35: Resilience: Connecting with God

[00:06] Stephanie: Welcome to Deeper Walk’s On the Trail podcast. You are on the trail with father-daughter duo, Marcus and Stephanie Warner. I’m Stephanie, and I’ll be talking with my father, Dr. Marcus Warner, as we discuss topics that help you stay on the trail to a deeper walk with God. Episode 35. We’re wrapping up our discussion of the ABC’s of bounce with connecting with God.

Hello, Father.

[00:30] Marcus: Hello, Daughter. Good to be back together.

[00:33] Stephanie: Yes, always. Even though we’re remotely recording this time so I can’t actually see the twinkle in your eye, but good to talk with you always.

[00:44] Marcus: I can hear the twinkle in your voice so there we go.

[00:47] Stephanie: Yay. Oh man, it has been a week. I’m an Asbury student at the seminary and I know you’ve heard. I know people all around the states and I think the world are starting to hear about what is being called the Asbury Revival 2023. A lot of people are also calling it an awakening and a lot of people are wrestling with what the appropriate thing is to call this. But whatever it is, there is a work of God happening down here, it’s pretty amazing.

[01:24] Marcus: It does sound pretty amazing. Clearly revival is anytime that Christian’s hearts are connecting with God in a deeper way and there’s some breakthrough taking place. There’s some change that is happening where people who have been walking away from God find themselves being drawn back to him, revival is to bring back life. I think people are praying that it will turn into another great awakening and that this is going to sweep. What we’re seeing right now is that people are starting to come in from all over the country because they’re hoping they can take this, and see it spread and turn into an awakening, which would be really cool.

[02:05] Stephanie: Well, and for those who don’t know, it started last Wednesday.  (Okay, I’m not going to try to do the mental math from when this is recorded.) It started at a Wednesday chapel and basically that chapel didn’t end. And more and more people have just been coming. What I have heard being described the most is its sweetness. And that’s what Ihave felt. I haven’t been there as much as I would like but I’ve been a couple times and I’ve talked to many, many people.

I’ve had classes in the atmosphere of it and my takeaway from it has just been the sweetness and the gentleness of it. I know I’ve heard testimonies of healings. I’ve heard testimonies of confession and repentance, testimonies of reconciliation, and of inner healing breakthroughs. It is just a sense of peace and God working on people’s hearts helping them know him deeper. So many good testimonies and so many people coming and seeing it, and a lot of people coming skeptical and leaving, saying, “Wow!”

And also, frankly, people who show up and they haven’t felt that peace yet, so they’re wrestling with it. A lot of people who come in with a lot of experiences. And the more it grows, the more people come with their expectations or their needs. And so I’m just really in awe of God’s grace through it all. And how I heard one person say, “The more and more people who come, the more temptation there has been to have sort of a hype or emotionalism.

And then it’s like as soon as that starts building it’s like God just pours water over it and brings that sweet peace back. And the leadership and students have just been working nonstop to have a space where God can work at his pace, where he can do what he needs to do, and we try to just facilitate that. And it’s just been really encouraging to watch.

[04:28] Marcus: Yeah, it’s amazing. I don’t know that I’ve ever been this close to something like this when it’s been taking place. It’s pretty amazing.

[04:39] Stephanie: I just wanted to read two quotes actually. I know I’m taking a lot of time on this, but I think it works for the topic of connecting with God. One of my professors wrote an article for Christianity Today. His name is Dr. Tom McCall and it was really good. And I just wanted to read what he says, “As an analytic theologian I am weary of hype and very wary of manipulation. I come from a background and a particularly revivalist segment of the Methodist holiness tradition, where I’ve seen efforts to manufacture revivals and movements of the Spirit that were sometimes not only hollow, but also harmful. I do not want anything to do with that.

And truth be told this is nothing like that. There is no pressure or hype. There is no manipulation. There is no high pitched emotional fervor. To the contrary, it has so far been mostly calm and serene. The mix of hope and joy and peace is indescribably strong and indeed almost palpable. A vivid and incredibly powerful sense of shalom. The ministry of the Holy Spirit is undeniably powerful, but also so gentle.”

I just loved that, it was a wonderful explanation. And then I’ll leave it at this. The president of Asbury seminary, Dr. Tennant, he wrote a blog and I just wanted to read the end of it here. He says, “But what we are doggedly seeking is not lasting memories but transformed lives long after the lights go out in Hughes auditorium, Estes chapel, or all the other places which are experiencing this work of grace.

In short, it is not about this place or that place whether Wilmore or any other city. It is about Christ himself. None of us owns this awakening, but all of us must own in our own lives his work and his gracious beckoning to that deeper place. Come, Holy Spirit.

[06:35] Marcus: Amen.

[06:36] Stephanie: On that note, let’s talk about this being with Christ himself and the work in our lives.

[06:44] Marcus: Absolutely. Well, and there’s actually a little Deeper Walk connection there too. Our board member Randy Peterson who’s in Lexington, knows the man who was preaching and there have been connections there. Not that we’re taking any credit for what’s going on, just that there is a connection. God does want to have a connection with people, and that’s what we’re talking about, connecting with God. And what I’m hearing is that people are recognizing that there are obstacles in their lives that need to be gotten rid of and that there is something else. It’s like we’ve all felt that, right?

We’ve all had times in our lives where there’s got to be something more to Christianity than this. There’s got to be more to my walk with God than what I’m experiencing right now. And there’s this hunger that says, I hope I could find it here, I hope I can find it there. And so when you get something like this there are those people who come and they will leave disappointed because they didn’t get everything they were hoping for. But there’s others who, absolutely, this is going to be a turning point in their lives. It’s an amazing thing. I’m just still taking it in.

[07:57] Stephanie: Yeah, you and me both. As you guys are praying for people’s lives to be changed and transformed and for revival to spread. I would also encourage you to pray for the care of the people who are involved. Like, I’ve heard people talking about sometimes the holiest thing you can do is take a nap. Like, go take care of yourselves.

[08:24] Marcus: We talked about that. That rest is an act of worship as we’re trusting God to keep carrying on, and that it is not all on us.

[08:31] Stephanie: Yes. Well, gosh, I was just thinking of when we’ve gone to family camps before, and this is kind of a funny segue. I was just thinking of a folder I bought at a bookstore at our family camp where we would go. Back in high school I bought this folder and it had artwork on it that was depicting the idea that Christianity is not a religion, but a relationship. And I always loved that concept but as I’ve gotten older, I’ve been feeling like sometimes that idea maybe gets overblown.

We need to define our terms on what we mean by that. When some people throw religion out and only want relationship. (And I think that’s a different conversation, so I shouldn’t segue us into that.) I wanted to talk about what does it mean to be in a relationship with God. What is relationship as attachment? And why does connecting with God matter so much? And what does it even look like to connect with God and have a relationship? So could you speak to that a little bit?

[09:40] Marcus: Certainly that original phrase, “Not a religion but a relationship,” came from when America was a largely Christianized country. And, like 80% of some polls had people professing to be Christian. Most people had a church affiliation and there was this need to distinguish between the fact that I attended church, and that I actually have a relationship with God.

Because Christianity was so cultural, I think the idea behind it was people were like, oh, don’t just tell me to go to church, I already go to church so I must be a Christian. They’re like, no, there’s something here about actually living with God on a day to day basis. And so part of this was talking about Sunday Christians. They were the ones who went to church on Sunday but you would never know they were Christians throughout the week. And that’s really partly what this was trying to address.

Now, when we come to Christianity as a relationship my favorite analogy there is John 15. Jesus said, “I am the vine. You are the branches.” My father is the gardener or the husband who’s going to manage the vineyard. He wants that connection like being grafted in. A branch being grafted into a vine, that’s the essence of the Christian life.

So we want that to get stronger and stronger and stronger. I love the way Bruce Wilkinson illustrated this in his book, The Secrets of the Vine, where he said, “If you find a really healthy vine, what happens is there’s a connection between the vine and the branch that is sometimes the size of your fist. So if you have a really big connection between the branch and the vine, and then the gardener is pruning that branch so it stays short. There’s a lot of life coming from the vine into that short branch and it only has one place to go, and that’s into the fruit.”

And I just love that picture that my connection with God has those two elements to it. God the father, his job is to prune my life and to keep that branch from just becoming a straggling, long thing that is wasting all the life that’s flowing into it.

So his job by pruning us is to keep that branch short and then our job is just to abide in Christ. To stay connected and to grow that connection as big as possible. And when you get those two things happening, a short branch and a big connection, that’s when you get this really big juicy fruit. So I love that picture from John 15.

[12:33] Stephanie: Yeah, and going further with that, I love the imagery of relationships being like plants. Seeds are so small and yet they grow and grow, and they grow into something beautiful and cultivated. Starting small and starting tiny, don’t underestimate it.

[12:53] Marcus: Well, and you realize too, that everybody has to start with a small connection and everybody has to go through pruning. And this is not something that happens in one season, let alone in one week or one day.

[13:06] Stephanie: Right. If you see somebody who has a really, really strong connection with God, don’t beat yourself up for not having it. Just start working and taking the steps to get to know him and it will grow naturally.

[13:21] Marcus: Yeah. It’s easy to lose that battle of comparison, isn’t it?

[13:25] Stephanie: Yeah. So in your book Building Bounce, you talk about three keys to growing a deeper walk with God, and you place them in a triangle. At each corner is know, trust, and obey. Will you walk us through that triangle?

[13:39] Marcus: Yeah, absolutely. So the analogy of know, trust, and obey starts like this. I used to tell my students when I was teaching college if I tell you I want you to move to Alaska, then why would you do that, why would you obey me? And you would only obey me if you trusted me. So in order to trust me you have to know me. So there’s this natural connection that before I’m going to obey you I need to trust you. Before I’m going to trust you I need to know you.

And so we see this triangular structure that when I obey and I see that it turns out well, I get to know you even more and I build even more trust. Then this just keeps cycling around and growing and so it is with our walk with God. Sometimes when we separate obedience from trusting and knowing God then our Christianity becomes just purely transactional. It’s just about duty, doing the right thing, and it becomes very behaviorist and that leads to legalism.

So legalism happens when that obedience part is detached from relationship. So knowing God is where this all starts. The Hebrew word, and I love the Hebrew word there is Yada. This idea is not an intellectual knowing but a relational knowing. I think the first usage of Yada in the Bible is Adam Yadad Eve, and she got pregnant. So I mean, that’s a very relational connection there. And so you can in certain cases call this intimacy, being intimate with God.

This takes me directly to Proverbs 3:5,6 which says, “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways Yada him.” To know him in all your ways. Being intimate with him would be another way of saying it and he will direct your paths. And so we see this connection between knowing God, Yada, having an intimate connection with God and trusting him which then leads to obedience. And the fruit comes from the obedience. And so that’s why these things are inseparably linked. We obey people we trust and we trust them because we know them. And those things feed each other.

[15:49] Stephanie: I feel like I have an example of this in my own life. Just in the last two weeks my car has been having issues. It’s been in the shop twice now, once last week and once this week. And along with everything else that’s going on it just felt like, oh, my goodness, why is this happening right now? And I was texting, calling, and talking with both you and mom at the same time trying to figure out how to solve this latest car issue this week. I could feel myself starting to get upset and it all happened in a blink.

But if I break it down I felt like I was prompted to recognize that I was being tempted to start thinking in a direction of fear or anxiety or whatever. And I was like, no and I stopped, I listened to that and I sought God. I was like, God, we have a history my whole life. But even as recently as last week when my car broke down you took care of me.

You raised up people in my life to take care of this and to take care of me. You have been so faithful to provide for me my whole life when things like this happen. And so I don’t know why I’m starting to get anxious right now because I know you’ve got me. And I was like, so, Lord, how do you want to solve this?

Please work this to your glory and I trust you to take care of me. And literally within minutes of praying that Randy Peterson texted me. And he was texting me about the revival but he helped me, and my landlords helped me. Yeah, God has been so good to me. And that’s just one example of even in the past two weeks how he’s been providing for me. And I know that he will so I’m choosing to trust that he will. I feel like I’m going deeper with him and he’s teaching me more of himself,  it’s really good.

[18:01] Marcus: Yeah. It’s also a great example of the SLOW acrostic that we talked about. You stopped, you listened, you obeyed, and you watched what happened. It happened very quickly because it’s not a rote, step by step. Okay, first I must do this, then I must do that. But you’ve done that often enough that it all happened very quickly. Like, okay, I need to stop. And you had a sense from God, trust me on this. You obeyed and you got to watch how God took care of it. And so I think that’s a wonderful illustration of how that process works.

[18:37] Stephanie: Huzzah.

[18:39] Marcus: Yay.

[18:41] Stephanie: Oh, so good. Well, hey, I think in an earlier episode, we talked about the bigger brain idea that Jim Wilder will talk about. Can we come back to this now and talk about it where God is the bigger brain?

[18:56] Marcus: Yeah, just to set the stage, little kids when they get scared they want to be around somebody who’s not scared. It makes them feel a sense of peace, like, okay, mom and dad have this and I don’t have to be afraid. And what they’re really looking for is somebody who’s got a bigger brain, a well enough developed brain that they’re not overwhelmed by the problems that we’re going through. So in the same way all of us have limits on our emotional capacity. There are none of us that are completely mature and have no limits and never get triggered, we all have some limits on that.

But we can always lean into a connection with somebody who has no limits. That is, Jesus who is never overwhelmed. Nothing is ever too big for him and so he is the bigger brain. Sometimes we don’t always have to have a solution from God and understand how things are going to work out or why things are happening or what’s going on. You never got an answer to why is this happening this week? You didn’t get an answer to how are you going to take care of this?

But there was this relational sense of I’m going to be okay because God, the bigger brain, who is not overwhelmed has this. Somebody who has the capacity to deal with it is with me and is in this. And that’s what we see over and over again in the scripture where it says, “Trust in the Lord. Do not be afraid, because I am with you.” And the idea of the “withness of God”, if you will, is that we are with somebody.

[20:40] Stephanie: Allen Arnold.

[20:41] Marcus: Yeah. We are with somebody who is not overwhelmed. For those who don’t know Allen Arnold, he wrote a book called With.

[20:48] Stephanie: The Story of With.

[20:48] Marcus: Yeah, The Story of With, hence that connection.

[20:54] Stephanie: Oh, very good. Well, we. I feel like we’ve covered so much and so little time, but also it’s been so rich. Next week we’re going to be talking about listening prayer. And that’s kind of continuing the connection, connecting with God topic, but also moving into, I think we want to spend a couple of episodes talking about listening prayer. I’m really excited for it. So for now, any final thoughts for this episode?

[21:24] Marcus: Well, you know, I sometimes consider myself a recovering left brain Christian. And I think a lot of us feel that way. We want a connection with God and we’re not quite sure how to get there. In listening prayer, I remember my journey with this was very frustrating and at times it still is. I mean, it’s not like you can just sit there and on demand hear from God whenever you want to. So a large part of this is learning how to recognize the fact that God does in fact speak to us and what that’s like. And how we begin to recognize it and then learn some of the things that we can do to begin  pushing into it more readily.

And then we specifically apply it to the emotional healing process of helping people. Really push into what God wants to do for them, say to them, and be for them in the pain they’re in. So we’ve been talking about ABC’s of Building Bounce and we’re going to be moving into the repair part. How do we not only build a connection with God, but how do we move into repair, for the damage that sometimes keeps us from building the kind of resilience that we want? So hopefully this series has been helpful to people and given them some tools.

[22:41] Stephanie: Do you want to give a final thought for the series as a whole?

[22:44] Marcus: Yeah, sure, the final thought on the series is going back to ABC’s. I remember working with Stefanie Hinman on this book and she had put together a program for traumatized children, it was just really obvious to see the need. You get some of these children who just don’t bounce back from things the way other kids do. You realize very quickly it’s because of the kind of family they grew up in or the kind of life experiences that they have had, and that there’s something missing. And so what we’ve been trying to do here is the same things that you learn about helping a child grow their resilience.

We find it’s the same thing that adults need to do to grow our resilience. So practicing appreciation, quieting from upsetting emotions, learning to get control of our body, doing battle for our mind, and getting our beliefs under control. Then also having safe secure connections with other people. And then the tremendous advantage that we have as Christians is the ability to connect with God.

When you put all those things together we have a nice little recipe for that process. I would also just say that again, that this is not something you do once. This is something that has to become a habit over months and months of practice, but it does work.

[24:00] Stephanie: Start small and it will grow.

[24:01] Marcus: Amen.

[24:02] Stephanie: Amen. Well, thank you, Dad. And thank you all for joining us on the trail today. Deeper Walk International is a nonprofit organization and we partner with people like you in order to do what we do. Some are on the trail with us as official Trailblazers who commit to donating $25.00 or more per month. Because of our Trailblazers we are able to provide free or discounted resources like this free podcast, our free January conference, and our video streaming service, the Learning Library basic.

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Thanks again. We’ll see you back next week