#127 | You Are Not Your Own, Pt. 2 | Alan Noble

So what are we doing in our churches to mutually support each other? Because if we're doing this on our own, it's going to be very hard to bear this burden.

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. My name is Michael Fleming and I am your host.

And today on our show, we're having.

Another one of our.

Deep conversations.

Do you ever feel like it's on you to change the world? I know that seems like a huge task, but it seems everywhere we turn that we're the masters of our own destiny, or at least we're told we are.

But the problem is, I mean, the idea of changing the world is great, but how about just getting out of bed in the morning and maybe even making the bed?

Because I don't know about you, but I get tired of the daily grind, the constant pressures, the constant refereeing between my kids or living up to expectations. And that might be my own or somebody else's. And I don't know about you, but do you really find yourself looking for ways to self medicate?

And I'm indicting myself here right now, where I just want to scroll a little bit longer. I just want to binge that show. I just want to tune out for a little bit.

Or maybe I'm going to go online and I'm going to try to find how to be a better dad or how to be a better director or a friend or father or Christian or brother or whatever it is. And there are all these techniques out there, all these solutions. Five ways to be a better dad, six ways to be a better husband.

But do any of these really solve the problem? Now, I'm not saying that we are just doomed to no hope that there are solutions.

But I do think that we wrongly believe this idea that if we just do the right thing, everything else will fall into place. And sometimes life just isn't that way. Sometimes we do everything right and it doesn't seem to work the way that we want it.

That's why today we're going to be talking again with Alan Noble. If you didn't catch last week's episode.

I would encourage you to go back.

And listen now because it lays the groundwork for what we're going to be talking about today. And last week we talked about this radical idea that society gives us a promise.

And this promise is that when we define ourselves and announce it to the world that we'll find fulfillment.

But it's not really true.

It's actually a false promise. It creates this burden of self justification. That's what Dr. Noble calls it. And really we can't ever live up to that standard that we create.

And paradoxically, it's only when we see that we belong to Christ that we can truly be free. And all of these understandings of technique kind of fall into place. This week we're going to look at some of the implications of that fact.

Whether it's the modern epidemic of self medication to looking for techniques to be better. We are addicted to efficiency.

Now, I'm not saying that efficiency is a bad thing, but I am saying is that we need to rethink what this efficiency or this idea of efficiency and having the right technique is really doing to us.

Because it's only really when we have God that we find true freedom, when we surrender to him and realize that there's not always one exact way of doing things. I mean, there is one way of worshiping God and obtaining salvation.

But when it comes to living in the modern world, the only real solution is following Him. And when we get his perspective, he showed us how to live within the world, shows us how to be whole people. That's what we want to be, is holistic.

That's what we talk about on here, is being missio holistic in our approach, which means thinking about the mission of God for all of life with all of who we are, where we are. Because watering our world doesn't just mean being, it also means doing. And it's hard to be doing if we're not ever being.

So I would encourage you to listen in as Dr. Noble and I talk about what it means to not belong to ourselves, but belong to God. Happy listening.

We see that society does really fail in the promises and how we respond. You mentioned that as we self medicate, which is something that I'm seeing more and more people dealing with, I mean, the stats don't lie.

We're some of the most anxious people that have been on the planet in our time. And even though we have all the modern things that should help help it, we're really not. Why introduce this though?

And have you got a response to people saying, okay, no, that's because some people will respond and say, you don't know what you're talking about. I mean, we deserve this, we need this. Have you had that or am I.

Way off there with the self medication?

Yeah, I haven't really, I think for the most part one of the early readers was a little skeptical that we all self medicate, but I think that was more of a rhetorical move.

I'm sure somebody out there doesn't self medicate, but I think for the vast majority of us in the west, in some way or another, in some harmful way, we are self medicating.

And I, I tried to offer an expansive definition because we have, we tend to view, we tend to have this very narrow view and I think it tends to be a sort of classist view of self medication. Right.

So we tend to think, well, I'm not an alcoholic and I'm not smoking weed or you know, doing heroin or something like that, so I'm, I'm not self medicating.

But when we include things like, you know, shopping, therapy, and when we include things like binge watching and we'll include things like doom scrolling.

Doom scrolling, what's that? Scrolling forever and bad headlines or something.

That's right, yeah.

When you're sort of addicted to watching the horrible awful news, which seems like it would be the opposite of self medicating because you're focused on the terrible political things that are going on around you and in the world. Right.

You're constantly reading the worst news about what's going on with past presidents, hypothetically, or what's going on in Ukraine or with viruses or inflation. How would that be self medicating? But what it does is it gets the pressure off of, off of you. Right. We talked about this. Right.

So how do you cope with these things that you feel, these pressures of belonging to yourself? Well, you externalize them, you know, you focus on what's going on externally in the world, which you can't really do anything about.

And there's a freedom in that. Right.

If I'm, if I'm obsessively focused on what a, you know, what an out of control politician is doing, there's a relief in that because then all I can do is rant myself on social media, but I don't really have any agency. But that's liberating.

That's liberating because I can on the one hand feel like I'm doing something, but on the other hand I'm not doing anything meaningful, but I'm distracting myself from all this angst and anxiety and pressure that's really bottling up inside of me that I'm trying to bottle up. So yeah, even doom scrolling can be a kind of way that we self medicate. So I really haven't had many people push back against that.

Once I've introduced the idea and given a long enough list and acknowledge that a lot of these things, like I think exercise can be a way we self medicate. And a lot of these things can be good and healthy. Reading things in the news can be good and you know, actually, you know, is. Is good and healthy.

But there are ways of doing these things that are forms of medication, ways that we distract ourselves from and cope in unhealthy ways. Once we acknowledge that, I think a lot of people say, oh gosh, man, that hits. That resonates.

So so far I haven't, I'm sure somebody has found that objectionable. They just haven't written to me.

I mean, the self Medicaid part I think I don't know too many people would disagree with in that. But it was the technique park. I didn't bristle. I went, oh no. Because I know some people that are all about technique.

And if I have the right system and if I do this. Here we go. And I was like, kind of like shifting the book over, hoping, you know, they're sitting beside me going, just take a read.

You know, just, just read a couple paragraphs here. First of all, describe what technique is so we can bring our people along here. And you introduce a nice philosopher here with that technique.

Help other people know who. Our friend Jacques. I don't even know if I could say it right. Jacques Ellul. Is that how you say it?

That's how I say it. Jacques Ellul.

Jacques Ellul.

And why he is such an important person to listen to simply because you quote him quite a bit.

I do, yeah. So I judge scholars by their names and it's not a great idea. But Jacquet Lewis, because I, I give talks.

No, you talk about Charles Taylor too.

He's the worst. He's the worst name. So boring. So boring. Charles Taylor, Right. What kind of name is that? Chuck Taylor. Chuck.

I should start calling him Chuck Taylor and wear Chuck Taylor's. And wear Chuck Taylor's. Right. And then point to him. That would be good. Another one of my favorite, Zygmunt Bauman.

I don't even know if I'm saying Zygmunt Bauman.

You talk about him because he does the liquid modernity.

Yeah, because his name is great, right?

No, I loved it. It's a fun name.

Is he a fun name? Yeah, I believe he is. He is. I'm gonna say he is. Yeah.

So Jacques Lelul has this concept of technique and what he says, the way, to paraphrase he roughly defines that technique is the effort to maximize efficiency, methods of maximizing efficiency in every sp of human activity. So it's not just being efficient.

But.

It'S methods of maximizing efficiency when we apply it everywhere.

And his thesis in technological society is that in the modern world, we're not just trying to be efficient, we're trying to be efficient in every place. One of the examples I give in the book is that when I was actually writing this section, I'm a side sleeper. I love sleeping on my side.

And because I'm getting old, my shoulder was starting to bother me. And so I searched for on Google why is my shoulder hurting when I'm sleeping on my side?

And one of the first things that came up is the proper, the one right method for side sleeping. And I didn't know this existed, but I should have known that there is a one right technique for sleeping on your side.

And it's like this scientifically. I don't know actually if it's scientific, but it probably is a scientifically proven method, the one right technique.

And if you're not doing it that way, of course you're going to get hurt.

And you intuitively know this because we're in this sort of society that if you're doing anything right, if you're, you know, laundry, teaching, preaching, talking to people, raising kids, Raising kids.

I think parenting is one of the most places where you feel this acutely because there's a lot of guilt involved with parenting if you're not, you know, potty training. And it goes all through, you know, for the rest of your life, right? Your rest of your parenting.

There's proper techniques of doing everything involved in parenting. Disciplining, right, reading to your kids, teaching them math, teaching them to do chores, everything right.

And if you don't do it properly the one right way, then you're being a bad parent and you're going to ruin them in some way and you better save up for counseling and whatever. That's the joke. But there's this sort of hidden truth or this implication that it's kind of true, right?

And so the reign elul's argument is that technique goes everywhere and it runs roughshod over all other values. So he's not opposed to efficiency.

He's not saying that, hey, you should never be efficient, don't intentionally wash dishes in the most inefficient way possible.

But what he is saying is that what technique does in contemporary society is if there is A more efficient way to do things technique is going to pressure you to adopt that more efficient method, whether there are other values that would encourage you to choose less efficient methods or not. And this is particularly important for Christians because we have other values that are superior to efficiency.

So things like beauty, truth, goodness, the spiritual virtues, faith, hope and love.

There are times when we have to do things that our college president here at Oklahoma Baptist University says that for example, our education is beautifully inefficient. To sit around and read literature in some respects is inefficient. There are more efficient ways of getting an education.

But if you value truth, if you value goodness, if you value beauty, then you have to do things that are inefficient. And so that's what Ellul's argument is. The two parts there. One is that technique overcomes all other things and pressures us to adopt efficiency.

And you see that again. I think the great example is in parenting. There's this constant guilt, this constant pressure to adopt the one right way of doing everything.

And you get this pressure in. You're reading headlines, here's the right way to do things. You're getting it in social media, you're getting it everywhere.

And the other thing to note is that it that all other values become secondary or tertiary or actually they just. They're irrelevant. They just don't really matter.

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A lot of these belief systems and the inefficiency has found its way into the church itself. And the church, I think, has become a propagator of that and is. It's become a bit of a Trojan horse.

You know, the modernity has come in and, and really kind of destroyed things from the outside. Even though they talk about making disciples and doing it the best way.

But implicit within that are those seeds of destruction that the church is, I think, sown and not realize it.

And I think Covid brought that to bear because suddenly people disappeared from church and now they're not coming back because they, they, they haven't understood the dynamic, the essential nature of relationships and embodiment within the church. And to me that's just a product of modernity.

The reason that people have stayed away is because they, they have never been taught how needed the church is. And essential. It's just give me Jesus, I prayed the prayer, I've gotten saved and I'm good.

And you're seeing that within the Southeast right now, I mean within the proverbial Bible belt. Russell Moore ran an article, I think it came out the day before yesterday on the South.

And a lot of people that are leaving the church in the south, they're maintaining a lot of their convictions on some things like abortion, but they're not on premarital sex or living together and even in the essential nature of going to church. So what I like about your thesis is you're bringing it back in, saying you're not your own. You don't have.

I mean, there is a freedom in not being your own and having to choose all these things. Like you said, limitless freedom is unbearable. It's freedom with limits.

It's also an understanding that you have a responsibility and that you belong not only to God, but to a people and you're engaged with that people. And that's what I found to be so illuminating.

As you've written, not being our own, but belonging to Christ and trying to find this other part in here because you had so many different pieces and so many things to bring out. But you mentioned here talking about technique.

I want to go back to technique for a minute because some people will say, well, what's wrong though, with technique? And as you said, efficiency isn't always, it's not a bad thing, but it's not the only thing.

And you mentioned defining the problem, explaining why it exists, develop a targeted solution. This isn't you saying that we need to do this. This is how we have gone about it and implement the solution.

And the idea is we think there's a solution to every problem or there's a one way to do everything. And there's not always one way. Like I tell people, only God was a perfect parent. And we still rebel, you know, so there's not this.

But I hear people say that. Like I thought I had one woman tell me she was, she was my hygienist, my dental hygienist.

And she, she fully said, I was told that if I homeschooled my kids, they would interrupt, like in, they would go to go to heaven basically. And I know that seems extreme, but her children had both rebelled. And I thought to myself, I'm like, there's not just one way to do it.

I've seen other parents come to me and they say, well, this is a biblical parenting model. What, what biblical parenting model is it? I don't remember Jesus giving us a biblical parenting model.

And I had, I asked one guy to tell me, I said, what is this biblical parenting model? And, and his children are grown now. But he said, well, there's a blanket and you put the child on the blanket and so they understand limits.

And I'm like, oh, where's that at in scripture? There's nowhere that this stuff is in there. But everybody just slaps this biblical label on it as if this is the biblical idea of parenting.

Yes, the Bible teaches individual responsibility. It teaches leading people, being there for them, loving them, encouraging, forgiving them.

But a blanket or one form of school is going to be the determiner of your child's future. That's just an unbearable. I mean, it's not true, it's not biblical at all. So with you seeing a lot of that, I mean, how do you, how do you respond?

I don't want to say how do you respond? I mean, you responded by writing a book. But why, why is it, I guess that we need to know that we are not our own?

I mean, I've elaborated on it, but I want you to describe it a little bit more.

So first of all, it is an unbearable burden. So actually here's, here's where I want to take this.

You know that passage you read, if I remember the context, I'm actually talking about the fact that I can't actually give a five step plan to fixing society. This is one of the most challenging parts of the book, is that once you accept that you are not your own, it gives you peace.

And this is something you mentioned earlier. Society is still going to pressure you. So here's an example, here's an example.

Let's say you Have a stay at home mom who's highly educated, somebody who could have a career, but she understands the value. And just for various life reasons, it's great to work, but for various life reasons, they're choosing, she's choosing to stay home.

And she knows that it's a beautiful thing to stay home with your children. And that's a choice that she's making, that their family is making.

And it's God honoring and that she's no less of a person for staying home with her children.

That having a career doesn't make her, doesn't give her identity, that it doesn't give her, doesn't define her, that it's not the thing, that the one thing that's going to give her worth, that her worth is in God belonging to God. Her identity is grounded in God's love for her, these sorts of things.

But the fact is that when she goes and she meets other adults, it's not going to be uncommon for even people who in theory love the idea of stay at home moms who think maybe that women should stay at home and shouldn't have jobs.

It's not going to be uncommon for them when, when they meet her, other women, in fact, to say, what do you, so what do you do when she says, oh, I stay home with the kids. Oh, that's great, so what does your husband do?

And there to be this sort of flip it, you know, just sort of, you know, there's nothing interesting about you, you know, and that adds up, that adds up to this kind of pressure which is what you described.

So even when you can internalize and you can acknowledge and you can accept, okay, my identity is grounded in God's witness to my existence in the world. My purpose is grounded in God's love for me and his acknowledgments and purpose he has given for me.

I get my meaning from God, my value, all these sorts of things. Society is still going to be saying, tap, tap, hey, you know what?

Pick up this burden, pick up this boulder, put it back on your shoulder and start carrying it up the mountain again. This is your job. Pick it back up, pick it back up every day, over and over again.

And so one of the things I've been telling people is that this is not, you know, sometimes people on Instagram will say, you need a mindset change. You know, you just got to change your mindset and then mindset fix and then you're good. And I'm sorry, this is not that. This is not that.

And it is, it is peace. It will give you peace, it will give you assurance. It is valuable. It is a comfort. Right? What is your only comfort in life and in death? It is that.

But I want to be honest with people and I want them to know that society is still going to be poking them. It's still going to be saying, hey, pick up that boulder, go back up the hill.

And so in the context of that passage, I'm trying to acknowledge, all right, there's no five step plan, there's no technique for fixing society. So what do we do? So how do we go about this?

Kind of where I've landed on that is this idea that we need to, instead of another technique, we need to be people who have this radical and from the world's perspective, an absurd hope in God and his provision. I don't know how society changes, I don't know how it improves. But I do believe that God is a God who can radically change things.

I think that we have an obligation to make spaces where we are mutually supporting each other. And we already have that built into our faith in churches. Right? So what are we doing in our churches to mutually support each other?

Are we doing that? Because I think that's going to allow us to be sustained long term.

Because if we're doing this on our own, it's going to be very hard to bear this burden.

Here's another song long for the little man holding my hand Waiting for the day when he understand there's these moments in life that really hit you straight in the gut. You could feel the weight.

James K.A. smith, you know, talks about counter liturgies. These, counter these, these, these rebellions that.

Well, and I think it is interesting to note that we already do have that mechanism there, that which is the church.

The church unfortunately in many circumstances hasn't addressed these issues, but they've been just as affected by it and in some ways propagated it without knowing it in order to be efficient, to grow and in it, from an outsider's perspective, it looks successful, at least the vestiges or the appearance of it.

But there is something that you're seeing with inside as the inside is starting to crumble because people are starting to see that it's not about really encountering God or knowing God or belonging to God. There's the idea of a self help, a self fix, which is. Got a Christian terminology attached to it such as sanctification.

But really implicit within it is this idea of push your boulder, as you said, the metaphor that you use.

I think that having the conversation though, is, is identifying it and as you said earlier, it's giving it the language necessary because once you can name it, which is part of our, our responsibility as, you know, co creators with God, in that he's given us the responsibility, just as he did Adam, to name his world, we name our world, we identify it, then we can, we can find out ways how the gospel then confronts it. And it gives us a comfort in the middle of that saying that we can cease from striving in that regard.

And that's what I really do appreciate where you're going and how you went about it.

And I liked how you went about it because you brought in such a philosophical part, you brought in literature, you brought in a lot of things that I wasn't as familiar with and you made me think a little bit different than I normally would. So I'm encouraged by that. It's just that finding that belonging, community, I think is the toughest part. We interviewed on the show Jim Wilder.

I don't know if you know who Jim Wilder is.

MICHAEL HENDRICKS Neuro Theologians and neuro neurotheology is what they're kind of their pioneers of where they're noticing how the brain actually goes about spiritual formation.

And a lot of our spiritual formation in our churches is taking place focuses on the left side of our brain, but spiritual formation actually takes place on the right side of our brain. So it's the idea that even we, it's part of the belonging aspect of being alongside one another, the social dimension.

I mean, yes, we are thinking creatures. Yes, we're to be not conformed to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of our minds.

But there is this idea that we belong to a group of people and that we're body and that within that when we understand that we belong, there is the safety net to cease from striving. Unfortunately, it seems to me that a lot of churches, rather than stop that have actually created more of it and nourished that mentality.

And I've just seen it in a lot of different churches where they're constantly, let's get bigger, let's get better, let's do this. Rather than bring people into a true encounter with the one who made them, the one who redeemed them, the one who purchased them.

And that's why I find when you mentioned the Heidelberg Catechism, which Kelly did too, by the way, I don't know if you've read his book, he mentions it and I read him back and I was like, Come on. They had a conversation with each other about this.

I did appreciate that because there is this comfort that brings us a stability, a connection through time, a way to stop. But as you said, and I actually, I was enjoying your, your solution and I was frustrated by it when you said there is not a solution.

And I was like, darn it, I read all this.

Why did he wait till the end? I tried. I know, I know. It's such a bait and switch. I wish I had a five step plan to fix it all, but it's. There isn't. There really isn't.

But I think we could do just the hard work of being in the church community and some of the things that you just mentioned.

I mean, if we can just stop doing so much of the technique in the church and focus so much on the gospel and being embodied, that will do so much good. You used the word encounter. This is something that Ellul talks a lot about in some other works.

Presence in the modern world, being able to actually encounter our neighbor.

He argues that in the modern world that's something that we just fail to do, that we don't actually encounter each other face to face, that we encounter kind of a shadow or we encounter artifacts of culture.

I think a lot about, even in small groups or life groups or whatever you want to call them, how easy it is to meet together and have really just a bunch of small talk. So that, no, I don't want to use the word authenticity, but there's just, there's just, there's just no vulnerability that.

Like true vulnerability, not just socially acceptable to me, there's socially acceptable vulnerability where I can tell you, like, I'm struggling with crime. Okay, right, that's, that's a safe one.

But if I went, well, I'm struggling looking at, you know, some type of pornography or, you know, I found out that my kid is doing this or that. I mean, very rarely do you find that. But I think when you have it, that's when the real community starts to develop.

When you have that type of vulnerability, because we are really broken. We're all sinful people. And Kelly mentions this and again, I know your friends where he talks about, we don't confess sins together anymore.

There's that idea of confession, but the scripture talks about it, confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you shall be healed. Or even, as you mentioned, we meet people, but I don't think we really encounter.

This is where I've kind of harped on second and third John, where John Leaves his ending. And he says, I've written to you enough in paper and ink, and I long to see you face to face.

And there is not, of course, that's not, as I like to say, he wasn't referring to zoom. He was referring to really encountering you where you're at. And that's where that idea of presence, I think, has been really undervalued.

And I'm thankful for guys such as yourself who are really starting to bring that to the forefront, that we need to be present together. And yet it's still a struggle for those of us who are saying and identified it as a problem.

It's still not easy because as my wife says, you're here, but you're not here. You're here. You are on your phone or you're zoned out. You need to be here. So that's what I like about what you.

But you were getting ready to say something before I.

So who knows what that was? No, just.

Just profound.

Yeah. It was going to be the best thing. I said this. This whole session here. I just think we have to have hope. I think. I think we have to have hope.

And this is part of. This is part of what I wanted to get at with this idea of technique, and part of what I think is so liberating with not relying on technique.

So when we say. And this is kind of circling back to one of the things that you were mentioning earlier when you read that, okay, here's these.

We identify the problem, we analyze it, we go through this, and I think rhetorically, you ask, well, what's the alternative? And how does that give us hope?

Well, one of the fraying things for us Christians is that when we say that we're not actually confined by technique, then we can say, okay, God, I don't.

For example, with church, I don't know how I can get all the members or even most of the members of my church to understand and buy into this idea that we belong to you, and then practice it and embody it and then work to encounter each other and then work to rely on each other and inviting each other into their homes and to, you know, to really make each other and help each other and equip each other to believe that they belong to God. Because it can't just be. I mean, it's got to be from the pulpit. It's got to be the way the church operates.

It's got to be all of these things, but it's got to be throughout the week. It's got to be the way we talk to our young people. It's got to be, you know, the example I gave with that stay at home mom.

You know, it's the way we do small talk. It's all of these things that we've got to have outposts of support for each other. I don't know how that happens. I don't have a five step plan.

But the exciting thing is that doesn't stop me from hoping that God can accomplish that good work. And if I'm confined, if I'm constrained to like a business strategy or to technique, then I've got to have, that's my only hope.

I've got to have that five step plan. Otherwise I'm screwed. But because I believe in a God who can work miracles, I can say, all right, here are steps I can take.

And I can hope all things and I can believe that God can accomplish this good work. And my task, my task is to be faithful to the things that God has put before me and trust him for the, for the fruit. And to me, that gives me hope.

To me, that gives me hope because I'm both. I tend to be kind of a realist and an optimist, which might not make sense, but I don't like to be a pessimist.

But I also look at the world and it seems like a big mess. So that's where I'm at. Which way will you turn? Look at you, stuck in the fire.

You just have to burn.

I like to draw attention to Paul. We have this tendency to look at the early church and say, hey, they were perfect.

I want to be in that Acts chapter to world where they were fellowshipping and had everything together in common. That didn't last forever.

And you have the reports where, you know, Paul kind of laments and he says, I've been danger in the street, I've been in danger in the city. I've been naked, I've been thirsty, I've been hungry, I've been betrayed.

I went through all this and then I've got my daily anxiety for all these churches that I keep hearing about Corinth. I hear that a guy's sleeping with his stepmother and they're getting drunk at communion.

And Philippi, these two women are fighting with one another in Thessalonica. They're quitting their jobs and setting up tents, waiting for Jesus to come back.

I mean, for crying out loud, there's, there's just a lot of issues that are going on in these fledgling churches. And so that to me is freeing Because I realize that there's not a perfect church.

I mean, even when I hear people say, let's be a New Testament church, and I'm like, which one? You know, the one that lost its first love? The one that was, you know, tolerating the. The. The nicolations, you know, what. Which church?

But I do find that every generation has to redefine the faith in their time, and they have to find and affirm. The gospel affirms something at every culture in and every time, and it challenges something in every culture and in every time.

And this is where I think that modernity, while it is a wonderful thing in that it's brought a lot of modern conveniences our way. I mean, who wants to go back to some of the bloodletting? You know, we don't need to go back to that. We have surgeries, we have techniques.

Those things have been good.

But when those things have been brought into the church and we have been dehumanized in the process, because we have seen the gospel as a product rather than a personal encounter, I think this is where we have to stop and say, okay, we have to re. Redefine ourselves and redefine our faith as. As they would say in the Reformation, simple reformandum. You know, we have to always be reforming.

And this is where I think your work is important, because it's shining, kind of like putting up a mirror and identifying the faults of our own time. In saying, this is what the gospel of challenging, this is what it. It's affirming, but this is where we need to find a way forward.

And I may not know it, but I'm a part of the conversation with you in that journey. And I think that's why your book is an important work. What do you see or what have been the responses that you have received from your book thus far?

There's been a. There has been a spectrum. I've gotten a lot of people who have.

Who have thanked me for, as we talked about earlier, for giving a vocabulary to things that they have felt. And that's been really. That's been really affirming because my favorite books have done that very thing.

I mean, we mentioned Chuck Taylor, Charles Taylor, and actually Jacques Ellul. Those are two authors who gave me names for things that I felt intuitively, but I couldn't piece together and I didn't understand. And I love that.

And so that's been really affirming. There have been some people who. Who have made some comparisons to Capic, and that's been really Flattering, because Capic's fantastic.

Is it Capic? I've been saying Capic. It's Capic.

I don't know. Now you've got me doubting. Now you've got me doubting. My name's.

That's the first question I'm going to ask him tomorrow. Is it Capic or capic. Okay, K.K.

Anyway, Kelly.

Kelly.

I know Kelly. And some to Truman. You know, some. Some overlap with Truman's book. And so that's been interesting.

There's been some, you know, some criticism, some just about the wordiness. So it was interesting saying it was compact. I'm a compact writer.

You know, some, you know, writing is an interesting process because you just get a spectrum. Some. Some have said it's too academic, and some have said it's not academic enough. And so you just say, okay, yes, you're right.

It's not an academic book.

It's not an academic book. But a buddy of mine, he's like, I want more footnotes. I want more footnotes. And I was like, okay, that's. Whatever.

Yeah, I mean, I. Yeah, everybody's got.

Their thing, you know. Everybody's got their thing.

I understand.

Yeah.

But it is. It's a labor of love, now that the book is out and you wrote it when. I mean, when did you write it, actually write it?

And what is the thing that you wish you would have done different?

You know, I don't. I don't know that I wish I would have done anything different. Different.

And here's the reason I say that is because the only thing I could have done different would be to spend an infinite amount of time on it. Right. So, for example, I found this fantastic quote from CS Lewis just recently that fit exactly what I'm talking about.

But I found lots of other quotes from other people that could have fit in the book as well and that I could have included, but that could go on forever.

And I also could have improve the quotes or the prose, and it could have tightened things up and expanded on sections and cut things and improve things. But one of the things I've learned as a writer is that you just have to turn in things. And I don't regret anything in the book.

There's nothing in it that I think, gosh, that was dumb, or that was. I really needed to clarify that or there's. There's nothing like that in the book.

There are lots of things that I wish that I could have improved on, but they're all things that I could spend the rest of my life, like I could just keep polishing forever. And so if I say, if I say that I could have improved the prose, what I'm really saying to you right now is that my next book, I should never turn in.

And so that's what. That's why I can't say. That's why I can't say that I have to just turn stuff in. I just got to turn stuff in.

And every time I turn stuff in, what's funny about this book, and this is true with each of my books, what's funny about this book is that when I started, I was like, I love this idea. Like, I believe in this idea. And I still really, really believe in this idea. And I believe that this idea is really important.

And I thought to myself, I don't know that I'm the person to write this, and I don't know if I'm going to be able to pull it off, but I really believe in this idea. And when I turned it in, I still felt like, you know, like, like your friends comments with the footnotes.

It's like, there are things that I could have done that could have made this a really great book. But you. One of my most encouraging lines, I'm not gonna. I'm abandoning that sentence. I'm like, you with the cough. I'm abandoning that sentence.

One of my most encouraging lines are from T.S. eliot, and it's about the subject of writing. He's actually talking about writing at this time.

He's the best poet, the most renowned poet in the 20th century in the English language. And he says, for us there is only the trying. The rest is not our business. And that's what keeps me going.

And that's why I turn stuff in instead of just polishing forever. So I have to just say, this is not the great book that was in my head, which is like way up here. That was. That was. That was perfect.

I know there's this great book that would have been a masterpiece and that lives up to the idea, but I'm going to turn in the book that I can turn in because I have to spend time with my family and that's okay. So I feel your friends concerns. I feel the comments from people who are like, it's too wordy. I'm like, I, yeah, yeah.

The people who are like, it's not academic. I'm like, I hear you. You're right. It should have been more academic. And the people who are like, it's not. It's too academic. I'm like, well, you know.

Well, I don't know about that one. But yeah, I know. I understand. One of the things is there have been a number of people who say, you know, the beginning is too dark. And I understand.

I am. I do ask a lot of the reader. You know, we talk earlier about asking them to sort of descend before I give them that hope.

And that was something I wrestled a lot with.

I tried to give some gospel hope at the end of each chapter in the first few chapters, because I ask you to sit through three or four chapters before I get to. You belong to Christ and what's, you know, that's the ultimate hope.

But the reason I did that was because I thought, okay, we need to, as I said earlier, we need to look squarely at the face of this problem in order for us to get through it.

So how can people support you or follow you and what you're doing?

Yeah, so you can go to O, which stands for Orville Orval. You can go to oh, I'm just going to wait for you.

Oallannoble.com is my website and you can find my various social media and I've got a substack and my books and various things there. That's probably the best way to connect with me.

Alan, thank you for coming on the show. I've had a really fun time talking about you are not your own, and I would highly recommend people get the book.

It's been a lot of fun. Thanks.

What a conversation. I'm still thinking about it. The things that Dr. Noble names are foundational to how we live as Christians.

It's really a seemingly simple concept that we're not our own, but it has many implications. And I know it's still hard for many of us to grab hold of. It's just this understanding is that Jesus bought us. He owns us. He directs us.

He's the one that determines our identity. We're not our own. We don't have to create ourselves and make ourselves look a certain way and announce that to the world.

We need to be content in letting him define who we are.

Our executive editor, Kevin O'Brien, thinks that this book should be included as a textbook in every Christian worldview class to help students see the freedom they have in Christ and the bankruptcy of our culture's view of ourselves. We really do believe in this book. If you haven't gotten a copy, we suggest you do as Alan said.

The book isn't perfect, and he said it's not for everyone, but it gives us a language for a very important aspect of our faith. And that's simple.

That we belong to God, that we were bought at a price because of what Jesus did on the cross for us and because we are a part of his body. We belong to one another, to his church. Apollos Watered is not a replacement for the church we don't want to be. Instead, we want to come alongside.

We're going to be doing things in the coming months to help foster community among our listeners, to develop connections and a deeper bond so that they too will go forth to water their worlds, to help their churches. But here's the thing. Even that is not a replacement placement for going to church.

We are a part of the church, and our goal, just like Apollos of old, is to water the church so that we can all face the challenges of living for Christ in an often hostile world, not just on Sundays, but really in every area of life. Next week we're going to be talking with author and theologian Kelly Capek about his book you're Only Human.

If you sense a theme, you are correct because Kelly brings out the pastoral side of who we are is human beings.

If God has used this episode to help water your faith, would you consider being a partner with us?

Go to Apollos water.org click the support us button. You'll be glad that you did. That's it for today's episode, everybody. I want to thank our apostle Apollo's water team for making this happen.

And I want to tell you, water your faith, water your world. This is Travis Michael Fleming signing off from Apollo's Watered.

Stay watered, everybody.