#286 | Seeking the Divine: Understanding God in Times of Silence with Jeffery M. Leonard

Today's episode is brought to you by Chris Orozco. May your heart for God leave a legacy for generations,.

People in the Bible, the best people in the Bible, struggle. They wrestle with their doubts. They don't understand.

And we can go from Abraham to Moses to Elijah to David to Jeremiah, for heaven's sakes, and then quintessentially, to Jesus.

Have you ever tried to find God and really found or felt like he wasn't there? The silence, the distance, and that question, is it me, or is God simply hard to find?

Today, we're talking about what it means to seek God when he feels elusive, and whether hope is still possible in the dark. I want to welcome you to Ministry Deep Dive, the podcast where we explore the ideas, practices, and people shaping the future of the church today.

Today, I'm your host, Travis Michael Fleming, and I'm glad you've joined us for another thoughtful conversation at the intersection of church culture and mission.

Here at Ministry Deep Dive, we're not afraid to dive deep down into the issues, to ask the hard questions and wrestle with the complex realities, to pursue clarity in a world that often feels uncertain. Our goal is to equip you leaders, thinkers, and everyday believers to engage deeply with your faith and live it out with confidence and compassion.

Today, I'm honored to welcome Dr. Jefferey M. Leonard.

He is professor of Biblical Studies at Stanford University, co Chair of the Biblical Hebrew Poetry Program unit at the Society of Biblical Literature, and an ordained minister. His work brings together careful biblical scholarship and pastoral insight, especially for those navigating seasons of doubt and spiritual struggles.

Jefferey is a thoughtful voice for those navigating seasons of doubt, struggle, and spiritual searching. His work resonates especially with those who feel like they've been reaching for God but aren't always sure where or how to find him.

And today we're going to be discussing his book, Seekers in the Hands of an Elusive God.

In this book, he does explore what it means to seek God when he feels distant, silent, or even hidden, and how hope can still take root in the middle of uncertainty. Jefferey, welcome to Ministry Deep Dive.

It is so good to be with you. And truthfully, Jeff is plenty good for me.

All right, I'll call you, Jeff. There we go. Well, let's get into the fast five. Jeff, are you ready?

I'm ready.

Okay. You went to school. So what's your best Boston memory?

Well, I missed out on Boston's first World Series victory. We moved back home just before that happened, so I'm gonna go with apple picking. We had just the most amazing times.

Taking our sons up to a place called Smolack Farms, not too far from where you went to school at Gordon Conwell, and picking apples and eating apple cider donuts. It was a magical time.

It's beautiful. People don't understand New England. You got to go up there in the fall. It's just absolutely gorgeous.

It's just like a Robert Frost poem.

Just come to life, you know, it's just so gorgeous. That's the best part of, like, living in New England. Winter not so fun, but the fall and the spring are pretty awesome. Yeah.

The problem is that spring is in July, so, you know, that's true.

All right, second question. Now, I know that you put this in your book because you. So I'm going to bring this out for you right now. All right, here we go.

If you were a 70s or 80s band, what 70s or 80s band would you be and why? You said you knew all the lyrics to these songs. So I want to know, what was the band then that you resonated with the most? Let's get. Let's hear it.

So the problem is, almost any answer I give will out me, you know, is some terrible sinner. So, I mean, do I pick? You know, I love the Police. You know, I like Journey, I like Sticks, I like Van Halen.

But I'm not responsible for the content of this message. Message, you know, I just like the sound, I guess.

So one of your colleagues at Sanford is. J.D. Payne had him on the show, and he was in a. He was in a band back in the day.

And it's funny, I got him on the show, and I made him tell me the band name, and it never been named publicly, and he was so afraid of it. You know what the name of the band was? Graven Image. That's the name of the band.

I will mark that down. And this is not the last time those words will be heard on Sanford's campus, I assure you. JD Is. Got it coming to him now.

Okay, if you were to be a restaurant. Here's the next question. Number three. If you were to be a restaurant anywhere, what restaurant would you be and why?

So is this a restaurant that I have been to or one that I might fantasize about making?

Whatever you want it to be, actually. How about a restaurant you've been to? Let's go with that.

You know, let's see. Probably the most magical dining experience of our whole life was we went to a restaurant.

And this, again, is going to be a problem for the Unapologetics podcast. It was called the Witchery, and it's in Edinburgh. And my family, we were there visiting my sister who was studying at a Bible school for a year.

And we had. It's just. It was the most perfect kind of right out of Hogwarts kind of, or better, right out of Tolkien kind of moment that we.

That we enjoyed there. And so I would. If I were running a restaurant, I would call it the Witchery, but, you know, or it would be the Witchery.

I don't know if I would call it the Witchery. How's that?

What was the food? Come on. I mean, seriously, Scottish food, really, you know, it's.

It's the old line that, you know, does British food, you know, have to be this bad? And the response is, well, if it's prepared properly. But it. It was just we. I had.

I had a steak and, you know, my members of my family had lamb and such. And so it was just. It was. It was really good stuff.

No haggis?

Well, you know, I've eaten haggis on a few occasions. My. My family background is Scottish here, but it's not the pinnacle of the. The food pyramid. I'd put it that way.

So maybe we do the rest of the interview in Scottish. Maybe we could try it in an accent.

Well, the good news is, you know, they'll only hear us for the next 30 seconds before they decide to click out, so it won't be too bad on them.

All right, in terms of Old Testament, you are an Old Testament scholar. What passage would you be and why?

So, one of my favorite passages.

Now, it's a tough, tough passage, but it's Job three, when Job finally breaks his silence and begins to curse the day of his birth and the night of his conception, and then turns to lament at the end of that chapter. It is as raw and authentic as anyone in the ancient world ever wrote. So I just find it mesmerizing and haunting all at the same time.

Well, then, that leads to our fifth and final question of the Fast Five. One word that describes your current season of life.

Goodness. It's too trite, but to say blessed, my life is as good as it has ever been. You feel like you need to proverbially knock on wood or something.

But I have a wonderful family and doing great, and I'm in good health and my career is going well. So it's. It's just. It's too much of a cliche to say, you know, blessed beyond what I deserve. It's just, it's been a real season of joy.

It is nice, though, to hear people say that. I mean, there's so many things going on around us at times because we. There's so much isolation and confusion and chaos.

And to hear someone say, no, I'm, you know, God is doing a thing and I'm enjoying it. I'm just recognizing the blessing that I have. I don't think that's a bad thing. But we both know that it's always not that way.

Indeed.

And that we feel. This is where we kind of segue into your book, which you.

I love how you borrowed the title a little bit from Jonathan Edwards, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. But you had, of course, Seekers in the Hands of an Elusive God. Something that I think many of us really do feel. Where is God?

We talk sometimes in these cliches and formulas, but truth be told, many of us don't feel that blessing. So often we feel God is more far and away than he is close and with us.

But for a person who feels this blessing, what then made you want to write a book about the elusive God?

You know, if I'm being honest, and I shared this with my students over the course of the Psalms and Wisdom class that I just taught this spring semester, I'm jealous of people who experience God's presence so readily. There are people that I know, and it seems like for them it's just sunshine on a summer's day. And that's just not my experience.

I'm as convinced in my faith as I've ever been, and I'm not going anywhere. But, you know, actually experiencing the presence of God is something that's very difficult for me.

And so it's that struggle of kind of trying to feel the reality of God, experience his companionship. And, you know, I'm in a blessed moment right now. The genesis of this book was a pretty difficult moment.

We had a professor in our department who ended up contracting a terrible disease called Creutzfeldt Jakobs disease, which I had heard of but never, you know, really had come across before.

And as soon as his diagnosis was announced, I look it up, I looked it up, and I remember seeing on that Wikipedia page this one line where it said prognosis and it said universally fatal. And it was just so clear at that moment, Jim was going to die. And it only took a few months for that to happen.

And he was just the dearest friend, dearest colleague and mentor to all of the students that I had been teaching. And of all places, we were thick in the middle of Job when his diagnosis came out.

And just the number of students who were coming to me and saying, I don't understand how do I pray when I already know the answer? And the answer is no. Where is God in all of this? And I'm a scholar, so, you know, as I'm wrestling with this, all I can do is scholar.

And so I decided just to kind of take this topic on full bore and say, what's the answer to that question? You know, if God is omnipresent, if God is everywhere, all the time and never absent, then where is he when we feel like we need him most?

And so that was what got this book started.

Why the title Elusive God?

Well, you know, as I was. It's kind of funny. I've written four books at this point.

And my first book, I had a title that I wanted, and my publisher kind of convinced me to go in a different direction. And I've regretted it ever since.

And for this one, when I submitted the book proposal, I said, this is the only title that I will do this on, you know. And so it.

I wanted to balance this idea that had emerged from the study that on the one hand, God is everywhere, and on the other hand, God is intentionally elusive. That it's not.

It's not an accident, it's not a flaw, but there is something purposeful in God's being difficult to pin down, being somewhat removed and separated. And the flip side of the coin of God's elusiveness is his desire for us to seek Him.

That there's something about that seeking process that is vital to understanding God properly. And the only way for God to get us to seek him is to be deliberately elusive. So it's something that God.

It's not just an accident, it's something purposeful in Scripture.

Is that then one of the reasons that God is elusive, because it's changing us from the inside as we pursue, we're becoming like him in that pursuit. Is that it?

Well, it's a sort of mental construct of appreciating who God really is. That our habit as human beings is to domesticate God. And so it happens in a thousand different ways across Scripture.

You know, if you're in the Hebrew Bible, the way that it happens most often is idolatry, is that, you know, what we tend to do is we take God, we reduce him down to something that we could, you know, make into an image.

And that image, however grand, it's not so much that it insults God, but it deprives us of a proper understanding of who God is, because we end up just minimizing God. And this is God is God. He's not affected by that kind of minimization on our part.

We're the ones who are affected because our minds become warped by having an idea of who God is. That's not true. And I'll give another example of this. It's the tabernacle.

The tabernacle, one of its most beautiful components was the fact that it was portable, mobile, you couldn't pin it down.

And so it's got all of these symbols in there of God's elusiveness, whether it's the, you know, think about the way God is portrayed in the tabernacle. It's things like smoke and fire. You can see them, but you can't quite capture them. You can't grasp them.

There's this, you know, impermeability of or impermanence of the tent that's there that can move around. And where a dramatic and negative shift in Israel's religion comes about is when they build the temple.

Because once the temple's there, God can't move anymore. And you get it into your head that, well, now we've domesticated God. He needs us as much as we need him.

And it's not like the Babylonians could ever come over and conquer us, because what are they going to do? Conquer God's house? And so it just led to the most terrible kinds of outgrowths in Israel's religion.

And eventually where it leads is you get this just horrifying passage in Ezekiel where God's presence is charted as it leaves the temple, goes to the door, goes to the gate, and then finally goes to Babylon as a way of saying, you're right, my house is inviolable, but if you're going to act this way, this is not my house anymore, and I'll remove my presence and, you know, soon after, here come the Babylonians. So it's that elusiveness is something that we need to think about God properly.

Is that also why we need the psalms? Because they really do draw us and show us how to talk to God in the fullness of our human condition?

Well, you know, it's funny because it's not funny. It's tragic that one of the things that I have to convince my students to do is to embrace the psalms.

Because our vision of God, it's not our vision of God, it's our manner of worship is such that I tell a little story where I call it the Briarwood smile. And it's just because of the church that we used to attend was called Briarwood.

We arrived at church one day to find a family that got out just below us.

And I don't know what had happened in the family that morning, but the older daughter, if her eyes had been laser beams, she would have evaporated her family into the ether. She was that angry at them. Now, of course, I found this absolutely just mesmerizing. So I watched the entire way as we walked into church.

You could see by stages as we got closer and closer to the church, that she went from a look of just absolute fury and hate to the kind of smile that you would give if you had like lemon peel and curdled milk in your mouth at the same time. I call it a Nellie Olson smile.

For generations old enough to know Little House on the Prairie, until finally when we got to the door, she gave the greeter the full blown head tilt, ear to ear smile, that kind of smile. And what I say to my students is nothing had changed in her heart from the car to the church door.

The only thing that had changed was the look that she had on her face.

And what I beg them to appreciate, and I think they get it, is that this is what we do when we worship inside, we can just be dying, but we screw a smile onto our face.

We go in and we sing songs about how Jesus is my boyfriend and everything is awesome and the truth is we're just lying to God about where we really are. It's not authentic.

And so we're robbing ourselves of the opportunity to kind of get where we really are out in the open so that we can actually meet God and work it out. And the Psalms can be liberating if we'll embrace those that are saying God, I just don't understand what's going on right now.

You mentioned in the book something that I found, I've thought about, but you brought it out further, talking about the public reading of the Word. And I just wonder, do we not do that enough in church in such a way that allows people that authenticity?

Like if we were to read more, giving our attention to the public reading, and some churches of course do, but if we were to do that more, do you think that would give people more the permission to be a mess before God?

You know, I think it is one of those values that emerges from a more kind of liturgical, you know, reading calendar, because you're not always, you know, there's a kind of self selection that goes on because A lot of times, the reading that we do in church is the reading of whatever passage the pastor is going to speak on that day.

And so if the pastor only speaks on things that are happy topics, or maybe mildly sad topics, but never really getting into the meat of some of the Bible's laments, it means those texts never get read. Except for, I don't know, maybe Maundy Thursday or something like that.

If you have that more kind of lectionary style of reading, it forces you to walk through some of those passages that tend to have a thick layer of dust on them because of how rarely they get read.

I have a colleague who's Greek Orthodox, and I wasn't aware of this until she told me this, but in her tradition, they read Psalm 88 every day as part of a certain set of prayers that are done in scripture reading readings. I find that fascinating because, you know, this is the one psalm that at the end never comes back to praise.

So its final words are, you've removed friend and lover from me. Darkness is my only companion.

It's a bold psalm to read and to have it worked into your liturgy in such a way that you're having to kind of confront those words. And they're not words that will always be relevant for you, but they're words that will sometimes be relevant and to have them as a.

You know, part of the logic of public reading is that it's that whole line that the psalmist has where he says, thy word have I hid in my heart that I might not sin against thee. Well, you don't hide it in your heart just so that you won't sin.

It just becomes like the background track in your head so that when the right moment needs it, you have those scriptural resources that are there other than saying, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? I don't know how many words of lament. My fellow parishioners actually have to pray to God when they don't know what words to say.

We all have the universal experience of suffering. Every single one of us has suffered in some way, shape or form. And the Scripture gives voice to those.

But for those who have been raised in certain traditions, as you have mentioned, suffering is not a normal topic that they have a very good theology of. Yeah, and for many of us, we think that suffering means something is wrong that we've done.

Rather, though God himself does the distance, I mean, he is elusive. And it's for us, though, for our maturity. I mean, you do talk about even in the subtitle of your book, Embracing Hope in the Seasons of Darkness.

What does that look like practically, though, outside of the cliche, how do we actually embrace hope when we find ourselves in some of those dark nights of the soul?

Yeah, well, you know, Scripture, because suffering is such a pervasive problem. Scripture comes at it from a hundred different angles.

And so sometimes you get that kind of first Peter like instruction that says that this suffering refines you and it builds character and endurance. You get that same kind of language in James. Consider it all joy when you're suffering. But there are those other passages in Scripture that.

That it doesn't take away from those that can find the maturity that comes from suffering, because there certainly is that element there.

But there are also moments when you're in the thick of things and what you need to do is to cry out instead of just counting your blessings one by one over how your life is falling apart.

And there is as much or more in Scripture about being able to use those words of lament and cry out to God and say, God, I simply don't understand what's going on right here. And it's not something that you're saying in a disrespectful or impious way.

The difference between the Psalms of Lament and the Israelites complaints in the wilderness is that in the Psalms of Lament, it's that. That line that we always got from. Well, not always. I mean, naturally I didn't. Perhaps you did.

But you might have gotten from your parents when you did something and they looked at you and they said, you know, your mother and I are so disappointed in what you've done. And, you know, we hate that. And so we swear we're never going to do it with our own children.

But if you think about the logic of what they're saying is, we think this of you, we think so highly, and then this is what you're doing, and we can't square that. How much worse would it be if your parents had said, you know, this is just what we expected from somebody like you?

I mean, that would be devastating. You'd want to say, can't you be just a little disappointed, you know, that I didn't live up to what you thought of me?

And that's the difference between the laments and the Israelites in the wilderness. When you're in the laments, they're saying, God, we know who you are.

You know, Psalm 22, you delivered our ancestors in you, they trusted and you delivered them. And that's what highlights this almost Pain, is he saying? And so I can't figure out why you're not delivering me.

Now, if you're the Israelites in the wilderness, their basic line is, yeah, we should have known this. You just brought us out here to kill us.

And so the laments are good, because what we're saying is, God, you are a great and wonderful God, so why aren't you there for me? Now? The complaints in the wilderness are, it's a cynical kind of, yeah, this is what we should have expected from a God like you.

One of these is good, and one of these isn't, not.

How should the church better support people who are going through doubt? They're questioning, they're struggling with their faith. What can we as ministry leaders do?

I mean, do we say, just, hey, read the Psalms, or, hey, read. Read Jeff Leonard's book? I mean, what do we. What do we do to help people that are really struggling in their faith? And how do we help them be honest?

I think that's the other question. Sometimes people just aren't honest about their struggles. They just leave.

How do we help people be intellectually honest in their struggles and their doubts? And how do we guide them?

Well, obviously, you pinpointed the real key, buying hundreds and hundreds of copies of my book. It is the source of figuring these issues out.

You know, I think so much of the issue is one of modeling that we've developed a kind of triumphalist, whether explicit or implicit Christianity that makes it very difficult to doubt in public. And so if you're the pastor, you just feel like, well, I've got to have everything together. I've got to have, you know, all of my answers wrapped up.

I've got every theological T crossed and I dotted, and I know the answers to all of this. And so I've got to have everything together.

And because we can't show weakness to the congregation, we never give them permission to doubt themselves because, well, I mean, look at him. He's got it together and he's not doubting there. So it must be some lack of faith on my part if I'm caught in these moments of doubt.

And one of the things I try to point out is that in the same way that James will say, I stipulate, James is my favorite New Testament book. So if I say anything against James, please don't take it too far. But James says, don't doubt if you doubt.

Let not such a one think that they're going to get anything from God there. And that's great, but James just Doesn't speak in half measures. He's all on one side or all on the other.

You could take the same hall of faith From Hebrew, Hebrews 11 that talks about the great faith of these characters. And you could find for nearly everyone their great moments of doubt that they went through.

People in the Bible, the best people in the Bible struggle. They wrestle with their doubts. They don't understand.

And we can go from Abraham to Moses to Elijah to David to Jeremiah, for heaven's sakes, and then quintessentially to Jesus. Jesus has, you know, to use your terminology there, that long night of the soul. My goodness, the wrestling that he goes through in the garden.

If Jesus himself can go through this in the garden and express the rawest kind of human doubt that you can imagine, it ought to give us permission to go through the same thing.

And so I think so much of the gift that we could give the people in our congregations is just modeling before them what it's like to be a person who says, I am struggling in this area of my faith, but just because I'm struggling doesn't mean I'm going to walk away from it. I don't understand everything. This is above my pay grade.

But the things that I know are true outnumber the things that I can't quite get my head around. And I know the path, and I know where that path leads. If I decide to walk away from my faith, there's just nothing there for me.

So I'd rather wrestle and still have the hope that there's hope than just abandon this and literally become hopeless because there's no opportunity for there to be any hope there.

Hope is such an integral part of the Christian life. I mean, faith, hope, and love in the New Testament.

And hope to me is, you know, looking to the future to find energy and joy in the present that something will get better. And we all need that hope. But when you talk about hope and what do you hope that. What misconceptions do you hope that your book actually corrects?

So part of it is, you know, it's. There are these moments, I think, that we have in life where we've kind of assumed that we were the only person struggling with a certain issue.

And suddenly you find that there's somebody else who wrestles with the same thing.

And it's like one of the things that maybe you could imagine is maybe there's some movie that everyone is raving about, and you finally find that other person who goes, I just don't get it. This. Am I The only one who sees that this is just a terrible movie.

And when you finally find that other person, it's just so liberating because you're saying, oh, it's not just me. To use a real pedestrian example, you know, there's that whole genetic thing where some of us, when we taste cilantro, it tastes like soap.

And when you. You may not be that person, but if you are that person, like I am, and finally you have that other person and they go, you know what it does?

It tastes just like soap. To me, it's just the most liberated to go, I'm not the only one. There's somebody else out there that has the same experience.

And part of what I'm after in the book is to say, look, there are lots and lots of people who have wrestled with this issue, that you are not alone in this. In fact, you shouldn't be alone. Because God intends for us to struggle with this issue.

That if God is deliberately elusive, if he deliberately hides in some respect so that we have to search him, it really ought to kind of make you question if you're on the other side, where you never experience God's elusiveness or we may be doing something wrong, if we're never struggling to find God's presence, if we're never wrestling with divine justice.

You know, for example, you know, one of the greatest Bible passages is when God gets ready to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, and he says, should I really do this without talking to Abraham? And when you read that one, if you take the time to read it, you ought to go, wait a minute, God.

You don't ever discuss things with people before you do them. I mean, you're the my thoughts are higher than yours, who's been my counselor kind of thing.

What do you mean, should I really do this without talking to Abraham first? And the whole purpose of his talking to Abraham was he wanted Abraham to argue with him about divine justice.

That here God says, I'm going to destroy this city. And when Abraham responds and says, wait a minute, God, you can't do that.

You'd be treating the righteous the same as the wicked, and that wouldn't be right to do that. And he's got this wonderful line where he says, shall not the judge of all the earth do what is just? So he's holding God to account for that.

And that's what God wanted him to do, do. Because Abraham was going to be the father of this great people, and they were a people that needed to live justly and serve a just God.

And Abraham needed to go through that process of wrestling with God over divine justice to convey that message to the next generation. And it's not a surprise then that Jacob becomes the one who wrestles with God in Genesis 32.

And that, you know, Moses is going to wrestle with God in the wilderness. That's what God wants of his people, to kind of carve out space for people to say wrestling with God. If you're doing that, you're not the outlier.

You're walking in the footsteps of your tough as nails spiritual ancestors who delivered the faith down to you, knowing that.

Everyone needs someone to identify with, especially in their suffering. I mean, there's a reason why we suffer. We share with other people.

And people say, like you just said, you too, that helps develop that kind of friendship, that camaraderie. But ministry leaders have a harder time in that.

They're supposed to again, portray the strength and they don't want to do their, to show their weakness because they're supposed to have it all together. As you and I already just discussed.

How though, do we help ministry leaders create spaces where people feel, where they can feel safe to wrestle with their own doubts?

Well, you know, part of, and of course this is hard for me because I'm, I tend to be sort of an introvert.

So reaching out and making connections and forming accountability groups and things like that, it's, it's not my, it's not my gift, but it is valuable.

Yes, it is.

And, and so having other ministers with whom you can talk and commiserate and share those things that, you know, frankly, you've been called to bear a certain burden on behalf of the people.

And if you're going to be a Moses or a Jeremiah or obviously we're not going to be Jesus, but we walk in the footsteps of Jesus, there is a loneliness that's going to be there. When I talk about Moses, one of the things that I emphasize is Moses is strong, Moses is compassionate. But Moses is lost.

And I don't mean by that that Moses is spiritually lost, that he's not saved or something like that. I mean, Moses, Moses doesn't belong. He's not really an Egyptian or else Pharaoh would not have tried to kill him.

He's not really an Israelite, or else they would have embraced him, which they never do. And he even struggles with God. I mean, he gets kept out of the promised land for something that in retrospect, you look at it and you go, really?

David does what he does with Bathsheba and Uriah and gets restored and Moses hit a rock and God takes him up on the mountain and he dies at the word of the Lord there. This is hard. Moses experiences that kind of spiritual loneliness there. Elijah is going to experience this, and Jeremiah.

And those figures are connected in Scripture. Their stories kind of interrelate.

You're not going to be able to share with your regular people in the congregation some of the things that you're going and that you're bearing on behalf of them.

So finding other ministers with whom you can share and open up and, you know, part of, is holding yourself accountable, but part of it is just saying, guys, I'm struggling. You know, I've been praying every day, but it's been ages since the last time that I really felt God's, you know, touch upon me.

So I think those things are important.

I also think finding that group of elders in your church that can hold you accountable, you can hold them accountable and you can share with them the burdens of ministry. You know, I'm a. I'm a low church Protestant. And so, you know, I. The gap between minister and elder is not as big in my tradition as it is in others.

And so having that opportunity to be honest and open and share burdens with some people in your congregation I think is important too. And so that's a. It's a uniquely ministerial kind of struggle that we go through that we need those other people that we can share with.

And it's going to be a different experience than maybe what a regular person in the congregation goes through.

Well, as you, you mentioned, we need, we all need community. Elders need community, Pastors need community, people that we can share with.

And that kind of goes back to just this understanding of community, this great community that God invites us to be a part of. What role does community help us in dealing with our doubts and our issues?

Is it that accountability factor in that we just have someone to share with, or is there something more?

You know, one of the things that I talk about in the book is that there is a certain kind of.

I don't think I actually use this illustration in the book, but I'll use it with my students, is that sometimes you need the Jillian Michaels character to come in and she's this super fit person that used to be one of the hosts on the Biggest Loser.

And so when the people were trying to lose weight and they were giving up and they're trying to eat something, they shouldn't or not do the same of whatever that they should, and she's this nagging voice that's sitting there yelling at them to keep going.

Sometimes what you need is that crowd of people that are Jillian Michaels to you to keep moving you in the right direction when you don't feel like it yourself. And I think there are two different kinds of things that can work that way. One is ritual.

And again, I stipulate, you know, I'm a low church Protestant, so we would have sworn that we had eschewed all ritual, that there was no ritual in our church. Of course this is not true. You could at look at our bulletins from week to week. They were as fixed as the Latin rite, you know, if we were Catholic.

But they're part of ritual is that it is true that ritual can be a substitute for genuine worship. But ritual also can be a habit that keeps you moving in the right direction when your heart isn't in it in that moment and it keeps you going.

You know, to use just a silly illustration, I, I am determined that I'm going to pray over every meal that I eat. My heart is not always in it. And sometimes there's that whole Tim Hawkins thing.

You're really kind of pushing it when you've got some Doritos and a Twinkie over here and you're asking God to bless this food to the nourishment of our bodies. But I'm gonna pray for every meal. I pray every night for my family, for my sons, for my daughters in law, for people that are. Yeah, I know.

That are hurting. I don't always feel like doing it it, but I'm gonna do it because it keeps me moving in the right direction.

People can be the same as rituals that if we make our commitment that we're going to go to church, we're going to be around people at least some of whom are moving in the right direction. It can keep us moving towards God even when our hearts just don't really quite feel it in that moment that we get.

You know, and sometimes we've probably all had the experience of maybe a holiday, Christmas morning and you know, maybe you're just not feeling it.

You know, you stayed up too late putting together that tricycle whose directions were, you know, translated through three, three languages to finally make it to English and it wasn't working and a screw was missing. And so now you're upset.

But being around the other people, eventually that spirit of Christmas morning catches on and you find yourself swept into it without realizing that you were. That's a trivial example.

But the same thing can happen to us when we worship together, is that maybe that song will finally ping with us and it will stir something in our hearts that wasn't there before. Or we'll see another person and who knows, maybe it's the example of their fidelity that inspires us to follow after them.

Maybe it's the example of the pain they're going through that kind of shakes us out of the malaise that we're in and says, you know, God's been awfully good to me, or to just be able to go over and sympathize with that person.

And, you know, part of the thing that we can do, you know, following in the footsteps of Jesus, when Jesus doubted, one of the things he did was he served. He kept, you know, kept plodding on in the path that God had laid out for him.

And so sometimes you don't always feel it, but people and habits can be things that will keep you moving when you don't.

It's amazing.

Those, those habits, that habitus that we train ourselves by, this is again why we go back to catechesis and that kind of idea of putting those into our worship services. And. But I also think of the other part of that, you know, the mimesis, the watching them, that, that constant example of what we're trying to see.

And this is again why we need one another as, as the body of Christ. We are to bear one another's burdens. We are to help with one of those things. But I think in our.

And again, I know we're kind of moving out of Old Testament, but in our media saturated device saturated culture, it's done. And rather than bring us connection, it's actually now become like a technocracy where it's pushing us away.

And the very thing it's trying to do, it's actually doing the opposite now, now. And we have to put those practices into place to fight back against that in order to truly be these fully formed disciples that we need to be.

Because our discipleship is much more than just, you know, going to church.

It's, it's the idea of living and following Christ through the entirety of our lives with the fullness of our everyday experiences being brought to the table as we continually encourage one another and try to be the people God wants us to be.

So thinking about, then, the people that are out there right now, these pastors and ministry leaders that are listening to our voices, if they feel that God is distant or unreachable, what would you want them to hear right now?

Well, you know, in my Chapter where I deal with doubt. One of the things that I really focus on is how vital it is to continue pressing on even when we don't understand all of the answers.

And, you know, one of the places where I go in talking about that issue of doubt that we all wrestle with is Jesus experience in the garden that, you know, here you've got this moment where, you know, Jesus is suffering.

And you especially just have to love Mark's presentation of it, because Mark gives us just such tender humanity when it says, you know, he prayed that if it were possible, that the hour might pass from him. And so, you know, even Jesus, you know, this is God incarnate, and yet he's praying, you know, God, don't make me have to go through this.

He had seen crucifixions before. You couldn't avoid seeing a crucifixion in his day any more than you could avoid seeing a public hanging in the Old west or something.

He knew what was in store. And he's in this moment.

And it's hard to even fathom the temptation that must have come upon him in this moment, because he's got most of the disciples tucked away, you know, over in this place, probably the grotto that's over there, you know, a stone's throw away. He's got his kind of inner circle that are there, but they just can't keep from falling asleep.

And so here he is by himself, and he can look up the hill and he can see the torches that are coming from Caiaphas house down to a arrest him. And literally all he has to do is just walk over the Mount of Olives. And if he walks over the Mount of Olives, he disappears off into the wilderness.

And he's in the same kind of area of the wilderness where David hid from the armies of Saul. It's a place that, you know, it's all these slot canyons that are there.

And so you could have Patton's third army in one and you could be in the next one, and he'd never find you because it's just so easy to hide there. And all he has to do is walk away. And he doesn't. He stands there and waits for the torches to catch up. And you go, well, why did he do this?

And there is no question that part of the reason that he did it was because it's the second half of his prayer. Not my will, but your will be done. He did it because the Father wanted him to do. But the other reason he does it is because it Says having.

I apologize. Having loved them. He loved them to the end. He did it not just for the Father, but for the disciples who needed him to do it.

And the disciples are there. They're the avatars for us in some sense. We were there in the garden. We were the ones asleep over on the side or tucked away in the corner.

And Jesus stayed there in his moment of deepest spiritual doubt. And he stayed there because we needed him to. And his doubt was every bit as sharp as the kind of doubts that we go through.

If you think about it, I talk sometimes about how there's doubts about God's greatness. People in Scripture rarely struggle with God's greatness. You know, there.

There are moments, you know, Abraham struggles with, is God really great enough that he can provide a son? In my old age, you know, this is what Sarah is struggling with. But most people aren't wrestling with this. They acknowledge God's greatness.

What they're struggling with is God's goodness, because they know that God is so powerful and so present that he can do something. So the question then becomes, why isn't he doing something? And that's the issue that Jesus is struggling with too.

He says, you know, all things are possible for you. There's not a hint of doubt about God's greatness in his prayer.

What he's wrestling is, is God, why are you abandoning me in my moment of deepest spiritual doubt?

Unfortunately, we had some technical difficulties and Jeff couldn't finish out. We had. His Internet went out and we. We couldn't do anything about it.

But I really did thoroughly enjoy the conversation, and I wanted to thank Jeff for coming on the show. I would recommend getting the book Seekers in the Hands of an Elusive God, because suffering is universal for each one of us.

It's a timely and needed resource for so many walking through seasons of un certainty.

And to our listeners out there, if this conversation has encouraged you, challenged you, or given you language for your own journey, we'd love for you to stay connected. Make sure you subscribe to Ministry Deep dive so that you never miss an episode.

And don't forget to follow and engage with Apollos Watered, the Center for Discipleship and Cultural Apologetics, where we're helping people think deeply, live faithfully and in, engage culture with truth and grace. Thank you for listening. Until next time. This is Travis Michael Fleming saying, stay watered, everybody.