5: The Broken Discipleship Factory: Part 4

[00:00:08] 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 five. Today, we continue with part four of our series, The Broken Discipleship Factory. Last episode, we looked at voluntarism and the solution of choice. In this episode, we’re looking at modernism and the solution of power.

[00:0036] Stephanie: Hello, Father.

[00:00:38] Marcus: Hello. Yeah, we’re going to dive in again to take a look at how the Enlightenment and the philosophies that came out of the Enlightenment have affected discipleship through the years, but before we do that, it’s good to hear your voice again.

[00:00:52] Stephanie: Oh, it’s always so good to hear your voice. I love talking to you. This is a pleasure.

[00:00:58] Marcus: It is fun. I always remember wishing I could have had a chance to do something like this with my dad. That would have been great fun, so I’m glad we get to do this.

[00:01:07] Stephanie: Yes, that would have been epic. Oh, can you imagine having grandpa on this with us?

[00:01:11] Marcus: I know, that would have been so cool. I don’t think there would have been time for both of us to get all of our words in.

[00:01:20] Stephanie: We can just sit back and listen and say, “Go, Grandpa, go.” I could have done that with Grandma Eileen, too. She preached a longer little sermonette after her wedding than Grandpa did.

[00:01:32] Marcus: Well, it was a joke between them. Later in life, you know, Grandpa married Eileen Lageer, and she was an author in her own right. The little joke between them was that she had sold more books than he had. She had done some background work on the history of the Missionary Church denomination called Merging Streams and another book on the Canadian branch of that denomination that was widely read and disseminated.

She also wrote a lot of books and articles on missionary work. Both of them were missionaries, and so we have that in our background. Your grandma and grandpa on your mom’s side, were in Brazil as missionaries and on the other side in Africa, specifically Sierra Leone as missionaries.

My dad was a missionary professor. So, you know, it’s been in our family for quite a while to have this concern for reaching people with the gospel. Going cross-culturally to try to find ways to make these things connect. And I think that’s kind of where it came from in my own life, was this knowledge to try to make sure that things were expressed in a way that people could get it.

You know, it wasn’t enough just to back up the dump truck and dump everything you knew about something. You needed to make sure that you actually communicated and that’s part of that cross-cultural process that I think we got from our family.

[00:02:55] Stephanie: Yeah, I think part of Grandpa Warner’s legacy is his understanding of worldview. When I think of Grandpa’s teaching, I think of worldview all the time. And I think you have done a really good job of carrying that on. And that’s one of the things that I love about Deeper Walk in general is I  feel like we’re able to have practical help and solutions, but framed in a very biblical, holistic worldview.

[00:03:26] Marcus: No, it’s true. And with my dad being a missionary anthropology professor as part of what he did, he often talked about culture as having a worldview at its center and that was basically the model that told you what was possible and what was likely and how things worked. Then out of your worldview came your values and then your values drove your behavior.

[00:3:52] Marcus: And he talked about this as a discipleship model, right, that is in discipleship you think about it this way. It starts with belonging, these are my people. But as I’m molding these people, we have to come to a worldview agreement and what that is.

So, often we bond around our worldview, and then that worldview produces values, and then those values produce behavior.

You don’t do it the other way around. That was one of the things he used to say about legalism in the church. They tried to make people act like Christians, whether they actually had the worldview and the value system of a Christian or not. And so they separated behavior from what was underneath and what was underneath that was belonging, worldview, values, and then comes behavior.

So yeah, it’s quite a legacy he left, and that model has stayed with me and been a profound influence on what we’re doing and why we’re even talking about voluntarism and this thing now, right. We’re dealing with worldview issues to get this stuff right.

[00:04:51] Stephanie: Yeah, And the worldview we’re looking at this week is modernism.

[00:04:56] Marcus: Yes. Modernism. It’s kind of connected to Nietzsche. I don’t know how you say his name. I always say it wrong. The idea is that the Enlightenment gave rise to voluntarism which gave rise to modernism. Modernism is the idea that what counts is power, the ability to make things happen.

We were less concerned with what is true than we were with what works and what makes things happen. And so the idea of power as being the centerpiece of life was something that happened in modern culture before it moved into the church. And the church’s version of power and putting power at the center of things was largely in spiritual warfare, in the Holy Spirit.

And it makes sense because, you know. If the world’s telling us that what really matters in life is how much power do you have to make things change, then the church was like, well, we have the ultimate power source there is. You know, so when the culture had said, truth is what really counts, the church was like, we have the greatest truth there is. Let’s make truth the center, we can do that.

[00:6:12] Marcus: Then they were like, no, it’s the will and making good choices that counts. So we said, well, nobody has a better ethic system than us. We can tell you what the best choices are. So the church went with that. Then it was power that counts. And to this day, we see this as the primary solution offered by the world to oppressed people, it is to empower them. And on the surface, that sounds absolutely perfect, but if you simply empower broken and bittered people, what happens?

[00:06:42] Stephanie: You change who is now going to get oppressed.

[00:06:27] Marcus: Exactly. You’re just flipping the dial on who’s the one getting oppressed. And that’s why if you look back on these movements that have empowered oppressed people, if there was nothing else, if no attachments were formed first, if they didn’t learn to form relational attachments with other people, then the newly empowered people just turned that on. And the history of the world is filled with millions of people being killed because they thought power was the solution.

And in the church, you know, we look at power and we say, well, the Holy Spirit is clearly the ultimate source of power. And what we have tended to do is take this model of transformation that says that truth plus choices equals transformation and said, the reason it doesn’t work is that we don’t have the Holy Spirit.

And if we just have the Holy Spirit’s power, now all of a sudden I will have the power to make those choices. That’s the way it tends to get taught,right. Of course, knowing what the Bible tells you, you’re not able to do that in the flesh. And of course, you can’t make those choices in the flesh, but with the Spirit’s power, now, all of a sudden, you can do all those things.

[00:07:55] Stephanie: Well, it’s like Star Wars theology.

[00:07:58] Marcus: Yeah, right, right.

[00:07:59] Stephanie: Holy Spirit is just a force. We just need to tap into the force, and through God we have all this power available to us, and we miss the personhood of the Holy Spirit.

[00:08:09] Marcus: Yeah, it’s somewhat reductionistic, right? It reduces the Holy Spirit to power. And I think that what we need to understand is that the Holy Spirit is also about wisdom and attachment and relational connection.

He is the Spirit of love, right? So it’s his presence that is driving attachment. That’s why the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace,patience, longsuffering, and all these. We look at these lists of the fruit of the spirit and you begin to understand, okay, the Holy Spirit’s influence in my life should be creating this.

Well, does that happen primarily through power? Or does it happen primarily through the wisdom that he gives us as we are walking with him? So as we keep in step with the Spirit and he guides us in our steps, then we are going to be wiser about that. But, you know, almost anybody can tell you, the Holy Spirit doesn’t just take over and suddenly force you to become mature.

It’s as we build that relationship that we grow in our maturity. And so the relationship with God will always result in a growth in maturity.

[00:09:19] Stephanie: Some of this goes back to the last episode. I think you were talking about trust and how important trust is to attachment, and part of trust is a journey, is the relational attachment.

The journey of walking with God and the Holy Spirit is establishing trust, and that generally doesn’t just happen in a flash. You don’t learn to trust somebody from one thing.

[00:09:48] Marcus: Yeah, no, you don’t start off with ultimate trust, and we don’t start on our walk with God with ultimate trust. I sometimes look at the children of Israel coming out of Egypt, and one of the things that the years of working with deeply traumatized people taught me, is that they have one thing consistently true about them. Deeply traumatized people do not trust readily or easily.

And most of them have serious trust issues with God. And so that made me think about the children of Israel who had been enslaved and mistreated for 400 years. I’m thinking, how much abuse did they go through? What kind of trust issues did they have? What did God do to try to grow a trust relationship with them?

[00:10:32] Marcus: And I remember thinking to myself, oh, those poor people, they’ve been through enough. Why didn’t God just take them to the land flowing with milk and honey and give it to them and tell them to rest and to immediately come enter into my rest. No more battles. You’ve had a hard enough life. Now that seemed reasonable to me, but that’s certainly not what God did, is it?

No, he took him to boot camp. He said, Hey, you actually have been battling for survival, but now we’re going to teach you how to fight battles that are actually going to take ground from the enemy. In a sense, he’s like, we’re going to teach you how to live a victorious life, not a battle free life.

[00:11:08] Stephanie: Well, they had to get out of the slave mindset. They had to detox from, you know, the worldviews and the abuses and such that they had. So God took them into the wilderness and was teaching them this is how the world really works and this is who I am to you. And this is how you can be victorious and safe with me if you trust me, but he had to give them things that they had to trust him over.

[00:11:35] Marcus: No, exactly. And so what we find God doing is he’s actually working on building their attachment with him. And you can make the argument that what they wanted was his power and what he wanted was their love. And they were kind of at odds with each other.

And so he took them into this boot camp, and he stripped them of their old identity, that slave mentality, that orphan mentality that says, I’m on my own. I just need to do whatever it takes to survive. If your power will help me to survive, great, give me your power. And he needed to strip them of that identity, that mindset, and he needed to build up a new one, just like what happens in boot camp.

You strip down the civilian mindset and develop the military mindset. And this new mindset was trust me. And so to develop their trust, he had to take them through trials to see that he was trustworthy. And that’s what he did, he didn’t take them to this posh resort, he took them out into the desert.

[00:12:35] Marcus: And at first I was just really discouraged by that because I was kind of hoping the Christian life was a posh resort. But the encouraging thing is no, God’s dealing with reality here. And the reality is that until Jesus returns, until there’s a new heaven and a new earth, we live in a world at war. This is part of a kingdom worldview that in this world at war, we do have to rely on God’s power to get us through these things.

But it’s primarily that we have to trust his character as much as his power. I find that more people struggle to trust God’s character than struggle to trust his power. So then we come back to this thing about the solution of power.

The way this plays out in the local church is if you come to a church with your problem and the solution that they offer you is going to tend to be, well, let’s get rid of a demon or let’s get you anointed with more of the Holy Spirit.

And the assumption is, that will take care of it. And so the problem, of course, with all of these things is that there are a certain number of people for whom that’s all it took. there’s some people who, as soon as they got the Bible teaching they just changed the way they were thinking, that was enough, and it worked.

And so you collect these stories as evidence that your model is correct, but it just avoids all of the stories of people that it was not able to help.

And it’s the same thing that you get these high accountability models and they get filled with stories of how that worked, and you’re like, therefore our model is correct. But again, it just sort of ignores all the ones that weren’t actually able to help.

[00:14:17] Stephanie: It goes into, like, the hammer and nail scenario of, yes, this hammer is really good at hitting nails, but not everything is a nail.

[00:14:25] Marcus: Right, exactly.

[00:14:27] Stephanie: Yeah.

[00:14:28] Marcus: And it is the problem that if the only solution you have is a hammer, then you’re going to tend to see everything as a nail. And that’s what we’re talking about here. We’ve got to deal with reality as it is. So, is there power in the Holy Spirit? Yes, absolutely. I mean, I’ve seen hundreds of people set free from things related to demons, but here’s the thing. I’ve never seen anybody get rid of a demon and become instantly mature, right?

[00:14:54] Marcus: Neil Anderson used to say this really well. He says, it takes only a few seconds to get free. It takes a lifetime to grow maturity. Because maturity is the attachment part of this. It’s the trust part of this. It’s the connection. Now getting free allows that to develop. There are some people who are already more mature and already have a deeper connection with God. So getting rid of something demonic can have a much more profound impact for them because that really was the main obstacle in their way that they needed to get rid of.

There’s also people the same way. They are already relatively mature people, so when the Holy Spirit comes upon them, boom, they can just go and they can take off. So with the Holy Spirit’s anointing, I find this pattern in the Bible. For the most part, when it talks about the Holy Spirit coming upon someone, the anointing, that tends to be for power.

And suddenly they’re able to do things they couldn’t do before. Whether it’s Samson, who can now, you know, beat people up, or whether it’s the apostles who can now speak in tongues, or whether it’s somebody who can prophesy or whatever, but they can do things they couldn’t do before. They now have power because the Holy Spirit came upon them and anointed them.

But when it talks about the infilling of the Holy Spirit and this Holy Spirit being inside of somebody, that usually connects to the idea of wisdom, that they now have words from God. That they have thoughts from God. There is now God guiding them. And so it’s almost synonymous with being wise to say that somebody is filled with the Spirit.

[00:16:34] Marcus: And we look at those, and I think a lot of us are looking for the next anointing and the next powerful thing to happen in our lives. Yet, that will not necessarily make us more mature. And all you gotta do is look at some of the churches that practice the most power.

And say, well, the Holy Spirit is always doing something powerful in this church or that church, and then looking at the people and say, are they producing more mature people as a result? And the answer is not generally yes, right? If they are, it’s not because of the power that’s taking place there.

So what we’re trying to show people is that power is a good thing. It’s another spoke on the wheel. It’s important. Like, truth is important, good choices are important, but the central thing has to stay attachment. It has to stay our connection to God. Because if we make power the main thing, we are going to skew the whole model, and we are going to find ourselves going in directions and offering solutions that actually end up traumatizing people.

And I’ve met with a lot of people who went to churches like this where somebody tried to cast a demon out of them or somebody prayed for them to be slain in the spirit or something like that. And they had this experience and because they had an experience, they got treated like, well, you should be all fine now and they weren’t all fine. And so it just led to, well, therefore you must be the problem, not our model.

[00:17:59] Stephanie: Yeah.

[00:18:00] Marcus: Yeah.

[00:18:02] Stephanie: It’s very unfortunate. But I’m glad we are building our toolbox here, seeing that these things are good and also that there’s more to the model than just them.

[00:18:14] Marcus: Yeah. So like I said, these are all good. Truth is good. Choices are good, the Holy Spirit power is good. It’s just that we have to be careful to avoid reducing Christianity to any of these things. Especially at the cost of our actual connection with God.

[00:18:29] Stephanie: It’s the most important thing. All right. Any final thoughts for this episode?

[00:18:35] Marcus: Well, that’s the main thing. I think when I think of intimacy with God, the word that pops in my mind is that Hebrew word yada, which is probably best known from Seinfeld, like yada, yada, yada.

[00:18:45] Stephanie: I know, I know, I know.

[00:18:46] Marcus: Yeah, I know, I know, I know. But in this case, Yada is the idea of knowing God and us knowing him. I sometimes think that word could be accurately translated as intimate, be intimate with God. So to have a deeper walk with God is to grow our intimacy with him.

And part of it is understanding that while we’re seeking solutions to the problems in our lives, we have to realize that ultimately everything that we go through is designed to grow our attachment to God and to strengthen that attachment so that no matter how hard things get, that attachment becomes unwavering. So that’s kind of the thought for today.

[00:19:26] Stephanie: Amen. Next week we’re going to finish up our series, and we’re going to be looking at the solution of tolerance. But for now, thank you for your wisdom, Dad.

Thanks for joining us, everybody, 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.