#209 | The Story of God & Idolatry in Western Culture, Pt. 2 | Mike Goheen

The structure of Paul's thinking, I would argue in Colossians and Ephesians, I think right through the New Testament was the gospel is a gospel of the renewal of creation. It's cosmic. Within that is a community that embodies it.

And within that are individuals that are included in that new humanity that is part of the cosmic renewal. And so sort of a cosmic communal in personal or individual kind of, of of movement I think is what you see in Paul.

And so I don't want to take away from individual salvation one bit. Matter of fact, I want to say when you put it in its cosmic communal context, it's even more urgent.

It's watering time everybody. It's time for Apollos Watered a podcast to saturate your faith with the things of God so that you might saturate your world with the good news of Jesus Christ. My name is Travis Michael Fleming and I am your host. And today on our show we're having another one of our deep conversations.

How big is the gospel? Sounds like a stupid question really.

I mean we talk about the gospel.

All the time, right? The good news of Jesus. But it's interesting, when I started talking to Christians, I like to ask them to define or describe what the Gospel is.

In fact, every culture that I go to visit, I do the same thing. And it's amazing to me how many people have different definitions of what the Gospel is.

I mean, you might be saying to yourself now like, wait a minute, I thought I knew. And you're wondering if there's something more. Is it more than Jesus dying on the cross to save you from your sin?

Well, it's not less than that, but it is a whole lot bigger than you probably realize. There's a lot more. Last time we started a conversation with my friend Mike Goheen about his book the Church and its Vocation.

It's really a book about Leslie Newbegin, the British missionary who spent 40 years in India and returned to England to find a culture that had entirely shifted in the 40 years that he was gone. He realized that he needed to take the things that he had learned as a missionary and apply them to his own culture.

He needed to have a missionary encounter a missionary mindset with the Western culture itself. Last time we started talking about some of his ideas and how all of these fit together.

And if you haven't heard it, you need to go back and listen to that episode first. Last time we talked about this western story about how we, even Bible believing Christians have been co opted by this story.

And simply carried along in it. Because the Western culture is extremely powerful.

And too often we reduce our faith to simply a set of ideas within that story instead of the other way around. I know that these waters are deep and many of you are probably thinking, hey, this sounds very suspicious. I've never heard anything like this before.

Well, it's because we're going down really deep into it, but it's so important.

It's going to expand your vision of the kingdom of God, and you're also going to see some of the good things that our Western culture has brought to us, but you're also going to see some of the very dangerous elements within it because it can take over. And, and the good things can, as we've seen in almost anything else, can finally take us over.

I mean, there are good things that become really God things that become bad things. I mean, look at cell phones. They're really good to bring communication, but yet they feel like they are taking over our lives.

As we continue our conversation today, we're going to see just how important this missionary encounter is, how we need to be formed first. And all too often, we haven't done the job because we've been looking too small, simply because the gospel is cosmic.

It's much bigger than we could ever imagine. And here's the exciting thing. You and I get to be a part of it.

I want to encourage you to check.

Out our new website, Apolloswatered.org if you'd like to become one of our watering.

Partners or simply see some of the.

Resources that we have that are for you. And I couldn't be more excited to announce how we are now doing watering weekends.

We want to come to you where you are, whether it's your church, your leadership team, or perhaps some organization that you work with. We want to help you in your missionary encounter with Western culture.

So go online, check that out, it's under our resources tab and sign up, because we would love to be able to partner with you and help you water your world where you are. With that in mind, let's get to this second conversation with Mike Goheen. Happy listening.

It might have been Winston Churchill that said, democracy is the worst form of government until you think about all others. Yeah, basically. So here we have the flawed aspect of Western culture, but yet we know the benefits that it brings to other people.

Especially we bring it to help food and shelter, and we want to be able to do that. Our system is better than many of theirs. If you just look at some of the results and how it's helping people flourish.

So how do you differentiate between that being an idolatrous thing to the aspect of how it's been good for society?

That's a good question. I think it's an important one because I think we need to love our culture. What we hate is the idolatry that twists it. But we love our culture.

And in loving our culture, part of it is saying what's good about it and what's good about American culture, what's good about Canadian culture, what's good about European culture. And I want to say a lot. A lot is good about it. And why is it good?

Well, a lot of it is because of what I call the salting influence of the Christian faith on Western culture. I think the salting influence of the Christian faith is very prominent.

And as I did, I had been very critical of a very Western Canadian especially, but North American vision of public life, of its idols. But what struck me about going to the Ukraine and one time being in part of the Russian, part of the.

Of the Crimea, was that in Russia there had been a revolution. The humanism of Russia.

Communism suppressed the Christian faith ruthlessly and in doing so had a degree of success and the evidence of what had taken place when you suppressed the Christian faith. The loss of salting influence was everywhere. I mean, this place in Ukraine was a devastated place. And I was able to say that in my lecture.

This is a devastating place because your story didn't work.

What that did for me in a good way, was help me see that in the United States and in Canada, there had not been a ruthless suppression of the Christian faith. There had just been this privatization, putting it over here in this small area. And I've been critical of that and still am.

But the reality is you can't put Jesus over here. You can't say, we'd like you to stay there. Jesus. Jesus doesn't stay there. He spills over into public life.

And the reality is that that salting of God's work through Christ in the spirit has had a tremendous shaping and salting effect on the United States and on Canada through religious freedom, if you want to put it that way. And so through that, churches have been able to live and act and live out their faith. In a variety of ways.

And in many ways it has brought a lot of good into our culture. And so I want to talk about that. So I think that's the good side of it.

I think the negative side of it is that we've developed the economic side of life very well. And that economic really delivers and offers a lot of good things and benefits of life. And people want those economic benefits.

They want those, but they don't want the way that consumerism and the idolatry of the economy dehumanizes. They don't want that. They just want the benefits of it in many ways. But I want to stay with the positive.

Often what they want is they see a culture and they say, okay, we like these things. And they don't realize a lot of these things have come because of the deep salting effect of the Christian faith. And I think what we want to.

I think what I want to do is I want to say we don't be careful. We're going to lose that. We're going to lose it both with the far left and the right today.

Both of them are threatening even what the salting effect of the gospel has brought us. And moving towards a more neo paganism. That deeply concerns me.

When you mention the salting effect of Western civilization, I'm reminded of Glenn Scrivener's book the Year We Breathe, as well as Vishal Mangalwadi's book, the book the Major World Is. Both of them say that our Western civilization has largely been shaped by the Bible in that we have freedom, this idea of concept of freedom.

And it's gone off the rails, like you said, with autonomy. But technology, education, equality, all of these things come from the scriptures.

He said, if you would have gone back to the Judeo Christian world and said all men are created equal, they would have laughed at you.

And we failed to see and understand that many of the different benefits that we're receiving today is because of that exact salting as you're referring to there. I'm just trying to break it down to our people so they understand it.

Because I know some of these are very high kind of mega or meta concepts for people and they need ways to illustrate it. You mentioned the dehumanization of materialism.

Can you just explain for a moment what that means so our people can really understand what this dehumanization is?

Yeah. For example, I think that our economist culture is leading to a world where people are becoming workaholics and they're becoming extremely busy.

What's happening is their lives are become so busy making money and pursuing things that it leaves little time for deep relationships. Marriages are breaking down. Parents don't spend the kind of deep quality time with their children.

People, especially men, don't have deep friendships. So it breaks down relationships. People are too busy to spend long times in prayer. And the spirit, spiritual practices.

It's affecting us physically because we're not spent. There's a whole book written by a family doctor. It says our economistic culture is destroying our physical health.

And it's destroying our physical health because we haven't got. We haven't even got time to spend an hour exercising.

So I think that what happens at so many relational levels, at what I'll call spiritual levels, at physical levels, at psychological levels, what's happening is we're not experiencing the fullness of human life that's coming because of an economistic culture that is destroying us. I could, I mean, I think just. There's so many things like that. Let me just give you an example that most of us would not have even thought about.

I mean, this. I hadn't thought about this, but this is a book. I think it's. If I remember right, it's called the Hairy Clocks. And what it does is says from.

Many more things then what did they basically say is, look at this. Bigger house, more goods. Think of the time you spend in cleaning your house. Think of the time you spend in laundering your clothes.

Think of the time you spend in taking care of your technology. And it starts to say, think of all the time you take in just taking care of the space and the goods you have.

And it kind of breaks that down numerically and says by the end, this is why we're so busy.

And what it's saying is, okay, you might be getting some good things, but let me just show you, having all these things is going to make you require, take a lot of time from you, and that time is going to be taken away from somewhere.

Maybe your marriage, maybe your family, maybe being part of family, maybe your prayer life, maybe participation in church, maybe in volunteer groups in small towns in the United States. So interesting that they used to carry a lot of the weight of a social kind of networking and glue.

And because of people's busyness, they're not doing things anymore. And a lot of that glue is causing towns to not have that kind of safe social cohesion.

So, in other words, there's many ways, I think, in which we become dehumanized by an economistic world.

Is that book called the Harried Leisure Class by Stefan B. Linder?

I believe so, yes.

Back then, which is just imagine today, Imagine today how much, how many more goods we have. You know, I wonder how many. I'm going to wonder how many people had two cars back then. A lot of family have two cars today.

Just think of the time and money it takes to keep your cars running.

I don't want to think about it.

I just. And I'll bet you they have about three, twice as many clothes now. I bet your houses are even bigger. That's what he's saying then, is now multiplying.

How do we, though, counteract that?

Like, even as you're talking about this, and we've talked a little bit about the book, but in a missionary ecclesiology, we're talking about how to be a distinct people of God, to offer a better vision of humanity to people in the midst of this world. We know the effects of it, but breaking that habit and finding an alternative seems almost impossible. Like with my children, just to give an example.

So my, my kids, I have a kid in college, one in high school, one in middle school and elementary school. We just decided every presidential election to be political and have a child. That's what we were going to do.

So in that, in that period of time, though, when my, when my son was 12, he gets to middle school and all of his friends have cell phones. And so you don't want him to be left out. You don't really want him to have that powerful tool.

And there's different ways you can do it and go about it.

And I know many families employ a lot of different things, but when they get that tool, then they start utilizing that tool and you realize you can't be do anything without it. I mean, now with the school systems, everything's good. Dependent upon the Internet, all the communications are there. Covid has ensured that.

How do we then help back away from these other technologies when we become so dependent upon them?

Well, what I appreciate about your questions, Travis, is you're asking the big, huge questions and you're looking for silver bullets on a podcast.

I'm not looking for silver bullet. I'm trying to help people break this down is what I'm trying to.

And I deeply appreciate that. And the thing is that you have to take each different aspect and start asking questions about. Okay, let me back up to the general thing.

I think one of the things we've not done well is in our churches, discipled our kids and ourselves into a.

Into a vision where we are unique holy people in the midst of the world so that our kids have a sense when they're in the school, we're not like the other kids. We're called to be. We're, you know, we're called to be.

I'm called in my school situation to be people of God for the sake of my world, for the sake of my other. The other students.

And so I think that one of the things that has happened in North American culture is the church has not fostered the way the early church did, fostered that sense of being a distinctive people. In other words, we do what the other people do. We don't do that because we recognize that, that, that is idolatry.

I think that's one of the big step back things. Now when you say trying to break it down, I realize that does not solve your problem.

If you do the best job possible and your local congregation does the best job possible and your son is a son or daughter, your son goes into that school and there's the pressure. There's incredible cultural pressures and incredible cultural pressures. We are part of a system that is de Christianizing us all the time.

We're woven into this system. And this is what was so beautiful about New Beginning. The missionary vision is they recognized that this idolatry is not just out there.

We are woven into the system. And figuring out a way forward is not just extract myself. It doesn't work that way.

It's trying to find ways to embrace the good in technology while at the Same time reject its dehumanizing, idolatrous effect on us. So you asked me that question. Here's the frustrating thing. I'm probably about 30 years older than you. I don't know.

And my kids are probably about your age. I don't know how old you are. My kids are in their early 40s. So my kids growing up had a different set of technologies.

That's why I could tell my stories and everybody would yawn. Oh, man, that was that back in the.

But we had to wrestle with the technologies coming, like email and Internet and MSN texting, things like that that were way back. We had to wrestle with those things coming into our home. And we had to say.

And one of the things we did was we took a thesis by Neil Postman in technopoly.

And that is, every time you adopt a technology, either individually or, or communally, culturally, it's going to give you something and it's going to take something away. Always. It's going to give you something and it's going to take something away.

And what he did, and I think if you put it in the context of the gospel, you can do what he wants you to do even better. But what we do then is we say, what does it give us? What creational power has God put in technology and allowed us to. What's enrich our lives?

What has it given us that's good? And what if we use it in other ways? How's it going to destroy us? And I can tell you one of the things we did with our kids.

I'm sorry, it's an old example, but when MSN comes on, they started saying, what we're trying to do with MSN is use it to communicate, build friendships. So they decided to cut themselves off.

My youngest daughter and five of her friends decided to cut themselves off from it for two weeks and see what happened. And they. What they found out was that MSN is very good at spreading information quickly among friends and very bad at building deep relationships.

So they said, let's stop using it for relational issues. Let's talk about to spread a lot of information quickly. Let's find other ways to communicate and talk.

That was one of the decisions they made because they said, this technology does this well and this badly, doesn't build relationships, but spreads information quickly. And I think this kind of Christian analysis, in light of the gospel that says, what's the creational good? How is it dehumanizing is the way forward?

And the problem is your family may be different than my family. If.

If I'm the same age as you and we have kids the same age, and we're going to wrestle with it differently for different reasons, and we can't stand in judgment on one another.

But what we have to do is wrestle together with this and ask questions of how, as a Christian community, do we ask this question not only of technology, but our economic life. How do we deal with our educational. I mean, our kids are being. Our kids are being deeply catechized every day of the week in the public school.

Dewey, the father of modern education, said that quite explicitly. We're catechizing kids into a worldview. How do we deal with education, technology, consumerism, political ideologies, social media?

They have to be these kinds of questions that say, what creational good is there? What is idolatry? Pray and wrestle together as families and churches and decide on things.

And what it may mean is, my son has got to have a phone for these reasons, but he doesn't have to have these things on his phone. Maybe we take those things off.

Maybe they're used for texting and they're used for phone calls, and they're used in these ways with the family, these ways with friends. In other words, that's what we did with email when it came into the home. We said, what's good? What's bad?

And we set up and our kids were on board with us. We want to be distinctively human here and not see this destroy us. What do we do?

We set up various ways of use of email that could benefit with us without destroying us. I'm not saying we did perfectly and did it well, but we struggle with it.

And I think that's what it means to have a missionary encounter with culture that's good.

I enjoy thinking through those things because there is that idea of being distinct in a weird way. You think of the Duggars or the weird kid that in the 80s that had shoulder pads or didn't have.

They were just weird, socially awkward kids because they were. They were homeschooled. We're not talking about that type of awkwardness or uniqueness. We're talking about being distinct.

And there it is in your practices, in the spaces. I mean, the nation of Israel, of course, had the Sabbath. That made them very distinct in their period, at times set aside for certain practices.

I want to change gears here for a moment. You talk going back to the book for a moment. We're talking about missionary encounter.

We're talking about missionary identity, we're talking about missionary ecclesiology. And you Refer to modern church has become in many ways, in many places, irrelevant. Why is that?

You've already talked about it a bit, but I'd like you to further. Like you said, the social cohesion has been lost in many communities because they have so many different options.

The church isn't serving that function any longer because we've really stripped it of some of its power. But what are some of the other ways that the church has become irrelevant in our modern culture?

Become irrelevant?

Yeah, irrelevant.

Yeah. Well, here's a quote that comes from a non Christian. He's an Australian, he's a sociologist. He studied the world global church.

Just because he was interested in why the church in Africa and Latin America were growing so fast and why the church in Australia was shrinking so fast.

And he says this, he says the Western church has singularly failed in its one major task, and that is to pass along its foundation story to the next generation and bring it to bear on the contemporary issues of the day. That's a cool. That's. That's a form of a paraphrase.

Who was that?

What's that?

What was his name?

His name's John Carroll. Okay, John Carroll and John Carroll. I think it's called the Gnostic Jesus or something like that. I forget the exact title of the book.

But the point he's making, and it's kind of side point, but the point he's making is the church has failed to show the comprehensive scope and vision of their faith that's given in their foundation story of the Bible. But he's saying, secondly, they failed to bring it to bear on the cultural issues of the day because they haven't had a comprehensive vision.

They haven't brought it to bear on sexuality and gender, on racism, on political ideologies, on goods, on technology, on consumer life.

And in so doing, they've left the churches, have left the people of the church, parents have left their kids without a way to navigate a distinctive way of living. And I think that is a critical thing that we've not. The president, I think of Eerdman's made this comment a few years back.

He said, during the time of COVID he says, we've seen just so many people leaving the church today. And he asked what happened and he says, because for 30 years before, I think it's more than that, but 30 years before, we've not been discipling.

It's been about attracting individuals to a certain kind of worship on Sunday morning, throwing our weight into that. We've not discipleship, discipled people into the biblical story, into understanding the western story, into living faithfully.

And our failure to disciple, he said, has hollowed the church out. Then he said when there were these three cultural pressures. He describes three cultural pressures.

One's Covid, one's the trumpest and the wokest polarization and the other is the racist incidents that took place with Floyd. He says these three things, they came in and the church had no way of knowing how to work with these things.

And it just pushed on a church that was empty and it just imploded. That's his vision.

But what that described for me is instead of being in a place where we're able to wrestle together with what the right and the left have right and wrong about these things, we're in a place where we just started fighting. Fighting led to polarization.

The polarization led to many people leaving the church and the church was collapsed because we weren't doing the kind of in depth, rich discipleship that we should have been doing. And so it seems to me that recapturing the importance of discipleship the way the early church did it is going to be critical for a church.

If it's going to take up the kind of dialogue I just described around technology.

It's got to take pretty much more seriously its own faith and realize that its faith is not simply about going to church on Sunday, having a worship experience, meeting Jesus on Sunday, and then going back and allowing yourself to be shaped again by all the powerful idolatrous forces at world and being given no means and no equipping means to be able to deal with them. I hate to say this, Travis, but I forgot what question you asked.

How has the church become irrelevant? How have the churches become irrelevant?

So again, what he's saying is we didn't have a big vision. We weren't bringing it to bear on these issues and what was happening.

We were just being absorbed into the streams and the cultural streams of the way that our humanist culture was shaping it. So we were irrelevant in speaking into that.

So because we focused on just the individual nature of salvation and the heaven aspect, we have missed the greater, I don't want to say periphery, but it's really. We've seen, basically we got the tree and we lost the forest. If that's a good way to illustrate it.

I mean, we focused on the individual nature of salvation because Christ did come to seek to save that which was lost.

We know that that's true.

It's not that the gospel is less than our salvation.

Right.

And I want to make sure.

People hear that as we talk about this, because there is this idea of evangelism, because some people are hearing this for the first time and they're overwhelmed right now, and they're so confused because they thought they knew what the gospel was, because they Even Paul's summation in 1st Corinthians 15, that Christ came to save and sinners. And that's the basic part, you know, And. But it's. It's much more than that. It's. There is a greater vision. The gospel is bigger than you imagined.

It's not less, but it is bigger.

And when we fail to understand the bigger, when we just focus on the narrow aspect of it, what ends up happening are people become collateral damage for discipleship, and they're not ready to handle the cultural forces that are there.

That's right. I think there's two things here that I think are important to say.

Number one, not only have we narrowed our view of the gospel, we've narrowed our view of sin as well. And I would remember having a Latin American describing. He's writing a commentary on Ephesians. And he.

And in chapters two, verses one to three, he said, here was Paul's vision of evil. It was three things. Number one, it was our sinful nature.

Second, it was the world in which the prince of the power of the air was at work animating that world. And for Paul, the world was the world of idolatrous culture in this present evil age. So idolatrous culture.

And thirdly, was a demonic power behind it. And he said, so consumerism is our greedy heart, but it's also setting up a whole culture around that idolatrous vision of life.

And the demonic power is using that culture to hold us in their grip. So we need a bigger view of sin, he says. And his understanding was.

His analysis of the American church was that as long as we have that narrow view of sin, we're not going to see how these powers are deeply shaping us, and we're not going to address them with the gospel the way Paul did. A second thing that I want to say is I'll stick with Ephesians because that comes in Ephesians 2, Ephesians 1 and Colossians 1 do the same thing.

And here's what they do. They say this Gospel in Ephesians, they talk about the uniting of heaven and earth in Jesus Christ.

It's the gospel's, the whole reconciliation of the creation. That's what's going to come at the end, says Paul. Now, in light of that gospel, Paul says there's a community called to embody it.

And then it's not until verse 13 where he says, and you were included in this by your faith in the gospel. So the individual dimension for Paul was inclusion.

And we probably don't need a dictionary to understand that include means to become part of something bigger.

And so the structure of Paul's thinking, I would argue in Colossians and Ephesians, I think right through the New Testament was the gospel is a gospel of the renewal of creation. It's cosmic. Within that is a community that embodies it.

And within that are individuals that are included in that new humanity that is part of the cosmic renewal. And so sort of a cosmic communal in personal or individual kind of, of, of movement I think is what you see in Paul.

And so I don't want to take away from individual salvation one bit. Matter of fact, I want to say when you put it in its cosmic communal context, it's even more urgent.

Repent and believe the good news because if you do, you're going to be part of what God is doing. That's a, it's part big in terms of what God is doing. And you yourself will be renewed to become fully human.

That's what the individualistic understanding of the gospel understands.

What they don't understand is becoming fully human, is becoming part of a bigger, fuller new humanity that is embodying God's purpose as part of the bigger cosmic renewal. And that as Paul says in Romans 8, the whole non human creation is going to be incorporated into this renewal one day when God finishes his work.

And so I think when you talk cosmic and communal, it intensifies the call of each person to repent, believe the good news and start to live out of that good news day by day and be renewed in the whole of their lives.

That's an incredible vision that I don't think very. The people that I have interacted with, people of my tribe, this isn't, this is.

And I've been in the church for a very long time, I mean my entire life really. But my adult life I've been serving in ministry and I. And I've served in churches and gone to seminaries.

And this is such a concept where I stop and I go, how did we miss this? How did we get to this part?

Because I thought I knew what the gospel was until someone one day challenged me about the kingdom and it made me stop and go, what is the kingdom? I was in India and I was talking with TB Thomas and he had mentioned I had asked him a question.

He'd been at the very first Lausanne, he'd met Stott and Billy Graham. And I asked him a question. I said, what's the one doctrine that you see very overlooked in the church today? It's forgotten doctrine.

And he said, the kingdom. And I think that's so true. I want to park on the kingdom just for a moment.

What is the kingdom and why is it so important for us to have a kingdom perspective?

As we talk about even a missionary ecclesiology, a church that has this missionary outlook or perspective, what role does the kingdom perspective play in that?

I think the kingdom in a nutshell is God's reign and rule over the entire creation and all of human life. Now you might say, okay, that's a great start, but what does it mean when Jesus announces the good news that the kingdom has arrived?

And I think what we have to say is in creation, God is pictured. I believe if you look at creation in saints, Near Eastern context, Genesis 1, God is King ruling the creation.

There is a traitorous act in Adam, his vice regent within the creation. And God's purpose to rule that creation is thwarted. God calls a community in Abraham to again live under his his kingship.

And the whole language of covenant, if you look at it in the ancient near east, is about a king who makes a covenant with a people to live under his kingship. And so Israel is to be a covenant people living under the kingship of God.

The trouble is, by the end of the biblical story, they're not doing that because the law, which is God's law of the king, was unable to form them to be that kind of people because Israel still shared in the old humanity. And so something had to be done to enable them to live under the lordship of their king.

And so when Jesus comes, he's using the language of Isaiah 52 and Isaiah 40 that said God was going to come in power and he was going to re exert his rule over the creation and save people to the ends of the earth. And when Jesus announced good news, the kingdom of God has come, he becomes this figure of Isaiah 52, 7, 10, and this figure is announcing good news.

God is coming back in power to save and to bring people under his renewing work. And so how can. This is a question that's been asked. How can Jesus announce good news, the kingdom has come when God's been King?

From Genesis one answer is, Jesus gives Himself in Matthew 12, he says to the Pharisees, if I cast out demons by the power of God, the kingdom has come upon you.

In other words, if God's power has broken into history to renew God's kingship, to take hold of the hearts of human beings so they can live under that authority and live under that rule, then God's kingdom has come. So God's kingdom is his rule over all of human life and over the world.

But it's breaking into the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and the power of the Spirit.

And what is happening is that power is saving people, Galatians 1:4, from the Old age, from the present evil age, rescuing them from that age, Colossians 1, transferring them into the kingdom of God, where now, by the Spirit, they can live under the rule of God, knowing that one day when Christ returns, he's going to re exert his rule over the entire creation with no opposition.

But until then, the church of the people, called to live under that rule of God in the power of the Spirit, being saved from the present evil age for the sake of the world, until Christ returns, the kingdom of God again is God's rule. You got to say more. It's the power of God breaking in to reestablish that rule over all of human life.

And it's those who repent and believe that then come under that rule again, as Paul says, transferred into the kingdom.

There is so much that you've talked about today, and I mean, we've come kind of to the end of our time.

And it's funny, we've talked about the book without even referring to the book, because all of this stuff is in the book, whether it's the missionary encounter, the missionary ecclesiology, the missionary identity. I mean, we're talking about individual salvation culture. I know some people are swimming trying to figure out all of this different stuff.

You were just a wealth of knowledge. I like to consider myself a fire hose of information. I think that you're a much bigger fire hose, maybe two or three fire hoses that are there.

That's because we're trying to do it in an hour. Usually I try to do this over four years with leaders.

And as we do it in four years, we just started a new group and two people came back, both of them leaders in the church.

And they came back and they said, we're going through this four years again because we've just got started and we realize we've only scratched the surface. And I think that they're right. This is a long process, and if people are swimming, that's good.

And hopefully they've heard resonances from scripture that will drive them back and say, okay, following Jesus is pretty serious business. It's serious enough that I better give my life to learning to what this is, learn what this is all about.

The discipleship and spiritual practices to be formed this way is a long, difficult, but delightful process for the rest of my life. And a quick podcast with the polished water is not going to Water is not going to solve everything for me.

It's just going to make me realize the length, the breadth, the depth and the difficulty of the process that Christ calls me to. And Christ makes that quite clear in Luke. Doesn't he want to follow me? You better give everything to me. And it's going to be.

It's going to be a long journey. It's going to be a difficult journey. But you know what? It's going to be a blessed journey.

It's going to be a journey where you find yourself renewed and healed and find the joy of what it means to be human. So are we in an easy sort of a quick gratification culture, willing to go into the depth of discipleship long term?

I suspect many aren't, but I suspect many are that are listening to this. And probably if they're listening to you, they're probably in that latter group.

They're probably more serious about their faith, more serious about following Jesus. They don't want Jesus light. They don't want kind of a cheap grace and a cheap gospel and a cheap faith. They're genuinely wanting to follow Christ.

So hopefully this will stimulate them to think about what the breadth of what that might mean.

Well, Mike, I want to thank you for coming back on the show and we're going to have you again to talk about the missionary church. We need to get into that to talk. That's the book right after this one. You wrote them kind of back to back with a little period of time in between.

But both are highly recommended. I really do recommend to people to check out the church in its vocation, Leslie Newbegin's Missionary Ecclesiology. And check out Newbegin.

Newbiggin is someone really worthy to read. I mean, some of the books. Where would you tell them to start with Newbiggin? What book would you have them start with? Foolishness to the Greeks.

Oh, boy, I don't know. I just. A leader yesterday told me he says he started. He's one of the ones starting first year again.

He said to me, I read Foolishness of Greeks in the first year. And he says it blew my mind. But I didn't know what he was talking about.

In other words, I knew he was onto something and he was saying something that was huge and it was starting to affect me. I said, but I didn't know. He says, after years, now I know what he's saying and I can't wait to read it again.

So foolishness to Greeks is the thing I read. But I was somebody in the midst of a doctoral program, had a theological education, a good theological education. So.

And I'd say Gospel Society is even more difficult. So I wouldn't. I'm not. Although at least first first third is. But those are the two major books by him. Ulusus, the Greeks, Gospel and Plural Society.

It was kind of the first book that was put out there that people were reading.

There's so many funny stories about people reading it and letting their stakes burn while they read it because they got so into it and they couldn't believe what they're hearing. Well, that's how I got into gospel and Pro Society. But I. Sorry, but the Greeks. But that came that as well.

Well, Mike, I want to thank you for coming on the show. Thanks for talking about the book. God bless you and your ministry as you continue serving at the Missional Training Center. Mike, thanks again.

Thank you. Good to be here, Travis. Appreciate it.

And I'm on a roll. A fire hose.

Indeed.

Following Jesus is serious stuff. It's not for the faint of heart. It's not.

If you're looking for an easy religion to make you feel safe and comfortable, then don't follow Christianity. Seriously. That's why Jesus said, take up your cross and follow me. It's going to be hard, but here's the deal.

It's wonderful to know that you were a part of God's kingdom, that you have been forgiven no longer to have your sin being used against you, that you are free, that you can experience that freedom. That's an incredible thing to be a part of. But then we take up our crosses. We take up our crosses daily to follow him.

And when I think about the bigness of the Gospel, I'm reminded of one of the final scenes in CS Lewis's the Last Battle the characters we have known for so long have faced their last battle. They've come to the other side of death and have come to the Narnia within Narnia, which is heaven.

As they see more and more, it keeps on going and going. Further up and further in is the cry. And somehow the further they go, the bigger it gets. That is the gospel.

It's cosmic, and we get to be a part of it. Not just as individuals, but as God's church ambassadors of the kingdom.

We get to show the world what.

It means to be fully human. A new way to be human.

As one song from the band Switchfoot said, living first in God's story and secondly in our own cultural stories gives us both a sense of proportion and a right ordering of our priorities. It won't solve all of our problems.

It's not going to magically fix the struggles you have with consumerism or your technology or the effects of the sexual revolution or any of a hundred or more other things. But it will remind us that we are not alone. Here's the deal. You're not alone. You're not. You are not alone.

No matter how much you feel right now, you are not alone. The longing that you feel in your heart, the holy dissatisfaction that you feel with where you're at, God is calling you to something deeper.

He's calling you to see more clearly. He's calling you to walk with him more intimately.

And the gospel reminds us that we're not alone, that we have each other and we need to lean on one another as his body. That's what we're here for, so that you can lean on us. And we want to be able to lean on you.

That we need to struggle through these things and to think deeply, to imagine better and then to act out our faith. God's power, his kingdom has broken into our broken world in Jesus. And he has begun to make everything bad, untrue.

But it's a story we can't just tell. It's a story we have to live. It's a story that will only be seen and believed when we act it out every day.

And I'm not talking about some phony, pretend sort of way, not as a mere recitation, but as participants in God's grand plan, his kingdom. That's a story worth living. And that's what a missionary encounter is all about.

I want to thank you for listening today, and I would encourage you to check out our website, ApolloSWater.org and check out our watering weekends. We love to be able to come and meet you where you are, whether it's your church, whether organization, your leadership team.

We want to help to be able to aid you in your missionary encounter with Western culture. I want to thank our Apollo's Watered team for helping us to water the world. This is Travis Michael Fleming signing off from Apollo's Watered.

Stay watered, everybody.