1: The Wilderness of Mediocrity

[00:00] Stephanie: Welcome to season two, episode one of the On the Trail podcast. I’m Stephanie Warner, and I’m here with my father, Dr. Marcus Warner, and we’re so excited to be on the trail with you today. Hello, Father.

[00:13] Marcus: Hello, Daughter. This is our first. I can’t believe it. It’s really weird doing this in front of cameras.

[00:19] Stephanie: It is. There are cameras.

[00:20] Marcus: There are cameras. Yeah.

[00:22] Stephanie: But it’s so much fun. We were welcoming people fully to the table – it’s a nice table. Kudos. Shout outs to our technical producer, Ben, and also Faith, who wears many hats at the ministry and is our go-to help with decoration. And she’s great. So thank you to both of you for helping us put this together.

[00:45] Marcus: Yeah. Also to my wife, Brenda, for sacrificing this room in the house. So here we are.

[00:50] Stephanie: Yes, indeed. We’re so happy to be here. And we are launching, now that we are on video, a new series.

[00:59] Marcus: Yes.

[01:00] Stephanie: And this series is called The Healing Journey: Lessons from the Wilderness. Or The Wilderness of Mediocrity.

[01:10] Marcus: Yeah. Or just the Torah and what we learn about emotional healing from the Torah. Yes. This is going to be an interesting combination of Bible and practical on the lessons that we get on working with deeply wounded people and our own journeys to healing. Let’s face it, the whole wilderness wandering thing is a journey. So it connects really simply. And I think a lot of people miss how profoundly fundamental and foundational the Exodus story is and all that goes into it. It’s like everything in the Exodus story is repeated in the gospel, is repeated in the end times narrative. The whole thing, kingdom theology is all rooted in Exodus. And so we’re going to take a dive here.

[02:02] Stephanie: I’m so excited. It’s going to be epic. As we’ve been plotting out this whole series, we’ve been leaving room for… Oh, I bet we’re going to want to even go more onto that. And that’s so cool. And we need to pause on that. And I’m so excited. It’s going to be great. Well, I want to ask you about this title, The Wilderness of Mediocrity. That’s quite a title. Where did it come from?

[02:26] Marcus: Well, that came from your grandpa – my dad. He used to have a five minute radio spot called Keeping your Balance, and his basic premise was that the Christian life is the exciting process of learning to keep your balance and that the devil likes to introduce distractions and extremes and get us off of the balance point into one of the extremes. And he really doesn’t care which extreme we go to. And so one of his messages that he would deliver fairly frequently was this idea that too few Christians are living a victorious Christian life, and that we’ve sort of been trained to think of the wilderness wandering experience in the Jordan river, that the Jordan river is death and the promised land is heaven. But that’s not really the best analogy here. He said, when they crossed the Jordan river and the promised land, there were giants waiting to be fought. Right? There were battles. There was a whole lot of warfare going on. But in the book of Joshua, we read that they won every battle that they faced when they trusted God. And so it’s really a picture of the victorious Christian life. It’s a picture of a life full of battles, but of God helping win those battles when we trust and obey him. And so it puts the wilderness in a different perspective.

And he also was cognizant of the fact that the wilderness was only supposed to be a two-year event for the Israelites, and it turned into a 40-year event. And so my dad kind of coined the term for those 38 extra years as “the wilderness of mediocrity.” And what he meant by that was they were going through the motions, but they were just kind of spinning their wheels and going through life. And he felt like way too many Christians were doing that, that we were just sort of spinning our wheels. We were fighting battles, but they were battles in the desert, not the battles in the promised land that were actually doing damage to the kingdom of darkness. And so it really stuck with me, as a kid listening to him talk, thinking, I don’t want to be in the wilderness of mediocrity. I want to be living a victorious Christian life. So I was like, so tell me, dad, what’s this going to take? How do you get out of the wilderness of mediocrity and into the land of victorious battle? So that’s where it comes from.

[04:45] Stephanie: Awesome. Yeah. Super applicable to every person and every walk of life. But then also, I’m curious. I know you made a connection to ministry with the deeply wounded. And where did that come from specifically? Not in how did you come to minister to the deeply wounded, but for the topic of this.

[05:07] Marcus: Yeah, how did this topic get connected to emotional healing journey? Well, I actually have a very vivid memory. I’m sitting in the back room of my parents’ house in Deerfield, Illinois. So Deerfield is where Trinity Evangelical Divinity School is located. So my dad was a professor there. He was teaching spiritual warfare, several classes on it. And I was a new student at Trinity. Just starting work on my PhD in old Testament at the time, which I didn’t finish. I ended up switching, but that’s neither here nor there.

[05:43] Stephanie: My whole life, I thought you had a PhD. Like all growing up. I thought you had a PhD.

[05:48] Marcus: Yeah, I have, ironically, a DMin degree. So if you say that wrong, it sounds like I have a demon degree, but I have a doctor of ministry. Anyway, here I am. I’m sitting in my parents house. I actually living with them while I’m going to school. And because my dad taught so much on spiritual warfare and because he would do ministry with people who were having battles, we had a regular flow of people coming through. And there was one lady in particular who was literally tortured as a child. To the extent that she split into multiple personalities, she was officially diagnosed by a secular psychiatrist and showed up at our doorstep, and we started a journey with her. And as it turned out, several other people who were really deeply wounded. And a group of us began gathering. There were probably 13 to 15 of us that were part of this group at some point, and we would meet. I just remember being in the room and thinking about this journey we were on with these deeply wounded people.

And at the time, I’m studying Exodus for my doctoral work, and it just sort of hit me, the biggest lesson that Israel failed to learn, the reason they did not get into the promised land, was they didn’t learn to trust. They were constantly like, well, let’s just go back to Egypt, forget this. All because they didn’t learn to trust God. And then I realized that in talking to, especially this one lady and these others, that the thing you kept beating your head against the wall, is trying to get them to trust God, right? They didn’t trust. And all of a sudden, it was like light bulbs went on. Oh, this is exactly the same thing. And then you look at it and go, well, why didn’t the Israelites trust God? Why doesn’t she trust God? Well, she doesn’t trust God because she was abused, right? And her abuse taught her not to trust. Well, then all of a sudden, another light bulb went on.

Well, the Israelites were really abused people, right? They had come out of horrible treatment over and over again. In Exodus one, we see words like ruthless and difficult and bitter and oppression and realizing, well, all right, so deep wounds tend to rob us of trust. And the other thing that hit me while we were sitting there was I was actually upset with God. A little bit like Moses, like, I told you this would happen. I was kind of upset with God because I was like, hasn’t she been through enough? And haven’t these people been through enough? Why don’t you just take them to the promised land? Why don’t you just get them to an oasis and let them rest for a little bit? Why does it feel like they have to go through so many battles to get to the place of emotional healing? Everybody they want to get to, we want them to get to.

Why is this so hard? And again, it hit me, when the Israelites left Egypt, where did God take them? Right? He didn’t take them to an oasis and say, you guys have been through enough. Just take it easy. I’ll go fight these battles for you, and then I’ll just give you the land. No, he took them to the desert and it was like, okay, the desert really was their boot camp, and there was a boot camp for abuse. People tend to have a victim mindset, a victim mentality. That’s their identity. I am a victim. Well, I think the Israelites had a slave mentality. They had a victim mentality, and God wanted to break that and teach them a new mindset, like, no, you are my children. You are holy. You are called to something different. This is your new identity. Learn to live out of this identity and trust me. And so they had to go through a whole boot camp experience to try to get those lessons. So I just still remember the whole thing just kind of hit me all at once. Like, okay, every one of these things connects.

[10:04] Stephanie: God is so good.

[10:05] Marcus: Yeah. And I could just go on and on, but that’s why we have an extended podcast series on this, because there are just so many lessons and so many connections.

[10:13] Stephanie: Yeah, we’re going to talk more about trust next episode and all of that. And, yes, a whole series where we’re going to keep pressing through. Thank you for that setup. On that note, since we are going to be going through the Exodus story, I was wondering if you would give us some context for Moses and the Exodus story and where that’s coming out of the Bible.

[10:37] Marcus: Sorry, there’s a couple of different contexts we could go into here. Historically, there’s all kinds of debate around the chronology of this stuff, and I personally am very comfortable with what is called the early date for the Exodus, which puts these events, the Exodus itself, around 1446 BC. I know a lot of people would prefer to put it in a late date, but that’s kind of where I feel the most comfortable, and I think that there’s good reasons for it archaeologically as well as within the text. But in this case, the whole story starts because God in his sovereignty, is unfolding this huge story for all of humanity.

And I like the way an author put this right in a book that I’ve been working through recently. And that is, God in a sense, is as aware of how messed up the world is as we are, which surprises some of us, right? Because we tend to blame him. Like, why do you let the world get this messed up? But God’s looking down here and he sees that this world is a complete mess. And he said, I’m not willing to wave the white flag and surrender and just give it up. I want the world to become what I created it to be, and I want people and humans to become what I created them to be. And I want this whole thing to be redeemed and to be turned around.

And so at one level, what’s happening with the exodus is God’s micro model of the entire process of redemption that is taking place. So initially it was the redemption of Israel from their Egyptian bondage to his promised inheritance for them. And it’s also a model for us as Christians in our freedom, our salvation, our training, us moving toward our inheritance. And ultimately, it’s a model for all of creation. And this idea that the creation has been in exile ever since Adam was kicked out of the garden.

And from that point on, it’s been groaning. The creation groans, longing for this to come to an end. So theologically, there’s a huge, big context here that gives the story of the exodus more weight than we sometimes think of, because for a lot of us, it was just a children’s story taught in Sunday school. And it’s something related to Judaism, but we don’t understand how profoundly important it is for understanding life and the gospel and Christianity in general.

[13:34] Stephanie: Huzzah.

[13:35] Marcus: Yeah.

[13:36] Stephanie: I’m tempted to have you now set up like the biblical narrative. You did theological narrative, and you did the archaeological, historical, quick window.

[13:50] Marcus: Well, biblical narrative in sense of. I’m not quite sure how detailed.

[13:55] Stephanie: Yeah, done.

[13:56] Marcus: Why don’t you give us the biblical narrative? You could do this and you know where you want to take it.

[14:01] Stephanie: I’m just thinking. So the Exodus story is going to be starting like Exodus one with the groaning. So where were they beforehand? Why is Israel in Egypt?

[14:12] Marcus: Okay, got it. I wasn’t sure how far to go.

[14:17] Stephanie: No, I like everything you just did.

[14:21] Marcus: Okay, so they were in Egypt because there was a famine. And God had prepared a way for them to survive the famine by having Joseph sent down to captivity. So most people know the story, Joseph being sold by his brothers as a slave. And that famous line, what the brothers intended for evil, God meant for good, for the saving of many lives. And so because of the famine, the entire clan of Israel goes, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, the entire clan of Jacob moved. About 70 people moved to Egypt and God basically told them to stay there.

And they did. And they stayed there and they flourished. And they were doing quite well until Joseph died. And then there is some fuzziness, right? The Bible has a gap there. It doesn’t tell us a lot of details. We just learned that there was a new king came who didn’t know Joseph. And most people think that this wasn’t know the son of the prior king, that this was probably a new dynasty and a whole new family was ruling Egypt that was perhaps hostile to the family that had elevated Joseph.

[15:37] Stephanie: And depending on how you date it, if you’re going with where you tend to date things, it’s very possible that the dynasty between had actually been a foreign one to Egypt. And that would have also given extra reason for some hostility.

[15:56] Marcus: Yes. Again, there’s lots of debates about these things, but I do think that there’s a good evidence that Joseph was elevated at a time when foreigners were in power or at least looked at in a more friendly light. And this new dynasty was very pro Egyptian, anti foreigners. And all of a sudden, here’s this huge, at this point, a huge number of descendants that have taken over, and it says that they literally are in dread of them. So that’s kind of an interesting issue in its own right, but that’s how they got down there.

[16:35] Stephanie: Awesome. Well, I am so excited to continue in this series. Any final thoughts for this episode?

[16:44] Marcus: Well, again, one of the reasons I wanted to do this series is because of the connections and the overlaps. It’s kind of like ability to kill two birds with one stone. We get to take a deep dive into the Bible, which is always good, and we get to take a deep dive into the emotional healing journey and looking at concrete practices, concrete lessons. And so some episodes will be more heavy on one side or the other of it. But I think it’s going to be a fun ride. I think we’re going to learn a lot, and I’m really looking forward to it.

[17:14] Stephanie: Me too. 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.