4: The Broken Discipleship Factory: Part 3

[00:00:00] 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. Welcome to episode four. Today we continue with part three of our series, The Broken Discipleship Factory.

Last episode, we looked at Enlightenment and The Solution of Truth. In this episode, we’re looking at voluntarism and The Solution of Choice. Hi, Father.

[00:00:38] Marcus: Hi. Nice to be chatting with you again. This is another light topic for today.

[00:00:45] Stephanie: Another light topic.

[00:00:47] Marcus: Yeah.

[00:00:47] Stephanie: Yes, I was just contemplating that whenever I see “voluntarism,” my Latin background brings up voluntas, which means the will, or a wish, or consent, or a desire, but it comes from the verb wolo, which means “to will,” or, anyway, so, that’s where voluntarism comes from.

Yeah.

[00:01:13] Marcus: Yeah. Wolo, which is volo, which, again, always makes me think of…

[00:01:19] Stephanie: Yes, that’s true, I pronounce it classically.

[00:01:20] Marcus: Exactly. Which makes me think of a Rolo, which is a candy, so I have a problem with that. Everything reminds me of food. I’m sure that’s a problem.

[00:01:28] Stephanie: Yeah. Your willpower.

[00:01:31] Marcus: I have a problem with willpower.

Wolo. “I will.” All right. Well, yes, but you’re right. That’s where voluntarism comes from. It comes from that volo, volantis, you know, family of Latin words, meaning “the will” or “to choose.” It does not mean wishful thinking.

[00:01:52] Stephanie: Yeah, it’s not, “I wish it would happen” so much as “I will it to happen.”

[00:01:58] Marcus: So, are we ready to dive in?

[00:02:00] Stephanie: Yes. Yes.

[00:02:02] Marcus: All right. voluntarism. Yeah. So, again, I got this word from Dr. Wilder when he was doing some webinars for Deeper Walk several years ago. And as we started working on The Solution of Choice together, we took a little bit deeper dive into this, and began to understand that some of the Puritan theologians like William Ames wrote that their theologies really started with the will and the idea that man is what I choose is central to the faith of the choices that I make. And again, we’ve argued that discipleship is like a wheel and that at the center of this wheel is our attachment with Jesus and then our attachment with his people and moving out from there.

And then that the spokes on the wheel are things like truth. and choices, and power, and tolerance, but that they are not meant to be the hub of the wheel. And when they become the hub, bad things happen. The whole thing gets off balance. And so we see this a lot in that Christianity, when, because of this emphasis on the will, started becoming somewhat reductionistic and making everything a choice. So we started focusing on salvation as a choice—like decision. Make this decision for Christ. And when that happened, evangelism became very much like sales, like the whole goal is that we got to get people to make this choice, we got to get them to make this decision, and I remember.

You know, I was a part of the Billy Graham crusades. It came to Indianapolis in the year 2000, and I was one of the counselors who went down and met with people. But their own studies showed that something like only one out of seven people who went forward and made this decision for Christ actually showed any evidence of following through with it. In only one out of seven could they record or find any evidence that there was actually life change that followed.

So it’s not that decisions don’t matter, and it’s not like there’s not a decision involved, but if you stop and think about it, becoming a Christian is much more like getting married And it may involve a decision, right? There are choices I have to make here, and there is an act of the will that happens. But what I’m doing is I’m forming an attachment with my wife, in this case, that begins here. And it is supposed to now grow and expand, and so the attachment makes us one, and it’s not just an act of will that makes us one. And so we also think philosophically, “What is the will?” and “ What do we mean by the will?”

And one of the things that I know Dr. Wilder has often explained is that a lot of our thinking about this actually comes from medieval philosophy and medieval theology, which talks about the human makeup very much like we talk about sunrises and sunsets. And that is, it uses anthropological language. It uses words like the will and the emotions and the intellect and breaks it down that way. And if we break this down the way that the brain actually functions, we’re going to get a very different view of who man is and what it means to be human. And so part of what we’re trying to do here is to actually create a new anthropology as a foundation for discipleship.

But that is, we need to start looking at what it means to be human a little bit differently than the medieval people did, because today almost nobody goes along with that anthropology unless they’re just inheriting it and have never thought about it.

[00:05:40] Stephanie: Right. Well, and I know Jim talks about how brain science shows that we don’t just have one will, which is where it definitely falls apart. It’s not like we just have to get our one will in line, but we have multiple wills.

[00:05:55] Marcus: Yeah, I think we can all relate to that, right? It’s like part of me wants to do this, and part of me wants to do that. Part of me really wants to go take a nap. Part of me wants to go golf. Part of me wants to study.

Part of me knows I should really… You know, I can have multiple wills going on at the same time. So now it becomes a question of which will is the strongest part of my brain. Also, based on the brain science, one of the things he said that was really fascinating was this idea that if you compare your brain to a tree, then attachment is like the roots of the tree. It’s really stable. It’s really solid.

Whereas choices are like the leaves on a tree, right? They’re a part of our brain, which is really fickle and head it is just like the leaves can fall off, they can blow, they can change, they’re doing all kinds of stuff, but it’s much easier to change what’s happening with leaves than it is to change that anchor point of our attachment.

And so the idea is that if I am attached, deeply attached to a holy God, then it’s going to start forming me into a holy person and all of a sudden making holy choices is going to be a whole lot easier. But if I reverse that process, and I say, “I am going to become a holy person by making holy choices that will eventually form an attachment with a holy God,” the whole thing’s going to fall apart, because it’s just not the way it’s designed to work.

[00:07:17] Stephanie: Yeah. Can you dig in more on the definition of attachment?

[00:07:22] Marcus: Yeah, sure. So when we’re talking about bonding, at the deepest part of the brain is a craving or a desire to be bonded to somebody else, to be connected, right? So when a baby comes out of the mother’s womb, the first thing that baby is looking for is not food.

The first thing that baby is looking for is attachment. And if you stop to think about it, that baby has been attached by an umbilical cord, literally, for eight or nine months here. And now that they’re out in the world, safety and security comes from feeling connected, right? So feeling like I am bonded and I am safe and I am with somebody.

So our earliest attachments are formed through smell and through touch, and then after that through sound, and then eventually through sight, and then it just grows, and then our attachment grows deeper and deeper. And so attachments will either be fueled by fear or they’ll be fueled by joy.

And so what I found is that in discipleship, a lot of us are trying to overcome a fear bond with God and transform that into a joy bond. Because we started off not feeling safely attached to him. We felt like it was all based on a choice that I had made and I might change my mind about that choice.

[00:08:46] Stephanie: Or maybe you made that choice out of fear.

[00:08:48] Marcus: Yeah, exactly. So my own story was when I was three years old, I had a nightmare about hell and went to my mom’s room, you know, your Grandma Warner, and asked, “What do I have to do to make sure I never go to hell?” which is a very different question than “What do I need to do in order to become a child of God? What do I need to do in order to be attached to God in a positive way? I want to have a relationship with this wonderful person, right?”

It was completely fear based. And so, I find that with a lot of our Christianity, if our attachment to God is primarily based in fear, it creates a problem.

And I get this question a lot, too. It’s like, so why does the Bible say that the beginning of wisdom is the fear of the Lord? What is this fear of the Lord talking about if we’re saying we want to have a joy-based relationship with God over a fear-based relationship? And I say at this point, we are talking about wisdom and what wisdom is. When the Bible is talking about the fear of the Lord, it’s talking about which path leads to what is good.

And so, if you define wisdom as taking the path that leads to God’s blessing and to what is good, and you define folly as taking the path that leads to evil and what’s going to mess your life up, he said that in that sense, the foundation of it is the fear of the Lord. And that is, I want to make sure I do what is pleasing to God and get on that path that he’s going to bless. And so in that sense there is a “fear of the Lord” thing.

So we sometimes try to soften that to “Well, it’s respect for God” or something like that, but honestly, I think it has to do with the fear of the consequences of getting this thing wrong, and taking seriously: “So wise people understand that choices have consequences and wise people understand that there is something to all of this.”

So as we talk about choice today again, we’re not saying that choices don’t matter and that choices are irrelevant. We’re just saying that it’s not supposed to be the hub on which everything else is built.

[00:10:48] Stephanie: It just reminds me of Grandpa talking about if you do things God way, you get to watch what happens. If you do things your own way, you get to watch what happens.

[00:10:59] Marcus: Yeah, exactly. No, that’s the fear of the Lord, and so it’s not that I’m afraid of God, but the fear of the Lord teaches me that there are real consequences to the path that I get on. And so wisdom starts with making sure I stay off of that.That’s why Psalm 1 starts off, “Blessed is the man who does not.”

It’s like, “blessed is the man who does not walk in the way of the wicked or stand in the way with sinners or sit in the seat of the mocker, but his delight is in the law of the Lord.” So, partly it starts in fear, but then it ends with delight. Right?

It’s like out of the fear of the Lord, I want to make sure I don’t do something that’s going to ruin my life, but as I push into this, I find delight in the Lord. I find delight in his law, and I begin to trust him. And so I think that the idea of attachment in Scripture, in my way of thinking about it, is primarily connected to this word “trust,” right?

And that is, a joy-bond with God is one that trusts him to be a safe and secure presence in my life, versus a fear-bond with God, which never gets past this idea of “I just don’t want him to ruin my life.”

[00:12:06] Stephanie: That’s really helpful. Thank you.

[00:12:08] Marcus: Yeah.

[00:12:09] Stephanie: So The Solution of Choice. How do we see this playing out in The Broken Discipleship Factory?

[00:12:18] Marcus: So the way this plays out primarily is that when you go to, you know, Church A, Church B, Church C, you’re looking for a solution to your problem. Let’s just say that you’re struggling with a pornography addiction or you’re struggling with an anger issue. And you go to Church A and they give you The Solution of Truth.

And they’re going to say, here’s the Bible. It says “Don’t do that!” Right? And so then you go to church B, it’s The Solution of Choice, and they’re going to say, “Well, we already know the Bible says don’t do this. Now, we need to make sure that you’re going to choose to not do this anymore. So we’re going to give you an accountability partner, and you’re going to report to him every week on your behavior.”

And that accountability partner will kind of force you to make good choices on this issue, you know. And that’s fine because at one level we want to make those good choices. But really, we would like to move past. Like let’s take the porn thing. It’s like at some point I want to move past where I am craving this and just have to keep that craving under control to where I am actually healing and being transformed and changing when it comes to this and I’m actually developing a protector mindset that says, “Even if somebody were to offer this to me, I would not accept it because You.” It’s like me being a protector rather than a predator.

And so, yeah, so you go into all of this and we understand that if it’s all about choices, then it is enough for me to just say no, right? It’s the same thing you think about love. Like if I go to work or to school or to someplace, and I really hate some people. Right. Or I really despise those people.

You know, is it enough for me to continue despising and hating them, but choose to be kind to them once in a while? Is that loving your enemies? Take it another step further. It’s like, yeah, I mean, if I’m talking about, you know, as a parent with kids or as a kid with parents or as a husband and wife, you don’t want to wake up in the morning and have to decide whether or not to love your kids.

Right? You don’t wake up in the morning and decide whether or not you love your parents. You don’t wake up in the morning and decide whether you love your wife or not. You know, that should be there. That attachment should be there. And that it makes all these other choices easier.

[00:14:40] Stephanie: Sometimes choices then are, you know, if you are waking up and realizing you don’t have that attachment, then there’s a place for choices as you are getting back onto that path. Right.

The end goal isn’t, “Oh, I made the choice to be kind.” That’s just a tool. It’s not the end goal. Yeah. It makes me think of when we talk about counseling and like getting to the root of a heart issue and how so many times people go to counseling and it’s just fruit picking, like, Oh, I’m going to manage my anger.

I’m going to manage my depression. And we’re like, we would much rather you manage that than not manage it. But we want to go deeper.

Marcus: Right.

And so, yes, this is a good thing to learn how to manage these things. But we want to find true healing. We want to find true attachment. We want to try.

[00:15:26] Marcus: Right. So we do want to make good choices, but that isn’t the—but that’s again, that’s a spoke on the wheel.

It’s not the hub. And what has happened, because our voluntarist thinking is so pervasive, is that we have tended to reduce everything to a choice. So not only would touch reduce salvation to simply making a choice, but we have reduced love to a choice. And how many times have we heard people say, “Love is a choice”?

I’m like, yeah, not really. Love is an attachment. Right? And based on that attachment, I’m going to make choices and their choices that come out of it and choices get woven into this. But again, I can be fickle in my choices, but hopefully that attachment is secure. Same thing with joy, you know, when we teach on joy.

This idea that there are choices you can make that are going to make the experience of the attachment better. There’s choices you can make that are going to make the experience of joy more likely. But you can’t just choose, you know, joy anymore than you just choose to be happy. So, like

[00:16:30] Stephanie: You talk about closing the joy gap.

[00:16:32] Marcus: Yeah, shrinking the joy gap. There are things that you can choose to do to build habits into your life. But that doesn’t mean that you can simply reduce what’s going on to a choice. And this is confusing. I mean, for me as a pastor, I remember preaching on 1 Corinthians 13, and simply reducing it to a list of choices that people make.

So I totally bought into the “love is a choice” thing. And was like, okay, so love is patient. Therefore, choose to be patient. Love is kind. Therefore, choose to be kind. Love is, you know, never failing. So choose to never fail. Really? You can make that choice? You know, I’m not sure I can make the choice to never fail.

There are some things that you can choose to do because they’re loving choices. But that isn’t the same thing as saying that love is a choice. So we come down to this where, again, if a church is offering a solution that says make better choices and here’s an accountability partner to help you make better choices, and that’s the extent of the help that you’re getting because that’s all that the model has to offer, right, then you can begin to see why that would get frustrating to people.

And when it works, right, when an accountability works and it’s truly life changing, I’ve talked to people who’ve come up to me and said, I don’t know why you’re bashing accountability. You know, it changed my life. I usually ask him, I said, if you look back on that, I said, was it the relationship and the attachment that you formed with those people and that person? Or was it the fact that they were asking you every week, “Did you fall?”

And without exception, they’ve all been—you know, it was the relationship and the attachment that actually had the power, you know, much more so. There were a lot of weeks they never even asked, you know, “How’d you do? Just knowing I was going to be with my people was what kept me on the journey.”

And so that’s kind of what we’re getting at here, is we want to broaden off the model that the church is using to create transformation so that we don’t reduce it to simply— otherwise it’s like telling an addict, just say no. Right? And that’s the ultimate voluntarist, you know, thing is, you know, just say no.

Like, that’s the only thing going on is you’re making a choice. There’s just a whole lot more going on in that situation.

[00:18:43] Stephanie: Yeah. I was flipping through The Solution of Choice and and just noticed a callout that I really liked. It says, “When choice is invoked in Scripture, it is generally calling people to remember who their God is and who their people are and to choose to stand with him.”

Marcus: Absolutely.

You get lots of—you do find choice in the Bible, but it is a relational choice just as much. Yeah.

[00:19:09] Marcus: It’s the choice to live out of the attachment. So even like “Live a life worthy of the calling you’ve received,” you know, is similar to, you know, “make the choice to live out of the attachments that you formed with God and his people.”

Yeah. That’s really our calling.

[00:19:27] Stephanie: Huzzah.

[00:19:28] Marcus: All right. So next week we are what? We’re going to be on. See, we’ve done truth and choice, so next one is on power, right?

[00:19:36] Stephanie: Correct. Correct. So any final thoughts for this week?

[00:19:42] Marcus: I think just this, and that is at the heart of this Broken Discipleship Factory concept is this idea that, that we have a faulty model, right?

And that faulty model is that we put truth as the hub, and then we put the will as the hub, and what needs to be there is attachment with Jesus, attachment with his people, and working on those attachments and strengthening those attachments needs to be the heart. And if we don’t make that correction, we’re always going to have this wobbly wheel in the way that we approach our discipleship.

So hopefully that’s a helpful cause right now we’re just trying to clarify things for people and help them get this model clear.

[00:20:18] Stephanie: Indeed. Well, thank you for your wisdom, Dad. And thank you, listeners, for joining us on the trail today. If you want to keep going deeper with us on your walk with God, please subscribe to the Deeper Walk Podcast and share with your friends.

You can find more at our website, deeperwalk.com.

Thanks again. And we’ll see you back next week.