[00:00] Stephanie: Welcome to the On the Trail podcast. For this week’s compilation episode we’re revisiting the FISH model series, this week is part one. We have been talking about the broken discipleship factory in our last series. And so you talk a little bit about that in this book, and then you start laying out, what does heart focus discipleship look like?
So, do you want to take a moment to kind of explore the core difference between the two? And why is heart focused discipleship so important?
[00:36] Marcus: Yeah, absolutely. When I was in seminary, we were taught that if the church was a factory, its product would be disciples. I have a lot of friends who are engineers, and one of the things that they get paid to do is to study products and figure out why they aren’t performing correctly. And so the question was, if you’re going to do an analysis of the “performance” of people who have been disciplined by the modern church, would we give them A pluses? Would we give them C’s? Would we give them D’s or F’s? Well, how is the church actually doing at producing mature disciples?
And I came to the conclusion, based on a lot of Barna research and just a lot of personal experience, that the factory is broken. It is not producing the kind of product on a regular day in, day out basis that we would want, nor that we would expect. So it’s not enough just to say, “Hey, it’s broken, fix it, right?” You’ve got to have an answer. And so what we’ve been doing for a long time here at Deeper Walk, is trying to create a model that churches can use. And not only churches can use, but also that individuals can use on their own journey to go deeper with their walk with God.
And so this model, in keeping with a lot of other things we do, we try to keep it simple. We explain it with the word FISH. Which stands for Freedom, Identity, Spirit, and Heart-Focused community. So those are the four core things that we will unpack throughout this series, where that came from and all the rest of it. But that is the core model, and that’s where it came from in trying to fix this broken discipleship factory.
[02:10] Stephanie: Yeah. Before we continue unpacking, I wonder if you would tell the story of the well. I think it really preaches.
[02:21] Marcus: Several years ago we were taking a family vacation, and mom had brought along cassette tapes. This will date when we were doing this. They were stories from the Jesus film, where all these miracles were taking place. We also listened to a story from a missionary organization somewhere in our past that went to India. They went to dig wells to bring fresh, healthy, safe water to the rural villages. They got to one particular village, and the well was already there, but it was not functional. In fact, not only was this well not bringing anybody any water, it had turned into the town dump. When they started unpacking what was in there, they actually found broken toilets and just really nasty junk.
But they had a little meeting, and they decided it would be more cost-effective to reclaim this well than to start from scratch and dig a new one. So that’s what they did. As they started pulling all the baggage and garbage out of this well, they got partway down and found something that really surprised them, and it was a cobra’s nest. So, as you can imagine, they were a little freaked out and immediately went and called for specialists who came in and relocated the cobras. But they continued on down the well clearing it out and pressure washing it. When they got to the bottom, they found that the foundation stones around the spring had collapsed, and were actually clogging the spring.
And I thought, now, there is a pretty good metaphor. In fact, the whole well is a pretty good metaphor for the Christian life, because Jesus said, “Springs of living water will flow up from within you.” I think all of us have the Holy Spirit in us, so all of us are potential wells. When we are functioning the way we’re meant to be functioning, the Holy Spirit is flowing quite naturally through us.
But for a lot of us, the foundation has collapsed. And that foundation is our identity in Christ. It’s grace, you might say, the foundation of this whole journey. Well, why am I not experiencing the life God wanted me to? It’s because the spirit is not flowing, and why is the spirit not flowing? It’s because the foundation has collapsed and as a result of that, my life is collecting garbage, right? It’s like I’m collecting stuff I don’t want to be there. Whether it’s addictions or emotions I can’t handle, or behavioral patterns I can’t seem to break. And in the same way that the well didn’t fix itself, there was a team of people that was involved in this process.
And I think it also reminds us that it takes a community to see the kind of transformation that we want to see. So you can see the whole FISH model in the well story, right. Freedom has to do with getting rid of the garbage and the snakes. The Identity is resetting that foundation. Spirit is the flow of the water from within. And Heart-Focused community is both the community that helped to restore the well and then the community that benefits from this new life-giving well that’s been reclaimed.
[05:55] Stephanie: Hallelujah.
[05:56] Marcus: Yeah, it’s a cool story.
[05:57] Stephanie: It is.
[05:58] Marcus: I’m like, when I first heard it, I’m like, that’ll preach. That’s good.
[06:01] Stephanie: Talk about a word picture or a whole story that is a great metaphor. So we love to root things in the scripture, obviously. Do you want to unpack the Romans background and maybe the story of how you developed figuring out the core elements of a heart-focused discipleship?
[06:21] Marcus: The core scripture behind this is Romans 5-8. And I was asked to go do some training for a group of pastors out in Oregon. This is probably ten years ago now. The topic was discipleship. So I started walking them through Romans 5-8 and I started asking them questions like, would you agree, first of all, that Romans 5-8 outlines what it takes to be a successful Christian?
Paul’s point in writing this is that a lot of people are stuck. They’ve put their faith in Christ, but people are concerned that they need law in order to grow. And he is trying to explain to them, no, you don’t need law, you need grace in the Holy Spirit. I said, so let’s look at Romans 5-8 and ask ourselves the question, “What does Paul say is absolutely essential to transformation as a Christian?” And it’s pretty clear that he starts with dying with Christ. Well, dying with Christ, you know, is about surrendering our life to Christ, yes, but a lot of preachers never get past that.
And so every sermon is just surrender again, surrender again, surrender again. I’m like, well, what if there’s more to it than that? Because the idea here is that sin enslaves us and Jesus said also that truth sets us free. Well, if truth sets us free, then the counterpoint to that is that lies enslave us. So we look at sin and lies as the two primary things that enslave us and keep us in bondage, and we died with Christ to be set free. So the first principle of Freedom is anchored in this idea that we died with Christ specifically, so that we could be set free from all that enslaves us.
That means that at conversion, we are given our freedom papers. And now, in discipleship, we are learning how to live that out. We’re learning, how do I actually claim this freedom? How do I fight for this freedom? How do I live out of this freedom? You know, you think a lot about our own American civil war and the release of slaves, that just because they got a piece of paper, didn’t mean that the story was over. In the same way, just because we’ve been granted freedom at our conversion, doesn’t mean that there isn’t a process of growing in our ability to live in that freedom.
So that’s what discipleship is about, there at the first point. The second one is Identity, and that has to do with the idea that we are raised with Christ. So if we’re raised with Christ, why? So we die with Christ, why? To be free. We’re raised with Christ, why? So that we can live out of a new identity. And this is directly related to the idea of maturity, because maturity can be defined as acting like yourself, while you’re enduring hardship well. And so the more that I can act like myself, act like the person God says that I am, the more mature I am as a Christian.
So we see, once again I’m given a new identity in Christ at my conversion. In discipleship, I am growing my capacity to live like that person in more and more situations, in which it takes more and more to overwhelm me, so that I don’t act like myself. I think Paul put it this way in Ephesians 4:1, he said,” Therefore, as a prisoner for the Lord, I urge you, brothers, to live a life worthy of the calling you have received.” And I think that it’s another way of saying, live your life based on your new identity.
Then the third thing is the Spirit. And again, if you read Romans 8, he goes, from all this hopelessness, and woe is me, to you know, why do I do what I don’t want to do? And then we get to Romans 8, and all of a sudden there’s the law of the Spirit, right. And there’s the Spirit of adoption who is in me. And he cries, Abba, Father. And he’s talking about how the Holy Spirit now enables us to live a different kind of life. And so we put it the same way, at conversion I’m born of the Spirit, and discipleship is about learning how to walk in the Spirit.
And then we go to the last one, and then all of this is done in the community. So Paul is talking not to an individual when he writes Romans, he’s talking to a community. And we need to be in the kind of enriched soil that is promoting growth, freedom, identity and spirit. So when you put all these things together, you see that these pastors all agreed that Romans 5-8 was, in fact, laying out a very clear model. A model of what it takes to live a successful or victorious Christian life, that it involves freedom, identity, spirit and heart-focused community.
So the question then became, so how many of you would say that your church has a very clear process for helping people live with greater freedom? Forty-five pastors were there and not a single hand went up. I’m like, well, how many of you would say, my people could articulate their identity in Christ? Let’s not even ask if they’re living out of it. Do they even know what it is? And probably only three of the forty-five pastors raised their hands like, I’m confident my people know their identity in Christ.
And then I said, “How many of your people could, not even asking if they are doing this, but just how many of them could explain the difference between walking in the flesh, and walking in the Spirit?” And again, very few of them felt any confidence that their people in their congregation even knew what the difference was, between walking in the Spirit and walking in the flesh. I said, “If you don’t know the difference, guess which one you’re probably doing?”
And then you get into a heart-focused community and you realize that all of these pastors were committed to the community. They all had small group programs and they all had Sunday school classes, for that matter. But there was no sense of these people being connected and sharing life at a heart level, and all of these things go together. I look at this, and I’m like, so how did we get here? You know, how did we get to the point where every church I know has a discipleship program, and yet none of them are using the model laid out by the apostle Paul, right? It’s like, how did we get here?
And that’s why we talk about a broken discipleship factory, it wasn’t supposed to be like this. It’s pretty clear what needs to be happening. So I look at this in my own life. I need to be working on my freedom. I need to be growing in my capacity to live out of my identity. I need to be constantly overcoming the flesh and walking in the spirit. And I need people around me who are on a similar journey, who are sharing this journey together. And that’s what the FISH model is all about. So that was a nice long explanation there.
[12:44] Stephanie: Oh, I love it. So good. Yeah. I kind of want to circle back around to the purpose of this book that you’ve written and who’s your target audience? Who are you imagining holding it, you know that everything you’ve just talked about, you can find in this book?
[13:01] Marcus: Target audience, I tell people “jokingly”, the target audience is me. And to a certain extent, it’s like I’m writing the book that I wish I would have had when I was first starting out my journey. I am reminding myself of the foundations of the christian life that I need to keep coming back to in my own life. But in the same way, this is a book for every Christian who is frustrated because they don’t know why, they’re nothing growing. They don’t know what’s missing. And the idea is, here’s a growth model that can help you do an assessment to see where the holes are that are missing in your journey. And if you are an overseer of a group of people, you can look at the programs you put together and go, where are the holes? Are we actually doing everything we need to be doing to help people live that abundant life in Christ?
[13:50] Stephanie: Excellent. I also want to circle back around to, at the beginning, I said “FISH”. And we’ve touched on FISH, do you want to touch on Go FISH?
[13:59] Marcus: Yeah, absolutely. It’s kind of funny. I was talking to a man whose last name was Fish when this came up, and h said, “So it sounds like what I’m hearing is you’re telling people to ‘fish and go fish.’” And it’s exactly right. The last chapter in here is on mission, and we often here at Deeper Walk, talk about kingdom impact. And one of the things having grown up in a missionary family, and a pastor’s family, well, my dad wasn’t ever a pastor. But he was a Bible professor, college president, and missions professor. So having grown up in ministry, let’s put it that way. One of the things that I realized was that there are a lot of people who go into ministry who aren’t free, and it sabotages everything they’re trying to do.
Or they go into ministry trying to create an identity because they’re not actually secure in who they are in Christ. Or they go into ministry in the flesh, trying to do this through their own power and their own strength, and they don’t know how to do ministry in the spirit. Or they go in and they become really isolated. How many people in ministry feel completely isolated, like they’re all alone, and they have to carry all the weight all by themselves, and they don’t have people?
And you look at all this, and say first of all, we see that if you don’t go through the FISH part of it, it’s going to sabotage the success of what you’re trying to do in the mission. That’s part one. Part two is that we can use all of these elements of the FISH model to do outreach. We can recruit people who are looking for more freedom in their lives. We can invite people to understand their identity. We know people are more curious about their identity.
It’s like how many people go and take identity profiles online to find out whether they’re a dwarf or an elf. I think people are fascinated with this idea of “who am I?” So we have ways of helping them do that. And spirituality versus carnality, how does this work, and what do the two bring together? So we can use these things in the way that we do mission. We can use them as invitations, points of invitation, as well as things that help us be more effective in our own ministries.
[16:04] Stephanie: Fabulous. Well, we are going to be going more into Go FISH and mission in our next episode. So for this episode, do you have any concluding thoughts before we wrap up?
[16:14] Marcus: Well, as we go through this series, I just thought I’d warn people that we’re actually going to walk through this model backwards. And one of the reasons I tend to read books backwards, is because I like to know where the author is taking me. And then I kind of work my way back and understand how we got there. In the same way here, I want to start with mission because I know a lot of people, especially when it comes to discipleship, feel like we tend to swing to one end of the pendulum or the other.
We’re either all evangelism or we’re all emotional healing. So we’re trying to show how all of these things fit together. And since I have a more of an emotional healing reputation, shall we say, I wanted to start with mission. So people could see how what we’re doing does lead to greater evangelism and greater effectiveness in ministry.
[17:01] Stephanie: So you follow up these illustrations by saying, ”My approach to evangelism came from a fear bond with God, rather than the overflow of joy I experienced, in my relationship with him.” And I think this is a sadly relatable sentiment. And I just wondered if you could push into that a little bit more.
[17:21] Marcus: Well, you know, my walk with God essentially started because I didn’t want to go to hell, right. So for me I could relate to an evangelism that said, “I don’t want anybody to go to hell. We need to tell everybody you know how to not go to hell.” Well, that’ll get you so far, right, that will get you started. But there’s a decidedly scary foundation to all of that. And then secondarily, the way that it was sometimes preached was that you’re not a good christian, if you are not out there doing this on a regular basis.
And when you’re a little kid in church you hear that your friend is going to go to hell if you don’t save them. So now I have a fear-basis for wanting to share with my friend. It’s like, “Hey, you know, you’re going to go to hell if you don’t get this.” “And I’m your only hope, so here I am, and Tada, I am here to rescue you.” And realizing I didn’t know what I was doing, and they didn’t fully appreciate what I was doing.
By the time I got into high school, in my own journey I was trying to figure out why I believe what I believe? Am I just inheriting my parents faith? It had a lot to do with, well, I had seen demons submit to the authority of Christ, and that was part of the foundation of my faith. So when I started to explain why I believed to my friend, I found myself talking about the authority of Christ over demons, and realizing this is probably not connecting.
Those early days were not good. It wasn’t honestly, until I was a pastor sitting down in a counseling context and being able to share Christ as good news. For the problems that they were bringing to me, I actually was able to lead someone to Christ for the first time. And I think in a seven year period, there were probably 25 to 30 people that I was able to walk through that doorway, into a saving relationship with Jesus. And each time it was because they were looking for answers, and I was able to provide them the answers they were looking for.
And so that’s a big reason why I’m excited about this model and its application to the evangelistic process. I found that in the way that I explained Christianity to these people, that I was relying heavily on the principles in this model. I didn’t have the whole model built out then, but the principles were already beginning to form.
[19:55] Stephanie: So you said in the last episode, how a lot of people know you for your emotional healing side of discipleship. So you wanted to start with mission, which is so important. I would love for you to unpack how the FISH heart focused discipleship model applies to mission, and we could start with Freedom.
[20:24] Marcus: All right, so when I think about freedom, you think about how many people in the world today are broken, and are looking for answers for their own issues. They’re stuck in addiction, they’re stuck in anger, they’re stuck with their eating disorders. They’re stuck with all kinds of things, and they’re looking for answers, and they are looking for hope. And too often they come to the church, and what they get is, “Well, that’s a sin, stop it.” Right. Or they get, “Well, just change the way you’re thinking about this.” Or they get solutions that are offered that don’t actually help them.
And so they feel like there’s no place for me here. Or more and more what we’re seeing, are churches who just welcome everybody in, with no solution to help them change. It’s like, come on in and be part of us, we’ll accept you here. Well, that’s better than the first one, but that’s not what Christianity is supposed to be about. Christianity is supposed to be about transformation.
When it comes to freedom and evangelism, I’ve seen many churches that have had tremendous “success”, if you will, in reaching the lost through their recovery programs. Through the things that they do, to meet people in their brokenness and their woundedness. And I think that’s part of it, right? We can reach out to people who are in need, if we as a church are already well practiced in helping people who have these kinds of needs.
So that’s the simplest, most straightforward way I could think of, that freedom connects to evangelism and helps us do that work. The other part of it is, what I’ve seen a lot of people do, including myself as a little kid and high schooler, was that I was trying to do evangelism, but I wasn’t free. And not only was I not trained, I had my own baggage that was keeping me from doing what I needed to do.
In fact, I think I remember one pastor who was well known for evangelism, who said, “He was so discouraged in his own walk with God that he found himself sharing the gospel with somebody; but in his mind he’s thinking, ‘you don’t really want to do this, do you?’” Which I think a lot of us can relate to because we’re struggling so much inside. Freedom is an important part of this, both in what we are offering to people, and also that we have to be growing in this area in our own lives.
[22:44] Stephanie: How about identity?
[22:47] Marcus: So, similar thing. One is we have people who are looking for an identity and we have a very identity oriented culture. A lot of people are having an identity pushed on them at younger and younger ages. And in our churches, we are not always as good at giving people a sense that we have an identity that comes from the kingdom of God. That we have this huge identity.
A lot of us have more of a sense of identity for being an American, right? Or more sense of identity from which political party we are a part of. We have smaller and smaller groups that we get our identity from. But what we’re trying to do is help people think of themselves as, I am a stranger and an alien here. My home is in heaven. I am a child of the king, and my whole identity is flowing from this kingdom source.
And so a huge part of discipleship is making sure that people are really well trained and well grounded, in the identity that helps them to be salt and light in the world. And if you think about it, if I’m a citizen of the kingdom then I am automatically an ambassador here. And so my identity, my kingdom identity is automatically going to direct me towards ministry. It’s automatically going to direct me towards mission and towards reaching people with the good news of the kingdom, right. That there is something out here.
So my identity motivates my mission. It’s also a part of what I am offering to people. The opportunity to have an identity that is eternal, an identity that matters for eternity, an identity that sets them apart, and calls out what is truly special about them. And what is truly special about them is what God has called them to be in Christ.
[24:43] Stephanie: So we’re doing mission out of our true identity – calling people to their true identity. I love it. How about Spirit?
[24:54] Marcus: So again, I’ve heard multiple stories about how learning to listen to the voice of God led directly to evangelism. I know one person who was pumping gas and the thought just came to them, you should tell this person about Christ. And they’re like, I don’t know this person this will be a super awkward conversation. But he couldn’t get away from the idea that the Holy Spirit really wanted him to engage.
And so reluctantly he kind of opened that door a little bit, tiptoed in, and to their surprise the person responded. And before they left the gas station that person had prayed to receive Christ. And they were actually thinking about it when they pulled up at the gas pump, like “I need Christ in my life, but I don’t know of anyone who can lead me to him.”
I sometimes think of the Holy Spirit as like a traffic controller or a logistics person. We gotta get this package to that location; we need somebody who can take it from here to here, and I choose You. And so a lot of times the Holy Spirit doesn’t tell us why he wants us to do stuff.
But as we are walking in the Spirit, as we’re learning to pay attention to those promptings, it’s amazing how often he wants to put us in a position to touch somebody’s life. A life that we weren’t even looking to touch. And that only happens if we are discipled and trained on how to walk in the spirit instead of the flesh. And the whole idea that there are thoughts in my head that aren’t coming from me, that might be coming from God.
[26:29] Stephanie: It reminds me of friends that we’ve had in closed countries where it’s dangerous to evangelize. Who rely very, very much on listening to the voice of God, because you can’t just walk up to anyone and say, “Hey, Jesus.”
[26:44] Marcus: Yeah, our pastor told a story about somebody in a closed country and he asked them, “So what percentage of people that you share Christ with say yes?” And this person said 100%. He’s like, let me rephrase, “If you share Christ with ten people, how many of them say yes?” He goes, “I understood the question, but evangelism here is not like evangelism in the United States.” “You don’t just stand on the street corner and pass out tracks, you can get arrested for that.” He said, ”We only share Christ with the people the Holy Spirit tells us to share Christ with.” “So if I go to share Christ with them I know that it’s because this is a Holy Spirit appointment, and this is somebody who needs what I am offering.”
And so I’m like, what a really different way of looking at evangelism. If I share with 100 people, percentages say 20 of them will say yes to this. Is more of God what do you want me to do? What is the leading of the Spirit in this? And so it’s just a very different lens through which to look at the task of evangelism. Now it still calls for a lot of courage because he doesn’t always ask us to do easy things. He doesn’t ask us to do things that look sensible sometimes, but that’s a big part of it.
And then the other side of it in terms of what we are offering to people, is this idea that there is a source of wisdom and power, and relationship with God. Like, how do we experience our relationship with God? Well, our relationship is confirmed in the covenant, but the experience of that relationship is primarily by the Holy Spirit. And so letting people know that a relationship with God through the Holy Spirit is possible, is one of the offers of evangelism.
[28:37] Stephanie: Well, and we could go off. But on the flip side of wisdom is also the power that you mentioned. I know there are a lot of stories of the Holy Spirit’s power in evangelistic settings. that the miracle is what helps bring people to Christ.
[28:52] Marcus: Yeah, no, there’s no question about that. There’s such a thing as power evangelism. Right. My dad used to teach a course, (your grandfather) at Trinity, on power-encounter in the mission field. So he had a whole course just on this idea, that most people who are following foreign gods, are following those gods because they have seen acts of power done in the name of that god. They know there’s power there.
What they’re not sure of is whether or not there’s actually power in Christ or whether there’s just talk. Because they know missionaries can talk, but what they don’t know is do you have any power? And so a lot of times there are these contests of power that take place. So part of being led by the spirit is also knowing when to step into these, and then having the confidence that when you do step into them, it’s because you know God’s going to show up here and do something.
[29:42] Stephanie: Yeah. All right apply the FISH model to heart-focused community and mission.
[29:48] Marcus: Yeah, and mission. So we’re gonna take the heart-focused community part of mission. Think about it this way. Churches have realized for a long time that it’s very difficult to invite someone to church if you don’t even like the church. And I think we’ve all been there at different times where it’s like, I’m not sure I’d invite anybody here. I go because I’ve got a commitment and loyalty, but this doesn’t really feel like the sort of place I’d want to invite somebody to. So there’s that element of it.
There’s also this idea though, do I have a group of people that collectively I would be happy helping people get connected to? Because I know that if they could meet my friends it would help them on their journey. That’s huge if I know that I’m not in the evangelistic task alone. Because this is not about me coming up with the right argument or the right formula, or the right strategy to get this person to Christ. But I actually have friends I can invite them to meet and there’s more going on here.
And also the idea that if I am in a community like this, I am more apt to do evangelism. I am more apt to actually share my faith with other people when I know I am not alone. And so it works both ways as well. And I would say that most of the people who have had a high level of success in their evangelism, are in a small group of people. People who are also highly committed to freedom, identity, spirit, and reaching the loss through those methods.
[31:21] Stephanie: So I want to shift us now to looking at joy and joy’s role in mission and all of that. Yes, we’ve talked a bit about joy in our previous podcasts.
[31:34] Marcus: Yeah, we have. So joy is one of the elements that Jim Wilder and Michel Hendricks mention in their book The Other Half of Church, as one of the four components of healthy soil and healthy community that need to be there. And so we take this to the next step, in that the opposite of a fear based approach to evangelism would be a joy based approach to evangelism. So the question becomes “What would that look like and how might we do that?” Not only where I am sharing and doing evangelism out of my own joy, but what if what I’m offering to people is joy?
And so I was thinking and I actually talked to a pastor about this. He told me that he was taking the three books, but right now there’s two that Chris Coursey and I have written. The Four Habits of Joy-Filled Marriages, The Four Habits of Raising Joy-Filled Kids, and we just turned in the manuscript for another one called The Four Habits of Joy-Filled Living. So he’s already told us his plan is to actually offer courses and outreach into his community, using these books because they are not Bible forward, they’re brain science forward.
And so he’s planning to use these for evangelism; that is, here you folks in the community if you want more joy in your marriage, the church has something to offer. If you want to raise more joyful kids, the church has something to offer. If you yourself would just like to be a more joyful person, the church has something to offer. And I’ve often thought, how would it change if every church in America could become a Joy Center? Right? That is, what if every church in America could become a place, where everyone in the community knew that they knew how to live with joy. They knew the church could train other people how to live with joy.
I’m thinking if I connect to a group and I have joy in that group, then I am suddenly way more open to everything else they have to share. And if I feel a joyful connection with these people and they’re helping me live with more joy. So I do think that part of what Chris and I did in writing these books is, and I’m not sure we even fully grasped it when we first wrote them. But we knew there was an evangelistic use for them, but hadn’t fully thought that through till this pastor said, “Well, that’s how I’m using them.” And I’m like, “That is so brilliant.” You know I really think we’re onto something here, if we could get churches, really around the world doing something like this.
[34:06] Stephanie: And it ties right into the heart-focused community aspect of FISH. And that it’s not just about growing together in community, but it’s also about reaching out in community. Reaching out with joy and not toxicity or shame, or you know whatever negative things we’re carrying. But if we can get our healing and our joy, and build “joy strength” together, then share it with others.
[34:33] Marcus: Yeah, you know joy is a much easier sell than fear. And I think too, joy keeps the motivation for what we’re doing high. Like Dr. Jim Wilder has often said, “That joy is the number one motivator in the world. When we can’t get it, we’ll settle for fear.” But there’s too many of us who our whole lives are being run on fear. And so, let’s face it. We are going to have more podcasts on joy coming up I’m sure, in the future. But in the the context of evangelism, this is where it fits.
[35:08] Stephanie: Awesome. Well in our next episode, we’re going to be talking more about Hesed community, heart-focused community. But is there anything that you would like to say to close out this episode?
[35:21] Marcus: Well, Christ taught what I call Four Kingdom Values. I remember doing a sermon series a long time ago on the Sermon on the Mount and said, “This is his kingdom theology.” And out of this kingdom theology comes four core values of kingdom people. And the first one was salvation. And the idea was there is nothing more important than making sure you get into the kingdom. That’s core value number one of the kingdom. We’ve got to let people know the good news that they can have eternal life in Christ, that they could be citizens of the kingdom of God, and that this whole kingdom reality is out there and can be theirs.
The second is stewardship. And this is the idea that God has entrusted me with certain gifts and talents, and I want to use those for kingdom purposes, and to reach people with good things from the kingdom. The third was spirituality. And this is kind of like the vine in branches. The idea that as the life of Christ flows through me then it enables me to be a better steward. I’m not doing it in the flesh, I’m doing it in the spirit now. It also allows me to do evangelism through the power of the spirit and so they work together really well. That this spirituality of life in the spirit flows into my stewardship, and flows into my outreach to people for the kingdom.
And then the last core value is servant love. And servant love is the idea that we love even our enemies according to Jesus, in the Sermon on the Mount. So what is that all about? Because that’s what kingdom people do. That’s who we are, that’s how we live. And so this is why it’s so crucial and why discipleship always leads us to loving our neighbors. And if we love our neighbors we want them to know about the kingdom, right? So it all fits together and I’ll close with those four core values.
[37:17] Stephanie: Awesome. We just got a sermon in like two minutes. I want you to spend more time on that sometime. Anyway, that was lovely. Thank you.
Well, today we’re talking about heart-focused community. Too many of us don’t think of relational joy when we think of discipleship, we think of discipline maybe, since it’s right there in the word. But the heart-focused discipleship model is a growth model, and we grow best in an environment of joy. I’m interested in hearing some strategies for people to not be stuck in isolation or toxicity.
And I know you’ve really appreciated the book, The Other Half of Church by Michel Hendricks and Jim Wilder. I think we’ve talked already about their analogy of comparing community to soil in previous podcasts. Do you want to walk us through their four key elements of the kind of enriched soil that catalyzes growth?
[38:11] Marcus: Yeah, absolutely. You know Michel Hendricks used an analogy in their book that jumped out at me and it was about growing tomatoes. And he said one year he grew a tomato plant and he took a lot of time and energy to make sure that it was properly nutrient dense. I don’t know if its’ just Miracle Grow or what you put into that stuff, I’m not a gardener. He put a bunch of this stuff in there and he got these amazing tomatoes. Well, the next year he planted the tomatoes again, but he was so short on time or something and didn’t do nearly what he should have done to prep the soil. The final tomatoes that came out were nowhere near as juicy and fresh as all the rest as the other ones.
And the analogy he pulled out of that I thought was just spot on. Which is that most of us if we look back in our lives to when we grew the fastest, or the most in our walk with God, it was when we were in a community of friends. We felt like we were part of a group and there was a lot of joy in that group. There was a lot of sense of belonging, like, these are my people.
And he himself told the story of being in a group like that growing quickly and then going through what he called “A 20 year lull”. I think in hindsight, he realized during that 20 years he wasn’t in that kind of community. He was not in those types of relationships and didn’t have that kind of belonging. And I think most of us can relate to that. That we look back to when my favorite time was to be a Christian, right? When was it the most energizing to be a Christian? It was when I was a part of a people or a group, and there was just a lot of energy in being a part of that people.
And that’s what we want to talk about here. I think you specifically asked me what the four elements of their soil are, right? And I got off of that, so here are the four elements. The first one is joy, and it’s this idea that I enjoy being with people. And one of the ways that you know that you are enjoying being with your group, is that you spend time together outside of the assigned times to be together.
If I’m in a small group and the only time I ever see them is on small group night versus, groups that I’ve been a part of where some of us would get together to play volleyball. Or some of us would get together to go shopping, or some of us would get together for something else. If you find yourself spending time with people outside of “group time”, that means I enjoy being with these people. There’s an element of joy involved in that community, so that’s the first part of it.
In fact, I was just talking to a friend down in Texas who just did his doctorate in ministry on the idea of joy in discipleship. And he was trying to measure, do people grow faster when there’s joy as part of their discipleship journey than they do when there’s not? And he came to the conclusion, absolutely. People grow faster when there’s “joy fertilizer”, it’s a catalyst to our growth. So that’s the first core element.
The second one is, and you’ll like this because you’ve been taking Hebrew, right? It’s the Hebrew word Hesed, which I thought was interesting. So Hesed – I have got to put a little “caveat” here, that there are two Hebrew letters for “H”. One of them is soft and the other one is rough, like the back of your throat, guttural. So most people like to say the second one – that’s just more fun. But to distinguish those when you write them into English the first one is usually just an h. The second one is either an h with a dot under it or it’s a ch, which is confusing. So you’ll sometimes see Hesed written, h e s e d, and sometimes c h e s e d. I just want to make sure that people know that I understand my Hebrew. We didn’t misspell this word.
But Hesed is a fascinating word and is probably the definitive word of the character of God. And when the Old Testament wants to define who God is and what his character is like, Hesed is the go to word, and it has been translated in a variety of different ways. The way I would explain it is this, it is the sense that because you are my people I’m going to do good to you. I can almost hear the Godfather, “Because you’re one of us, I take care of my own. You know what I’m saying?” But I don’t think that that’s core to God’s character, he’s not Don Corleone.
But there is an element, even an echo of that even in the idea that says, “Well, because you’re my daughter there are good things I will do for you, that I wouldn’t do for just anybody.” And so the first time that we see Hesed in the Bible is in Genesis, and it’s where Abraham’s servant is negotiating to have Rebekah come marry Isaac. The question is on the table and he says, ”So are you going to show me Hesed or not?” When his point here is that a good family would say yes, you know, that’s what we do for each other. And so there’s this Hesed idea. So the idea behind God is that he takes care of his people. You can count on him and you can trust him.
It’s an attachment based word because we have this attachment and because we have this bond. And what’s interesting is God is often bonded to us more deeply than we are bonded to him, but he still treats us out of his attachment love. So you might define Hesed as attachment love. Now we take this and we circle back to it as a quality of a small group or my people. And what we’re talking about is highly bonded people.
We’re talking about people who have a really deep bond with each other. Well, how do you form deep bonds with people? You have to have two key ingredients, vulnerability and empathy. So if I’m vulnerable with you, but that vulnerability is not met with empathy then I’m not going to be vulnerable anymore. And on the other hand I can invite people to be vulnerable but I’m never vulnerable myself. That doesn’t work either. So what happens is that groups bond as they are vulnerable with their weaknesses, and those weaknesses are treated gently and like protectors.
The other thing that grows bonding is going through hard things together and getting through on the other side. And so you’re like, “Ah, yeah, I remember when we all had to face this.” It could be as simple as we had final exams and, “Yay we made it through.” Or it can be little things. It doesn’t have to be, “We fought World War Two together, right?” It can be anything on that scale. But you could know how bonded military units are because they do hard things together and they overcome things together, and it just does something to bond you.
[45:40] Stephanie: They build trust.
[45:42] Marcus: You build trust, that’s Hesed, right? Hesed is that we are tightly attached together. Yeah, I heard the motorcycle, that’s all right we’ll get by. That’s the idea of Hesed, we do good to each other because we know that we belong. The next core element is group identity and what comes out of the belonging is identity. So in the book that I wrote with Jim Wilder, it’s called Solution of Choice. We talk about this model that says belonging plus identity, it’s also in Rare Leadership, equals transformation.
And so the idea here is that if I’m in a group where I know I belong, and I’m thinking, if you were going to have a substitute word for Hesed, it would probably be belonging. So joy, belonging, and identity. I know who I am because I know who my people are. And so my people are the sort of people who handle problems this way. My people are the sort of people who treat weakness, this way. My people are the sort of people who treat our enemies this way. So all of these statements about “who are my people”, and how it is for us to act out of our identity statements?
So a group identity is this idea that we have joy in being together, there’s a sense of belonging with each other, and I know these are my people. And coming out of that is a clear set of values and a clear set of – it’s just like us to do this. It’s just who we are, it’s what we do. And then the last one, the fourth element there is shame but it is healthy shame. Now for some people that’s an oxymoron because they think all shame is toxic. But one of the things in talking to Dr. Wilder that I heard him say about this was, that the right side of your brain when we experience shame, it’s more of a reactionary thing. It’s not until it gets to the left side of our brain when we attach a narrative to it, that it becomes toxic.
So it depends on the narrative that is attached to our shame whether or not it’s toxic. In this case what we’re saying is that in a healthy community, in a heart-focused community, I need to be able to say hard things to you, and you need to be able to say hard things to me. It’s not enough for us just to be happy all the time. It’s a happiness that can get us through hard things together but it’s also a joyful connection. That is we have a strong enough relationship for me to tell you hard things. So one of the tools that we use for this and we explain in Rare Leadership, is the envelope conversation, of making the relationship more important than the problem.
Start with your relational history, explain the problem, and state your hope for a positive relational future. So let’s keep the relationship bigger than the problem. We have to have a group that knows how to deliver a healthy shame message. And the definition of a healthy shame message is one that keeps the relationship bigger than the problem. So those are the four core characteristics as I understand them, as they were taught in Michel Hendricks and Jim Wilder’s book, The Other Half of Church.
[48:54] Stephanie: Yeah, let’s camp out a little bit longer on this idea of weakness. At the heart of building a healthy group identity is how we view weakness, and how we treat it. Can you unpack that?
[49:07] Marcus: When I think of weakness and group identity my mind immediately goes to locker rooms. Probably because I played about six different sports growing up and spent a lot of time in locker rooms. You know when the leaders on a team are bullies and when the leaders on a team are protector leaders. Protector leaders when they have weak members on the team; come around those guys and they don’t let them stay weak, they do what they can to help them get better. Whereas bullies actually have a vested interest in keeping them weak. Now they may say, “I’m trying to toughen you up”, but really what all the bullies are interested in is making sure they stay at the top of the pecking order.
So you cannot grow a healthy community, you can’t have a heart-focused community if you are brutal to weakness. Right? To have a heart-focused community you have to be gentle with weakness. So I think for example, using the locker room idea, when I was in college, I loved basketball and played basketball my whole life. But they had a requirement at this college that you had to run 3 miles in under 21 minutes before you could go inside to the gym. Well, first of all I almost never ran 3 miles consecutively in my life. I was usually just a gym rat, I ran around a lot but just going and running was not my thing. And then secondly, doing it at that kind of pace wasn’t something I was used to.
And so the first couple times I went out I wasn’t even close, right? I was running in 22, 23, 24 minutes. So the guys on the team – though they didn’t just shame me into it, but they gave me a healthy shame message. And essentially, you know you got to do this, but we’re going to help you. And so four of them said, “Let’s go run this together and just stay with us, and let’s Just talk our way through. Let’s just run it together and don’t even think about the time. Let’s just hang out while we run and let’s get through it.”
I ran it in 18 minutes. It literally knocked five minutes off of my time because I was doing it relationally with them and wasn’t thinking about what I was doing. And so they met my weakness with gentleness, but not in a way that just said, “Well, that’s all right, if you’re weak you just stay that way.” It was a way that helped me grow and get better and not stay in that weak condition.
[51:19] Stephanie: That is a beautiful example. It can definitely be overwhelming to look at where you want to be, and then realize where you are and how far you have to go. I know for me, sometimes it feels like there’s this glass ceiling where I can see clearly where I want to be, or what skills I want to have, and I’ve just reached the end of myself. I can’t get there in my own strength and it’s frustrating, but it’s okay. And we’re not supposed to do things in our own strength. Part of this journey is learning to show grace to yourself.
[51:52] Marcus: Yeah well you know, as “somebody who’s completely made it” and doesn’t have any gaps left, you know, I can’t really relate to what you’re saying. Yeah, no, you get the idea. It’s like we’ve all got those gaps, and we all have days where I don’t even know if this works right?
[52:06] Stephanie: You know I’m in seminary right now and working and trying to balance lots of things. And sometimes I have friends who just look at me and are like, “What, you’re human?”
[52:17] Marcus: Exactly.
[52:18] Stephanie: You know realistic expectations. And above all we just need to seek the Lord, he is so good and able. And he cares and he knows what we need when we need it. So all that to say, what are some strategies for people to start where they are? It’s not just, “Oh, now I know the answers and I will be perfect or find the perfect community.” What are some strategies?
[52:40] Marcus: Well, I do think that when we come to strategies, it helps to have a sense of where I’m at in my maturity development. Life Model likes to talk about infant, child, adult, parent, and elder level maturity. If you think about it, in those cases an infant can’t do anything for themselves. So they kind of need somebody to invite them into a group, create the group, invite them in, and get this thing started. And that’s okay. Some of us are in places where I’m isolated and I’ve been living in isolation, and I wish somebody would create this for me. Well, part of the maturity process is taking the next step to create something for yourself, and not wait for somebody to do this for you.
So I would say that part of your growth journey is going to be finding ways to build a little bit of joy into every relationship that you have. We put it this way. You want to be the sort of person who when people see you coming, they go, my problems are about to get smaller, not my problems are about to get bigger.
And so one of the things that some of us do if we’re stuck at infant level maturity, what we have trouble with is that we show up wanting it to be all about me, and all about my problems. And so sometimes we are too quick to dump on people all of our problems, instead of coming at it like, “I want to find a way to add joy, so that you leave being happy that I came.” And how you do that is just in a way that you contribute something that is positive. So those are skills that we need to kind of work on and continue to grow.
So our next step in some cases really depends on where you’re at. For some people, it’s going be adding a little bit of joy in every connection that they have. For others it’s going to be you need to go join a group, even if it’s not a great one, just get in a group someplace. And then what you want to do is add joy to the group. You want to be as vulnerable as seems appropriate in that group level, and make sure that you’re meeting people’s things with empathy.
So I think the next steps here for some people, if I’m like an adult, parent or elder, I may want to start a group. And so when it comes to some of us too, realizing that our group options aren’t limited just to our local church, that we can think bigger than that. It’s okay to have my people who are part of my local church and that’s a good thing, and I want that. But I can also, especially in this Internet age, I can have other people and I can make connections online.
So we encourage people to consider journey groups if they can. It costs some money, but it’s still an option for people who can’t find what they’re looking for locally, and don’t know how to go about creating it yet. So those are kind of the options. I can just start where I’m at and try to make my relationships a little bit better. I can do something online. I can join a group. I can start a group. Kind of the next option depending on where I’m at in my own personal journey.
[55:51] Stephanie: Sure.
[55:52] Marcus: That’s a long answer. There we are. Okay.
[55:54] Stephanie: : Thank you. Thank you for your in-depth understanding. Any final thoughts to conclude today’s episode?
[56:01] Marcus: Well, the word that keeps coming up in my mind is just catalyst. And that is, if you want to catalyze your growth, if you really want to see changes as you’re going deeper in your walk with God, you have to have this. It’s like a tomato trying to grow but it’s in really lousy soil. We have to have this enriched soil.
So that means I need to take some next steps and I need to find some ways to get connected. Because if I’m trying to do the christian life in isolation, at best, it’s going to be a lot of hard work. And at worst, I’m going to just find myself discouraged and quitting. So isolation kills. We definitely want to engage. And even if it takes a little bit of a sacrifice, it’s a good idea to make sure that you participate in some type of group activity like that.
[56:57] Stephanie: This episode living in the Spirit, the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, is a topic that we could spend many, many episodes on. For today, we are going to look at some key principles and practices for what it looks like to walk in the spirit. You’ve said, ”Trying to live the Christian life in the flesh is a bit like a Jedi, going into a fight and deciding not to use the force.” I mean, right?
[57:21] Marcus: Yeah, exactly. It’s like, forget the force, I’m just going to beat this guy with my fist. Right.
[57:28] Stephanie: While that’s an apt analogy, we also want to be very clear that the Holy Spirit is not just “some force.”
[57:34] Marcus: He’s not “the force”, it’s not a synonym.
[57:36] Stephanie: He is a person, he is God. We can have an intimate relationship with him that’s not just power related. And one of the keys to our walk with God is seeking and relying on his wisdom. I’m excited to look today at one of my favorite of your acrostics, S.L.O.W.
At Deeper Walk we have a fabulous community we call Trailblazers, who have committed to donate monthly $25.00 dollars or more to support the ministry of Deeper Walk. And I bring this up because something we do for new Trailblazers, (that’s my impression that we are still doing that), we’ll send them a keychain. On one side of the key it says S.L.O.W, stop, listen, obey or watch. Do you want to explain what this acrostic is, or give a story.
[58:24] Marcus: Oh, sure. So the reason that SLOW is out there, but I need to back up here. I’ll just say what SLOW is and then I’ll give the story. So S.L.O.W stands for Seek, Listen, Obey, Watch. So S.L.O.W, seek, listen, obey, watch. Sometimes I use stop instead of seek, this idea of stop and seek. So this acrostic was developed because I was looking for a way to explain what it looked like to walk in the spirit instead of the flesh. So I would go to Paul’s writings where he says,”So I tell you, walk in the spirit and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh.”
And I’m like, “Great, so this next paragraph is going to explain how to do that, right?” And it wouldn’t, it would just go on to another topic. And I was starting to get frustrated with Paul honestly. I’m like, “Hey, why don’t you explain this for those of us who don’t intuitively know what it means to walk in the Spirit?” He said it like everybody knew what he was talking about. So you gotta backfill from there, what is he talking about walking in the Spirit? So having spent a lot of my time in the Old Testament, one of the things you notice in the Old Testament is that those people who are wise, are often described as being filled with the Spirit of God.
Now sometimes it’s Spirit of the Elohim in Hebrews, or “Spirit of the gods” is sometimes how it’s translated. But I think the idea is that the Spirit of God inside someone tends to refer to the idea of wisdom. Thus we have Bezaleel and Aholiab, who are the architect engineers of the tabernacle, it says they were filled with the Spirit of God. Daniel was filled with the Spirit of God, and so he was able to give wisdom about what they should do. Joseph was filled with the Spirit of God, so he had wisdom about how to handle the upcoming famine and that sort of thing.
So we see this routinely in the Old Testament that when it wants to emphasize the idea of being filled, it is talking about now having wisdom from God about what to do. But we see the same thing in the New Testament. Peter being filled with the Holy Spirit proclaims on the day of Pentecost the explanation of what everybody is seeing.
I began to think well, let’s look for continuity between the Old and the New Testament and not try to pit them against one another. And if you’re looking for continuity, you understand that what the New Testament calls walking in the spirit, the Old Testament calls wisdom, right? And those two things are essentially synonymous.
The other thing I noticed in the Old Testament was that when they used the expression, “That the Spirit came upon someone”, that was usually for power. So when the Spirit came upon Samson for example, Samson didn’t suddenly become wise, right? He became powerful and he was able to defeat his enemies. And we see this routinely in the book of judges, that the spirit of God comes upon someone and then power is the result. And throughout the Old Testament it’s a routine reference.
Now, I don’t think it’s 100% but it’s pretty close, right? It’s like almost always those are the distinctions between them. In the same way when the Spirit is coming upon someone, Jesus says to the apostles, “Wait for the Spirit to come upon you, then you will receive power”. So we see both of those things happening.
So my basic gist here is that wisdom is primarily the relational element of this. And that is when I’m walking with God relationally, in that relationship he grants me wisdom to know which way I should go. As the Old Testament says, “You’ll hear a voice behind you saying, this is the way, walk it.” Whereas when I am walking in the Spirit I am much more likely to see the power of the Spirit flow. And I think that the power of the Spirit tends to flow primarily in the area of our giftedness.
So for me that tends to be more in teaching. I regularly find myself when I’m teaching, saying things I wasn’t planning to say and going, “That feels like a God thought.” And sometimes when I’m teaching I will find myself talking to myself like, “You know, you need to listen to what you’re saying right now.” And that’s sort of this God thought where the power of what’s happening is happening through your gift.
And so some people have a gifting that is more oriented towards healing, or more oriented towards miraculous and things like that. Thus they’ll tend to see that power in those contexts more regularly. So that was a long answer to SLOW, Right.
[01:02:50] Stephanie: I was even thinking as you were talking, I just kept hearing “with.” That wisdom is doing things “with” God.
[01:02:58] Marcus: It is and that would be the other Old Testament word that you hear a lot. In fact when I was in seminary I heard a sermon called “The Withness of God.” And it’s this idea that throughout scripture how often did God say, “I am with you.” And that him being “with” us was the key to all of it. Well, through the Holy Spirit living in us God is with us all of the time. And so those two ideas are definitely connected.
[01:03:23] Stephanie: Huzzah. How can we know that what we are hearing is God? How can we recognize our wisdom versus God’s wisdom, versus. “Oh, my father’s pretty wise and he’s telling me something, is that from God?”
[01:03:44] Marcus: No, that is a tricky thing. I know a lot of people whose lives have been derailed because they thought they were hearing from God. In fact if you go to most psych wards, you’re gonna hear a lot of people who are convinced they’re hearing from God. And I know people who have ended their marriages because a pastor told them, “God told me you’re supposed to divorce your husband.” I mean, yeah, there’s a need for discernment.
And so when we’re talking about wisdom, it might help to define it from an Old testament perspective. Wisdom starts with discernment. And discernment is the ability to distinguish what is good for me and what’s bad for me. And so as a parent we want to teach our kids discernment, “Don’t touch that stove, that would be bad for you.” You know, “Don’t eat that, that would be bad for you.” And so our goal is we want good things for people. You have to learn discernment about what’s going to lead to good and what’s going to lead to bad.
Well, the problem of course is that life is so complicated that we can’t possibly know everything, and no one person can have all of the wisdom that they need for life. And so God does that on purpose I think, because he wants us relationally to connect with him to get his wisdom and his guidance. Now the frustrating thing about that is that he often doesn’t do it the way we want him to. So if I’m saying, “Should I marry this person, should I go to this school?” “What is the will of God for me, am I supposed to do this or do that?” I find that he often doesn’t answer those directly, and part of that is because he wants me to walk through the process with him. In the end he’ll get me where I need to be.
But sometimes there’s just a process to it and my problem is impatience, I want it now.
I want it immediately and I want the instant gratification of being able to stop and hear God right now, and know exactly what I’m supposed to do. And for a lot of us I think the reason that’s a problem is that we’re doing it out of fear. If I don’t hear from God then I’m going to get this wrong and then everything’s going to fall apart. And we’re trying to use walking in the spirit as a way to be perfect. I have found that I can walk in the spirit and still make mistakes. And that is, this is not a recipe for how to be perfect and get everything right all of the time.
I heard Bill Gillham years ago, he wrote Lifetime Guarantee, and he had some good exchange-life teaching. And he said it was possible to walk in the Spirit and still burn the eggs. You might hear the Spirit say, “Yeah, make breakfast for your family this morning.” Well you can still mess that up even though you heard from God correctly. I think we need to have the freedom to realize that we’re not talking about an expectation of perfection. That if you get this part of Christianity right you’ll never make a mistake again. So I think it’s important to understand that too.
[01:06:38] Stephanie: I feel like you used to teach SLOW more as stop, listen and obey, and you have started teaching it more as seek, listen, and obey. And I think some of that comes from what context you’re in. So stop would be more in a moment of temptation, that you would stop and listen, versus seeking being more of a lifestyle. .
[01:07:00] Marcus: Yeah, that came from my own experience. I grew up in a church that could be described as, “Father, Son and Holy Bible.” It was that kind of church, I certainly didn’t grow up in the charismatic world. And the idea that God wanted to speak to me, honestly in my theology as a teenager and even early in my twenties was that I didn’t ever expect to hear from God in my entire life. And that if I did, it may be once or may be twice about something really important.
But this idea that I should have a conversational walk with God, a listening walk with God, wasn’t on the radar. My picture of wisdom was to study the Bible and the Bible will fill you, and that will make you wise. And there is some truth to that. Because the Holy Spirit did author the scriptures, and it does give us a worldview that helps us discern things, and recognize what’s going on.
And I think that in our next session, we’re going to be talking about the role of scripture in helping us walk in the Spirit. But the problem is that when you’re only using the scripture, and you don’t have the Holy Spirit involved, then it’s like a plane that’s only got one wing. You’re just going to go in circles a lot. I think the original question was, how do you know the difference?
[01:08:20] Stephanie: Yeah.
[01:08:20] Marcus: Right.
[01:08:21] Stephanie: Yeah, discernment, testing, all that.
[01:08:23] Marcus: So there’s a couple of things on discernment. The first one I point to is that you can discern whether or not the Holy Spirit is leading you, because it will always lead you to the fruit of the spirit. So if you sense God is telling you to do something but it’s directly contrary to the fruit of the Spirit, then you know that’s not God. So if he’s saying, “Be impatient and yell at this person.” Right. That’s not coming from God. If it is, “ Don’t show self control, just indulge yourself.” That’s not coming from God. If it’s something that’s leading you to not be loving or if there is no peace in it.
And when we say peace, I want to be careful about this. Because there’s a lot of counterfeit things in the new ways you can give people peace. It can give people euphoria, that can give people a feeling of ecstasy, like, “Oh, this has to be God because I feel so good.” What we’re talking about more is that I have a peace that this is the sort of thing that God would want me to do. And part of the way I know that is that I know scripture. But also part of the way that I recognize it is, that there’s this prompting that I’m getting. Yeah, you can kind of tell this is the right thing to do, and there’s a peace about it. Like, this is the right thing to do.
So we start with simple ones. I was very upset with your mother, I know you’ve never seen us upset with each other. When I get upset I tend to shut down, in this case I got in the car and I was running an errand. In my mind I’m just like, chewing her out, I’m so upset. And I’m feeling very justified in my anger and very justified in where I’m at. And all of a sudden there’s this random other thought that comes into my head, which was, “You’re just having a pity party.” Well, you know that didn’t fit the narrative that was going on in there. And I took it as a Holy Spirit thought because I’m like, well, what would happen if I follow that line of thinking?
So I’m like, all right. And it stopped me in my tracks because it was kind of a surprising thought. And I realized, yeah what I’m doing is I’m feeding my flesh. And it’s pretty clear in a situation like this which one’s the spirit and which one’s the flesh. Because you’re talking about which path is going to make God happier, and which one is clearly a more loving thing to do. And I find that most of the stuff that we’re talking about when it comes to walking in the flesh, walking spirit, is that sort of thing. This path is clearly more in line with what God would want for our lives.
[01:11:04] Stephanie: I would also jump in there and say I think that there is a tone to God’s voice. That he says things gently or he might say something very hard nosed, or that it could be said with a condemning tone. But in my experience when he has convicted me of something, it hasn’t been a”eww” kind of feeling. You know, even if it’s something that makes me go, “Oh, man yeah, I need to change this.” I know it’s God who’s convicting me of it because I feel peace about the fact that I’m being convicted about it.
[01:11:44] Marcus: There’s no question about it. I would say that most of the time when I know it’s God it’s corrective. Right. That’s one of the ways I know it’s God because I’m in my flesh, and I’m going down this road and I get this random thought that is not in sync. And so it startles me into “wait a second, I need correction here.” But every time that I’ve felt that correction, even though it’s been a healthy shame message, I have left feeling like you will be happier with yourself, if you do it this way.
[01:12:17] Stephanie: Yes it’s not a toxic shame message. It’s not like if you have one bird on your shoulder feeding your angsty thoughts, it’s not another bird coming and saying, “How dare you have these bad thoughts, or you’re just having a pity party?” In that way it’s not a toxic shame, it’s a healthy correction.
[01:12:33] Marcus: Yeah. And that’s what happened in that case too. So by the time I got back from that errand I was in a much better place. And I was able to have a very different conversation than I would have had. And the evening turned out a whole lot better too. So all those things help. So that’s one way that we know it’s the spirit, it will lead to the fruit of the spirit, that’s my first test.
If you got to take it to the next level there’s some things that are just purely not scriptural. And like, you know, you need to divorce your wife and marry this other person in the church. That’s clearly not God, that’s not scriptural. And then there’s also direct testing, especially when it gets into spiritual experiences. Because almost everything the Holy Spirit does the devil can counterfeit, so because of that we have to test experiences.
I’ll give you an example of this, I got an email one time from a missionary. There were nine teenage kids in this church who were all slain in the spirit at the front of their church, and simultaneously had exactly the same vision. Now on the surface that would sound like, “Well, if that’s not the Holy Spirit, what is?” Right? The Holy Spirit gives them a dramatic experience in a church, with a special evangelist there, whose gift is having people experience the Holy Spirit, and they have the exact same vision. So how can that not be the Holy Spirit? Well, that’s fine until you hear the vision.
And the vision was essentially teaching pure legalism. And what they did is they visited heaven and they visited hell. What they saw was, for example, christians who enjoyed christian rock music were burning in hell. The Christians who danced were burning in hell. It was just going through straight legalism. So I sent back a message to the missionary, and I said, “Can you think of a better way to start a cult, than to give somebody a supernatural experience like this that nobody questions?”
And now they say, “Well, we all know what God wants now, we all know the right thing.” Cults are characterized by believing that there’s one person who’s got a special connection with God, that nobody else has. And we all have to submit to what that one person hears from God. Well, that’s really dangerous, you know? And even Jesus left twelve apostles, not just one. And one of the reasons I think there’s twelve apostles and not just one, is that there was no one voice that said, “Everybody submit to this one person.”
[01:15:00] Stephanie: Well, we even see in the scriptures Peter and Paul having corrective conversations.
[01:15:06] Marcus: Yeah, we do and I think that’s for our edification and our benefit. Once you start getting this idea that only one voice is the final arbiter of all things that are true, you’re starting to go down this slippery slope to something very cult-like. So we do test the spirits and other ways that we test the spirits are sometimes with direct tests. And a direct test would be somebody who’s had a supernatural experience and wants to test it to see if it was legit. You just say something like what we call an “If” prayer.
Like, “If” this is the Holy Spirit, then I thank you for the experience, and I ask you God that it will bear great fruit in my life”. But “if” I have been deceived and that was not the Holy Spirit, it was a counterfeit, then I renounced that experience in Jesus name. And I command that spirit to leave.
Well, I’ve done this probably 30 to 50 times with people in my life. And I’d say right now it’s about 50/50, with how many of them are the Holy Spirit, that it really is the Holy Spirit. And how many times they were actually deceived by something and it was a counterfeit religious experience. And I say that because the Holy Spirit is not offended by that test. The Holy Spirit has never said, “How dare you think that I might be a demon. No you did what the Bible told you to do, you tested the spirits. This is me, we’re all good.” And everything went forward and that person was bearing fruit in their lives.
But we have had people who’ve had counterfeit tongues. They’ve had counterfeit miracles. They’ve had counterfeit religious visions, they’ve had counterfeit all kinds of things, even psychic abilities. You know they’re claiming to be prophets but they’re actually not. They were actually getting things from a demonic spirit. So we do test these things because some people have never heard that they can be counterfeited. And so they just assume that because it’s happening in a church, it must be God, it must be the Holy Spirit. So it’s one of the reasons why we do blend the spiritual warfare training with our walking in the spirit training, to try to bring balance to this and make sure that we don’t get deceived.
[01:17:11] Stephanie: That’s really good. And wow, I can’t believe we’re already at the top of our time here. Like I said at the beginning of the episode, we could have many, many episodes just on doctrine of the Holy Spirit and such.
[01:17:24] Marcus: There’s no question about it. Yeah.
[01:17:26] Stephanie: I encourage you to get the book A Deeper Walk and read more about this. But for now, Father, do you have any other things that you wanted to make sure you touched on in this episode?
[01:17:39] Marcus: Well, yeah. The main thing as I started to say earlier, is that I did not grow up in a church that taught this stuff. One of the reasons that this fluctuates between stop, listen and obey, to watch, seek, listen, and obey, is that I learned the process as stop, listen, obey, in a temptation context. And that is when you’re tempted, you stop and listen. Right. There’ll be a still, small voice inside. That was the advice a pastor gave me.
And so that’s how I started my journey and I realized that it worked, that I often got surprising thoughts. Now there have been times when I was tempted and I stopped and listened, but I didn’t hear anything. But usually if I stopped long enough I knew what it was that God wanted me to do, even though I didn’t hear anything. There was like this “knowing”, I know he doesn’t want me to go do this stuff.
Which brings us to two kinds of listening and I’ll just wrap up with this. And that is we call right brain listening and left brain listening. Left brain is what most of us expect. And that is that I’m going to get a clear distinct thought in my mind that is obviously the Holy Spirit. Or I’m going to actually have an audible voice or a vision or a dream, or something that’s going to tell me what to do. Well, that’s more left brain hearing. It’s where God interrupts us and just makes it clear this is what’s going on.
Most of the time I think that our listening is right brain. So just like right now you and I can look into each other’s eyes, and then we can read each other’s body language. And I can kind of tell it’s like, it’s time to wrap up right now. But also this is good. I don’t want to cut it off. There’s a lot you can read just from body language, right? And I’m looking at this like most of our communication is nonverbal.
Well, I would call the right brain listening “nonverbal communication” with God. We don’t hear something per se, but we know what it is God wants us to do. And there’s more of a sense of knowing or a sense of peace that I’m on the right track. I just need to keep going where I’m going. And so I would just encourage people that there’s more ways to hear God than just having him interrupt your life, with some sort of a vision or a clear word, or something like that. More of our daily walk with God is that right brain kind of connecting with God. Where we begin to intuit what we sense he’s leading us to do.
[01:19:52] Stephanie: That’s awesome. I also feel led to just give a plug to Dawn Whitestone’s book, Strategic Business Prayer. It is good for more than just business, so look it up.
[01:20:03] Marcus: Well, yeah, the Strategic Business Prayer book she wrote first teaches you how to do listening prayer and then it applies it to business. So if you’re just interested in how to do listening prayer, it’s still one of the better resources out there on how to do it.
[01:20:16] Stephanie: Yeah. Very good. And in the last episode we were talking about living in the Spirit. And your acrostic SLOW, seek, listen, obey and watch. As we move into talking about scripture, I wonder if you could talk more about where you see SLOW applied in the Bible.
[01:20:37] Marcus: So one of the first things that jumped out at me is the book of Joshua. And Joshua had a lot of battles to fight. So I look at Joshua as a really good paradigm for the victorious christian life. And the victorious christian life is the idea that we will have battles to fight. But if it’s a battle God wants us to fight and God is in it, there is always a path to victory. And so the question is, what is that path to victory?
And God lays it out for Joshua at the beginning and he said, “Be strong and courageous and obey.” So obedience was the key to victory for him. Well, how did he know what to obey? And he realized that for every battle that Joshua fought he had to stop, seek God, listen to what God wanted, and then obey that. And then he got to watch what happened. He also got to watch what happened when he didn’t stop and he didn’t seek God. Because if I don’t stop and I don’t seek God, then I can’t listen.
And that happened to Joshua with the Gibeonites who came and they pretended to be from a distant country. And he did not stop and seek the Lord on what to do. And that was the one time he got into big trouble because he didn’t stop and seek the Lord. So he wasn’t able to listen and obey, and we watched what happened. Now even that was redeemed though because the battle where the sun stood still is where they went to defend the Gibeonites. Joshua definitely sought the Lord on what his strategy should be for that battle.
And so even in spiritual warfare situations with people I’ve often told them, let’s stop and ask God for his strategy for this battle that we’re in. And so that’s where that came from. We see that illustrated there nicely I think in Joshua. His whole campaign was based on stop, seek the Lord, listen to what he has to say and obey. And then watch what happens and go forward. It also reminds me of Jesus’s words where he says, “Watch and pray so that you don’t fall into temptation.” Because I think it sort of completes the cycle that as I’m living a life of watching and praying, I’m more likely to recognize that it’s time for me to stop and seek the Lord.
I can give you one more while I’m on this because it’s like the Torah. The Torah is anchored in the creation story. And so we see God creating stars and the sun and moon. The moon to rule the night and the sun to rule the day. And then the stars remind us of seasons. Well, that word “seasons” is the same word that the Torah used for its festival season, right? It’s time for tabernacles, it’s time for Passover, you know whatever the festival was.
And so one of the things that we see in the Torah was that the Tabernacle and then temple worship, was anchored in a morning sacrifice and an evening sacrifice. Which is related I think to sunrise and sunset. And I can’t get over the idea that sunrises and sunsets are beautiful because they are calls to worship, they’re reminders. Stop and seek me, let’s spend some time together. And then every week there was a sabbath and on Sabbath they did a double sacrifice. And then once a month there was a new moon and every new moon, there was a double sacrifice.
And then there were week-long festivals where you weren’t supposed to work. In fact I totaled it up one time, that if you took off every day that the Torah tells you to take off, 70 days a year were vacation days. Right. That’s pretty good. And literally we talk about a 10% tithe of money, but there was a 20% tithe of time. And so we see that resting was actually an act of worship to God. To take the time off and to trust that he would take care of you, even if you didn’t work yourself to death.
And I think how much better our lives would be if we actually took the time to rest that the Bible puts in there. To stop what we’re doing and seek the Lord on this regular basis. So there’s sort of this calendar reminder. Stop and seek me, listen to what I have to say, and then obey. Then watch what happens and see if you don’t see more peace in your life.
[01:24:41] Stephanie: That’s beautiful. So beautiful. Oh man, I love your perspective on the Old Testament. And yes, thank you for your contagious love of the Old Testament. I’m in Biblical Studies masters right now, and I’m gonna be doing an exegesis of Joshua next semester. I’m just very excited.
[01:25:01] Marcus: Yeah, you’ve got some great profs down there too, so it should be a good time. I’m looking forward to gleaning from what you’re learning.
[01:25:10] Stephanie: Someday I would love to have a series of just digging one episode at a time into your Biblical theology overview.
[01:25:17] Marcus: That would be cool.
[01:25:18] Stephanie: But right now we’re going to firehose.
[01:25:20] Marcus: We are firehosing today.
[01:25:21] Stephanie: So your biblical theology overview around here is known as WWW.PLAxN.COM. Do you think you can give a brief overview?
[01:25:32] Marcus: Well, first of all WWW.PLAxN.COM, it’s the word plan with an “X” in it and PLAxN.COM is an active website. You can actually go there but I don’t know what it takes you to. I haven’t been there in a while. The idea here is there are nine building blocks of Biblical theology that every Christian really ought to know and understand. So when I was in seminary we used to have this discussion of, is there a central theme to the Bible? And some people are like, “Well, it’s Jesus.” And some would say, “Well, it’s the kingdom of God.” Or it’s “the promise” that was given. And there were all kinds of ideas. Or it’s God’s eternal purpose in creation. A lot of people have had ideas about what’s the centerpiece.
I used to argue that if there’s a centerpiece, it’s the idea of worship. And that is God created us to walk with him. So, if you define worship as walking with God. That is his purpose in creation was to have a family that would be relationally connected with one another, and relationally connected to him. That’s what worship is. We express our worship to God through our connection with him and through loving our neighbor. That is how we walk with God.
Walking with God is about trusting him and obeying him. Growing more intimate with him in this process of trusting him, knowing him, and obeying him. As we know, trust and obey God, is just this cycle that continues to get us deeper and deeper. So coming out of that in our discussions at seminary, was this idea that there is something called “Creation Theology.” And that is lessons that are anchored in the fact that God is the creator. Lessons anchored in the fact that this is how God designed the world. And this is sort of foundational to understanding the worldview of scripture.
And so the “WWW” of these building blocks are all related to what we might call creation theology. And they are lessons that apply to all humanity and all places. And the first one is worship and worship as walking with God. The idea that God’s purpose for creation was to create a people who would have a relationship with him and walk with him. And so God created paradise.
And we get glimpses of this now and then because we have these moments in our lives where like, “Life just can’t get any better than this.” And it’s a glimpse of that paradise God created us for. But as we all know we don’t live in paradise right? “Paradise has been lost”, as someone famously said.
We live in a fallen world that is at war, so the second “W” is warfare. And that you cannot understand this reality unless you understand that we live in a world at war. And this takes us directly to the problem of suffering and evil in the world. Jesus said when he was here, he called the devil “The prince of this world”, right? That the world is under the influence of the evil one. So the evil one is free to roam the world and there is evil that is free to happen.
And I heard a pastor years ago say, “God allows evil, but he uses evil, and he overcomes it.” So he clearly allows evil cause it’s happening a lot and he uses evil. We see this in Joseph who was “evilly” sent into slavery and was “evilly” sent to prison, and was “evilly” left there too long. But God used the evil that happened to him to put him in just the right position to create a redemption story. And then he overcame it by “raising Joseph from the dead” so to speak, and giving him this place of glory. We see this in Job, we see it in Jesus, we see it in Esther, and we see this in stories all through the scripture.
So there’s the idea that God created the world for worship and created paradise, but that we live in warfare. We can’t understand life until we understand that we are born into a world of war. And so to help us in this fallen world at war we get to the third “w”, and that’s wisdom. And it’s this idea that there is a universal wisdom that we all are called to. God said, “Life is too complicated for you to figure it all out, so let me make this simple for you. Trust me.”
So that’s why we get to like Proverbs 3:5-6, “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make your path straight.” And that word “acknowledge” is Yada, right? It’s the Hebrew word that can be translated to” be intimate with.” Thus it says, Adam, Yada’d Eve and she got pregnant. Right? So you have this intimacy idea that God says, “In all your ways be intimate with me, and I’ll make your past straight.”
So that brings us right back to the S.L.O.W., seek, listen, obey, and watch. So the “WWW” of this is anchored in this idea of creation theology lessons. They come from the nature of the world, our worldview, and how we look at what’s going on in the world. God wants us to know that there is a wisdom that will guide us into a path that ends in his blessing, even though we live in a world that’s fallen. So we want to get on that path that leads to what is good. God says, “Well trust me, obey me, and that path will end in blessing. So those are the first three.
[01:30:44] Stephanie: This next part, the PLAxN, I remember you teaching my fifth grade Sunday school class. We would use our hands and you would walk us all through it. So this is simple enough for fifth graders.
[01:30:56] Marcus: Yeah. “Are you smarter than a fifth grader?” So if you want you can take your right hand and turn it towards your face, staring with your Pinky. And you count down starting at 2,000, 15,00, 1,500, 500 and zero. So you got 500 year intervals between each finger. Now there is no zero BC or zero AD, one BC goes to 180 but I use zero just to keep it simple. So we got 2,000, 15,000, 1,500, 500 and Jesus at the zero marker there. So I’ll just ask you because you know this stuff, right? So which famous Bible character was alive in the year 2,000?
[01:31:36] Stephanie: Abraham.
[01:31:37] Marcus: Very good. And which famous character was alive in 1500?
[01:31:41] Stephanie: Moses.
[01:31:42] Marcus: And in 1000?
[01:31:43] Stephanie: David.
[01:31:44] Marcus: There you go you see she’s known this since fifth grade. So my pointer finger is not a person, it’s the exile. And then the thumb of course is Jesus. That’s your standard Sunday school answer. So we have Abraham, Moses, David and Jesus. Now what those four characters all have in common, is that God had a covenant associated with each one of them.
So if you think about covenants in today’s world, a covenant is like a wedding or marriage covenant. And so we think of rings as the symbol of those. So what we like to do is put a “ring” on each one of those covenant fingers, Abraham, Moses, and David. We call it the Abrahamic covenant, the Mosaic covenant, the Davidic Covenant, and then Jesus brings the New covenant. So the first one going back to 2,000 BC and Abraham. The Abrahamic covenant is regularly called “The promise.” And so that is the “P” of PLAxN, promise. The mosaic covenant is called the “law”, so that’s the “L” of PLAxN.
And then the covenant with David was the promise of an anointed one who was coming. So the Greek for anointed one is Christ or Christos. The Hebrew is Mashiach from which we get Messiah. So you have Christ the Messiah, The Anointed one who’s coming and that he’s promised to come through the line of David. So we have PLA, promise, law, and anointed one. And then we have exile and the new covenants. So if you just take the four covenants it spells P.L.A.N, promise, law, anointed one, and new covenant.
[01:33:14] Stephanie: Look at that.
[01:33:15] Marcus: Look at that. Who knew? I think God set that up.
[01:33:19] Stephanie: God likes to make you smile.
[01:33:21] Marcus: Yeah, just to make me smile. So God’s plan for the world was to bring his son to be the promised seed through whom all nations on earth would be blessed. So the promise is sometimes called “the gospel preached ahead of time” in the Old Testament. And I find it interesting that this promise in one of the settings in which it was given, was called “The binding of Isaac” Abraham binds Isaac and puts him on the altar. They just kind of role play the whole thing that Jesus the promised seed is going to do, that will bring salvation to the world, and thus bring blessing to all nations on earth. And today in every nation on earth there are Christians. So we’ve seen the fulfillment of this promise already.
[01:34:06] Stephanie: Do you want to touch on the exile’s role within the plan?
[01:34:09] Marcus: Yeah. The exile is the one non person. When I was studying in seminary and was really diving into the theology of the exile, there were two passages that stood out. Both referred to the exile as divorce. I’m like, that got my attention. It says, “God gave faithless Israel her certificate of divorce and sent her away.” I’m like wait, “God’s divorced, is that what this is?” And so it brings up this question, “Well when did he get married?” That takes us back to the law and the law of Moses.
Sometimes look at it this way that the promise is a little bit like an engagement. It’s when they were betrothed and then the law is when they actually got married. So there’s this marriage covenant at Mount Sinai where Moses is presiding. He says, “Do you Yahweh, take Israel to be your people?” And then Israel is like, “Do you take Yahweh to be your God, forsaking all others?” And they say “Yes”, and they enter into a blood covenant.
So there is blood that is sprinkled on the altar to represent Yahweh coming into the covenant and there is blood sprinkled on the people. You know it probably didn’t get all of them, but the idea is that they are both brought into this covenant. The prophets referred to it as a marriage, that they had gotten married. But I like to say that Israel essentially committed adultery on their honeymoon. You know right there at Mount Sinai Israel was worshiping the golden calf. Later in the desert they were worshiping the Baal of Peor.
And the imagery of idolatry and adultery were just linked all through Israel’s history. We actually see an interesting picture of this in the life of Solomon. And that is that Solomon like Israel, God spoke to Solomon just as God had spoken to Israel. And Solomon built a temple and at the centerpiece of this temple was the Holy of Holies, where the ark was that has the law inside.
And the first commandment of the law is “No other gods beside me.” So just shortly after Solomon builds the temple saying, “I’m going to worship Yahweh. This is his temple on the earth, no other gods besides him.” What does he do? His foreign wives convince him to permit the worship of their gods and soon he’s building shrines to them.
And so Solomon just like Israel had done is breaking the covenant. He is committing spiritual adultery and the penalty for that is exile. And we see a glimpse of this because God took ten of the tribes away from Solmon and gave them to somebody else. And that’s a foreshadowing or picture of Israel’s exile. And then we see this just building and building. And you realize that God had every right to send them into exile much sooner than he did, but it was his patience and his mercy.
So finally he sends them into exile. Both Ezekiel and Jeremiah who are the prophets when the Babylonian exile occurs, leads them to foretell a new covenant that is going to come. It will in a sense replace the law, and the new covenant will surpass that one. And then Hebrews in the New Testament does a really good job of unpacking how that all works.
So the exile is important because it sets the stage for why a new covenant was necessary. And then the new covenant I like to say, is not only the thing that replaces the law, but it fulfills the promise to Abraham, and it fulfills the promise to David. So it brings all of these covenants together in one, and it’s the fulfillment of all of them. So the exile kind of ties all these covenants together in a pretty unique way.
[01:37:52] Stephanie: Yeah, I guess so. I don’t think I’ve ever actually thought about the foreshadowing of Solomon before, that’s really cool. I learn something new from you all the time, I love it.
[01:38:04] Marcus: You know in one of our books, The Deeper Walk Guide to the Bible, we have a segment on the Exile and that chapter kind of camps out on Solomon. I call it,”The slippery slope to exile.” It’s got its own acrostic to it and everything, shocking. But yeah, it was one of those things that jumped out at me when I was studying the Old Testament intensely, back in the kind of early days of ministry.
[01:38:27] Stephanie: So do you want to do any more on the new covenant, or do you want to talk about “Dot Com?”
[01:38:32] Marcus: Yeah, let’s go into Dot Com and make sure we get there. Because the new covenant is the covenant of grace as opposed to law. Right. And then when we get to Dot Com, and “COM” is a little bit different because “COM” stands for “coming of Messiah.” We talked about creation theology and WWW. I call the PLAN you know, salvation theology, which most people are very familiar with, and then Dot Com represents kingdom theology.
And it’s this idea that the kingdom has come in Christ and thus we are living in the last days. But until this present evil age ends we’re still waiting. So we’re in this already not yet period. That the kingdom is already here spiritually but it is not yet here physically. And so when Christ does return that will be the coming of Messiah. That’s when this present evil age ends and his throne is established in Jerusalem and he literally reigns over the earth. And so all of our prophetic views of the kingdom are kind of anchored in that part of the acrostic.
[01:39:45] Stephanie: One of my favorite aspects of your teaching is how you’ve helped me understand a Biblical worldview. Having an accurate understanding of what the world is, how it works, who God is, and how we relate to him. To say this is important is an understatement. So I really appreciate that. And I know we’ll look more at worldview more in depth in a later series. But for now I’d love for you to talk about the Bible’s role in developing and understanding worldview.
[01:40:18] Marcus: Certainly. Yeah. I sometimes say that at the heart of discipleship is the idea of worldview. That culture starts with belonging and that these are my people, and then my people share a common perspective on life. And so most of us our worldview is our assumptions about life that we never even think about. But when we explore them, worldview encompasses a lot of things including “how do things happen, what causes things to happen?” Like, is there an overarching narrative that fits it all together?
And so worldviews are often expressed through the narratives of a culture or the mythology of a culture. So in that sense of the role that myth plays in some cultures, we look to the Bible as true mythology, if you will. It’s saying this is the actual narrative that we need to have. And so one of the reasons that studying the Bible is so important is that as we internalize scripture, it begins to shape our worldview.
One of the ways that it does that is that the more that I embrace scripture, the more I fill my mind with scripture, the easier it is for me to see life as an extension of the Bible. It gives me the categories by which I evaluate what I’m looking at. If I don’t saturate my mind with scripture, and if I don’t have the worldview that comes from Bible study, then I will get my narrative on what’s happening from someplace else. And that creates double mindedness and double mindedness robs us of peace, and creates all these other problems in our lives. So yeah, hard to overstate how important that is.
[01:41:55] Stephanie: Yeah, that’s perfect. As we are wrapping up this very, very rich content episode, can you just leave us with some strategies for interacting with your Bible? Or memorizing it so that you can start achieving this saturation?
[01:42:12] Marcus: Yeah. Most people I talk to say, “Oh, I am terrible at memorizing. You’re so lucky.” They’ll tell me, “That Bible memory is so easy for you.” And there’s some truth to that. Right? God gave me a mind that remembers things. But there is something called Bible quizzing. When I was young it taught me to spend usually 10 hours a week or more taking walks with my Bible, like for an hour a day or sometimes two or three. And I got in the habit of repeating a phrase at a time to myself, and as soon as I had that phrase down and I could say it perfectly three times, then I would add a phrase. And then I say that one perfectly three times and then I would put the two of them together, right.
And what I found was that generally in about 15 minutes I could actually memorize three verses. And most people are like, “Really?” And I’m like well, try it. So the goal is to take 15 minutes on any two verse or three verse segments of scripture. See if at the end of that 15 minutes in just through this repetition process you can actually recite that. Now what you’ll probably find is the next day you’ll forget it, and that’s why you have to do it again.
And that’s why you do this every day. What I found when I was really doing this as a major part of life, I found that it was not really that hard to memorize a chapter in a month. And so once you get to that point where you’re actually memorizing whole chapters, it really begins to reshape your brain. It begins to reshape the way that you think and the way that you’re looking at life. So I say this because most people are intimidated and they don’t even try.
The other thing I found really helpful was having a partner. A retired gentleman asked me one time if there was anything he could do to be supportive. And I said, “Well why don’t you be my Bible memory partner?” And so we got together once a week for an hour and just reviewed all of these things, and it kind of helped keep me anchored and moving forward. So I encourage Bible memory, encourage Bible study, and honestly Bible reading.
And I think one of the problems we have is that too many of us have gotten used to five minutes of Bible here, five minutes of Bible there. And I think even if we just took Sundays for example, and said, “I’m going to take an hour this Sunday and just read my bible for an hour.” That would be huge for a lot of us. I just want to encourage people to start where you’re at and to start picking away at this. You can actually learn a lot more than you think just by building a habit into your life.
[01:44:58] Stephanie: I would also just encourage that if you can read a whole book at a time. If you can set aside a Sunday and just read a whole book, I have found that to be very enriching. And you get the whole context of what the book is trying to do just reading it straight through.
And so on the flip side of it, if you’re not doing the memory work or if you’re just wanting to saturate your mind with it, instead of saying, “Okay, I got my chapter for the day, or I got my reading.” You could sit down and just read a whole book and you can start with a smaller book. But I have found that to be very good and helpful. Thank you dad, any final thoughts? We need to wrap up here.
[01:45:41] Marcus: Yeah, we covered a lot of territory. Obviously the whole Bible in one podcast. But hopefully people get the idea that you can’t have a deeper walk without scriptural knowledge. And I think in the chapter of my book I end with this story. A missionary was smuggling some Bibles into a closed country, and after he made the exchange, he said, ”So, do you want us to come teach?” And the person looked back and kind of with this stunned look on his face held up the Bible and says, “Bible will teach.”
And I think that’s part of this. We all need to keep growing in our ability to feed ourselves from God’s word.
[01:46:19] Stephanie: 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, and share with a friend. Do you love this channel? One of the best ways that you can support us is by becoming A Deeper Walk Trailblazer. You can find information at deeperwalk.com.
Thanks again. We’ll see you back on the trail next week.