(00:02) Stephanie Warner: Welcome everyone to Season 4, episode 49. Hello, Father.
(00:07) Marcus Warner: Hello, Daughter.
(00:08) Stephanie Warner: We’re back on the trail.
(00:010) Marcus Warner: Back on it. So I’m still in Michigan, as you can tell.
(00:12) Stephanie Warner: You are still in Michigan. Yes, I’m curious. I think next episode I might be in Michigan with you, but, you know, you’re writing, you’re…
(00:24) Marcus Warner: I think there’s a possibility next time you’ll be in Michigan and I’ll be in Indiana, but we’ll see.
(00:28) Stephanie Warner: Yeah no, you know, it’s family time. Yes, all right. I’m eager. I’m eager for this episode. We are having a little bonus, a little bonus episode. We’ve been walking through What Every Believer Should Know About Spiritual Warfare. And we actually, we finished the book last week, but I said, no, we did not finish the book, because there are appendices. There’s, honestly, just for people who, I know some people are like, and I’m done, and they don’t actually look at, you know, they don’t read Forwards or read Appendix and things like that.
But Appendix One has freedom prayers and Appendix Two has a theological note to the role of experience, which we’re going to be going through. And Appendix Three has a roundup prayer from Mark Bubeck. And yeah, there’s good stuff. Good stuff. So more to be had. And I thought, you know, this is a good topic to just kind of press into. And rather than leave us on the occult there, I thought let’s get into that.
So last episode of the What Every Believer Should Know About Spiritual Warfare book study, and once again, if you have not yet availed yourself of it, there is a free discussion guide you can download for this book, if you want to go through with a book buddy or in a group. And the goal of this series has been, and continues to be, to equip you with a spiritual warfare first aid kit, so you can function with more freedom on your deeper walk with God. Thank you for being here with us. All right, Father. We are getting into the role of experience.
(02:13) Marcus Warner: Yeah, well, yeah. So there is this doctrine called the sufficiency of scripture, that I believe in the sufficiency of scripture, right? But it means different things to different people. And so we kind of have to clarify. And that is, I think everybody understands that no matter what your view of the sufficiency of scripture is, the Bible doesn’t teach us everything we need to know about life. It is a sufficient guide to faith and practice, right?
But part of what it does and part of what makes it sufficient is that it’s pointing us to the Holy Spirit, and it’s pointing us to spiritual realities beyond itself. For example, and I just state the obvious, the Bible doesn’t teach you how to tie your shoes. It doesn’t teach you, you know, how to set a broken leg. There’s just a ton of things the Bible doesn’t teach you how to do. And so a lot of what we learn in life, we learn by experience. The Bible doesn’t say how to plan an order of worship.
There’s not even anything in the Bible that you could call counseling. You don’t get biblical counseling. You don’t see a Christian setting an appointment with a more experienced Christian saying, hey, I’ll pay you a hundred bucks if you’ll help me solve my problems. So you can take a doctrine like the sufficiency of scripture a bit too far and say, if it’s not in the Bible, you shouldn’t be doing it because that’s clearly not true. There’s just way too many things you can point to that say, yeah, well, we don’t do that.
So what sufficiency means is, it’s sufficient to give us guidance and boundaries and foundations and things like that for what we need. Understanding that part of that is, go talk to God about it, and go pray and see what God is pointing you to. In fact, one of things that Jesus got upset with the Pharisees about was that the scriptures pointed to him and yet they thought they would get life just from this, the Bible.
The Bible doesn’t claim to be sufficient to give us eternal life. It’s Jesus who gives us eternal life, and it’s the Holy Spirit. So it is sufficient as a guide to point us to these things, but the realities themselves are experiential. And so because of that, there’s always going to be this interplay between experience and scripture when it comes to doing theology. And it makes some people nervous, but there’s just no way around it.
(04:54) Marcus Warner: In fact, I would put it this way, that the primary job of the theologian isn’t just to systematize what the Bible teaches, it’s to answer the questions that life poses. And so when I experience something and I go to a theologian, I want to know, well, how can the Bible help me to understand this thing? Whether that is the anxiety I’m going through, or whether it’s evolution, or whether it’s, you know, the latest political issues going on in the world. I want to know, I want some help in how I think biblically about this.
Now the Bible may not give me a complete answer to it. I say well obviously, it’s right here in this chapter and verse, if somebody brings up this philosophical idea, your response should be, you know, X, but it does give us guidance and direction on some of these things. So, that’s what we’re trying to do. So most of our lives, we start with experience and going, I am going through something. I am having an experience. And then we start there and then we go to the scriptures and say, what should I make of this?
And it’s no different with spiritual warfare. The Bible is clear that there is such a thing as spiritual warfare, and that there is such a thing as demons. But in my life, for example, well, let’s start with my parents. It was somebody sitting in front of them manifesting, and them going, wait, does the Bible give me any help with this? Is there anything the Bible has to say that might help me? And they go, well, this looks an awful lot like what the Bible calls, you know, a demon. And so they’re like, if I treat it like a demon, what does the Bible say? Well, it talks about casting out demons. So I’m like, all right, well then, let’s try it that way.
So the Bible then becomes a sufficient guide, right, and says, okay, it’s giving me some guidance. I was able to diagnose what’s going on. I’m able to help this person, and then let’s test it. Let’s see what the fruit is, because the Bible also tells me I should do that. And they’re saying, the scripture feels more alive to me now. My relationship with God feels fuller. I feel greater freedom. The problem that I came here for isn’t a problem anymore. That’s all pretty good fruit.
(07:18) Marcus Warner: And so you’re like, okay, that’s kind of what happens. We start with the experience of, somebody’s got this problem. We go to the Bible, say, what guidance can we get from the scripture toward helping with this problem? And we press into it. And so a lot of this is trial and error, right? You’re going through here trying to figure out the best solutions possible, and which approaches to things really produce the best fruit. Again, some people are going to be uncomfortable with that, but I really think that’s just the way life works.
(07:52) Stephanie Warner: Mm-hmm. I like in this appendix that you press in a little bit on like examples of people in the Bible who appeal to experience. Do you want to talk about any of those?
(08:06) Marcus Warner: I do find it interesting that in the Bible itself, experience is the final arbiter on what is true and what is false. You could start relatively early, but it’s with Moses and the people of Israel. He’s like, you heard the voice of God at Mount Sinai. You saw the waters of the Red Sea part, right? You saw the plagues that happened in Egypt. He appeals to their experience, you know, to help them understand what is true, that the Lord really is God.
Elijah at Mount Carmel, he appealed to the experience. Let’s see who actually sends fire from heaven, and let’s see who’s really making it not rain. Is it Baal or is it Yahweh making it not rain? Who’s the true God?
And so Jesus himself is like, why won’t you at least believe in your experience of all of these miracles, right? You’re seeing these signs and wonders. His own resurrection was an experiential thing. It’s like you have to, the experience of the resurrection sends you back to the scriptures to try to figure out what to make of all of this. And so when you go back to the scriptures in light of this experience of the resurrection, all of a sudden all these things jump out at you and you’re like, oh, here it is. It’s all over the place.
The apostle Paul, like when he’s talking about his conversion, he’s like, I was knocked off my horse. It’s like, I had this experience. Jesus spoke to me. In fact, in the letter to Galatians, most of his arguments with the Galatians are rooted in experience. He goes, well, my experience was that Jesus spoke to me directly and gave me this gospel directly. I didn’t even get it from the other apostles. And so don’t let anybody give you anything other than what I have, my experience of my revelation. That’s a pretty profound thing that he’s saying there. In general, you’re looking through, the Bible routinely appeals to experience as the arbiter between what is true and what is false, which is a weird way to think about things.
(10:11) Stephanie Warner: Mm-hmm. But then, doesn’t contradict, you know. It’s experience that doesn’t contradict scripture.
(10:18) Marcus Warner: But what it’s doing is, it’s contradicting people’s interpretations of the scripture. So it made the Pharisees furious, right? Because they thought they had the Bible figured out. Now these experiences are causing them to question their interpretation of the scripture. And so the problem is that it can be difficult to know when something is scriptural and when it’s my interpretation of the scripture, if I’ve not thought about it. You know, if I’ve not actually looked into it.
So one of the things that experience does is it drives us to relook at it and see if I need to look at this from a different angle and a different perspective. Now, all of that having been said, experience always requires a narrative.
(11:09) Marcus Warner: I’ll give you an example, right? I’m personally not charismatic in my theology, right? I’m more evangelical. I believe in the continuity of the gifts. I believe that the Holy Spirit can still do whatever he wants to do, and he can give people whatever gifts he wants to give them. But with some people who’ve grown up like cessationists, and then they have an experience of the Holy Spirit doing something miraculous and all of a sudden, like I think of Jack Deere, Surprised by the Holy Spirit, kind of a person who was in a particular theological camp, and then they had experience and now they’ve changed.
Sometimes you can feel like your only option is then to adopt the narrative or theology of people who support those experiences. And I’m like, not necessarily. Every experience has to be interpreted. There’s a narrative that goes with every experience. And so, it’s meant to drive us back and research again, and look into this again to see if, you know, what the proper interpretation of this is.
And you do so with a certain amount of humility because you realize, wow, there’s just a whole lot of different perspectives on this. Here’s what I, the conviction I’ve come to, but I do realize that there are people who disagree. And that’s why it comes down to things like experiencing the Lord’s Supper. What is the narrative? What is going on here when I experience this communion? And it means different things to different people.
So in the end, each one of us is answerable to God, you know, for where we come down on these things. And everybody wants to be right. But I think that God has intentionally designed it in such a way, that it’s almost impossible to know if you’re right about everything. And I think he’s done that partly so that we will live with humility, and that we will keep seeking, and that we won’t get complacent and feel like, you know, I’ve got all the answers.
(13:14) Stephanie Warner: Mm-hmm. And this is where legalism can come in and threaten things, because if you feel like you know what is absolutely right in all the circumstances, you can be like, well, here we go. I’m going to, you know, I will be the perfect Christian, and I will do all the things, and Jesus says, hey, how’s your heart? Let’s walk together, and truth is very important, but also…
(13:36) Marcus Warner: And when we talk about this in Jim Wilder and I’s Solution of Choice, we talk about this too. The image I use is that we talk about four good ideas to neutralize Western Christianity. And they’re all good ideas, right? Truth is a good idea. And good choices is a good idea. Tolerance is a good thing. Power is a good thing.
But if you move any of them to the hub and make it the hub of the whole wheel that the spokes are coming out from, if that hub isn’t a love connection with God, if it’s not the John 15 abiding in Christ, then everything gets skewed out. So the same thing can happen with truth. And that is you put it in the middle, and all of a sudden you can find yourself in a lot of fights you really don’t need to be in.
(14:26) Stephanie Warner: Well and I think with all of this, you know, as you’re studying scripture and as you’re living out just, you’re experiencing life and, you know, some people struggle with spiritual warfare, and like the role of experience for them is they haven’t experienced it. And so it just feels too far out. Like it doesn’t feel like it’s necessary or that it’s real.
Some people have had negative experiences with people who have misapplied spiritual principles or whatnot. You know, I know we’ve known or known of, you know, many people who are just like vehemently against, you know, spiritual warfare as we would teach it, until they had a personal experience and we’re like, oh, like all of a sudden, this is really real, and like experience starts reshaping the worldview. And so I think, you know, we talk so much about worldview at deeper walk.
And I think it’s so… Worldview, I don’t know if I’ve ever quite articulated this before, but worldview has just layers. You know, you have kind of your wet cement layers, and your, I’m still trying to figure this out layers, but there’s how we experience the world, how we understand and interpret the world, right? That can change. Like whatever worldview you have, you know, like, I’m five years old and I have this worldview, right? When you’re fifteen, your worldview is probably going to be a little bit different at fifteen than it was at five. And so on.
And we can continue shaping it. And sometimes that just happens to us passively, but we can consciously like take a lens at our worldview, and try to figure out, okay, how am I thinking about the world, and do I agree with how I’m just naturally thinking about it? I don’t know.
(16:14) Marcus Warner: Yeah, that’s why I like to say discipleship in a lot of ways is about changing worldviews from the one we were raised with, to the worldview of the kingdom of God. And that’s an ongoing process, because we see through a glass darkly, and we don’t have full access to all of that.
So we take the truth that we do have, knowing that that truth is sufficient to lead us into a life of holiness and godliness and a life of intimacy with God. And so it says in II Peter, we’ve been given everything that we need for life and godliness. And through these great and precious promises that God has given to us. And I think that that’s what we’re looking at. So I just want to start with this idea.
So let me get to two stories kind of wrap this up. I met with a person a while back, and they were stuck with something and we pressed into it. It turned out to be demonic, and we were able to pretty gently, you know, bind things, deal with it in a no-drama way and get rid of this thing, and they felt tremendous freedom. Well, I found out afterwards, they told me after it was done, that they were one who had had a horrible spiritual warfare experience in their prior church, and they didn’t want anything to do with spiritual warfare. But it’s like I had done it so gently, they almost didn’t realize that was what was happening until it was done.
And they were like, maybe this is what it’s supposed to be like. And it doesn’t have to be what I had experienced before, which was a lot of shouting and yelling, and people being kind of crazy and people rolling on the floor. They were traumatized by what had happened before. And so I look at that and say, that was helpful for them to say, okay, I can have a different mental picture in my head of what it needs to look like, for this to be a spiritual warfare issue.
And then I think of also a guy who used to be heavily connected to our ministry who started off as an independent Baptist pastor, who just despised any teaching that suggested that Christians needed to worry about spiritual warfare, or needed to deal with demons at a direct level. And he once stood up in his pulpit and actually crushed, you know, a back in the day cassette of teaching from our ministry.
And then ended up having a child with an issue that could only get resolved with a spiritual warfare solution, ended up turning to our ministry for help, got that help, and realized he was wrong and began, you know, to change his whole tune, and began studying all that he could about it. So it generally takes an experience, right, to change somebody’s theology. And that’s not always a bad thing.
Sometimes we’re afraid we’ll have an experience that will change our theologies. That’s not always wrong. But we also need to not just assume that because I had this one experience, I now know all of the theological implications of that experience. I need to process it with people. I need to go through scriptures for myself. I need to seek God about it, and not just jump to a conclusion. I think that’s one of the mistakes that a lot of us make, is that we get the sense of, I know what God wants from me. I’ll take it from here. And that’s where we get ourselves in trouble, instead of continuing the process as a journey.
(19:58) Stephanie Warner: Mm-hmm. Well, that’s good. I was going to say earlier, and that’s why we’re on the trail, right? ‘Cause we are discovering, we are growing, we are experiencing and we’re all doing this together with…
(20:12) Marcus Warner: Yeah. Well, there’s a lot of trial and error to this too. And I’ll tell you, most of the people who’ve gone through like deeper walk training on spiritual warfare don’t do it exactly the way we teach it. And we don’t mind that. It’s like, because we don’t have a formula that says you do it exactly this way. It’s more like we’re trying to give guidance. And so most of the people I know have gone through it have ended up finding something that works for them, that feels natural for them. And that’s good.
It’s also one of the reasons why you get such variety. And then you bring into this issue of variety, like if you’re starting with a sacramental theology, you’re going to approach spiritual warfare very differently than if you have a non-sacramental theology. If you have a high church, apostolic, hierarchical thing, authority means something different to you than it does to somebody else. If you’re charismatic versus non-charismatic, the way you approach spiritual warfare is going to look very differently.
You can’t just say, hey, we do spiritual warfare ministry, and automatically know what that person is talking about, because it can look very different for somebody coming out of Lutheran, Anglican, Catholic kind of background, and somebody coming out of a Vineyard kind of background, or somebody who is coming out of a Southern Baptist background. Spiritual warfare might look very different in those situations, because of theology and the practice that people are comfortable with, and that they are bringing with them, into the experience of the way that they practice things.
So what we’re trying to do is create a biblically balanced approach to this. And what I have found is that no matter which of these groups you’re coming from, the more balanced you are, the closer it starts to look. And I’ve actually heard Catholic exorcists using language that I use. I’m like, wow, that’s interesting. They’re talking about permission. They’re talking about authority. They’re talking about this, using the same kind of terminology I would. I think it’s like, the more biblically balanced you get within that sphere, the closer your vocabulary is going to get, and the more that there’s going to be overlap in what you do and how you approach things.
(22:24) Stephanie Warner: Yeah, well the why is so important. The, you know, abiding in Christ and the attachment there and also the why, you know, it’s like you said, the principles are, you know, what it looks like on the surface might look different, but are the principles? Are we following the same principles generally, and I think that’s good.
(22:43) Marcus Warner: Well, and you can only take experience so far. So you obviously can’t root everything in it, but it’s just, it’s got to be a factor in there. But the main purpose of experience is to drive us to reinterpret our view of reality and say, am I really as biblical as I think I am? Am I thinking with a kingdom mindset as much as I thought I was, or do I need to adjust this at some level?
(23:07) Stephanie Warner: Reinterpret or refine or build upon or, you know, like ’cause, just every experience isn’t going to contradict the other experience, you know. So but yes, if you’re having an experience that is…
(23:18) Marcus Warner: Yeah, well, just in spiritual warfare circle ways, like we tend to focus on the no-drama approach to deliverance, right? I know other ministries that they want high drama in their deliverance because that’s what they see in the Bible. They see, you know, this stuff. So it’s all going to look different. And that’s why you can’t just kind of accept or reject all spiritual warfare ministry based off of what your experiences has been.
And even if people learn, like deeper walk principles, it doesn’t mean they’re going to apply those principles the same way I would. And it doesn’t mean, because there are so many factors that go into that, from maturity to experience to actual theology. So a lot of moving parts here.
My point here isn’t that experience as the final arbiter, although I do find it interesting that when it comes down to: Is this kingdom of darkness versus kingdom of light? God tells us to test. And most of those tests are experiential. So, is it bearing fruit? By your fruit, you will know them. That’s an experiential thing. It’s anchored in scripture. Like we’re saying, is it producing the kind of fruit scripture would want us to see, but it’s still an experiential test.
(24:41) Stephanie Warner: Yeah. Well, hey, I’m going to point people to the appendix ’cause even after all of that, we didn’t get through everything that appendix talks about, which is a sneaky acrostic. In the appendix, you talk about five common reasons why Christians often avoid the subject of spiritual warfare. And yes, it spells FACTS. I looked, I was like, I don’t think he actually said, I’m going to give you an acrostic. You just did it, ’cause that’s how you are.
And those five common reasons are fear, anecdotes, controversy, theology, and secularity. So I’m just going to, you know, leave that little cliffhanger. Go read the appendix. I don’t think we have time to dig into all of that. But yeah, I think we need to take some time for final thoughts on the series as a whole. So any final thoughts for this episode to start?
(25:39) Marcus Warner: Well, I bring this up because I want to think theologically about everything that I do in life, and I want to have a kingdom perspective on all that I do. I also know that I have had to change my mind many times in my life about what I thought I had figured out theologically, or in my interpretation of scripture, that it’s an ongoing process as you learn more.
And one of the ways you learn more is through experiences. You’re like, well, maybe I should look at this a little bit differently. I hadn’t thought about it like that. And so that’s the goal. The goal is still intimacy with God, anchored in Scripture, but informed by and challenged by sometimes, our experiences.
(26:31) Stephanie Warner: Yeah. Yep. All right. I think this might be final invitation for Battle Ready. Come get trained and equipped and encouraged for the Battle Ready conference. And I think you can even still submit some questions. If not, you can always submit questions, and we’ll try to get to them in a podcast sometime. But yeah, come. Battle Ready conference is a pay it forward event. So that means if you want to help pay it forward so it can spread to others, you can pay. But also if you can’t pay, you can come for free. We don’t want money, you know, to be an obstacle for this event.
So welcome, welcome, and thank you everybody. We’re so pleased to offer this podcast free around the world. Thank you to each of us who partners with us. Thank you to each of you who partners with us. Sorry. I am tired, but I am grateful. Thank you to everybody who partners with us to keep us on the trail. Thank you for those who pray for us. Thank you for those who donate to Deeper Walk. Thank you for the volunteers. Thank you for everyone who’s just a listener and a friend. We’re so grateful for you and it is a privilege to be here with you. All right, Father. Final thoughts for this series as a whole. And then I’ll have you pray for us out.
(28:00) Marcus Warner: Sure. Well, you know, again, spiritual warfare is the context in which we live our lives, but it’s not the point of our lives. The point of life is our union with Christ. It is that John 15, abiding with Christ, being the vine that abides, being the branch that is connected to Christ. We deal with spiritual warfare because we have to. It is a context we can’t escape. And so it’s something we’re going to have to keep coming back to again and again, because it is just a part of the reality of the framework in which we live. But we always want to make sure that it remains the context and doesn’t become the point.
(28:43) Stephanie Warner: Hm. Yeah. Alright, will you pray for us? Thank you.
(28:47) Marcus Warner: Yeah. So Father God, we are grateful that you don’t leave us alone to figure out spiritual warfare without guidance from scripture. And we are thankful also for pioneers who’ve gone ahead of us and learned some things the hard way, through making mistakes, or from, you know, having to deal with something they had no idea how to deal with that experience. So thank you for those people who’ve kind of paved that road for us, so that we can have greater guidelines and greater understanding of how to deal with the battles in our own lives.
And I pray for the people now who are listening, who have a specific warfare thing going on in their life right now, would you just through your Holy Spirit give them the keys to unlock what needs to be unlocked, and that you will provide for them unexpected help along the way. And we just pray protection and blessing on each listener in Christ’s name. Amen.
(29:53) Stephanie Warner: Hm-hmm. Amen. See you next week.
