[00:00] Stephanie: Welcome to the On the Trail Podcast. For this week’s compilation episode, we are revisiting The Kingdom Worldview.
One of the things Jesus came to do was to teach us a kingdom worldview; to see life as God sees it, to understand reality as God understands reality. And so we were just talking about what you consider common sense is, determined by your worldview. So, Father, what is worldview?
[00:27] Marcus: Let’s start with the definition: my worldview is the lens through which I look at reality. That’s a simple definition. It’s the beliefs and assumptions that determine how I explain reality and how I evaluate reality. I say beliefs and assumptions because a lot of times assumptions are essentially beliefs that I don’t even realize I hold.
From culture to culture to culture, people have beliefs and assumptions that determine how they explain what they are seeing, what they’re experiencing, and also what they value as important or beautiful or just or good or evil. All of these things can change depending on your worldview. Again, it’s the lens through which I look at reality. It’s the beliefs, either the ones I assume to be true or the ones I ardently argue to be true, that determine how I explain and evaluate what I see around me.
[01:33] Stephanie: And why is it so important?
[01:36] Marcus: We’re talking about reality and that’s why this is so important. How do I see reality? A simple illustration I heard somebody use long ago, is if your worldview says that your car runs on unleaded gasoline, but it actually runs on diesel, and you put unleaded gasoline into your diesel engine, you will ruin it. So your worldview is your concept, that mental picture of how the world works and how reality works.
The other reason it’s so important is that it determines what solutions you think are possible because it determines what you think causes things. So what we’re really going to focus on here, there are a whole lot of dimensions to worldview, but we’re really going to hammer in on the idea of causation.
What makes things happen? Why do they happen? I’ll give you an example. I talked to a friend named Bill Jones, who had once worked with somebody who had pounding headaches. Now, you said common sense comes from our worldview. Most of us westerners have a worldview that says, if you’ve got a pounding headache, what do you do?
[02:57] Stephanie: Go to the doctor, take an aspirin, do something.
[03:00] Marcus: Exactly. You take Tylenol. If that doesn’t work, you take more Tylenol. If that doesn’t work, you take Tylenol with something else in it. If that doesn’t work, you go to the Mayo clinic. You go to some specialist. You get a brain scan, whatever. She did all that for years and years and years, just pain management, trying to manage these pounding headaches until finally she met with Bill. Bill had a worldview that said, “You know what? Sometimes headaches are caused by spirits.”
Now, most of us laugh at that. That’s like cartoon fodder. “The demon of headaches has gotten me – haha – isn’t that funny?” It’s because our worldview doesn’t think that’s a possible solution, so it’s not common sense to us.
[03:45] Stephanie: But also, I would also interject that there are some people who have been around who found a demon under every rock, so others are jaded by that worldview because that’s the extreme of it. I’ll just throw that out there too.
[03:59] Marcus: And that’s the thing with worldviews. You can go into opposite extremes.
One example of the opposite extremes is about a missionary working in an Amazonian jungle village when a measles epidemic broke out. The villagers decided to cut the heads off of all the roosters. What made that a common sense solution? They believed that measles were caused by spirits. Even when the missionary tried to show them a slide of bacteria, saying “You can see the microorganisms that are behind all of this!”, their interpretation, their worldview was so entrenched that the chief thought he was seeing the spirit when he saw the microorganism.
So your worldview will determine what you see as possible, and what you will see as causal, and therefore what you see as possible solutions.
So, back to the story of Bill Jones and the woman with the headaches. What ended up happening was that she had actually gone on a short term mission trip, picked up an occult object, and brought it back with her. Her headaches essentially started when she got back from the mission trip. So when my friend had her destroy the object and command anything demonic to leave, her headaches literally stopped in the middle of the prayer and never came back.
And so we would say from a kingdom worldview, it makes sense to consider spiritual dimensions for solutions to the problems in our lives. It goes on and on and on beyond that. That’s why worldview is so important, because it will determine what we think is real, which will determine how we explain what is real; It will determine what we think is important, and it will determine the possible solutions that we are willing to consider in trying to fix problems.
[05:44] Stephanie: I know I’ve had the benefit of growing up in your household. You’ve been figuring out a lot of things. You’ve been on a journey where you’ve discovered a lot of things even as I’ve been older, and so I haven’t had all of this from the very beginning. But worldview-wise, I’ve always felt very centered and comfortable with a biblical worldview, and I haven’t had to ask what the other answers are. I really appreciate it. Thank you.
[06:11] Marcus: Well, there is something comforting to knowing that your worldview can explain what you’re experiencing.
[06:18] Stephanie: Yes. Things do not throw me for a loop. I see other people thrown for a loop. That’s one of the reasons why I’m so passionate about a biblical worldview. It would help so many people.
So I’m just curious, when did worldview start becoming important to you personally?
[06:35] Marcus: So, you know this actually came from your grandfather. My dad was a missionary who then was asked to teach missions. Part of teaching missions is teaching cultural anthropology because everything is cross-cultural. And how do you bring things into a cross-cultural context? When trying to explain to people how culture works as a missionary, my father taught the model that explained that culture is like an apple. The outside of the apple is what you see, which would be the behaviors of the culture, the unique customs of the culture.
He gave this example: If you go to Egypt and get an invitation to a dinner, if you show up on time it is considered rude, because the servants are just showing up at that hour to start the process. Everybody knows in that culture that you show up an hour late. Whereas in other cultures, if you’re not there ten minutes early, you’re late.
So you’ve got to know the traits or the customs of each particular culture and how they’re different from one another.
But then you understand that underneath that outer layer of behaviors and traits and customs are the values. What is the value that drives that behavior? I want to honor my host. I don’t want to bring shame to my host, I want to make sure he’s totally ready for me to show up. Understanding starts the process of developing the habits. If I come late, and that honors my hosts, whereas in other places, if I make the person wait, that dishonors them, I have to understand the values behind the customs. In this case, the value of honoring somebody is what is driving my choice of arriving early, late, or on time.
[08:23] Stephanie: So, that’s where we talk about honor/shame cultures, or fear, what would be the flip side of fear? We would say joy, but [how does that relate to culture?]
[08:31] Marcus: It’s true. Different cultures have different values of what they think is more important or less important. Even in terms of how you dress. In some cultures, you show some ankle and you’re inappropriate. Other cultures don’t care what you wear to the beach. All of these things are expressions of value.
So values come, then, from the core of the apple. If you think of the values as the fleshy part of the apple, then the core of the apple is worldview. And worldview is, again, the assumptions and beliefs I have about how all of this works, what is real and what isn’t real. It answers questions like, where did we come from? Why are we here? Where are we going? How does life work? Is there a God? What is he like? All those are the kinds of questions worldview answers.
And so there are some classic, common worldviews that we all know about – Islamic worldview, Hindu worldview, Buddhist worldview. There’s an animistic worldview. There’s a secular/atheist worldview., and there’s postmodern worldview. We have all these worldviews out there, and part of the challenge is how do we all get along when we don’t believe the same?
That is the big challenge. One of the things that makes kingdom worldview so unique is that we are told that even if people don’t agree with us on the worldview, we still need to love them. Now, the church obviously hasn’t always lived that out, but that is what we’re called to, and that’s why we want to talk about it.
[10:13] Stephanie: We talked a lot in our Solution of Choice/ Broken Discipleship Factory series, about the four good ideas that neutralized western Christianity, and much of that could come back to worldview as well.
[10:26] Marcus: Yes. Every growth model is anchored in a worldview, because my worldview determines what I think transforms people. And so in those four good ideas to neutralize western Christianity, the first worldview was about truth. They looked at reality and said, truth is what drives all change. Therefore, get your truth right, and everything else will change. The next idea was choices are what drives reality. And then it was power that drives reality.
And now we’re at a point, where everybody believes something different so everyone says we just need to let everybody do whatever works for them and not worry about truth at all. We are starting to move past that. I would say that we are actually not so much in a postmodern world anymore. I think we’re moving into the next phase where a new truth is emerging, it’s just a very anti-Christian truth. People are calling folks to believe in a specific absolute about how the world works. It is just the opposite of Christianity.
[11:31] Stephanie: So unfortunate.
[11:32] Marcus: Yes, what a happy topic, but that’s kind of what I see going on.
[11:36] Stephanie: So we just finished the first series on worldview that needed tweaking, and then a whole series on discipleship in terms of a kingdom worldview. I’ve heard you teach before about discipleship as assimilation, the process of transitioning from one culture to another and learning the ways of the new culture. Tell us more about that.
[11:57] Marcus: Yes, there is this aha moment when we become a Christian, that part of our identity in Christ is that I am a citizen of the kingdom of heaven. I had this aha moment when I was taking my dad’s class on cultural anthropology and putting it together with the biblical teaching about citizenship. I was thinking that part of what’s happening in discipleship is that I now belong to a new culture, and so belonging is at the core. I went from belonging to the world to belonging to the kingdom. Just like if I were to move from one culture to another culture, and not just move there, but now I belong there, and now I would say, these are my people, I want to fit in. I want to learn how they think. I want to learn what they value. I want to assimilate into the culture.
In the same way, discipleship is essentially a guided assimilation into the kingdom of heaven. How do people in the culture of the kingdom of God look at reality? What do they value? How do they live?
Discipleship is first belonging: these are my people. Then the worldview grows out of that, which is my theology and how I deal with some of my assumptions about life, and then my values grow from that, which results in a transformed way of living.
[13:25] Stephanie: So if somebody wanted to do a Bible study that would help them get more focused and entrenched in a kingdom worldview, what would be some good places for them to start?
[13:36] Marcus: You mean actual scriptures?
[13:38] Stephanie: Yes.
[13:42] Marcus: Genesis is where all of this starts. The problem we have when we read the Bible, is that we read the Bible with our lenses already in place.What we kind of have to do is read the Bible while questioning our lenses.
For example, in the Torah (the first five books of the Bible), God is constantly appearing to people, speaking to them, showing up in dreams. He is talking to humans in almost every chapter, which raises the question, does God still do that today, or did he stop talking once the Bible was written? Is the Bible God’s final revelation so that from now on, all we have to do is go to the Bible?
I don’t think that’s what the Bible is intending to say. I think the Bible is pointing us to spiritual realities that are supposed to shape the way that we live today. It is less about where in the Bible I go to get this worldview than it is about making sure I allow the Bible to question my worldview.
I would just go back to Jesus’s own day and the Pharisees.The Pharisees were Bible scholars. Nobody knew the Bible better than them. They had the whole Torah memorized. They had most of the prophets and the psalms memorized. The problem was that they had created a worldview that said certain things about the messiah, and certain things about the Sabbath, and certain things about the spirit of God, and certain things about this and that, which did not allow experience to open their eyes to the possibility that their worldview interpretation might be wrong.
Therefore, nothing they saw Jesus do could get them to question their worldview, or to question their theology, or even to go back to the Bible and say, could I possibly have read this through the wrong lens?
That is what our danger is today. We often experience things that should cause us to go back to the Bible and read it again. There needs to be a dialogue with God asking, did I miss something here? Would you show me? How do you want me to look at this?
I think all worldview starts with the Torah, with Genesis, and then it goes out from there. If I’m going to camp out on another passage of scripture, it would be the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7) when Jesus, who is a teacher of wisdom, sits down and teaches people where to find the good life, which is what blessed is. If somebody is blessed, it means that God has been good to them. How do I get God to be good to me? is another way of saying, where do I find the good life? That is what wisdom is all about.
Jesus walks us through and he gives us a kingdom perspective, a kingdom worldview. He lays out kingdom values and then he wraps up the sermon on the mount with, “The wise person has heard my worldview teaching and my values teaching, and now they are going to put it into practice. This is the way they’re now going to live. The foolish have just heard all this, but have decided that they are going to go their own way.” We still see that to this day.
Mature disciples are growing a sense of belonging, a sense that these are my people. They are also adding to their faith, knowledge, which is this perspective of the kingdom, and having a kingdom perspective on everything they look at.
Let’s face it, if it was that easy, then everybody in the church would always agree on everything. But we don’t.
Part of what we’re doing is using worldview language instead of just theological language. We’re trying to use a little bit different filter to help us think about this thing through a little bit different angle to see if it helps clear some things up for us.
[17:58] Stephanie: Well, on that note, the next episode we will be looking more at Worldview and Kingdom Theology. But for now, any final thoughts to close this?
[18:07] Marcus: Well, I just know that for me, the idea that worldview leads to solutions has been huge. One of the things that sets Deeper Walk apart, the reason that people often say, I love coming to your ministry, is that we offer a variety of solutions. We’re not a, “we have a hammer, therefore everything’s a nail” kind of ministry.
It’s because we have a worldview that says attachment and belonging are important, maturity skills are important, demons are real, the Holy Spirit is still active and engaged in your life today, and the scriptures are the foundation.
We have a worldview and a holistic approach that brings all of these things together, which allows us to see what the right solution is for the problem in front of us, instead of trying to make all problems have a single solution. I hope it’s encouraging to people that we’re going to be taking a dive into this, and I’m excited about it.
[19:05] Stephanie: I’m also delighted to dive back into this topic with you. Worldview. It informs how we understand and interact with reality. I’ve heard you quote an ivy league professor saying, “What we get students to assume to be true is far more powerful than what we have to argue is true.” I think that has universal application outside the classroom.
So today let’s start by talking about why grasping the kingdom worldview is so important for Christians in particular.
[19:34] Marcus: I sometimes look at discipleship as learning to live in a new culture. It’s just like when a missionary has to go into a cross-cultural context. Not only do they have to teach the Bible and teach Christianity, but they have to do it in a cross-cultural way.
In a sense, Jesus came from a different culture. We are brought into that culture with him, and so you could define discipleship as learning to live and act with a kingdom worldview, which is the essence of Christianity.
My dad was an anthropology professor, and worldview was really central to a lot of what he taught. That has formed my opinions too, and really helped to open my eyes to its importance.
The other side of it is that, as Christians, if we don’t have a kingdom worldview, what worldview are we going to live with? We’re just going to be clones of the culture.
[20:35] Stephanie: At best it would be a syncretist worldview.
[20:39] Marcus: And that is a problem with Christianity all around the world. We have our core cultural worldview and then we slap a little Christianity over the top of it. That’s syncretism, as opposed to actually transforming our worldview to be conformed to the Bible.
[20:55] Stephanie: Can you talk a bit about apologetics? How would worldview affect Christian apologetics?
[21:00] Marcus: When I was your age, they used to call it presuppositionalism, so they got a shorter word now as a worldview approach to apologetics.
The idea is that you can look at the exact same evidence and it means totally different things depending on the filter (worldview) that you’re using .
I’ll give you an example. There were some researchers at a university in Arizona who were doing studies on the power of the mind. They had a worldview that said there are no spirits, that Christianity is not true, everything that happens in this world is physical and material and energy. They believed that the mind could generate energy.
So they were doing a classic, occult parlor trick, trying to make a table levitate. Well, in the middle of their session, it levitated. Not only did it levitate, it started going around the room, and they were chasing this table around the room. Yet that experience was not enough to convince them that spirits are real. They were convinced that it was just the power of their mind doing this and that it was out of control.
We even see this in the life of Jesus when he did miracles. He taught people things, they experienced it, they saw it. But their worldview was so locked into what they interpreted from what they saw Jesus doing, it did not change their lives.
Worldview has that much power. It’s the filter through which we look at everything in life. Apologetics-wise, this is why it is often hard to even have a conversation with some people, because our worldviews are so different that our words don’t mean the same thing.
[22:49] Stephanie: Yes. Even just defining terms can get hairy because you have to have the same worldview, or at least understand each other’s worldview.
[22:57] Marcus: Yes
[22:57] Stephanie: When talking about a kingdom worldview and theology, we look at questions like: How do I look at God? How do I look at myself? Where have I been? Where am I going? That sort of thing. Do you want to talk about that?
[23:10] Marcus: Yes, those are the classic questions of theology. Somebody showed me how Biblical theology and systematic theology are different. Biblical theology is me studying the Bible and trying to organize what it says into categories. Systematic theology is when the world asks us questions and we try to give them biblical answers.
I taught systematic theology back in my twenties, and it was just one of those God things that he dropped in my lap. It was the opportunity to realize that as systematics go, when somebody asks you a question and says, “What does the Bible have to say about this? What would be a biblical perspective on this?”, then you go through and try to systematize everything the Bible has to say about that particular topic.
Well, that’s huge, because we all have questions about life, and we want to know, is there a biblical way to look at this? Is there a kingdom way to look at this? And if we don’t get those things clear in our minds, we’re just going to default to what everybody in our world does. It tends to be more our subculture than our larger culture. That is, whatever our people with whom we most identify do tends to be our default culture.
[24:27] Stephanie: When I think of Grandpa Warner being a teacher, I think of him teaching worldview. We’ve already talked about him a little bit in a prior episode, but I would love to give him more space in this episode. I have some thoughts, but do you want to?
[24:44] Marcus: Well, what do you remember? I mean, we were very different ages. We had a very different relationship with him when we were experiencing that. But, he was famous for his worldview teaching. In fact, I know Wycliffe had him come in, and they used to have their missionaries go through his worldview training. Yeah, it’s pretty good stuff.
[25:06] Stephanie: I remember the apple and the core. I don’t know if I could just explain it off the top of my head. I don’t have your brain, but I remember the apple, and I especially just remember him talking about spiritual warfare and worldview. I thought that was what made him especially unique in his teaching.
[25:28] Marcus: Yes, my dad taught a warfare worldview. That was kind of his core topic. In talking about warfare worldview, he liked to explain the difference between a Christian perspective on spiritual warfare and animism.
The way he would explain it is that animism is a belief that there is an impersonal power in the universe. You can think of it like “the force” in Star Wars. This is the most pervasive worldview in every culture on earth, the idea that there is a spiritual force or spiritual power at work, and this power is neither good nor evil, it is simply powerful.
My dad likened this spiritual force to electricity. He said that electricity can heat up our house and it can light up the room, but it can also kill us. So, is electricity evil when it kills us and good when it’s lighting up, or is it just neutral? Most people in the world who live with an animistic worldview believe that this power is just neutral.
Animists also believe that the power can be controlled, and so they look at shaman, witch doctors, as sort of like electricians. They’re the people who are specialists on how to manipulate this power to get it to do what you want it to do. Such people also believe in spiritual beings. They just don’t believe that all power is personal. Whereas a kingdom worldview, a biblical worldview, teaches that all power is ultimately personal.
This [difference between a personal and impersonal spiritual power] is huge. We see it today in psychology and medicine, in our universities, and more and more in the United States and around the world, is this acceptance of what used to be an occult worldview that says if you can use it for good, then it must be good, instead of understanding that underneath all this there is the biblical worldview that says there’s only God power and demonic power. There’s not a neutral power that can just be manipulated.
So your grandfather’s teaching on worldview tended to focus on things like this. And he loved, particularly, distinguishing animism from a biblical perspective on spirituality.
[27:50] Stephanie: And he had direct relation to it because of his time in Africa.
[27:54] Marcus: Right. He and my mom were missionaries in Sierra Leone. And he tells me, too, that they were completely unprepared for it. They didn’t get this kind of training.
[28:06] Stephanie: Which is why he had a passion for giving people training.
[28:09] Marcus: Exactly.
[28:13] Stephanie: Since I brought it up, do you want to explain the apple? What is the apple?
[28:16] Marcus: I’m going to mix metaphors here. If I were an alien coming to the world and trying to figure out what’s going on, it’s a little bit like a missionary coming into a culture and trying to figure out what in their world is going on. When my parents went to Sierra Leone, they had to figure out the culture.
My father used an apple as a way to understand what’s going on in a culture. The first thing you run into is the outer layer of the culture. It’s the observable behaviors and institutions.
For example, architecture is often different in various parts of the world, not just because of what’s available for making it, but because it expresses the values of what is important in the culture.
For instance, there was a time in medieval Europe when the cathedrals and castles were the dominant architectural buildings because the church and the king were the two great institutions of the culture. Well, today, what dominates our landscapes?
[29:19] Stephanie: Skyscrapers.
[29:20] Marcus: Yes, financial institutions, for the most part, because what we value is money. And that dwarfs everything else that’s going on.
So the outer skin of the apple is what is readily observable habits and traits and customs and things like this. Underneath the skin is the fleshy part of the apple which are the values. The idea is that our values drive how we behave, what we create, and the things that we see on the outside. And then the core of the apple that drives our values is our worldview.
This is how he taught that at the core of every culture is its worldview, and the worldview drives its values, and the values drive its behavior. That was the apple analogy.
[30:07] Stephanie: And would you add anything to that now or make any changes?
[30:10] Marcus: The only thing I would add to it, I think, is that deeper even than worldview is belonging. When it comes to belonging and why I would add belonging, I think of my parents’ experience in tribal Africa.
One of the things that became apparent was that what was core to that culture was who their people were. In other words, they looked around and they had an extended family system, in which your second cousin was called brother or sister. We in America often don’t even know our first cousins, much less our second cousins.
In the Sierra Leone culture, you were actually responsible for your cousins’ debt, so you stayed engaged in their lives to make sure they didn’t get too far off track because you had some kind of responsibility there. Their whole way of looking at it began with the idea that these are my people. Then everything flows out of, “What do my people believe? What do my people think is the way life works? What do my people value? How do my people behave? How do we do this?”
So the only other thing I would add is this idea that belonging is often a deeper motivation even than our worldview. We are predisposed to adopt the worldview of the people to whom we feel most belonging.
[31:35] Stephanie: That makes sense. And you can see that at work in modern culture in the political climate.
[31:44] Marcus: There’s no question about it. If I’m surrounded by a people group and I want to belong to that people group, it’s very difficult to oppose their worldview and oppose their value system because if you do you’re not going to feel like you belong. That motivation to belong is a very powerful force that drives us toward particular worldviews, and it can be used for good or for evil.
In the church, what’s supposed to happen is this belonging energy that drives us collectively to promote a biblical worldview and biblical values and to make that the norm in our churches. Paul talks about that regularly.
[32:32] Stephanie: Can you give us some practical ways we Christians can cultivate our worldview, aside from the three pillars we’re going into later? Just some things that we could be on guard for or things that we should have on our radar?
[32:52] Marcus: Part of it is knowing the worldview of your culture so you can recognize when it’s creeping into your biblical worldview. This is why we study theology. Part of it is to make sure that I have a clear theological foundation for the way that I think.
I love the way we’re going to talk about Joseph Stone in our next session. I remember him saying that he thinks theologically, which means that he is always asking, “What is the Christian way of looking at this?” Rather than using the term worldview, he liked to say “my conception of life”.
The analogy he gave was, if I’ve got a car, and my conception of the car is that it runs on diesel, but it actually runs on unleaded gasoline, I can do major damage to that car because my conception of it is wrong. In the same way, if my worldview is not in sync with reality I can do major damage.
The way I promote these core beliefs is that I listen to podcasts like this, I study my Bible, I begin to think theologically about things in life a little bit more, and I hang out with people who help me.
[34:18] Stephanie: I see it also in counseling terms. We talk about fruit picking versus getting at the roots. I think that a lot of times, Christian worldview, overtly, at least, has tended to be fruit picking that has turned legalistic or even the opposite of legalistic. People will fruit pick instead of understanding why. Why do I believe, and how do I apply that “why” to everything in life.
[34:43] Marcus: Yes, it makes sense because we live in a buffet culture called postmodernism, we pick a little bit of everything and bring it together and create your own worldview and that’s okay even if it’s completely illogical. That’s what we’re trying to avoid.
Sometimes, just knowing what cultural tendencies are, I can recognize them creeping in. I also know that the more I read the Bible, and the more that I’m in the Bible, the more I tend to see the stories of my life in terms of the stories of the Bible. Just like mythology teaches the worldview of a culture, so the stories of the Bible teach us the worldview [of life in the kingdom].
When we read stories like Balaam and his donkey, it affects our worldview. We read stories about the angel of the Lord killing 185,000 Assyrian soldiers, it affects our worldview. When we see David confronting an angel on what was to become the temple mount, it affects our worldview. I can go on and on and on.
The Bible presents a world in which spirits are very active in our lives. For most American and western christians, the spiritual realm has become what I call the attic of the house. That is, we know it exists, we know it’s real, but we kind of stuff the things up there and forget about it because we don’t see any practical application to the way we live our everyday lives. It’s not functional. That’s what we’re really trying to change here at Deeper Walk.
[36:19] Stephanie: In the next episode, we’ll be looking more at the three pillars of a kingdom worldview. But for now, any final thoughts on theology?
[36:29] Marcus: One of the reasons we’re going to talk about the three pillars of a kingdom worldview is that to begin thinking theologically, you have to have your foundation set. Where do we start? That’s what the three pillars are going to be about. Where do we start in putting together a biblical worldview? I’m looking forward to this. We’re going to introduce them next week, and then we’re going to take a deeper dive into each one of them in the weeks to come.
[36:52] Stephanie: Yes. Well done. I’ve heard you preach on the kingdom worldview on multiple occasions and in true pastoral fashion, you’ve identified three points that all begin with one letter: Sacred romance, Sovereign lordship, and Spiritual warfare. Where did you get these three?
[37:09] Marcus: It came from a kind of a combination of things I was listening to. I mentioned Joseph Stone in the last podcast. I loved the sermon series that he did for the ICBC conferences back in the early two thousands. He was talking there about his experience of studying at Oxford and getting his theology straight. He was essentially raised in a very reformed tradition that said that the sovereignty of God is the foundation of all theology. And so he was pondering that, and he was very convinced of the sovereignty of God. as we all understand that God is the king and all things run through him, so God’s sovereignty is a core pillar. But John Storm made the argument that even deeper than that was what we call union with Christ.
Now, union with Christ is a term that was very popular a couple generations ago, but I don’t think most Christians today know what that is. So I took union with Christ and I borrowed John Eldredge’s term, sacred romance, from his first book and put those together.
The idea here is that the number one pillar of a kingdom worldview is that God loves us and that God wants to have an intimate relationship with us. And so that’s number one. So I agreed with him, that pillar number one of a kingdom worldview is that God loves us. He wants us to experience what John Eldridge calls a sacred romance. That’s intimacy with God.
The second pillar is the sovereignty of God. Now, these two pillars get taught a lot. I also put them together as the goodness of God and the power of God. But we all know there are some problems that come up if the only thing you emphasize is the goodness of God and the power of God. If the only thing you emphasize is that God loves us and that God is sovereign, and that leaves us with the problem of evil. What do we do with the problem of evil if these are the only two foundations?
And so that leads us to pillar number three. And pillar number three is spiritual warfare. You can’t really understand the world that exists if the only two pillars you have are that God is good and that God is sovereign. We have to understand that God created a wonderful, perfect world, but that sin has marred this world, it has warped this world, and we no longer live in that paradise.
We now live in a fallen world where there are all kinds of problems and where Satan has authority in this age. Jesus called him the prince of this world. Paul called him the god of this age. You can’t understand life until you understand spiritual warfare. So those are the three pillars: Sacred romance, sovereign lordship, and spiritual warfare.
[39:49] Stephanie: Weighty indeed, and also very good. So, in your book, Toward a Deeper Walk, you use the image of what you call “a special backpacking shirt” to depict these three pillars of the kingdom worldview. Do you want to help us with this image? What makes the shirt special?
[40:04] Marcus: I know we’ve never actually made one of these shirts. We really need to actually. I know somebody who did. He made his own version of it, which was cool. The idea is that the pocket over your heart, right above that pocket where you usually put a logo, we put a heart. It all starts with the heart.
Heart-focused discipleship. We’re all about heart, and the idea that we need to make the heart our focus. And by that, we mean sacred romance. Let’s make the sacred romance, intimacy with God, our number one priority, the focus of our lives. So the heart on the shirt pocket represents sacred romance.
We need to make the heart our focus, because Satan is already making it his focus. So that’s the first thing, and then we put a square around the heart. The square around the heart represents sovereign lordship, and that sovereign lordship elicits two fundamental responses from us. The first one is trust, and the next one is thanksgiving.
Because God is sovereign, because he works all things together for good in the lives of those who are called according to his purpose, we live with gratitude for God’s sovereignty in our lives. And it also means that we can trust him to work all things together for good in our lives.
Then around the square with the heart inside, we put a circle, and the circle is spiritual warfare. The circle is a reminder that we need to guard our hearts. As Proverbs 4:23 says, ”Above all things, guard your heart.”
So this is where we put those three pillars together. It’s a reminder that our heart is the bullseye of this target, and we need to make it our bullseye, because Satan’s certainly making it his.
[41:49] Stephanie: Indeed. Let’s go ahead and just take a quick look at each of these pillars to give an overview. After this episode, we’re going to take an episode each to go into more detail on each pillar. With all of this in mind, let’s take a quick look at sacred romance, which many would call abiding in Christ.
The two most important perspectives of sacred romance are the way you see God and the way you see yourself. This also makes those two areas Satan’s greatest targets, as you said. So if he can distort the way that we see God, he can distort the way we see ourselves, and that results in a loss of intimacy and a whole bunch of worldview issues. Can you talk more on this?
[42:37] Marcus: Well, this is where we see the real importance of worldview and, that is, at a heart level, what do I really believe?
I remember as a professor, I was giving a test, and this guy got 100% on his systematic theology test. But in talking to him in person, he didn’t believe any of it. There was a huge gap between his head and his heart. I know that sometimes we say God is good, and God loves us, and we say all the right things about God, but in our heart level, we don’t really trust his love for us because there is a distortion in what we believe about God and what we believe about ourselves.
Pondering this, my view of God and my view of myself are the two sides of a coin. If I pierce one, I pierce both of them. Think about a coin. If I drill a hole through that coin, I am marring both sides of it. So my view of myself and my view of God are inseparable.
What helps me think about this is the analogy of the shepherd and the lion and the sheep. As Christians, we are sheep and Jesus is our shepherd, and the goal is to stay close to the shepherd. Sheep have literally no defense systems. The only reason that sheep still exists today is not survival of the fittest. The sheep didn’t outwit the wolves. They didn’t develop some kind of superpower against the wolves. They only survived because of shepherds.
In the same way, the only reason that we survive in this world of warfare is because of our shepherd. The wolves know this. The roaring lion knows this. Therefore, he wants to keep us away from the shepherd. Well, if you were going to [separate the sheep from the shepherd], and your core identity is that you’re the father of lies, what kind of lies do you tell?
You tell lies about who God is, the kind of lies that would keep you from trusting him, the kind of lies that would keep you from being too intimate with him. And then he tells you lies about yourself. Maybe you’re too bad for God to want you around. Maybe you’re not good enough for him. Maybe you haven’t performed well enough. Maybe there’s something fundamentally flawed about you, whatever it is.
[44:56] Stephanie: Or, on the flip side of it, he tells you you can be super sheep.
[44:59] Marcus: That’s true. On the other hand it’s like you’re so good, God thinks you’re doing him a favor by hanging around. There are probably people who go that direction, too.
I think that we understand this is why these two things are inseparable. Because my view of God and my view of self are kind of the anchor for my relationship with God. And that’s why we talk about sacred romance and we’re saying that if that’s really the heart of the whole thing, then at the heart of sacred romance are these two key perspectives.
[45:35] Stephanie: Can you talk a little bit more in terms of John 15?
[45:39] Marcus: John 15 is kind of the definitive passage on sacred romance. Jesus says, “I am the vine, you are the branches. My father is the gardener, and every branch that remains in me or abides in me bears fruit.” It’s this beautiful picture of how the life of the vine, in order to get into the fruit, has to go through the branch and into the fruit.
You can have a couple problems with this. If the branch is too long, then all of that life in the vine just goes to the end of the branch and doesn’t get channeled into the fruit, so the gardener has to keep that branch short and he does that by pruning. The reason the gardener is constantly pruning the branch is to keep the life of the vine going into the fruit. When the branch is kept short, when the life is flowing into the fruit on a regular basis, the connection point between the vine and the branch begins to grow.
I love the image that the connection point [on a grape vine can get to be] the size of a human fist. The bigger that connection is, the more of the life of the vine can flow into the branch and thus into the fruit. And that’s what sacred romance is all about. That is that the size of my connection with God determines everything else, so because of that, it is the focal point of the war, and so it’s got to be the focal point of my journey.
[47:05] Stephanie: Excellent. Now that we have a picture of the loving attachment God desires to exist between us, from that foundation, let’s take a brief look at sovereign lordship.
[47:14] Marcus: Sovereign lordship starts with the idea that God is king. Now there are some extremes you can go with this. One extreme is fatalism, the idea that God has predetermined everything that happens and thus if something happens, it is God’s will.
I don’t know how you can land here when Jesus taught us to pray, “…may your will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” which seems to imply that his will is not being done here. In other words, I don’t pray for God’s will to be done if it’s automatically always done – that’s fatalism.
The other extreme is a level of free will that doesn’t really see God as being involved in life. It’s almost the deistic idea that he, the clockmaker God, wound things up, and now he just lets things play out.
When we’re talking about sovereignty, we’re talking about the idea that God is a sovereign. He is the initiator. He has a vision. He has a plan. He has a purpose, and he is moving towards that purpose, and his purpose is related to sacred romance. He wants to have a family. He wants his children in heaven and his children on earth, which doesn’t just mean Christians who died and are now in heaven. We’re talking about the angels, the sons of God. That in becoming sons of God, we have joined the sons of God in heaven, and we are now one family united in Christ.
His purposes are these huge, enormous things that are all about love and all about our bonding to him. He is the initiator as a king. He’s also a judge, which means that we are all accountable and answerable to him for what we do. That’s why the Bible says that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.
So if you think about it from that point, the fear of the Lord is really putting sovereignty first and saying, even if you don’t think God likes you, even if you don’t think he’s good, even if you’re not interested in a relationship, at least recognize that he’s the final authority and you’re going to have to answer to him. The reason I think that the Bible makes the fear of the Lord the key is because not everybody’s going to be drawn to love him and trust him.
[49:30] Stephanie: Well, trust takes time.
[49:31] Marcus: Trust takes time. Exactly.
[49:32] Stephanie: So you can choose to obey immediately, but trust takes time.
[49:37] Marcus: Exactly. I go back to the parable where Jesus talked about the guy who buried his talent. His point was, “Assume everything that you believed about God was true. You still knew you were going to have to give an account. You should have at least put the talent in the bank.”
That’s what I mean by the fear of the Lord being the foundational thing. It’s not that we build our lives on the fear of the Lord. It’s that even if you don’t have anything else, that should be enough to get you to say, “I’m not going to be a fool and live my life in a way that God is going to judge.” That’s part of the picture of the sovereignty of God – that we’re answerable to him. He’s the initiator.
There’s also this idea of God as a chess player God, which I’m sure we’ll pick up on more in a later. Our lives sometimes feel like a game of chess. I’m terrible at chess. I once was beaten in five moves. Life feels even more complicated than that, but God is this infinite person who is playing chess at a level I can’t even comprehend. Part of sovereignty is trusting the wisdom of God.
That’s probably enough for today, but that’s where we’re headed.
[50:52] Stephanie: Well, and I would just say, I think that the sacred romance is so important to the sovereign lordship because it’s also part of how you know that he’s good.
[51:01] Marcus: Okay.
[51:02] Stephanie: That’s how I see it, at least.
[51:03] Marcus: That you know he’s good because he’s sovereign?
[51:06] Stephanie: No, because he loves you.
[51:08] Marcus: Because he loves you.
[51:09] Stephanie: That’s why I say tie it in.
[51:11] Marcus: Well, the only reason we can trust our sovereign God is because of the sacred romance part. In other words, he could be sovereign and be completely evil.
[51:20] Stephanie: Which is why it’s so important that he loves us.
[51:23] Marcus: Yes.
[51:26] Stephanie: So now that we have a better understanding of sovereign lordship, I think we can better approach spiritual warfare? Let’s take a brief look at that from a kingdom worldview terminal.
[51:37] Marcus: So spiritual warfare starts with the idea that we do not live in the world as God created it. We live in a present evil age. In the Garden of Eden, something happened that changed Satan’s access to our world, that gave him a whole other level of permission, and all of his whole kingdom permission to a place here in this world. And that is not going to change until Jesus returns and this present evil age is over.
The good thing about spiritual warfare is that it’s not eternal. And that separates our worldview from yin yang, Ahura Mazda, any kind of dualism that says there is an eternal good and eternal evil that are battling it out. Biblical Christianity says evil had a beginning and evil has an end. And that’s good news.
The next part of spiritual warfare is that we then have to have a theology of evil. Where does evil come from? Why does evil exist? What is evil? How do we reconcile evil with the goodness of God? It also means we have to deal with the evil one. That is, who is this evil one? What are his strategies and tactics? What is he trying to do in my life?
My dad, who fought in World War II, used to say that the first priority of the Christian life is to know God. The second priority is to know your enemy. Having been in battle, he says you need to know what your commander wants, but the next best thing you can know is how your enemy operates so you can avoid his snares and traps. Fundamentally, spiritual warfare comes down to those things.
[53:21] Stephanie: It helps on the big picture problem of evil, but it also helps on the practical levels of day to day life.
[53:27] Marcus: Exactly. So those are the three pillars: sacred romance, sovereign lordship, spiritual warfare. They are all intimately related, and they are all needed, because if you take any one of them out, the system falls apart.
[53:43] Stephanie: So next episode, we’re going to be looking more into sacred romance. For now, any final thoughts?
[53:51] Marcus: Well, I know that understanding these pillars helped me, first of all, just in priorities. It helps me sometimes to re-anchor my life when I’m starting to feel a little bit out of control, and I come back to, “God, you’re feeling distant right now. I’m not feeling a sacred romance. but I do trust your sovereignty and I take my stand against the enemy. I come back to you.”
I live out of these things every day, and when I’m getting lost, I come back to them. That’s why I think it’s important for us to really know what the anchors to our faith are, on which we build. If we’re going to take a kingdom worldview further, these are what I would call the foundations that come from creation theology.
There are other foundational things that come out of what Jesus does specifically that we haven’t gotten to yet, and we’ll hopefully get to at some point. When you bring them together, you understand that everything that Jesus did connects to these three pillars. So we’ll have more to say about that later.
[54:58] Stephanie: I bring up Jane Austen’s famous love story because we’re talking about sacred romance, and this romance is in the context of kingdom worldview. So in Pride and Prejudice, Lizzie Bennet starts off with a very poor view of a certain Mr. Darcy. She has a horrible first impression of him and immediately writes him off as cold, aloof, and arrogant.
Then she meets the charming Mr. Wickham, who spins horrible tales about Mr. Darcy, making Lizzie believe Darcy is the very last man she would ever marry. Meanwhile, Mr. Darcy is falling more and more in love with Lizzie. By the end of the story, Lizzy is able to enter Mr. Darcy’s world and see him as he truly is and not as his enemies would have her believe. She falls completely in love with him, and they, of course, live happily ever after.
I give this crash course summary of Pride and Prejudice to ask a more serious question. How, Father, is God like Mr. Darcy?
[55:53] Marcus: Yes. That is where we start the chapter on sacred romance in Toward a Deeper Walk. One of my favorite book titles is called The Hidden Rift with God. The idea is that a lot of us, even as Christians, have something that we hold against God that keeps us from being as intimate with him as we would otherwise. A lot of times, because we’re trying to be good Christians, we are in denial about it. That’s why it’s a hidden rift. We sort of don’t even admit it to ourselves that it’s really there.
I’m thinking about a person I met who has a story very much like this with God. As she had grown up in the church, she decided that the last thing in the world she was interested in was Christianity. So she went into New Age and got heavily into a very occult sort of spirituality. Then God spoke to her one day and she was like, “Okay, God, who are you?” And then she said, “Please don’t tell me you’re Jesus.” She had already made up her mind that the last person she could ever trust, or ever love, was the God of Christianity, because she’d been wounded in the church and had these negative experiences.
I think that’s a little bit like Lizzie Bennett. She had made up her mind about Darcy, that he was the last person that she could ever love, the last person that she would ever want to spend her life with, but it was because she was believing lies about him. And Wickham plays the devil character perfectly – the angel of light who comes across as somebody we would really like and want to hang out with. But he has an agenda, and that agenda is simply to keep us away from that sacred romance with Christ.
There are a lot of parallels here. The good news was that when this lady did hear from God, he did reveal himself as Jesus. And today she is actually leading a Christian ministry, and has a wonderful ministry introducing other people to that sacred romance.
[58:10] Stephanie: Huzzah! The idea of living with and being in a loving relationship with God is called by many, “abiding in Christ”. A pastor we greatly respect, Dr. Joseph Sohn, calls it “union with Christ”. We’ve talked about that a little bit. John Eldridge calls it the “sacred romance”, and that’s what you’ve chosen to go with in your teaching. I love all those angles.
The best way of understanding love, short of experiencing it yourself, I think, is not through a list of facts, but rather through story. Another story I grew up with you telling, which you heard Dr. Sohn retell, and I think you’ve read it in other books as well, which I think was also originally told by Danish philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard.
[58:54] Marcus: Absolutely.
[58:55] Stephanie: It’s called “The King Who Loved a Humble Maiden”. Could you give a quick retelling of that?
[58:59] Marcus: Certainly. Let me give you a little Kierkegaard first, because he was the one who wrote the story. Part of what was going on in the background was that Kierkegaard lived in a time when Christianity was a state religion. He just despised the lack of authenticity in that religion, and the fact that people had lost the sacred romance, and were just going through the ritual, just going through the motions. So he told several stories about this, and one of them was “The King Who Loved a Humble Maiden”.
I’m going to give my own spin on it to make that story fit the purposes here. There’s a young man who is the king of a small country, and he knows that he could essentially make any woman that he wanted to be his wife. Nobody was going to tell him no. So he wanted to marry for love. He wanted this to be reciprocal. There have been a lot of movies based off of this kind of theme of somebody who disguises themselves, goes undercover and tries to win someone.
In fact, there’s a famous story about Henry VIII where he did this, and it backfired. He thought he was going to disguise himself and woo the maiden, but she was completely repulsed by him. So he ended up pulling rank and making her marry him anyway. Thankfully, that is not our Jesus.
So, back to the story, the king does go undercover. I like to tell the story like this:
He comes to a town, and he meets the young lady, and he realizes that this is the one, and there’s something about her. So he’s looking for excuses to spend more time with her, he realizes their family needs carpentry work done. So he comes back the next day with the tools of a carpenter, and sure enough, gets hired by the family to do some work there.
At first, she’s just rolling her eyes at him and doesn’t trust him. There are some walls there. Eventually, she begins to notice that he’s not like other young men, that there’s something about him – he has a very different bearing, a very different character. She finds herself looking for excuses to figure him out. So they’re hanging out, spending time together, she’s bringing him lemonade on their breaks. Before you know it, they’re taking walks together and they’re spending more time together. Kind of like Lizzie Bennett, she finds herself falling in love with somebody that she had originally not had any interest in.
Meanwhile, her parents are not happy with this young man. They have a conversation where the parents say to her, “We don’t know anything about him. We don’t know his family, we don’t know where he’s from. The only thing we know for sure is that he’s poor.” Which, of course, is not true. He overhears her saying to her parents, “I don’t care if he’s poor. I love him. If he asks me, I’m going to marry him.” Well, that’s his cue.
So he leaves and he comes back, and word begins to spread that the king is coming to visit their town. Everybody’s decorating and getting things cleaned up. Sure enough, the king comes in his royal carriage, and to everyone’s surprise, it’s the carpenter who steps out of the carriage, now in his royal robes, and everybody kneels.
Now, a lot of people who weren’t thinking highly of him are now kneeling before him. He walks over to her and lifts her to her feet, and then he kneels and says,”Will you marry me? I needed to know that you loved me for who I am.”
I think that most fairy tales and most of these classic, almost archetypal stories are anchored in the gospel. They are anchored in the gospel reality that is reflected in a lot of these stories. The gospel truth is that Jesus came into the world as one of us with nothing to really set him apart or commend him other than his own character and his own deeds, and to offer himself to us.
The reality is that the young lady could have rejected the king. She could have taken offense. She could have done a lot of things. But the idea of the sacred romance is that we are responding to God, in a sense, emptying himself and becoming one of us and becoming a servant for only one reason.
[01:03:54] Stephanie: He’s so gentle.
[01:03:55] Marcus: Yeah.
[01:03:56] Stephanie: Yes. He loves us. He’s so gentle. He does not want to wield his power over us and make us do things.
[01:04:02] Marcus: I often tell people, one thing God will never do is make somebody love him. He can blow up obstacles that are getting in the way. But love isn’t love if it is forced. If I can give you a magic potion in your drink that makes you fall in love with me…
[01:04:25] Stephanie: I wish our listeners could see the twinkle in your eye as you tell the story I love. Anyway, maybe sometime we’ll get visual.
[01:04:41] Marcus: It’s a great story. Who doesn’t want to be loved and to know that somebody went to all that length for them? I think that I grew up knowing God loved me, but at an emotional level, to say God loves you was a little bit like saying the sky is blue. Well, of course that’s true, I know that’s true. But there’s a difference between knowing that and taking time to enjoy a blue sky, taking time to enjoy the contours of the sky and to really enjoy that.
Part of what we’re talking about with the sacred romance is moving beyond the theological statement, “God is love” or “God loves you”and into the experience. What are the obstacles that are getting in the way of me really enjoying that love and experiencing it at a deeper level.
I found it interesting that the apostle Paul, in Ephesians three, when he talks about knowing how wide and long and high and deep the love of Christ is, he talks about the need for power. He goes, “I pray that you will have the power to know.” Why do we need power to know something?
I think it’s because we have an adversary that’s actively working to keep us from that kind of knowledge, that kind of experience. And so it does take power, because there are obstacles that are going to need to be torn down, and there are experiences that are going to need to be pursued. That’s what we’re looking at with sacred romance.
[01:06:16] Stephanie: How epic is that? The sacred romance we are invited to joy, to enjoy. Wow.
[01:06:24] Marcus: That’s right. Joy is a good word.
[01:06:29] Stephanie: I was thinking about joy. The sacred romance we are invited to enjoy is rooted in grace. Let’s talk about that.
[01:06:38] Marcus: Joy and grace are actually anchored in the same Greek word. I think one is the feminine and one is neuter. I always forget which one’s which, so I’d have to look it up.
The idea here is that part of joy in relationship is knowing that we’re special to somebody, and the idea of grace is that I am special to God, unrelated to my performance. That’s kind of the key concept here. For most of us, we are trying to earn love, or we’re trying to perform in a way that is good enough to be accepted. The idea of grace is that God’s taking care of all of the performance stuff. He’s taking care of all of that so that we can just begin the relationship. And as we go further in the relationship, we begin to change like we would in any relationship.
The more time I spend with somebody, the more bonded we become, the more it begins to change me a little bit, for the better or for the worse. So in this case, we’re looking at experiencing the joy that comes from knowing that I am special to God, and that I am special to him independent of my performance, which is super important, because the time we need God’s grace the most is when we fail.
If I’m doing everything right and the only time I feel happy to see God or believe that God is happy to see me is when I have performed well and I’m on top of everything, then when I need him most, in some ways, I don’t have access to him because I have believed this lie. I’ve got a bad worldview, a worldview that is not rooted in grace, but in law. That’s why grace is so important.
[01:08:32] Stephanie: Let’s keep talking. I don’t want to end our time together without talking more about how Jesus Christ died so we could experience intimacy with God. Let’s talk about that.
[01:08:44] Marcus: Yes. Jesus is God made flesh. Why did God become flesh? I go back to John 1:14, “The word became flesh.” So just unpacking John a little bit here: Why call him the word, because it sounds a little abstract. “The word” is this abstract thing, it’s an idea, it’s theological.
When you look in the Old Testament, where do we see the word of God? We basically see the word of God in two contexts. One is in creation. The word of God speaks and things are created. The other is prophecy. The word of God came to Elijah, the word of the Lord came to Jeremiah. So we have both of these contexts.
I find it interesting that John says that the word was life, (creation), and the word was light, (prophecy). The word became flesh so that we could experience life and we could experience light. And I think that light is largely about our worldview. Getting our worldview in sync with the kingdom of God.
Jesus came because he loved us and wanted us. We understand now that our abiding in Christ is going to increase life, and it’s going to increase light. Our wisdom should grow and our experience of life should grow. That’s why Jesus said, “I came that you might have life and have it abundantly”. Sacred romance is that we get the beauty of a relationship with Jesus and get to know him better. Then out of that comes these two wonderful things of life and light.
[01:10:32] Stephanie: I just want to talk about the Holy Spirit now.
[01:10:34] Marcus: Sure, let’s do that.
[01:10:37] Stephanie: Whenever we talk about Christ dying, I always want to immediately say, “and then he rose and sent the Holy Spirit.” And this isn’t all just grounded in history, true history, but it is a continued relationship, a continued walking with God. Can you talk about that?
[01:10:58] Marcus: Yes, we talked about in the F.I.S.H. Series, this idea that we die with Christ, we’re raised with Christ, we’re born of the Spirit, and we’re brought into a heart-focused community, a heart focused family, if you will. And we see the same things here, that Christ died for us, he was raised for us, and he gave us the Holy Spirit.
I love the fact that the Holy Spirit is called the Spirit of Christ in Romans chapter eight, where it says, “If anyone does not have the spirit of Christ, he doesn’t belong to God.” It’s not an intellectual thing, it is an experience that comes through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.
That’s why it’s a relationship. That’s why we experience the sacred romance through a relational connection. Our relational connection at this point comes primarily through the Holy Spirit because he is the Spirit of Christ dwelling in us. The way Christ dwells in our heart by faith is through the Holy Spirit.
I think sometimes when we talk about the Holy Spirit, people focus almost exclusively on power, the Holy Spirit’s power to do miracles, to heal people, to give words of prophecy and things like that. But there’s also this sense of the Holy Spirit giving us wisdom, especially as we have to make decisions in life. Probably even deeper than those two things is that the Holy Spirit is how God pours out his love into our hearts.
Romans five says that God pours out his spirit into our hearts because he loves us. And that’s how we begin to experience that love. We have to train ourselves and learn along the way how to better connect to the Spirit’s voice in our hearts and the Spirit’s presence. It’s a big part of how we experience the love of God.
[01:12:47] Stephanie: Indeed. Thank you.
Next episode, we’ll be looking at the second pillar of a kingdom worldview, Sovereign Lordship. For now, any final thoughts?
[01:12:59] Marcus: Well, you can see why this sacred romance is the anchor. Recently I heard the song about God’s reckless love, how he knocks down walls and comes pursuing us. I love at the end of Psalm 23 this idea that goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life. I’ll unpack that a little bit.
Goodness is this Hebrew word, tov. It’s such a rich word because it goes all the way back to Genesis and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and that God wants what is good for us. And then there is the (Hebrew) word for love which is actually the word hesed, or mercy is his hesed. It’s this idea that we belong to God and therefore his heart for us is good, at least this idea that “God is for us who can be against us?” This idea that these things don’t just follow us, they are pursuing us is probably a better translation of that Hebrew word.
The sacred romance plays out like that. We have a God who initiates relationship with us, who pursues relationship with us. We are the ones who tend to want him to just fix our lives and make it easier. But he is less interested in fixing our lives and making it easier than he is in meeting us in whatever we’re going through and deepening our walk with him. Hence the name of the organization.
[01:14:16] Stephanie: So good. Thank you.
I’ve encountered many people who believe God’s sovereignty means that he determines everything that happens. Like the universe is some cosmic software system creating the illusion of free will, but God is actually predetermining everything that happens. So what do you think? Do we live in the matrix? Does sovereignty mean determinism?
[01:14:37] Marcus: That is becoming a more popular idea these days. Even among non-Christians, there’s this idea that there’s some sort of a matrix-like system going on. But the Bible is pretty clear that that’s not the case.
The Bible doesn’t talk about determinism, it doesn’t talk about fatalism. We have a couple of obvious situations: think of David when he’s at, I don’t know exactly how you pronounce this, Keilah, however they pronounce that city. But, he asked God, “Is Saul going to come with his troops and come find me?” And God says, “Yes.” And then he says, “Will the people hand me over to Saul?” And God says, “Yes.” Well, neither of those things happen. If neither of those things happen, and God said, “Yes, they were going to happen,” then what that means is that this isn’t all just predetermined.
God actually knows hypotheticals. He knows what has sometimes been called middle knowledge. That is, he knows all possible realities. Honestly, that’s just us trying to figure out a mind that is so far beyond ours. We can’t understand it.
So where we go with this determinism is essentially a way to try to understand in human terms how sovereignty works. But what sovereignty really means is that God is king, and because God is king, everybody’s accountable to him. Like a king, he initiates laws, initiates activities. Just as he is the head over everything, so God is an initiator and God is also the judge to whom we will have to give account someday.
So I think when the Bible is talking about sovereignty, it has more to do with God’s plans, his power to make sure that those plans happen, and then the fact that he’s the judge over all things.
[01:16:36] Stephanie: But he does know the future.
[01:16:38] Marcus: Yes, he knows.
[01:16:40] Stephanie: He just doesn’t take our free will from us.
[01:16:44] Marcus: Right. Just like he said to David, the implication was that if you don’t do something, this will happen. So he knew that, right? He knew what the future was in that case. And he knows how that all happens. People, again, have tried to come up with metaphors to help us understand. The one I’ve heard the most is that God is up above a parade, watching the whole thing. The past is just as present as the future is to him.
Or that God is like the speed of light, where everything is an eternal “now”,t everything is right now. I don’t know if those are true or not. They’re helpful guesses, if you will. They make a certain amount of sense, and they help us wrap our heads around the idea of somebody who knows the past and the future and knows all things, because at some level he’s standing outside of it.
I’m content to just know that the Bible tells me to trust him, that he has my future, that he knows the future, and he has to know his plans for the future, which is the most important part.
[01:17:45] Stephanie: That’s so good. I’m in a class at seminary right now with Dr. John Oswalt and a lot of times he says things, and then he adds on, “You know what? If I get to heaven and God tells me, ‘Actually…’, I’m gonna say, ‘Yes Sir!. We can only know so much here, and if God tells me differently later, I’m not going to fight him on it, but this is how we’re making sense of things.”
[01:18:17] Marcus: It is. And, you know the reality is that sovereignty is a theological term that is based off of the kingship of God. It is based on the idea that God is powerful and that he knows the future. Because of that, the future that God has determined he wants to happen, he’s going to make that happen.
So the other part of this is, when Jesus has us pray, “May your will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” there’s a clear indication here that it’s not. Why do you pray for his will to be done on earth as it is in heaven? It’s because his will is not being done on earth as it is in heaven.
[01:18:56] Stephanie: There are a lot of places in the Bible that say, “This should not happen.” It’s not saying it can’t happen, it’s saying it shouldn’t happen, but it is happening.
[01:19:07] Marcus: Exactly. And so anytime that you say this shouldn’t be this way, if God is saying it shouldn’t be this way, then you can’t believe in determinism.
[01:19:17] Stephanie: So our goal here isn’t to solve the mysteries of life and free will, but I think it’s so vital to think appropriately about the why and how of our existence. So let’s explore this more. You’ve talked and written before about the idea of God as the cosmic chess player. Do you want to expand that thought?
[01:19:37] Marcus: Sure. I got to thinking about this one day, that my own life is sort of like this 64 square chess game. Some people are really good at playing the game, and some people are not. I am not all that good at chess. I once got beat by a teenager in five moves.
The point here is that even if you’re super good at chess, the biblical way of looking at this is that God’s chessboard doesn’t look like ours. We see 64 squares in front of us, but God’s chessboard is miles wide and multiple layers deep.
We’re dealing with our 64 squares. We may even hypothesize, like I just did, that the other things exist, but we don’t have access to them, so every now and then, things show up on our 64 squares: “Where did that come from?” We didn’t see that coming.
Ultimately, this is God’s game, if you will. It’s not just mine, because if it’s mine, I just want to make sure things work out in a way that I want them to work out. Well, God is up to something bigger than that. Part of trusting him, and trusting him in his sovereignty, is that he is working something out, and when he’s done, it will be for my good as well as for his. In the short term, I often have to sacrifice my good for what he’s up to without understanding what it is.
[01:21:04] Stephanie: On that note, let’s tackle another heavy-hitter: the problem of evil. But this is a huge topic, so…
[01:21:13] Marcus: I feel like we should have a cackling laugh after that, but, yes!
[01:21:19] Stephanie: It’s a very real problem. Every religion must answer this fundamental question: How do we explain the presence of suffering and evil? So let’s get to the heart of our faith. What does the crucifixion of Christ teach us about the problem of suffering and evil?
[01:21:37] Marcus: One of my favorite quotes came from, I believe it was John R. W. Stott in one of his books, where he’s talking about Jesus in pain on the cross. And he was contrasting that with Buddhism, where you have this placid looking person who nothing seems to ruffle him and there’s no passion there.
He says, “I would much rather have Jesus. I’d rather have this passionate person, somebody who enters into my pain and suffering and understands my pain and suffering, rather than somebody who’s teaching me how to detach myself from all that is suffering.”
I think that one of the things that the cross teaches us is that Jesus, and his ultimate answer to the problem of suffering is, “I went through it too. I don’t stand aloof to it and say, ‘Well, it’s too bad for you’, and think about it theoretically. I am entering into it with you. I became human and I went through the suffering.”
And not just any suffering. He went through the suffering on the cross. Because of that, nobody can say to God, “You don’t understand.” Nobody can say to him, “You just don’t get it.” Even to a certain extent, “This isn’t fair,” goes out the window because he was willing to subject himself to it when he didn’t have to and he only did it for us. So the cross is a significant answer to the problem of evil.
[01:23:07] Stephanie: Can you tie that into sovereignty, the sovereign lordship?
[01:23:13] Marcus: I heard a sermon several years ago. I can’t remember who did it, but the sermon was basically explaining sovereignty this way: God allows evil, God uses evil, and God overcomes evil.
First, that he allows evil is unquestionable because evil exists, except for those people who try to argue that evil is an illusion. But for a person in suffering, that is not a very helpful answer. The idea that God allows evil clearly is true. We see there is a lot of evil in the world. Secondly, God uses evil, and then thirdly, he overcomes it.
So we see this in the cross very clearly. God allowed the evil of the cross. You could even say he decreed the evil that happened on the cross. And here we have got to cut some lines. That is, God decreed that Jesus would suffer and that he would die and that it would happen by crucifixion. That does not mean that he prescribed every lash that hit him, everything that took place.
I go back to the story of Assyria, in the book of Isaiah, where the Lord says through the prophet, “Isaiah is my rod to punish Israel.” But then he goes on to say, “But Assyria did things I did not intend.” The point being that Assyria is going to be punished for the things that they did that weren’t part of the plan, that wasn’t what had to happen.
In the same way, I think that at the cross there were people totally guilty of all kinds of things. You can’t just say that it was God’s intended plan, therefore nobody’s guilty. God planned that he would use their ignorance against them. He definitely allowed that, and at some level he decreed it. It doesn’t mean he decreed every evil thing that took place in all of that.
Secondly, he (God) used it (evil). We all know that. That’s why we are Christians. We say he used the cross to be a sacrifice to make atonement for our sin so that we could be justified, and we could be purified, and we could be redeemed, and ultimately reconciled to God because of that. He used it for a greater good, and he overcame it. He overcame it in the resurrection. The crucifixion and suffering aren’t the end of the story.
We see this pattern a lot in scripture and in our own lives. God allows evil in our lives, he uses that evil, and he promises that he can work all things together for good. The hope of the Christian is that he is going to overcome evil, and that we will have eternal life. That’s the blessed hope of the believer.
[01:26:11] Stephanie: I love that you camped a little bit on the idea of decree. Do you think you can match that against determinism? What is the difference between a decree and something being determined?
[01:26:24] Marcus: When we talk about determinism, we’re simply talking about percentage, like is it 100% determined, and the answer is no. Are there some things that are determined? Yes. Jesus is going to come again that’s been determined.
There are other things that have been determined that are simply mysteries to us. We do not know the mind of God. Who has known the mind of God, that we may instruct him. I don’t know everything that God has decreed, but he has revealed some of them to us.
He wants us to order our lives out of faith, that if he has decreed something, we can trust it and we should therefore live that way. There are decrees that determine things. When we talk about determinism, though, that’s the idea that 100% of everything that happens happens because God forced it to happen. That’s not biblical.
[01:27:24] Stephanie: That makes sense. I love what you say in your book, Toward a Deeper Walk:
The point of understanding God’s sovereignty is not to be able to explain why we suffer or to know what the good is that God wants to accomplish or how God will overcome the evil in our lives. The point is hope. God wants us to know that we have hope because he is good and he is sovereign. As we learn to depend on that hope and trust God’s plan for us and his heart toward us, we find peace.
That’s just a lovely summary of all these things that are so important, but what is the point? There’s always more we can say on these topics. Much of the content of this worldview series can be found in your book, Toward a Deeper Walk. I love that book.
So next episode, we’re going to be looking at the third pillar of a kingdom worldview, which is Spiritual Warfare. But for now, any final thoughts to wrap up this big, huge topic?
[01:28:30] Marcus: Just last night, I was struggling with a little bit of anxiety. One of the things I would just repeat to myself as I’m trying to find peace is, God is good, God is sovereign. Because God is sovereign, he’s going to work everything together for my good. Because God is sovereign, I can trust him. And it also means because God is sovereign, I can give thanks. And so I can set my mind on what is there to be thankful to the sovereign God for.
Gratitude at some level is rooted in this idea that every good and every perfect gift comes from above. That’s why we give God thanks, because it is all flowing from the abundance of his sovereign love.
I encourage people, when it comes down to the practicality of what we mean by sovereignty, it means I can trust God even when I don’t understand. I find myself, personally, that’s the hardest when I don’t know what he wants me to do and I have options in front of me and I’m just not sure which one he wants me to do. I find I can lose my peace the most quickly when that happens.
Part of this is learning to trust God, that even if I make a wrong decision, even if I don’t do exactly what it was he wanted me to do, he can still work it out. He’s still for me, not against me. He can still work with whatever is on the chessboard, if you will, and bring about the result he gets.
I can’t make a move so stupid and so bad that he goes, “Well, that’s it. I can’t overcome this.” because that’s part of the idea of his wisdom and his love and just his capacity, which is so much beyond our ability to imagine.
[01:30:21] Stephanie: You know how I love a good story. One of our favorite family movies growing up was Hook, where Robin Williams plays Peter Pan, who’s all grown up and has kids of his own. Captain Hook comes and kidnaps his kids as bait for a final confrontation with his nemesis. We’ve talked before about how this storyline has parallels to Satan’s strategy with us. Do you want to tell a little more of the story and give some thoughts?
[01:30:47] Marcus: I do remember watching this movie with you guys when you were little or younger. I remember it just hitting me because there was a scene where Captain Hook has kidnapped Peter Pan’s children. He’s got them sitting in a class and he’s up at the chalkboard, writing on the chalkboard why parents hate their kids. And the little girl says, “No, they don’t. My parents love me.” Then Hook gives her a detention like, “Bad girl.” He goes on to make his case, because Hook’s goal is to go to battle with Peter Pan and for Peter to see his own children siding with him.
I thought, wow, that is really profound. That is exactly what Satan’s strategy is, that his goal is he can’t hurt God directly, and so he has to hurt God by going after his children. What he’s trying to do is turn his children against him. Not only trying to turn people who don’t believe in him away so they don’t become Christians, but trying to put a wall between Christian children and the Father, so that we don’t trust his love for us, and we don’t live out of that love for us, and we just don’t trust him.
I thought that was a pretty profound picture of how warfare works, and what Satan is actually trying to accomplish in turning people away from God.
[01:32:14] Stephanie: I also think that’s a great scene showing one of his strategies. One of his key strategies there is deception: parents hate their children. And she calls him right out, “No, that’s not true.”
Do you want to talk a little bit more about how the enemy uses deception and how that affects our worldview?
[01:32:34] Marcus: That is a classic thing. Notice that his core lie is why parents hate their children, but then he goes in and he gives them actual evidence: Times when their parents got mad at them about something that was unfair; then his main point is before kids came along, they could do whatever they wanted. Life was fun. Life was better. “Everything was better before you came along,” is kind of the idea.
When Satan deceives us, he always anchors it in things that are true. And so the essence of deception is kind of like Satan says, “One plus one plus one is three.” He’ll say things like, “You got hurt really badly by the church. God did not protect you from this pain in your life. You have felt bad about yourself forever. Therefore, you’re worthless.God can’t be trusted.” It’s all true.
So what happens in our mind is we rehearse the things that are true. “I was hurt. God didn’t stop it. Bad things have happened to me,” and our mind just constantly rehearses those three true things that reinforce the devil’s lie.
What is left out and what makes it deceptive is that he gets us to omit or overlook all these other true things. And that is: God was also hurt when we were hurt by the church. It was not from God that that happened. It wasn’t his idea that we get hurt this way; he also suffered. He was there with us in the suffering, and he is here with us now to help us recover and to help us reclaim what happened.
There is more to the story. There are more truths. If we embrace those other truths, we found out that it is not one plus one plus one equals three. It is actually more like pi plus three squared. God is up to way more than we can possibly wrap our heads around. And if we understood the whole equation, if you will, if we understood all of the true things, we’d see that God’s thoughts are not our thoughts, that his ways are not our ways; “as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are his ways higher than our ways and his thoughts higher than our thoughts.”
When you get to that point, then you realize that the deception leaves and the truth takes root. Satan’s main strategy is to get us to focus only on those true things that support his lie, and to not look at all of the other true things that would overturn his lie.
[01:35:12] Stephanie: Yes, and it can have the most profound effect on the lenses that we’re viewing life with. One deception can start helping us interpret all these other things in life from a wrong base. It is so important to find where the enemy is trying to deceive us and replace that lie with truth.
What are some other strategies we should be on the lookout for? Deception isn’t his only tool in his tool bag.
[01:35:43] Marcus: You know me: I have an acrostic for this. In the book Toward a Deeper Walk, I talk about S.I.N. The acrostic seems appropriate. You know how the devil tries to get at us. The first one we call Seduction. The idea behind seduction is to lure us into a trap. He is putting out something good for us and gets us with what is good, but we are going about it in the wrong way.
Seduction itself has got a sexual overtone to it, so he might lure us in with a beautiful guy or a beautiful girl, and next thing you know, we are going someplace we shouldn’t be going. He has seduced us or lured us into a trap.
He can do the same thing by dangling the world out there. I sometimes think of the devil as the man behind the curtain who’s got a megaphone, and the world is his megaphone. He uses the world to lie to us, to deceive us, and to dangle things in front of us that look really cool, like, “Oh, that will make my life so good. That’ll feel so good,” and there’s sometimes some truth to it, right? There is beauty, there is pleasure, there is something to it that’s good.
His goal is never our pleasure. His goal is to ensnare us. It’s a full fledged trap, and he is luring us into it. So that’s probably his core strategy right there, seducing us into a trap.
The second one is Intimidation. The devil likes to hide and to get us to blame ourselves for things that he does, to get us to blame the world for things that he does, to get us to blame the flesh for things that he does, to get us to blame God for things that he does. He’s happy to stay in the background most of the time.
I honestly think he doesn’t like staying hidden forever because he likes the glory, and the demons like the glory at some point. And so when they get discovered, or when they decide it’s time to reveal themselves, their strategy tends to be intimidation. They want to show you just enough power to make you think that there is no end to their power, and to make you think that God can’t rival this power, that Jesus isn’t enough.
I remember talking to somebody several years ago, and they had been really battered and abused spiritually. They had this view of a huge devil and a small Jesus. They were too afraid to ask Jesus for help. They said, “The devil is bigger than Jesus. I can’t ask Jesus for help but then Satan will be mad at me. I don’t want to do that,” which is an interesting conundrum.
So I said, “Well, why don’t you try just a test? Why don’t you just say, let’s have a challenge, and if Satan wins, you’ll serve Satan, but if Jesus wins, you’ll serve him. Invite Jesus to come and let’s have a little contest of strength between the devil you’re so afraid of and Jesus, and just see if you’re right.
And she says, “Oh, it won’t be a fair fight. The devil will crush him.”
“Well, you’ve got nothing to lose, then, do you?”
So she did. She saw it in her mind when she prayed. She saw these two warriors show up, and she said, “Okay, it’s about to begin and oh my God it’s over! Jesus just completely wiped the floor with him in one move!”
It was all over. All of a sudden, her theology was corrected. Her worldview changed, and she realized that Jesus is the one with all the power.
[01:39:22] Stephanie: My God has the loudest roar.
[01:39:24] Marcus: Yes, exactly. We serve the bigger lion with the loudest roar. Judy Dunnigan would say so.
[01:39:31] Stephanie: Yes!
[01:39:31] Marcus: So that is intimidation, and that’s how he comes after us. [He wants to] get us to feel like we’re in over our heads and we need to just back out of this. I could tell you a ton of stories on that, but we’ll stop there.
The third one is Name calling. It’s this idea that he is “the accuser of the brethren,” King James says. He likes to bring condemning thoughts to us to get us to anchor our identity in shame, to get us to anchor our identity in isolation, to believe that we are not good enough for God to love us. Therefore, God can’t possibly love us. He uses name calling, and he gets us to look at ourselves as unworthy of God’s love.
I look at it this way: at some level, I am unworthy of God’s love. I like the way my dad explained this to me years ago. He said that from God’s perspective, he looks at me and sees that I am dust. It’s just – I’m dust. I wouldn’t have anything he didn’t give to me, but he made me, and he made me in his image, and he made me as somebody to be part of his family and to love. And he loved me so much, he sent his son Jesus to die for me. It wasn’t, “Well, I’ve got to fix this problem. I love this person, but I don’t like them.” It was, “No! I want to be in relationship with this person!”
He’s got a profound and deep love for us. So Satan tries to undermine that love relationship by attacking our identity, attacking our sense of who we are, and he does that through name calling.
[01:41:03] Stephanie: At the end of the day, all of these three things are still deception
[01:41:08] Marcus: Yes, exactly.
[01:41:10] Stephanie: They’re just very different takes on deception. Very interesting.
Well, those are some of Satan’s strategies. What are some of our strategies? How do we win the battle for our mind, the battle for our heart? How do we recognize truth and claim it?
[01:41:27] Marcus: That’s a good question, because there are a lot of strategies that go into how we win the war. Part of this is by being scripturally sound and studied and running things through scripture. Part of it is by learning to walk in the Spirit, and some of it is testing the thoughts that come into our heads.
I tell people all the time, one of the most important lessons that I find the church does not teach is this principle that not every thought that comes into your head is yours. Some thoughts are coming from the Holy Spirit.
There are thoughts that are prompting you to maybe go bless somebody, maybe go be a source of encouragement to someone. I can’t tell you how many times people have prayed for healing for somebody because the Spirit prompted them to do it. Or they led somebody to Christ even though they weren’t even planning to talk to them but the spirit led them to do it. And it was because those thoughts came into their head and they recognized, “This is a God thought I should pay attention to this.”
The devil and demons also put thoughts in our heads. Sometimes that’s all they do, and then they let us run with it. One of our strategies is recognizing that, “Not every thought that comes into my head is mine.”
I remember again, going back to your grandpa on this, he talked about, “How do you test the spirits? How do you take thoughts captive” And he ran a simple process that went like this: you ask yourself the question, “Is this a thought that God wants me to have?”
And so you’re thinking, “I feel really down. I feel miserable. I feel like God doesn’t like me.” Or maybe you’re struggling with thoughts of anger towards somebody else or thoughts of lust or thoughts of whatever it is. You’re thinking about something, and you’re going, “Is this a thought God wants me to have?”
“Oh, no. This is more of a temptation.”
You’re thinking, “Is this a thought I want to have?” That’s the second question.
“No, I’m trying to get rid of this. This is a thought that’s taking me down.”
He says, “If it’s not coming from God and it’s not coming from you, where’s it coming from?”
That was a simple test that’s been very helpful, really, throughout my life and my ministry, too. Closely connected to that is, “What is the fruit of this thought? Is the fruit of this thought, if I follow through on this, if I camp out here, Is it love, joy, peace, patience, long suffering, self control? Or is it fear and despair and shame?”
So I’m looking at it going, “Okay, I need to learn to test thoughts that are creating the fruit of the spirit and hold on to those. And then I deal with those [other thoughts] by saying “if” prayers: “If this thought is coming from the enemy, I renounce it, and I command the spirit telling this thought to leave now in Jesus name.”
I can remember the first time I tried this. I had a thought that produced some anxiety as I was teaching at Bethel at the time, and I was walking across campus, and I just remember thinking, “I have no reason to be afraid. Why is this fear coming right now?”
And I just said, “In the name of Jesus, if this is just a temptation of the enemy, I command you to leave” And in the middle of the prayer, it stopped. It was like, oh, okay. Well, that was helpful. That was exactly what it was. It was just a temptation to go that direction in my thinking.
So those are some of the strategies that we have available. Did you have any you were thinking of in particular that maybe I haven’t gotten to yet?
[01:45:01] Stephanie: My brain keeps going to the Bible, and I’ll address that in a minute, but I was thinking of another of your acrostics, which is R.E.S.T. – Recognize the enemy, Expose the enemy, Stand against the enemy, and turn to the Truth, which I think we’ve covered pretty well.
[01:45:19] Marcus: Can you say that again? Because I actually forgot about that.
[01:45:22] Stephanie: REST: recognize the enemy, expose the enemy, stand against the enemy, turn to the truth.
[01:45:31] Marcus: Yes. It works. I like that.
[01:45:35] Stephanie: Good job! I just wanted to say to rest in your relationship with God, but also, I’m in a Biblical Studies Masters, so I’m particularly keen on the need to be in the Bible, we need to be in the scriptures.
I have to preach to myself because the times when I am immersing myself in scripture versus the times when I am not, I can tell the difference between the patterns of my thoughts. Really being in the Bible trains us to think as God thinks. It trains us to recognize God’s voice, which will help us in our discernment of, “Is this a God thought, or a me thought, or a Satan thought?”
That was just where my brain was going.
[01:46:32] Marcus: That is one of the reasons why we do want to saturate our minds with scripture. I will say though, that part of why we bring the warfare element into this is that meditating on scripture alone doesn’t always win the battle. There are times when you have to shoot the messenger. You say, “No, you’ve got to get out of here in Jesus’ name. There is a role for that, too. The two work together hand in hand.
[01:46:57] Stephanie: Well, we need balance. We need balance in all of it. Just like when we talked in our F.I.S.H. Series about scripture and the Holy Spirit; that you need them to balance each other and inform each other.
[01:47:09] Marcus: Yes, exactly.
[01:47:12] Stephanie: Let’s step back from exclusively talking about spiritual warfare now to look at kingdom worldview as a whole. This is our last episode in the series. Now that we’ve explored it from these multiple angles and these three pillars, do you have any concluding thoughts on Kingdom Worldview?
[01:47:33] Marcus: Kingdom worldview has been the heart of my walk with God and my ministry because I realized a long time ago that kingdom worldview is about having a proper perspective on what’s going on in life. It has helped me so much just to think in terms of these three simple pillars:
I remind myself regularly that God is for me. Sacred romance reminds me God is for me. He wants me to be close to him. It’s not a battle where I somehow have to earn my way closer to God by performing better. I am responding to his love for me. I have to remind myself of the part that’s so foundational to a kingdom worldview, this idea that God is the pursuer, that he loves me, and I’m always responding to his love. I’m never trying to get him to love me. That’s huge.
Second is the sovereignty thing, because life feels out of control a lot. Especially as a leader, you find yourself dealing with the future a lot. You’re having to look down the road and see what are the obstacles that may be coming down the road we’ve got to get ready for. And so you’re trafficking in the future a lot.
Parents do this, students do this. We all have to try to anticipate the future so understanding the sovereignty of God, especially this picture of the chessboard, is helpful for me to think, “Even if I can only see the 64 squares in front of me, I can trust the fact that God is working on this multi level, enormous chessboard. He’s got everything under control, and I can count on him to work this all out for my good.” Again, that’s so foundational.
Then when I get to the spiritual warfare piece, I understand that there’s a part of this that is on me too. There is a response on my end to all three of these pillars, and that is to realize that not everything that happens in this world was preordained by God, otherwise you have God preordaining evil. What we find here though is that God has always preordained a way of escape. His promise to us is not an escape from pain, but an escape from the temptation, escape from sin, escape from slavery into that sin. We’re looking at this from the book of Joshua, that there’s no such thing as a battle that we can’t win as long as God is calling us to fight that battle.
I come back to these three pillars routinely, not just in my teaching, but for myself. I find that there’s always a deeper place to go with all of them. A deeper place to go and understanding God’s love, a deeper place to go in terms of his sovereignty, a deeper place to go in terms of warfare and what the enemy strategy is for me right now. That is partly why we call it Deeper Walk: we’re never really finished in this life, we’re always going a little bit deeper in these things.
Those are my concluding thoughts on kingdom worldview and why it’s so important.
[01:50:39] Stephanie: Thank you. And can I just put you on the spot and ask you to pray for us and our listeners as we’re closing out this
[01:50:46] Marcus: Oh, yes! That’s a great idea. I’d be happy to…
Our Father, you taught us to pray to our Father because you love us. I think of the words of Jesus and Luke that say, “Do not be afraid, little flock, for the father is pleased to give you the kingdom,” and how you reveal yourself there as father, as shepherd, and as king.
You’re the father who loves us. We’re a little flock that you shepherd, and you’re our king, and you’re happy to give us the kingdom. And we thank you that we can rest in who you are, in your love for us and your sovereign control of life, in the fact that our future is anchored in a kingdom reality to come and in a kingdom reality right now. And I do pray for each one who is engaged in their own battle, that you would give them the keys to victory in their own battle right now. We take a stand with them, plead the blood of Jesus between them and the enemy, pray that your Holy Spirit would bring clarity as to your truth and will expose the lies of the enemy. And that you would give us the peace that surpasses understanding that comes from your Spirit. In Christ’s name. Amen.
[01:52:10] Stephanie: Thanks for joining us on the trail today.
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