑ you know, everything from how the tabernacle is to be constructed, to the sacrifices, to the feast days, all of that. But when you dig into it, it all points toward a Messiah, and this theme that comes out is God’s desire to dwell with his people, and that is such a powerful thing that I think we all need to hear today, is that God isn’t distant. He’s not up in the sky looking down on us. He wants to be here with us. He wants to dwell among us. And that’s what the tabernacle was for. That’s what Jesus did when he came to Earth, was he wanted to dwell amongst the people. And

that is a powerful, powerful message for people who are feeling alone and lost in a world that is just seeming to get more and more dark.

WES: Yeah, yeah. No doubt. Beautifully said. I think often about the way that Matthew wrote his gospel account and how it seems like that’s exactly what he’s doing, is drawing these parallels not only between Jesus and Moses, but even Jesus and Israel, and how Jesus is born in a very similar situation as Moses was born, in that the children ‑‑ in order to try to kill Jesus, the children in Bethlehem were killed, much like the baby boys were killed in Egypt. And it’s interesting that Jesus flees to Egypt. He and his family flee to Egypt rather than fleeing from Egypt.  But they flee to Egypt, and then he comes out of Egypt, and just like Israel is brought out of Egypt ‑‑ in fact, that line that God called his son out of Egypt refers to Israel, and it’s almost as if Jesus is the embodiment of Israel and he’s brought out of that. And the next thing that we see is he crosses through the water, he’s baptized, and then he goes out into the wilderness and he’s tested there for 40 periods of time. It’s almost shocking that I missed that for so many years of my life, not realizing, oh, this is almost, beat by beat, a picture of the Exodus.

STUART: Yeah, it is. And I’m the same way as you. Like, you know, I grew up in Bible class and we learned the stories. We learned the parting of the Red Sea and, you know, the Ten Commandments and all of those things, but I didn’t learn as much the connections between Jesus and these stories in the Old Testament. And I think that’s really important as we’re training our kids, as we’re studying the Bible, is to make sure that we see these shadows of the Messiah everywhere we look in the Old Testament and see how they point forward. And, to me, that’s the inspiration in scripture, is the fact that over, you know, thousands of years in different parts of the known world at that time, people were writing pieces of the Bible that all connected. And it’s not like they got together on a Zoom call and said, “Hey, what are you writing over here? Okay. Well, I’m going to write this part over here. Let’s get it together and let’s make sure” ‑‑ and it’s just absolutely amazing to see all that. And I think it helps ‑‑ when you do see that, it helps you appreciate the Bible that much more.

WES: I’m going to throw this at you, Stuart. I didn’t put this in my notes to you, but as I was preparing, I thought about something that my youngest son asked me maybe a few months ago. It’s interesting, when your kids ask you questions, you think automatically, okay, this is what I would have always said, or this is what I was taught growing up, and then you realize, I don’t know that I believe that anymore. But he asked me ‑‑ he was studying about the Exodus, and he asked, “Why were pharaoh’s magicians able to do what they did? Why were they able to turn, you know, staffs into snakes? Why were they able to turn water into blood? And why is it that they did these things? Were they just doing, you know, sort of magic tricks?” 

And I remember back to the explanations I got to that question, because it seems like a natural question for kids, but for some reason, adults just kind of get to the point where they’re like, “I don’t know; that’s just what it says.” And I just kind of was dismissive of it, that it was just a trick ‑‑ you know, it was just some sort of a trick, and maybe that’s the case, but I think now that it’s an indication that there were very real powers ‑‑ I would say demonic powers behind Egypt, and that these forces that they were worshiping as gods ‑‑ that there is something there. There is a demonic power and force there, but God ‑‑ but Yahweh is more powerful and that God demonstrates his authority and power over these forces of evil. And, again, I think this picture pointing forward to the gospel in the New Testament and the liberation that we experience by the blood of Jesus liberating us from very real forces of darkness and evil is part of the story that’s always been part of the story. I’m curious to hear your thoughts on that, if you have any. Again, I apologize. I’m just throwing that at you.

STUART: No, it’s a great question, and it’s one that I’ve read before, too, and been like, okay, wow, that’s interesting. And I think, similarly, I’ve probably either heard or tried to find ways in my head to normalize it or to kind of write it off and be like, eh, it wasn’t real. But you’re right. I think that there’s a whole spiritual world out there that we see little bits and pieces of. You go into the book of Daniel or even like ‑‑ you know, I love the story ‑‑ was it in II Kings with Elisha and his servant, and they ‑‑ all of a sudden, his eyes are opened and he sees the army. I mean, like there’s so ‑‑ there’s a whole spiritual world out there that is operating without us being able to see it. And, you know, who knows if that was part of the power that Pharaoh’s magicians had. I mean, you know that there were some dark magics or some dark works happening because you go even into the period of the united kingdom, and that was ‑‑ it was the ‑‑ what is it, the magicians or the conjurers, they were kind of outlawed. And so it’s like there was a whole group of people that was able to do things, whether it was, you know, have a conversation with somebody who had died or ‑‑ you know, that was not even allowed to be part of the culture in Israel. And so that kind of points to, okay, there’s something maybe even slightly sinister here that is kind of beneath the surface. 

But yeah, I don’t have an answer for that specific question, but I think that it’s a valid one. And to your point, I think that Pharaoh seeing his magicians be able to do some of the things that he thought that God was able to do, it maybe even bolstered himself even more and said, “Oh, look at me. I really am a god because I can do the same things that your God can do.” But, of course, we know the story, that very quickly God’s power went way beyond what the magicians could do, and even the magicians themselves said, “Hey, I’m out. I can’t.” And so that right there is a telling story of just the power of God above anything that may be in the world that we think is ‑‑ oh, you know, that’s real power. No. God’s way more powerful.

WES: Yeah, no doubt. And I think it’s telling that, plague by plague, God shows his superiority over these other false gods or other gods or demonic powers, however you want to frame that ‑‑ that God shows his power over these things. And that even when you think about the way that Moses ‑‑ that God, but through his chosen instrument of Moses, the way that he confronts these powers of evil and darkness and the way that he demonstrates his superiority is so similar to the way Jesus does, that he doesn’t attack Egypt with chariots, with human armies, that it’s not the way that you would think. 

I mean, when you think about the story of the Exodus, here you have this nation of slaves, and there’s a shepherd who comes into the world’s most powerful empire and tells the world’s most powerful king to let God’s people go, and that he’s approaching this battle with nothing but a staff ‑‑ a shepherd staff in his hand and that God uses this lowly shepherd to liberate his people and defeat the world’s largest empire and army ‑‑ it is exactly what we have in Jesus, times infinity, that we ‑‑ as Paul says in Ephesians 6, we’re not wrestling against flesh and blood and that we don’t approach things with these carnal weapons, but we have faith, we have the word of God, we have prayer, and that through these things, and through our lowly shepherd who gave his life for us, our Passover lamb, the forces of evil and darkness cannot stand against God.

STUART: Amen to that. Yeah. And we live in a culture now where nations ‑‑ they flex their muscles by the weapons they do have and the ability that they do have, and so it becomes easy for us to really start to feel secure in our own place and time and our own nation, or whatever the case might be, and forget that God is in ultimate control. And we look around and we see the powers of darkness just kind of closing in, and we go, what’s happening here? Like, where is God in this whole situation? And it’s helpful to know, you know, he’s still here. He’s still here. We may not be able to physically see him, but he is still here. He’s still working. He still has a plan, and we can go back to scripture and look at what God’s plan is, and that’s a really important thing. 

You know, it’s funny because, like, when you put it that way, like you just stated, you can see why Moses was a little bit hesitant at the burning bush, to go, are you sure about this? Like, you know, you do realize who Pharaoh is, don’t you? Because he sees what we all see, and that is the world’s most powerful nation and the world’s most powerful person in Pharaoh at that time. And God is wanting me to go in there and say, hey, let your workforce go? I mean, you know, all of a sudden, it sounds a little bit more daunting than for us who can read the whole story, so…  

WES: Yeah. But to that point that we keep coming back to, that the New Testament writers continue to draw on these stories to bolster their faith ‑‑ you think about chapters like Hebrews 11 that draw from this and from other stories ‑‑ but to remind them that God delivers his people by faith, that when God’s people trust him, they’re loyal to him, they give their allegiance to Yahweh, that they have nothing to be afraid of, that all we have to do is trust him. You know, you have Moses, you have Noah, you have the people marching around the city of Jericho, that God will deliver his people. You just have to continue to trust him and to follow his lead. 

But to that point, I kind of want to shift gears just a little bit in that the stories of the Exodus that the New Testament writers draw from aren’t always the positive ones, that you have the wandering in the wilderness of the people of Israel, and that whole generation, not only do they ‑‑ you know, they receive the law at Sinai and then they go and spy out the land, and then, of course, they say, “Okay, this nation is too big. These people are too big.” Ironic because they just were delivered from much bigger people, much, much more daunting powers, but they’re afraid of the Canaanites, and because of that, they wander in the wilderness for 40 years. And the New Testament writers continually draw on that story of the wilderness wandering to remind people that just because God has saved you and delivered you doesn’t mean that you can’t fall and ultimately be destroyed just as that generation was, and it’s a warning against apostasy, against falling away once they’ve been delivered. I wonder, is that something that y’all explore, the period of wandering in the wilderness for 40 years, or is it primarily about the Exodus itself?

STUART: No, we definitely do explore the wilderness, and it was quite stark. You know, we couldn’t go stand in the spot and say this is where they camped; this is where the tabernacle was. But you can go into the wilderness, especially in the Sinai Peninsula, and you can see how starkly different it is from the lush green of the Nile Delta and the Nile River. And so all of these passages where the Israelites are talking about, “Why did you bring us out here to die? We had plenty of food in Egypt,” it’s because they’re literally standing in a desert where they have nothing. No food, no water, nothing. And so they are ‑‑ their hand is forced. They have to rely on God’s provision, and that was really, really evident, and it became a beautiful thing.  

As we sit back today and we reflect on the fact that we want so badly to rely on what we know, we want so badly to go back to what is comfortable for us, but when God calls us out of slavery, we have to rely on him and we have to rely on his provision to get us through. And it’s a ‑‑ we all have our wilderness wanderings, and I think that that’s something that maybe us as Christians, especially in some place like the United States of America, need to really kind of sit and meditate on because we live very comfortably here. And while that’s not a bad thing, we need to really think about where are we putting our reliance? Are we really putting our reliance on God and his provision, or are we putting our reliance on Egypt and its provision for us? And when we really look introspectively at ourselves, hopefully that elicits change in our lives and really helps us to focus on, “I need God. I need God when I’m wandering in those wildernesses.”

WES: Yeah, amen. Well, I think it really illustrates that sort of ‑‑ what scholars call the “already and not yet” aspects of the kingdom in that Israel was already delivered. They were already saved. They were already liberated. They were already rescued from slavery, but they were not yet in the Promised Land, and so they had that period of living in the wilderness, and it’s a period of waiting and a period of testing, a period where they had to practice perseverance and endurance and faith and trust in the Lord. And there were some ‑‑ there was always a remnant of people who were trusting in the Lord, but that period of being in the wilderness ‑‑ and I can’t help but imagine that, for y’all, being in that wilderness makes that so much more real, and I can’t wait to watch the documentary so that we can see what that’s like, to be in the wilderness as a reflection on where many times we are spending our life and in being in this wilderness and a reminder to follow Jesus, who was faithful in the wilderness, rather than be like the generation who grumbled and complained and didn’t trust the Lord.

STUART: I know, and it’s so true. And as you mentioned earlier, it’s like Jesus ‑‑ he went through the water and immediately went into the wilderness and he was presented with a lot of the same temptations that the Israelites were, and, honestly, that we are today, and that is, look out for myself, look out for me, make sure I’ve got what I need, which is, you know, my bare necessities, but also power and control. And every time, Jesus says, uh‑uh, I’m not relying on those things; I’m relying on God. And that’s exactly what the Israelites didn’t say, and it’s also sometimes exactly what we don’t say, but it’s what we should be really focused on.

WES: Yeah, no doubt. I love how Jesus, in that account of the temptations, how he quotes from Deuteronomy. All three of the temptations, he responds with quotations from Deuteronomy, which, for those that are listening that may not know, Deuteronomy is this reminder of the law, “the second law” it literally means. And so the new generation that’s about to leave the wilderness and go into the Promised Land are reminded this is what it means to be faithful to Yahweh. This is what it looks like to keep covenant. And so they’re being told, hey, if you don’t want to end up like your fathers who died in the wilderness, here’s what you have to do. Here’s how you have to live. And Jesus is proving that he is the faithful son of God. He is the faithful Israel, and quoting “This is the way that I’m going to live. I’m going to live faithful to the covenant with Yahweh,” not only to save us, but as an example to us, as well.

STUART: Yeah, absolutely.

WES: So let’s kind of tie back into the theme of this podcast, which is to love like Jesus. We’re trying to learn to love like Jesus. So how do you think that the story of the Exodus, and even this documentary, can help us to better love like Jesus?

STUART: I think that, with the story of the Exodus, we can see that Jesus ‑‑ he is our perfect lamb, and that was such a big part of when they went into the wilderness and when they were presented with the law, was this idea of a sacrificial system that was created and this idea of atonement for sins, and that was all brand‑new to these Israelites.

They come out of a land where that was ‑‑ I mean, they still had sacrifices, but they were to these deities of Egypt, and so now they’re learning that sacrifice is different. Sacrifice in the ancient world, a lot of times it was you sacrificed to appease the god or the gods, and “I hope that I do enough in order to make the god give me something.” That’s very opposite to the way sacrifices are in Israelite culture and Jewish culture. It’s about God gifting us this opportunity to become ‑‑ to be with him, and so we see that through the Day of Atonement. In Leviticus we see that, all the way up to Jesus. And he gave his son, he gave us this gift, he gave us the sacrifice, so that way, he could be with us. And it’s just a ‑‑ it just shows the love. And, like, I would much rather worship and serve a God that is like that than a God who’s like, “Just keep giving to me, just keep giving to me, and I might ‑‑ I might have something for you.”

WES: Wow. Yeah, so well said. Stuart, why don’t you tell us a little bit more about where we can find out more about “Out of Egypt” and everything that Appian Media has done and is doing?  

STUART: Okay, yeah. So AppianMedia.org is our website, and if you go there, we have all of the content that we’ve produced, all the documentaries available on our website, and there’s a lot of stuff out there. And so we’ve got a lot of people who are using ‑‑ whether it’s “Following the Messiah,” which is on the life of Jesus; we have a series on the united kingdom of Israel. We did a series ‑‑ or we did an episode on ‑‑ “Trial and Triumph” is what it’s called, but it’s on the seven churches in Revelation. But “Out of Egypt” is going to release March 16th and be available after that. And, yeah, I mean, AppianMedia.org is really the place to go.

WES: Awesome, awesome. Well, thanks for the work that you’re doing and thanks for this conversation, Brother. This has been rich.

STUART: Thank you. I appreciate it, Wes. Thank you.

As a listener to this podcast, I know you’re passionate about deepening your understanding of scripture. This podcast is certainly one way to help you do that, but I want to invite you to consider another opportunity to invest in yourself and in your spiritual journey. That’s through pursuing a graduate degree in theology at Freed‑Hardeman University. With five master’s degrees and one doctorate degree, FHU’s graduate theology programs offer a unique blend of academic rigor, spiritual formation, and practical application. Whether you’re interested in deepening your understanding of scripture or sharpening your ministry skills, their distinguished faculty are there to guide you every step of the way. And with their flexible online and web conference courses, you can pursue your graduate degree from anywhere in the world. So over the next few weeks, each podcast will feature a different opportunity housed within the Graduate School of Theology at Freed‑Hardeman University. All application fees are waived right now, and even more importantly, scholarships are available. If you’d like to learn more about the programs they have available, go to FHU.edu and type “Graduate Theology” in the search bar.

The post The Exodus and The Gospel with Stuart Peck appeared first on Radically Christian.

In today's Bible study, Wes McAdams and Boo Scott discuss the Lord's table. They examine Jesus' table fellowship in the Gospel of Luke and its implications for the Lord's Supper today. They also discuss what it really means to "discern the body" and take communion in a worthy manner.

The post Who is Welcome at the Lord’s Table? with Boo Scott appeared first on Radically Christian.