15: The Masters of S.L.O.W.

[00:00] Stephanie: Season 2, episode 15. Today we are continuing our lessons from the wilderness series with a look at the masters of S.L.O.W.

Hello, Father.

[00:09] Marcus: Hello, Daughter. The masters of S.L.O.W.

[00:13] Stephanie: You know, I needed to mix it up a little bit.

[00:16] Marcus: Yeah. We could have alliterated and gone with the sultans of SLOW. But, hey, there you go.

[00:20] Stephanie: Okay. More on that later. But first, today’s icebreaker, ice cream in a cup or in a cone?

[00:31] Marcus: When I was a child, it was definitely a cone. It’s been a long time. I usually do a cup these days.

[00:42] Stephanie: I feel like I agree. I used to choose a cone and then I’ve been through a cup phase. I feel like these days I’m kind of going back to a cone.

[00:54] Marcus: I don’t know. Cone feels like it takes too much work. I’m like, I gotta juggle it.

[01:00] Stephanie: It depends on how much ice cream you’re getting. Do you want to be able to save it for later?  For all at once you need a cone.

[01:08] Marcus: Yeah.

[01:08] Stephanie: Yeah. Okay. Let us know in the comments. Are you a team cup or team cone? All right.

[01:17] Marcus: It’s pretty bad when you’re too lazy to eat a cone. Go ahead.

[01:20] Stephanie: This is when you just need to get a cup with a party hat cone. Well, last episode, we looked at Moses and the giants, and now it is time for a transition of leadership. Moses is passing the baton on to Joshua.

[01:39] Marcus: Yes, he is. So we get to the end of the book of Deuteronomy and we’re seeing that generation pass away. Miriam passes away, Moses’ sister, and Aaron, Moses’ brother, passes away. And then it’s coming to be Moses’ time and he’s ready to go. And God says, you’re not going to be able to go into the land because you did not honor me as holy in front of the people. When he was given a specific command he violated it in his anger. And so Moses is taken up and he’s shown the promised land. But in preparation for this God says, I want you to appoint Joshua to be the successor. I want you to pass the anointing to him.

And there’s going to be this transition. Now, these are big shoes to fill, right? Because Moses took on the gods of Egypt. Moses took on Pharaoh. Moses parted the Red Sea. Moses was the one who got them manna and all this other stuff. Moses came through in a pretty big way, despite the fact they wanted to kill him every other month. But there’s a lesson of leadership there, too. He got them where they needed to go and people knew that God listened to Moses. So the very big question for Joshua is, are you going to have the same kind of connection with God? Will God come through for you, too? And so this whole thing of transition of leadership is really important.

[03:15] Stephanie: I also have a hot take here. Maybe not that hot of a take and also not necessarily holistic. But it also strikes me when I read this transition that yes,  it is articulated that Moses is not able to go ahead because of what he did. But also, I feel like there’s an element of Moses already being a legend just based on what he did. And by saying, okay, now Joshua is the one who’s going to take you in.

It kind of takes some of the glory away from Moses and puts it back onto Yahweh. Where it says, I am the one who brought you all this way. And it wasn’t that you just had an epic human king who got you all this way. When I read it sometimes it feels like it’s putting the focus back on, nope, God is the one who is taking you.

[04:08] Marcus: There’s no question about it. We see the same thing with David and Solomon. David wanted to build a temple for God, but God stopped him. He said, no, you’re not the one to do this. And he made it so that Solomon would build the temple. And I think there’s some of the same components there that God doesn’t want to share his glory here.

And he doesn’t want to make it seem like it’s all dependent on one person. As we recall, Moses started off not wanting to do this. Moses was like, look, no, I’m not going to do it. Go find somebody else. And then when we see where he ended up, it’s like, oh, my word. You can’t imagine anybody else doing it.

[04:45] Stephanie: And he stepped into his calling.

[04:47] Marcus: Yeah, he stepped into his calling.

[04:49] Stephanie: God calls different people to different tasks. And so Moses was called to a specific task and by the time he’s done, you know, he’s legendary. He’s done it. And now it’s time for Joshua to rise up. And so what is Joshua’s task?

[05:05] Marcus: So Joshua’s task is not a small one, right? He has to go tackle the invasion of the land of Canaan that forty years before they had refused to do because they were scared. And the Canaanites have known that they’re around, and have known that they want to invade, and have had forty years to get stronger and more prepared. So he has a monumental task ahead of him and he is taking that task very seriously. So let’s just read from Deuteronomy 31. It says, Moses continued to speak these words to all Israel, saying, I’m now a hundred and twenty years old. I can’t be your leader anymore. The Lord has told me, he said to me, you will not cross the Jordan.

But it says, the Lord, your God, is the one who will cross ahead of you. To your point, right? He doesn’t say, but don’t worry Joshua will do it. He says, no, it’s the Lord your God who will cross ahead of you. He, the Lord your God, will destroy these nations and you will drive them out. Joshua is the one who will cross ahead of you. The Lord will deal with them as he did Sihon and Og. Which goes back to last week and the idea of Moses and the giants. And he said he’s going to destroy their land. He’s going to do this. The Lord will deliver. The Lord will come through. He will not leave you or abandon you.

So a lot of us know this Hebrews 13 thing, I will never leave you nor forsake you. This is where the promise starts. It starts with a promise to Israel that just because Moses is going away it doesn’t mean that I am going away. And that’s huge.

[06:35] Stephanie: Yeah, that is huge. I’m curious how you’ve seen this in your own life? Bringing it practically in this.

[06:46] Marcus: Yeah. So I’ve been on both ends of this. I was young, and now I’m old. There was a time when I was the young, upcoming person. When I was thirty seven I became a senior pastor. I was forty five when I became the president of this ministry. And I remember as this forty five year old new president at Deeper Walk I was surrounded by my dad, who was almost eighty. Mark Bubeck who was almost eighty. Fred Dickason was often around and he was around eighty. And so the key to being young, I found, was to hang out with people in their eighties.

But there was very much a sense of passing the torch. Of having a mantle given down to the next generation. And this sense that we need you to take all this stuff that we’ve been developing, and make sure that it gets spread out there. So I had a very much a sense of stewardship even more than leadership. When I came here I felt more like I am a steward of what these people have put together. Not like I finally can do my own thing. And then over time it kind of became mine. I owned it more and I began developing some of my own content around it. We began expanding some of the horizons and purposes, and so on.

So now we’re getting to the point here where the question is, do we need to find another me? Do we need to find somebody else who’s going to be a content creator and public speaker and all this? And I’m like, I don’t think so. I think what we need is somebody who’s good with the work.  We now have an organization in place. We need somebody who can really build that out. And so succession wise it doesn’t always mean finding a clone of yourself.

[08:45] Stephanie: Right. And we have a tendency of putting people on pedestals and then think, life is never going to be as good if that person isn’t on the pedestal. Or if we don’t get somebody to swap out on the pedestal. But God is the one who wants to be on the pedestal. God is the only one who belongs in that position and he’s calling different people up to for different seasons and for different tasks.

[09:08] Marcus: Yeah, my first game here, I’ll be honest, I was primarily motivated by fear. I just didn’t want to destroy what had been built. And then you get to a certain point where you’re like, okay, God, where do you want to take this? What do you want to do next?

[09:25] Stephanie: I got to witness Grandpa praying over you and sort of passing on a mantle to you. And I think Mark did that as well.

[09:33] Marcus: Yeah. One of the first things that happened was I went out to visit Mark Bubeck in his home in Arizona. I remember he laid his hands on me and said, whatever mantle God has given me I asked that he would pass it on to you. Very much like an Elijah Elisha kind of thing moment there. And so that’s why I said, a very strong sense of being a steward, of wanting to manage what had been passed down well. And so now we’re looking to pass this on further. Not that I’m imminently retired.

[10:03] Stephanie: Yeah, And that’s not what I meant when I brought it up.

[10:07] Marcus: But, yeah, you get to the point where you realize this isn’t about you, it was never about you. This is about God and what he’s doing.

[10:14] Stephanie: Right. Yeah. And so we took it from the Bible to your own personal experience. Can you help with some practicality for somebody in their everyday life?

[10:34] Marcus: I think this happens a lot. Taking it to the emotional healing journey, one of the hard transitions for people, is moving from somebody who’s been their primary counselor for a long time to a new person. It’s very easy for deeply wounded people to idolize the person who helps them get their first breakthrough. And so they’re like, oh, only you can help me. You’re the only one. And I won’t work with anybody else, I won’t listen to anybody else. And it’s really, really common, especially for deeply wounded people.

And so this transition of leadership often takes place as people move from one person being key to their lives, to letting other people in, and letting other people help. And I think it’s really important that you get there at some point. Because the longer you go on with just one person being the only person, it just sets it up for a much more difficult transition when it finally happens.

[11:30] Stephanie: So. All right, bringing us back into the story a little bit now.

[11:38] Marcus: Sure.

[11:40] Stephanie: Did you have something else you were talking about?

[11:43] Marcus: Well, no, we’re talking about SLOW?

[11:44] Stephanie: Well, we will be. But I was just going back to the part of why they didn’t get into the promised land in the first place, and why they had to wait. But then they do get to come in with the next generation, which is with Joshua. It’s not only Moses who doesn’t get to go in, but it’s actually kind of the generation who was with Moses who doesn’t get to go in. Do you want to look at it from that angle?

[12:17] Marcus: Well, yeah, there’s a sense that you would have expected Moses to be able to get in because Joshua and Caleb were in, and they had been faithful. Moses had been faithful, and he’s called a faithful servant in all of God’s house. And so it was a little bit surprising to a lot of people when Moses was told, no, you’re not going in because he wasn’t part of the rebellion, he wasn’t part of all that. But he sort of joined them a little bit with what he did at the end of that. And so there’s a lot there. I have trouble unpacking that quickly.

[12:54] Stephanie: So one of the things we talked about was the concern for the children. One of the reasons they had that rebellion of not wanting to go in in the first place was because they were concerned for their children. They thought they could take care of their needs and their children’s needs better than God, right?

[13:15] Marcus: Yeah, that’s exactly it. So in Numbers 13 and 14, when the spies went into the land  the complaint was that they’re going to slaughter our children. And God’s response to that was, yeah, it’s not your children you need to worry about. Your children are actually going to be the ones who take the land. And that is exactly what happened. And so that’s part of that multi generational thing where there is a multi generational solution to the problem, because it was a whole culture. It was a whole family system that needed to be redeemed.

And it is this kind of ironic thing here, too, of how many of us in our fear for our kids don’t do things? I’ll give you a classic example from my own life. I’ve often told this story before, when I was seven I saw a demon in the house and it freaked me out. I found out years later the rest of that story. That demon was actually there not so much for me, but to intimidate my dad to say, look what I can do to your kids. You know, you think you want to mess with me? Because he and my mom had just met with their very first demonized person.

They had just done their very first spiritual warfare deliverance session. And that’s when the demon showed up to attack me. And at that point my dad often said the devil was offering him a deal, basically like, hey, I’ll leave you alone if you leave me alone. And my dad was like, you can never make that deal.  You can never make that deal. You might think that that’s going to give you some safety, but there is no place less safe than making a deal with the devil. And so he was like, I’ve got to make a choice here.

And what he decided was that he was going to teach a seven year old that hey, if this happens again, this is how you stand up to the enemy. You don’t have to be afraid of him. And sure enough it came back another time. And as a seven year old I was able to say, I just plead the blood of Jesus over me, and boom, it was gone like that. And so there is this sense that a lot of us have to deal with what we are afraid of for our kids. We’re afraid for that generation because we don’t trust God with that. And so this is exactly what was going on here with this generation.

[15:26] Stephanie: And so then we see that he faithfully brings the next generation with Joshua into the promised land, and he’s going to equip them. He’s promised to go ahead of them and to walk with them, and he’s going into the land. And in the next episode, we’re going to be talking about Joshua as a model for the victorious Christian life. And that’s exciting.

But here we see that we move from battles into victory as we are moving from the Moses generation into the Joshua generation. And one of the models for victory that Moses passes on to Joshua is this SLOW model. A lot of times when we talk at Deeper Walk about it you bring up Joshua, because he does a lot of SLOW model case studies, which we’re also going to get to.

[16:25] Marcus: Well, I break it up because that’s where I first noticed it.

[16:27] Stephanie: Yeah, but we’re going to give Moses some credit here too.

[16:34] Marcus: First of all, SLOW stands for a four step process. It was related to this question of what does it mean to walk in the spirit? And I’m like, kind of in my frustration with Paul, why don’t you just spell this out? Paul, what does it mean to walk in the spirit? You tell us to do it, but where do you tell us how to do it? And I had several epiphanies. One of them was what the New Testament calls walking in the Spirit, the Old Testament called wisdom, and that they’re actually the same thing. Because wisdom in the Old Testament is getting the Holy Spirit’s guidance in the distinguishing between what is good for you and what’s bad for you.

And so when you walk in the Spirit you walk in wisdom and they are basically the same thing. And that epiphany opens it up to, well, how did they walk in the spirit in the Old Testament? What did that look like? Well, Moses is actually the quintessential model of this. Moses literally had a tent called the tent of meeting that he set up on the outskirts of camp. It was different from the tabernacle.

The tent of meeting is where he would go each day and the cloud of glory would come. The people would stand at attention as he walked into this tent and he would meet with God. He would talk to God face to face, it says, unlike anybody in history. And so the idea of seeking God, like, what do you want? What is your will? And what I find interesting is it wasn’t a thirty second conversation.

He once spent forty days and forty nights followed by another forty days and forty nights, up on the mountaintop with God. And all we have of that is something you can read in five minutes which is like, here’s how to build the tabernacle. And so you look at this and there’s obviously more going on here than just God saying, here, take some dictation. I’ve got five minutes worth of information to give you. Moses had a pattern of stopping what he was doing to go seek the Lord and then he would listen to what the Lord had to say. And then came the obey part. Are you going to obey what I said?

And so, because he had this firmly established pattern it’s actually what kept him out of the promised land. He sought the Lord, he listened to him, and then he disobeyed.  And it was like, that is not what I told you to do, Moses. And so he had broken the model, in a sense, and there had to be consequences. And so this is the W part. You get to watch what happens when you obey.

You get to watch what happens when you disobey. So then we see it coming into Joshua where he’s got to go and fight these battles. God expects him to stop what he’s doing, go seek him, listen to what he wants him to do, what his strategy is for this particular battle, and obey that. And then he gets to watch God work. But as we’re going to see there are times when he did it and there’s times when he didn’t do it. And there are distinct differences in how it turns out.

[19:34] Stephanie: And God is faithful throughout so that’s a good thing. I’m excited for those conversations. Well, I am going to pause for some announcements real quick. The announcement is a reminder that there is still time to join one of the summer intensives, or multiples of them. Have a party. Summer intensives at Hobart, Indiana, at our Deeper Walk Joy Center.

Dan and Sarah Allison are going to be leading people through spiritual warfare tools and training. Melissa Finger will be leading an intensive on what every people helper needs to know about complex trauma. Dawn Whitestone will be hosting a weekend of prayer for our children and a prayer ministry graduation and reunion. For those of you who are in the school of ministry that will be a fun time. So lots going on. If you are interested in joining a summer intensive in person with other people this summer, check out dwisom.org. Sounds like a party. And you know, lots of good content, but a party. Joy! So, Father, any final thoughts on this episode?

[20:51] Marcus: Well, again, one of the things we’re trying to do is combine a look at the biblical texts and the story that has been so formative in the scripture, to the emotional healing journey. One of the things we see here is that part of the goal of the emotional healing journey is to develop intimacy with God. Seeking God, listening to his voice, obeying what he says, and watching what happens.

That’s always the goal of the journey to make that a lifestyle. And so it’s not enough just to have a one time experience where I seek God, I listen, and there’s something amazing that happens, and I have a breakthrough. The whole idea here is to begin developing a pattern and a habit that creates greater intimacy with God. And so this SLOW pattern is one way to keep in mind how you do that.

[21:42] Stephanie: And we’re going to keep unpacking that in the next few episodes and it’s going to be great. Thank you. Thanks for joining us on the trail today. Did you like this episode? Would you like more people to see it? This is the part where I ask you to, like, comment, subscribe, share with a friend. And do you love this channel? One of the best ways that you can support us is by becoming a Deeper Walk Trailblazer. Thanks again.

We’ll see you back on the trail next week.