Transcript for:
Insights from Carrie Newhoff Podcast Episode

[Music] welcome to the carrie new hoff leadership podcast on youtube my name is carrie newhof and my goal is to help you lead like never before so what i do every week is i sit down with world-class leaders and church leaders business leaders and i talked to them about what made them who they are and try to have the conversation with them that you would have if you got to sit down for lunch with them or have dinner with them or really got to spend some time with them so we go into the back story and we explore what made them who they are and some of the principles they've learned along the way so if you enjoy this episode i would love for you to like it to subscribe and also to share it with your friends and in the meantime here's today's episode john mark welcome back man it's just so good to be with you happy to be along i love your show love you it's an honor to come along well it's mutual i'll tell ya uh we're going to talk all about your new book live no lies and sometimes when i do interviews we touch on the book this one i want to devour and encourage everyone to go and get it it's the most one of the most exciting books i've read in the last decade and it's going to go in territory that may be new for some of our listeners particularly from the business community but we're trying to bring the best of the church to the business world and the best of the business world to the church often on this podcast so just fasten your seatbelts because i think this is going to explain a lot but you and i were talking just as we were getting ready to record you have this venn diagram in your mind when you write books can you can you or or teach can you share that ven diagram schematic that you have in your mind sure yeah so um gosh backstory there i was just saying this book and my previous book the ruthless elimination of hurry feel very different if like if you're just a reader you're probably like what happened to the guy who was just saying slow down and simplify your life and now it's all about the devil and culture but actually they go together at both a pastoral level and a personal level and at a pastoral level you know my heart every leader has their own kind of sense of emphasis like what they bring to the table and that's why there's no such thing as one-stop shopping or one-size-fits-all leadership my heart what i feel my call to is really discipleship and spiritual formation and the growth and the healing and the expansion of the soul into a person of agape as defined by jesus and so that's kind of that's what gets me out of bed in the morning i'm really not that interested in the running of a church or sunday gatherings i'm for these things i'm not cynical about them it's just not what gets me out of bed in the morning i'm really interested in the growth of the soul and so i think i came up in like a very uh bible like literally that kind of west coast evangelical bible church movement of the 80s and 90s my my dad was radically saved out of a rock band in 1970s california had a billy graham crusade your girlfriend invited him to like all the stereotypes you know right and ended up saved into one of the first mega churches in america in the bay area where i grew up it was it was a great church very kind of evangelical bible church and so in that kind of model of church the working theory of change is basically teach the bible in an inspiring way and then go do it you know which is maybe not the most sophisticated working theory of change that's a passion of mine is that all pastors and churches and christians have a working theory of change whether it's intentional or unintentional whether it's conscious or subconscious and for most people it's it's subconscious it's unintentional and it's haphazard and that's why they feel defeated and discouraged is because often that working theory is actually not based on scripture or science or anything in between so anyway i grew up in a church kind of culture where the solution to everything was more bible study and i love the bible so don't take that as a cynical comment about the bible but um i just grew up teaching the bible and so i'm grateful for that like chapter by chapter verse by verse exegetical bible teaching that was like what i grew up and was raised into as a pastor and a leader but i began to realize as a pastor that uh that that's not enough knowing the right thing as you know the philosopher jamie k.a smith would say is not the same thing as as doing the right thing which is still not the same as wanting to do the right thing and so you know you have to habituate your body your heart so basically then i started i got all into spiritual formation the last decade of my life and then i started kind of ending my sermons very differently with practice with inner healing with calls to community life in the spirit contemplative kind of stuff kind of how do you actually take a bible study or an exegesis of a passage of scripture and attempt to habituate it into your body actually get it into your muscle memory like wire it into your neurobiology and like begin to live this stuff to practice what you preach as jesus said but then i began to realize that wait a minute a lot of people are coming into my church if not the majority of people and again we're in this very secular very progressive city in portland with all sorts of secular assumptions about who god is good evil what the good life is what what it means to be human what it means to be sexual what the purpose of life is that are non-starters it doesn't matter if i teach them this is what the bible says and this is how to do it they don't want to do it or they disagree or they have a whole other definition of good evil and what they're even aiming for so now i preach off of basically a venn diagram in my head it's not like i put it up in front of the church of biblical theology spiritual formation cultural commentary and i'm always trying to do three things in a sermon teach the scripture uh give people practices to form their heart and body into christ-like character and cultural commentary and a lot of that's just it's pretty simple it's like philip reef's whole thing you know that sociologist he said the best way to critique secular culture is to biopsy it i really like that word picture if you think of a biopsy you just cut out a little piece and you hold it up under the light and put it under a microscope so i do a lot of that in my preaching it doesn't have to be angry it doesn't have to be negative though i'm sure i can be too negative at times it doesn't have to be emotional it can just be like let's take let's cut out post-modern gender theory let's talk about you know whether or not gender is between the ears and not the legs or whatever the same would be in portland let's take a saying like that out or you do you or speak your truth or whatever and let's biopsy it let's see where it comes from let's see who started that language let's see where the origins of it are let's see what the philosophical kind of underpinnings are behind it and let's just put it under a little bit of a microscope just in a calm kind interested curious almost journalistic kind of way and what happens is all sorts of people began to realize whoa wait a minute wait that's underneath that no i don't actually believe that or i don't want to believe that or it just starts to expose reality for what it actually is you know so a lot of this book is really kind of heavy on that cultural commentary piece just trying to kind of biopsy the culture a little bit hold it up to the light and just see what comes to the surface i think that's what probably resonated most with me so i'd say ruthless elimination of hurry and we'll link back in the show notes we did a great interview you did a great interview on that on this podcast and many other podcasts it's a fantastic book but that was a little bit more on spiritual formation right whereas this one i think what really made it come alive for me it was electric to read it was the cultural commentary as i told you i i've been waiting for someone to write this book and hoping praying that somebody would write this book and have someone at your stage of life age 41 write this book i thought was just brilliant and you really see our culture which we struggle with every day kind of exposed for what it is and you're like huh yeah that's not really compelling and i don't believe that and oh that's where this goes it's like you tug on all the threads and say well if that's true then what about this and what about this and it's just it's just brilliant you and i were chatting as well about um you know the need for the church what i really appreciated this is going to sound super nerdy but the number of footnotes in this book i don't know whether you tabulated them at the end but it's it's hefty dude like there are dozens per chapter probably hundreds if not a thousand throughout the book and what amazed me as somebody who spent a little bit of time in university is how wide the reading was it's just huge i mean people i've never heard of from all over the place left field right field and um your disciplines and rhythms i'm curious as to your writing rhythm because this isn't just oh i looked up five things and i googled a few subjects and caught a couple of headlines and you know here's my research like this is years of reading i think am i wrong in that like do you want to talk about that how like this isn't oh i did some research for a book this is i've been thinking about this for a long time reading widely and here's the book what are your personal disciplines in reading and study for the book and beyond the book like just in life well i mean first off disclaimer the what i love about writing there are so many things i'm really a writer before i'm a preacher or a pastor or at least i don't know if i fancy myself that but i prefer it but the beauty of writing is you can sound way smarter than you really are you know because you can spend six months or a year working on a book and you can give a rough draft to your friends and i'm you know my sister who's smarter than i am you know does a heavy edit with me before i even turn it into my editor and she's wicked smart and so you can you can make yourself sound a lot smarter than you really are so first off disclaimer secondly i mean yeah i mean i i've done i definitely have some disciplines nothing earth-shattering the main discipline is preaching so you know preaching um so before i became a pastor the one career i was really interested in and began had begun pursuing was journalism and i was never drawn to uh like uh beat journalism you know reporting what happened that day but i love explanatory journalism like still to this day i'm a sucker for like long-form articles in the atlantic or op-ed i'm just going to say the atlantic right the atlantic is where you had to write you know yeah so i i think the way my brain is wired um i don't think i'm a super original thinker nor do i even want to be aiming to be i i'm good maybe similar to you i want to simplify and synthesize so how do i take this vast body of work that most people won't go out and read and i i can do some reading on paid time how can i leverage that and attempt to synthesize simplify it put it into language that is accessible to people that are smart but aren't necessarily educated down that rabbit hole or want to put the time into it my basic theory on preaching is that most pastors underestimate their people's intelligence and overestimate their people's maturity so they end up intellectually talking like i'm shocked how many pastors i meet who are much smarter in real life than they are in their preaching and i think it's because they've actually been taught depending on what church tradition they come from to dumb it down and assume that because they're people i'm like your people didn't go to seminary they're probably as smart or smarter than you are so assume intelligence you know that our favorite writers are the ones that are just a little bit smarter than us or they write just a little bit above where we are they're probably a lot smarter than us but they write just a little bit above where we are and it's perfect because your mind is engaged that way it's not bored so um preaching is such a gift because similar to journalism there is just this repeating every week i mean i have to come up with 4 000 words basically i mean it's a 40 minute talk i don't preach you know 52 weeks of the year but i figured i write the equivalent of about four books a year in my sermon series you know so there's a discipline there that is exhausting and why i wrote a book on hurry emotional elephant sabbath and well i'm about to go on a very long sabbatical but it's such a good discipline you know so that's an amazing discipline and then living in a secular part of the world is a good discipline too because it just sharpens your mind like i've been thinking a lot about the gift that tim keller is as i'm no tim keller no do i ever think i will become that but he's in an aspirational sense becoming a teacher like that in my 60s 70s would be a dream and i thought why is it so rare that there are pastors and leaders of his age that have that kind of wisdom maturity christ-like character track record legacy of faith and godliness but yet you know i read one of his books recently i think it was making sense of god and he's describing like how identity works for gen z i'm the dad of a 15 year old gen z kid keller understands my son better than i do i'm like he's he was articulating the way that identity and social justice work and intersect with the gospel for gen z in ways that were foggy and unclear in my own mind and i literally have one of these in my house i'm one of these like they're an animal i have three gen z kids in my house you know so what how how did he stay so sharp i mean how how is he such a gift whereas so many leaders at that age are great marriage great legacy love jesus culturally 20 years out of date not even aware of what the most pressing questions are much less coming up with good answers for them how is keller you know 20 30 years older than me and doing much better than i am and i think there's so i don't know what the answer to that is but i think part of it was living in new york city for all of those years so many years doing live q a after his sermon in manhattan with secular people wicked smart all around him there's a sharpening influence there and then other than those two kind of more obvious things you know it's not rocket science i try to read an hour every morning before i turn on my phone okay that's what i was going to ask you do you read daily and i didn't want to put you on the spot because it sure it feels like there is way more on the cutting room floor than ever made it into a manuscript and occasionally you listen to a message well often you'll listen to a message and it's like you squeezed everything you knew about knew about that subject into 35 minutes right or you wrote everything you understand about something into that 800 word article and it just felt like there was so much that didn't make it into the book which is yeah oh no we cut 30 000 words off of that book from the initial draft there's all sorts of fast the original one was much angrier and more controversial and interesting but thankfully so you read an hour a day before you turn on your phone and again this is in ruthless elimination of hurry you don't touch your phone i know when you and i are texting or whatever emailing you don't check email very often your phone is on sabbatical until what 9 a.m or something like that um yeah it's different at different times in my life right now it's 11 a.m on most days i'm actually about to get a second phone not for like weird uh celebrity reasons but for just work reasons i'm i'm gonna have a separate work phone from a home phone and uh it'll be still a cell phone because it doesn't make sense to get a landline but it'll be like it'll have office hours and um i'll answer those text messages when i am at work that way right now and the phone just blurs those lines between home and work technology is great if you want to stay on top of things but i think i'm trying to get to the bottom of things and that's where text messaging and email and social media are just they do nothing but sabotage the most important work that i have to do that's worth the price of admission already okay well maybe we should uh dive into the book a little bit at some point because that's what i wanted to drill down on you your book addresses some felt needs um and then it goes in a really surprising direction so i'm just going to read from some of the things you listed why is my mind this is what a reader or somebody you're speaking to in the culture today would ask why is my mind under such duress why do i feel afflicted by the ideologies of our time why is it so hard to find peace why can't we solve the world's deepest problems with all of our money technology and political prowess how did you begin to identify that those are the problems that people are struggling with you know it's a common trope right the doctor who discovered some great medical breakthrough did so because his wife or her husband died of that same disease 10 years earlier or whatever right and i think the the maxim there not to moralize that but is often our greatest contribution comes out of our deepest pain and um i know that's for sure true in my own life i love that line from david brooks who says i'm always trying to write myself into a better life and um so again you know from my previous book the ruthless elimination of prairie to this one which if you pick them up and read them will feel very different at some level at a pastoral level there was a method to the madness i want to form people into the image of jesus or create pathways for people to say yes to the formation of jesus and i think first step there is busy hurry most people are just too busy to follow jesus so it's a non-starter unless people slow down you can't even talk about discipleship second step was all right even if you slow down you're just gonna end up with more american project self hindu self actualization christian buddhism not all bad but not discipleship to jesus right so we have to identify the secular narratives on the left and the right and give people kind of a framework of discipleship but at a personal level i would say i would say it this way um you know uh the backstory to my previous book is like laughable in its stereotype of like burned-out mega church pastor having an early midlife crisis kind of thing and so you know this massive turning point in my life about a decade ago now where i kind of demoted myself from the leadership position i was in and radically kind of overhauled my life with all of these practices and rule of life and strict digital rule of life and reading in the morning and not touching my phone until 11am and sabbath and long summer vacations and emotional health and therapy all of this stuff and here's the thing on one hand it radically altered my life for the better like i can't even fathom who i was 10 years ago to who i am now on the other hand shocker it was not a silver bullet it did not fix all of my problems and i realized a little bit of angst there's a whole other layer so if the first layer is designing a lifestyle of apprenticeship to jesus and that's a major theme in my last book that you know the way of jesus is exactly what it sounds like it's a way of life it's not just a set of ideas or bible and theology or a list of do's and don'ts or an ethical kind of moral vision it is those things it's it's more not less it's also a lifestyle right of apprenticeship to jesus so kind of i felt like layer one was all right let me let me organize my lifestyle around following jesus um what the ancients called a rule of life let me develop a rule of life let me slow down and simplify and move my body into a lifestyle where apprenticeship to jesus is the organizing principle but then i did that and i realized oh shoot i'm still me so i'm in a way better situation but i got all this crap in my heart i got this mind i think of that line in romans you know the mind governed by the flesh is death the mind governed by the spirit is life and peace so i've moved my body into this way better place but my mind and my heart are still wracked by kind of the conflicting ideologies of our time by my own like inner angst and stuff by you know um robert mulholland i don't know if you've ever read his book invitation to a journey but he has four layer which is one of my favorite books of all time he has four layers of sin that we work through in our discipleship layer one is what the ancients called gross sins not meaning gross like ew but meaning like murder you know uh violence adultery layer two is uh conscious sins meaning sins that are socially acceptable but not the way of jesus so they would be gossip materialism white lies bragging arguably depending on your moral vision cussing or watching dirty movies on netflix totally socially acceptable but not the way of jesus we make them consciously third layer so our discipleship to jesus starts moving through these layers third layer is what he called unconscious sins which are like sins of motivation where you do the right thing for the wrong reason you're passing a church but really it's about overcoming a father wound or ego or money or power or control or whatever where god starts terraforming like our inner motivation what we it's sins of you know not just commission but omission not just what we do but what we don't do that kind of stuff right interpersonal kind of relational stuff but then the fourth layer what he would say the deepest layer of sins hold and bondage over our soul is what he calls trust structures and this is what calvinists call idols what psychologists call our attachments what thomas keating called our emotional programs for happiness they are the things that we think we need to live a happy and peaceful life that don't go by the name of jesus and they actually sabotage our formation into people of love and so my problem was all of those truck structures were still totally intact even as i was sabbathing and spending time in prayer in the morning and reading and good discipline with my phone living in community and taking a long summer break all good stuff it's like it it got me you know whatever percentage of the way down the road but it did not get me to my destination so i think the last five years or so have been all right like what about the mind what about the heart why is it that even when i have great life rhythms my heart can just feel assaulted in a sense and exhausted and weary even when i'm doing all the right things is there something deeper and i'll stop talking but that's where this book came out of that sense of why even when my body is doing all of the right things is there's still a sense of struggle in my mind and in my heart a sense of opposition and even a sense of assault and then that got me thinking well maybe it feels like a struggle and a war because it is and maybe my generation has lost sight because of our low comfort level of military metaphors and faith of what's all over the new testament that we're in a kind of war for the soul and and maybe the ancients in the christian tradition have extraordinary wisdom to bear on this kind of a sense it was it was so good because you know we've talked about this before i loved your this cultural moment podcast you did with mark sayers and it feels like it's that on steroids and triple clicked quadruple clicked like way down into that and the cultural expose the cultural biopsy that you do in the book i thought was so helpful but you put it in the battle language of spiritual warfare which again you know there's a couple of listeners now going oh good tell me more and i would say 98 are going uh okay they think this is where i stopped listening right so uh we got people who don't believe people who are like yeah that was like first century stuff but you do i thought a really helpful job of explaining what that is because the book is about the world the flesh and the devil right which language i remember people 30 years older than me using but like nobody in my generation let alone yours uses it what what is underneath that and can you can you explain that in a way that might make sense because in the book it makes incredible sense but it's a it's a leap to get there that was the original title of the book but my publisher who's wonderful basically said nobody will want to read the book and title it the world the first so then it was in the subtitle and then it didn't even survive the subtitle it was just no sorry we'll put it in the table of contents this is as best you're gonna get that's not a slam of my publisher that's a that's a slam on me uh yeah you know okay so we all feel this sense of like inner tension why do we feel so torn between uh god and the world between you know new testament language the spirit and the flesh between these different kind of desires in that war in our soul why martin luther king jr has said that inside every person it's like a civil war is raging and why do we most of us feel they're like yeah i feel this this conflict of desire i feel this inner tension i feel this sense of opposition when i try to follow jesus or do the right thing or just become a person of love i feel it's like i feel an oppositional force you know we we struggle to name that and articulate that and understand it in a in a secular kind of frame that doesn't have any any category for spiritual warfare so to speak but the ancients i think we're we're much more erudite than we are today and starting with the desert fathers and mothers who are heroes of mine and we can come back and talk about them they identified what they called three enemies of the soul which were kind of like a counter-trinity you know almost like an oppositional force to the father the son and the holy spirit and they identified them and there's different language used down through church history but the most common is the world of flesh and the devil and same as you i vaguely remember like one really old hellfire and brimstone preacher from our church using that language but in a very unsophisticated way that was not compelling at all that's your flesh john that's your flesh that's the devil you know and and i think as a general rule our generation has just like laughed at that and thrown it out like as oh my goodness what's like for the guy with the bullhorn on the side of the road and i i so basically what i try to do in this book is take this very ancient paradigm that was used for arguably 1500 years of church history and then fell out of favor maybe a century half a century ago and basically update it for a secular and sophisticated person or cultural moment so that's what i'm trying to do is take this ancient paradigm translate it to our kind of western secular mostly progressive but not entirely moment whether or not i do that successfully i'm not sure but that was that was the goal of the book and and then in the section on the devil which is about it's almost half of the book my basic case is that most of what we when we hear the word spiritual warfare which is not language used by jesus or the new testament writers recent language but when we hear that when most people teach on it i mean half of what they say is just superstitious nonsense or you know what i mean or weird magic incantations or a demon behind every bush the devil gets blamed for everything you know it's ridic and when we blame the the devil for silly things it makes it easy to write him off for everything you know and so i just do a deep dive on jesus teaching on the devil in john 8 where he says nothing about what i would expect nothing about demonization nothing about disease or death nothing about natural disasters like a tsunami or hurricane nothing about like a horrifying poltergeist or ghost or child's nightmare though i actually think there's biblical evidence for all of that stuff but he doesn't say he doesn't even mention it he says he calls the devil the father of lies and says when he lies he speaks his native language and he refers back to the genesis 3 story of the serpent in the garden with eve as like the paradigmatic story behind all of the stories of temptation and that's where jesus goes and so i guess a big part of the book is kind of a deep dive into a hypothesis that the devil's primary stratagem against us is deceptive ideas that play to disordered desires in our heart or what the new testament calls the flesh that are then normalized in the kind of echo chamber of what the new testament calls the world and what we would just call the arts or entertainment or culture or politics or economics but the new testament would call the world and how these three enemies of the devil the flesh and the world deceptive ideas that play to disorder desires that are normalized in our society of sin how they work together to kind of sabotage our souls growth into union with god and christlikeness can you give us one or two examples because it makes so much sense in the book so that's an excellent theoretical framework but like give us an example of what why would we resist because i love this we had craig rochelle on he talked about the battle in your mind jenny allen has talked about that you tackle it similar topic but from a very different angle all extremely helpful treatments of it but give us an example maybe in sexuality or even freedom i loved your section on freedom of how you know jesus might think about that how the lies show up and how it's expressed in culture because i found that so clarifying pick an example that that you'd love to walk us through yeah well i mean there are examples in the book from the culture wars which who knows how much trouble that will get me in and then there are the more pressing examples just out of our own life the lies that we come to believe based off reading the news and or twitter and the lies that we come to believe based off of a traumatic experience or pain or a family of origin or you know some kind of a moment good or bad and one of the cases in my book not to state theory but is that the deceptive ideas get as far as they do in our life these lies in the language of jesus because they play to a deep conflicted part of our heart so like the devil's lies don't sound like hey elvis is alive he's still living in mexico believe it they don't sound like that like who care why that is no emotional bearing on my life so it just it doesn't matter but let's let's take you know a deeply freudian kind of secular idea that i must be romantically and sexually satisfied to be a happy person which a lot of us wouldn't if we were asked do you believe that we might say no i don't believe that almost all of us believe that because we're raised in a culture that deeply disciples us to believe that sexual and romantic fulfillment are mandatory to living a happy life and without that you will be miserable um obviously jesus would totally disagree with that statement as a celibate jewish male no but that is the narrative right that marriage is oppressive or commitment is oppressive absolutely and there's a left version of that that would talk about the patriarchy and you know gender roles there's a right version that would talk about how you need to be married to be happy but it's the same narrative it's a personal fulfillment based view of romance and sexuality so when there's a thought that comes into my mind um that i would argue is is more than just a thought i i would argue with the ancients that it's quite possibly demonically animated or has some kind of a dark energy or like a malignant will behind it that sounds something like hey john mark i know your wife is great and i know you've been married for 20 years now but you know you were 21 when you got married she was 19. you hadn't even gone to college yet you didn't know who you were you had no idea what your myers-briggs type was your enneagram number was you're from totally different families of origin totally different cultures you know what your personalities just aren't a great fit and it's okay you know you would be happier if you were to get a divorce and marry someone else there's somebody out there that would be a better fit for you and you just be a happier person and and that's good and you want that for her you want it for you and you want it for now that's just as much of a lie as some right wing conspiracy theory or you know the royal people are lizard the royal family or lizard people it's just as flagrant of a lie and you could cite study after study from a secular you know clinical psychologist to expose the dark comedy of that lie but that lie unlike elvis or the royal family or lizard people it plays to something really deep in my heart some kind of deep pain deep fixture where i'm torn where there's a part of me that deeply wants to love and honor and stay faithful to my wife until i die and another part of me that just wants to have sex with whoever i want and be romantically satisfied and do my own thing and not have the responsibility of marriage and family and that's not the deepest desire of my heart but it's there and i make the case in the book that our strongest desires are often not our deepest desires and but our hearts are these kind of battleground of desire you know this war of loves as david bennett calls it and so i get i guess that's an example that's a great example kind of is bipartisan that's not a left or a right example that's just a human example and most people can 100 identify with that right at one time or another you're kind of like ah so what is the strongest desire is not your deepest desire so let's break that down a little bit the strong desire is okay i deserve i should have sex with whoever i want to have sex with i should be free i shouldn't be burdened down or this isn't working for me what is the deepest desire under that i mean it would probably depend depend on your own wounding or your own family system but what do you think some candidates for deepest desire would be well honestly i can't help but wonder if being made in the image of god as all people are if at some level all of us have the deepest desire the same deepest desires well i mean what do we m so what do we most desire so you know you're you have these strong desires that i talk about in the you know the which are flesh desires so bodily animal primal you know neurobiological desires for sex for domination for food for you know power whatever it is so in a moment of temptation my strongest desire might be to lust or objectify a woman or you know do something stupid break my marriage vows but that is not my deepest desire my deepest desire um if i actually come to quiet outside of that moment when i'm my best self before god well i mean in that example my deepest desire is to become the kind of person who's actually free from the need to be romantically and sexually satisfied by some illusion or fantasy that isn't even real and is deeply content and grateful and happy and joyful in my marriage and my life before god that's like that's the real desire that's down there and chasing another marriage is just gonna make that problem worse not better it's not gonna solve the problem it will literally pour gas on the fire so i think our deepest desires regardless of religion or creed or class or gender or culture i i think our deepest desire is for god it's what the ancients call union with god i think it's to be set free from our fear and our ego and to become people of love it's to become deeply good people for all of the moral relativism of our day it's uncanny we actually have impeccably high moral standards for people in the world expect people to live like saints while you know well you know in a very secular world view and you go to any funeral you're never going to hear anybody say what i love about so and so was they just got a lot out of their tinder subscription you know or they knew how to just demolish opponents at work through white lies and manipulation you know or they just knew how to eat drink and be married no i mean never we even in our moment of moral relativism all of us get that the meaning of life at some level is to become a good person to become a person who's pervaded by love and i think all of us deeply desire that we desire goodness we desire a life of the new testament's trifecta of love and joy and peace so i think you know the spiritual formation always starts with rest and desire so the starting place for all discipleship all growth and transformation is slowing down to rest you know genesis 1 creation starts with sabbath then the week begins we start from rest and then desire we get in touch with the deepest subterranean level of desire in our heart which is ultimately to be with jesus to become like jesus and just to do what he would do if he were us to play our small part to make our contribution in the world and the more we can get in touch with those desires and then design a life around living in alignment with them the more we find peace it's that stephen covey line you know we achieve in our peace when our schedule is aligned with our values but those values have to go all the way down to the deepest desires of our soul do you think i don't know that you make this case in the book but do you think that our culture is being fueled by the strongest desires right now which don't seem to be tethered to much they seem to change um they can change in heartbeat they can change in a year they can change in a decade i think you do make the argument that 100 years ago people looking at our moral culture today wouldn't even recognize that this is planet earth but would you like because there is there is a sense of like we talk about moral relativism but there is a sense in which if you look at the culture untethered from faith the church or christianity we believe one thing a decade ago we believe something entirely different today and we'll believe something different at 7 30 tonight depending on whichever way the crowd source morality happens to flow left or right progressive or you know that that ideology do you think we're being ruled by just desire right now and freedom and this this shackles this freedom from you right about in the book yeah i mean god i mean feel free to disagree i'm just trying to put my finger on it no no no i i mean i emphatically agree i don't want to sound alarmist i i don't think that secularism has any metaphysical ground to stand on just meaning you know for example the west is built around the idea of modern western democracy is built around the idea of human rights this is this is an inarguable statement i'm about to make human rights are a thoroughly christian innovation idea and conviction that literally are contrary to secular darwinian materialism to evolutionary theory not just that they're conscious they're the opposite of what it says so this is historically inarguable in my mind and don't take my word for it take somebody like tom holland secular historian or yuval harari the leading atheist of our time he calls human rights a christian myth and he's not saying that christian that human rights are bad he's saying they only make sense if you believe that human beings are made in the image all human beings are made in the image of god that christ is set as free if you believe that human beings are animals just with a larger prefrontal cortex than the apes and this is time and chance and bizarre coincidence and its survival of the fittest and the propagation of the species then the strong defending the weak literally makes no sense at all then hitler is the logical outworking of darwinian materialism so when my secular friends advocate for human rights which i love and i link armless with them on that but they're doing so in spite of their worldview not because of it i just think i think that's honest and most secular people are okay to live with massive dissonance between their kind of metaphysical world view and their moral vision of the universe but that's a major problem because let's take you know the sex the redefinition of sexuality right now so people outside the west are like angry like you look at some of the leading african leaders right now robert cardinal syrah from guinea or even pope francis has accused the west of what he calls ideological colonization so there's rightfully in a country like yours or mine a very high like sensitivity right now to imposing whiteness on the world which i'm fully in agreement with but just but ironically imposing westerness on the world in particular its view of sex and gender from a liberal perspective is not only socially acceptable it's actually thought of as virtuous there's actually like a militant version of progressivism that sees it as like on a mission from god that they don't necessarily believe in to impose the progressive vision of sex gender gender roles male female stuff on the developing world on africa on people of color all around the world and they're not having it you know because there's no metaphysical like says who you know our african brothers and sisters say who are you to tell us what is should be legal or not legal or acceptable or not acceptable and you know i mean what happened with the episcopal church last year was just fascinating were the africans you know i'm sorry not the episcopalians was it the uh the methodist yes united methodist where the africans stopped the almost entirely white progressives from redefining their denomination's sexual statement and they got the africans all got accused of bigotry by the white progressives i mean it's just we're living in up as you know orwell orwellian kind of time so all that to say no i'm i'm with you the question becomes all right if we're just making up right and wrong based on mob mentality what instagram is saying and what you want then why is why social justice why is slavery wrong why civil rights why all of this stuff there's no metaphysical grounding for it and so this is where i think that christianity will still have an important role to play in whatever comes next culturally in the west because you know who was it voltaire who said if there wasn't a god we'd have to invent one because you literally can't function as a society without an appeal to a higher moral authority and moral vision transcendent kind of source of reason and purpose and so that's where i think i think something's coming next that will be interesting it is interesting because what we just talked about for the last five minutes what you just described i think is sort of the child or grandchild of deconstructionism you quote foucault and derrida in the book you quote nietzsche and so you go back to 19th century philosophy mid 20th century philosophy you get deconstructionism right which kind of looks through something and then nothing's there and truth is completely subjective and um yeah it isn't power to oppress the weak yeah mm-hmm um talk about how deconstructionism and even existentialism a little bit earlier has shaped the moral framework for the world we're living in because i'm sure most 21 year olds who would have no idea who foucault or derrida were or or nietzsche was for that matter many would but some wouldn't but but we're living that heritage can can you describe how we have that kind of we're living in a world that was mostly built by freud and foucault in my personal opinion at least in the progressive arm of culture yeah i mean okay so the funny thing is deconstruction is like a buzzword right now for millennials mostly not entirely who are deconstructing their faith meaning they are either walking away from faith in general or going so progressive that they're no longer really in the territory of orthodox disciple of jesus but what people don't realize is deconstruction is a technical term as your refugee it is it's a philosophical school of thought it's a philosophical school of thought uh the the phrase itself as i understand it was coined by daradah who worked in tandem with michelle pucco these are famous french post-modernists that kind of pick up intellectually where communism left off because marxist marxism was basically intellectually discredited which is fascinating because it's made a massive comeback via the internet in late a new version of it has made a massive comeback in progressive circles but it was basically intellectually discredited and so then foucault aired out others kind of picked up and they agreed and they disagreed they both critiqued marxism and they continued its line of thought forward and they moved the kind of you know marx was was interested in classism and the struggles between the rich and the poor and that broke down and so the postmodernist often brought it into other intersections as we would say today between gender or between sexuality between religion between race but it's the same kind of basic power analysis and so people don't realize that deconstructionism is a philosophical school of thought it's a wider cultural movement started by white men that is in the air we breathe and everything from an uber app or airbnb which are deconstructing the taxi industry or the hotel industry to post-modern gender theory which is deconstructing the idea that gender and biological sex go together in any coherent or cohesive kind of way it's all a part of this larger cultural movement and the tragedy is people don't realize that in you know deconstruction is all about it's obsessed with pointing out power dynamics viewing every relational interaction interaction through the lens of power and through the binary of oppressed or oppressor and it's fascinated with this as obsessed with calling out the abuse of power in structures of society or leaders this could be anything from pastors of churches or presidents or systemic forms of injustice like racism is obsessed with this and much of it is actually good i just recently read a book on post-modernism called cynical theories that was explaining foucault and dereda's impact on critical race theory and other things and it was a fascinating book and i found myself actually agreeing with foucault and darida half of the time and thinking what they were saying was demonically evil the other half of the time but you know a lot of what they were critiquing was like it's like legitimate critique um it's like there's some good stuff in there the the calling out of the abusing of power what people don't realize is you're not trading the authority of the church or scripture or christian orthodoxy or even your pastor for no authority you're just trading that authority for a different authority a french postmodernist and a larger cultural zeitgeist and then your own self as the locus point of authority that you think is authentically who you are but actually was handed to you by your professor or your high school teacher or your twitter feed or instagram or the new york times or whatever your periodical choice is so they're larger cultural i'm not sure if i'm answering your question we're late in the day i just feel like i'm rambling yeah this is good this is this good though we we we don't tightly edit on this show we don't edit at all which is good this is a real conversation can you tightly edit and make me sound more thoughtful and concise and measured and unnecessary then i act can you make me better this is why i prefer writing like see i could just delete all of that and start over now this is this is good though because this is real life these these are these are the this is the conversation i long for the church to have this is the conversation i wish our generation of christians could have because i think if we did we'd be stronger as a church i think the world would sit up and pay attention you know adam and grant had adam grant and i had a great conversation and you know when he really saw even poke through the veil of the stereotype of what the church is which is based unfortunately on a lot of reality um you know he was curious and we've kept up a little bit of a dialogue which is great i hope to have him back but i think i think we have done ourselves in and you said something there which you you hint at in the book i don't know whether you say it that way but you know that whole you do you like the individual is the locus for authority right and that operates on the left and on the right it operates in progressive circles and in the far right freedom from you can't tell me what to do i am my own autonomy i get to decide you can't tax me you can't control me and then on the left it's like i will control you but i am the locus of what is right i am the locus of what is wrong and i will tell you what's acceptable and i will tell you what's unacceptable so we're in this tyranny of the individual how does that play into the milieu of lies that the enemy is is sowing our way well yeah i mean that's one of the things i explore in the book is the radical redefinition of freedom in the west from uh freedom as the classical understanding which was freedom to pursue the good to become a person of virtue to become a person of love that's both the classical greek definition and the christian definition to the modern definition which is freedom to do whatever the hell you want my word choice there is very deliberate not trying to be crass trying to be theologically accurate um the freedom to do whatever you want and not have anybody tell you differently and you're a hundred percent right i'm i'm fascinated by in all of the cultural polarization which i know is worse in my country than in yours but you have a lot of american listeners i would imagine it's mostly american listeners but it's bad in canada it's a western thing we're ruining everything i'm so sorry um but and we're exporting our culture war to the world via the internet which is really tragic but i'm i'm always on the hunt like where do left and right agree like where do they actually start with the same presupposition uh one of the i'm not actually that interested in politics i'm more interested in how politics has become a religion um because that's what i'm interested in but my favorite i think book on politics i've ever read or at least in many years is patrick deneen's why liberalism failed which i actually saw he's a conservative i think he's a catholic it's not a christian book at all but he's a conservative constitutional law professor from notre dame but i actually saw it on obama's president obama's recommended reading list and he basically said i disagree with a bunch of this but you need to read this book it's worth hearing and uh he does just this great in-depth analysis of the left and the right and basically argues that both the left and the right that all of america is built around what he calls the radical redefinition of freedom that he would argue goes back not to the 60s in foucault and daredevil and woodstock and the beatles but goes back to the founding fathers to the constitution of our country to 1776 to the enlightenment to this radical redefinition of what freedom was from freedom as power and to pursue what is good to permission to do whatever you want to define the good for yourself and the kind of anarchy that that at some level creates and he basically argues that the right aims this redefinition of freedom at the market and the environment so it's like let us do whatever we want with the trees and with market capitalism keep your laws off of our you know government our financial trading off of our stocks keep your taxes out of our life don't tread on me let us do whatever we want with the earth drive our staff the left aims it at gender sexuality traditional family norms ethics religion the internal world of the cell but it's the exact same mindset it's let's throw off any form of external authority because that's what's blocking us from the good life and let's redefine find freedom as the ability to do whatever we want the left just aims it at things like sexuality gender marriage religion the right aims it at things like the environment the economy politics taxes it's the same exact mindset and ironically this redefinition of freedom is actually whatever you call it what the new testament calls slavery because what people don't realize is that human beings are not just as we were often educated to believe these rational objective selves that will just pick the good and do what is objectively right we're emotionally easily manipulated uh tribal kind of communal relational emotional desire-based creatures who are easily deceived easily manipulated easily led astray by others or by our own flesh and our own brokenness and our own hurt and this redefinition of freedom often leads people just to greater slavery which we would call compulsion or addiction in our culture and the epidemic of compulsion addiction both those that are socially acceptable and those that aren't those that keep people from being able to hold down a job and have a normal life and those that don't is so widespread and those things i think go together yeah how would you define freedom then like what is a what is a healthier definition of freedom if that is not free dumb like you know this whole idea because you make the point right we make our choices then our choices choose us or um and that's what happens right i can drink what i want when i want and then soon you don't have a choice anymore if you let that go too far um and the same goes with sex the same goes with food the same goes with money right anything right down to that that thing so how would you redefine freedom then in a way that is biblically faithful and culturally helpful yeah i mean i think is freedom capacity to both want and pursue the good as defined by jesus and you know um which is where you know as an american we would think of like 20th century communism is an obstacle to that definition of freedom because you literally can't pursue the good as defined by jesus in some aspects and uh so it's the capacity to want what is good and then to actually do what is good and that's where discipleship to jesus comes in because you can want to do the right thing but that's totally different than actually having the capacity to do the right thing i can want to be a loving husband and father but then in real life i can be critical exacting perfectionistic angry selfish fear-based domineering in spite of my deepest desires so i need more than just the desire to be a good father i need actually the power to become a good father and that's where discipleship to jesus comes in through disciplines or practices we can open ourselves up to a power that's beyond us that of the holy spirit to actually grow in our freedom and i think there's a quote in the book from keller there's multiple books in the quotes in the book from keller but there's one in there i think where he talks about how freedom isn't opposed to restriction or constriction that actually freedom is about picking the right the freedom to pick the right constraints that will then form and forge us into the people who are actually free so marriage would be a great example of how we have the freedom to marry who we want to make that covenant but then that's a constraint and a massive constraint till death do us part in sickness or in health as somebody whose wife was chronically ill for 15 years like it's a massive constraint but that constraint is what actually sets us free from our slavery to our flesh which is our body's desire to constantly get what we want and to treat other people as objects of our desire and our self-gratification rather than as objects of agape of self-giving love toward marriage becomes the constraint that over decades of fidelity sets us free and in a sense discipleship to jesus is the constraint that over decades sets us free we'll talk about the disciplines as we get to the end of the interview so i just want to put a pin on it because it's really good to sort of live in this space but you have some very specific practices to help you move from that area where you want to do what's good but you don't do it to the point where no now i have some disciplines and habits in my life that are are paving the way to actually realizing that intention and my desire is no longer master me so we'll we'll get to that uh i tried my best russian voice on this chapter in my head while i was reading so you can correct me and give me your best russian voice but dez information i don't know is that right you crushed it so i just i recorded the audio book and you know you write all these them you just write them you know and then you get into a recording booth with two strangers and you're recording your book you're like i don't know how to pronounce half of these words there's information i don't know you definitely had to google that one and i think you just said it better than i did in the audio book so oh well you got to get the audio book now just to hear john mark say that so disinformation right that that is a term coined by the russians was it yes that's my understanding the kgb mm-hmm kgb created that so what is disinformation or death information oh okay so it was a a strategy developed by the kgb in the cold war that is still ongoing to this day where basically the the strategy was to flood the west via media entertainment with disinformation lies deceit half-truths red herrings conspiracy theories conflicting reports to throw the west off its balance and to get it kind of in a self-suicide kind of fighting itself rather and to blind it to russia's activity in the east and just to get us kind of chasing our own tales so there's an example in the book that sounds like it's out of a conspiracy theory website but it's true of a street rally and i think it was in houston where there was a riot broke out between these the two rival political groups one was like the it's a right-wing group i think it was called the stop the islamification of texas and the other was some kind of a muslim i forget the name of it off the top of my head but group polar opposite political extremes right-wing and a a muslim rights group or whatever and they both had these rallies against each other and it found out later and it got violent the whole thing was organized by russian agents on facebook who had started both of these groups were started by russians not muslim people or right-wing people who would organize these groups develop followers set these rallies set them for the same time the same place in purpose to create this uproar and i just like that first off that sounds crazy but it's totally true oh yeah it's such a good example you know this is like real life stuff this is not theory stuff russia is actually doing this to the united states of america right now as we speak so i use that in the book as a model as a word picture for spiritual warfare because one of my assortations is that when again spiritual warfare is not biblical language when we hear that the american imagination or or modern imagination or canadian imagination is so shaped by world war ii and lord of the rings that when we hear spiritual warfare we think of like two equal and opposite armies kind of meeting on the field of battle whether it's the the battle you know britain in the air or a naval battle or a land-based battle whether it's modern world war ii or ancient you know lord of the rings it's these two equal and opposite armies or maybe one's the underdog but there's still basically two armies kind of clashing on the field of battle and that's how we think it's like jesus against satan and us against the world but that is not remotely how the new testament writers think about spiritual warfare i mean they are adamant that jesus has already defeated the enemy on the christ that on the cross that christ made a public spectacle of the powers dismantling their power through his death on the cross they think about it totally different so i pick up russia disinformation fake news algorithms conspiracy theories dividing tribe against tribe and a kind of societal suicide as a much better word picture for how spiritual warfare works now than world war ii we we touched on it before and then we kind of moved on but just for the remaining skeptics and i've thought a lot about this myself why do you believe there's a force of evil why do you believe that there's a devil i mean you just wrote a book on this and i'm sure there's a number of listeners who are like okay john mark a lot of this makes sense but that part's a little bit crazy what has convinced you that there is a personification of evil i think for me and i i unders to the skeptic who thinks that sounds crazy i totally understand um no judgment i think for me the secular theories of evil that attempt to explain why the world is so messed up why politics is so messed up why we are so messed up if we're honest they the math does not add up you know because the secular theories and their different theories of evil and how to fix evil but generally they fall into you know this is not a hyper-intelligent you know ivy league definition but basically it's a lack of education it's a and that's why people are superstitious and tribal and da da it's a lack of kind of equal opportunity and wealth redistribution and so we need the government to fix things it's a lack of the right political processes maybe religion itself is part of the problem and it's superstitious and it divides people against each other and creates you know self-righteousness and zeal blah blah blah blah the or the lack of just technology science these theories of evil or even evolutionary psychology which would be the closest thing that i would possibly buy that everything's just about survival and that's why we hurt each other because we're just apes underneath everything and it's all about just survival that'd be the closest one i'd ever come to believing but then you just have massive problems it does not explain the human soul it does not explain consciousness it does not explain love it does not explain why we're living in a massive culture that has this extraordinary value for love and human rights even if it defines those a little bit wonky at times that's completely metaphysically out of alignment with what it actually says it believes like there's just there's too much mystery to the human soul it's it's beauty art it's the c.s lewis thing the problem there's the problem of evil but then there's the even greater problem of good so for me i think the secular theories that attempt to explain away evil they just don't work because there's too many harvey weinsteins too many jeffrey epstein's too many fill in your blank of somebody that was well educated politically progressive had all the money in the world all the science all the technology and they were still an evil person and an evil force in the world it just does not explain that and so it gets me thinking what if jesus and the ancients and not just the ancients what if pretty much every single culture christian or not around the world except for majority white western secular culture what if they are actually right and we're the ones that are crazy what if they're actually more in tune with the reality of the universe and we're the ones that are blind and what if science is the new superstition do you talk about um and i want to say i i don't usually do this but i googled do you know steven pressfield like you know his work yeah the war of art yeah yeah yeah so he wrote a book a few years ago called do the work i just googled it quickly because when i read it when it came out it blew me away and this is the description off amazon so just listen to this i don't think he's a person of faith if you are stephen i apologize but he writes it this way there is an enemy there is an intelligent active malign force working against us step one is to recognize this the recognition alone is enormously powerful it saved my life it will save yours and he is talking about the resistance artists writers creators feel to that oh my work's a pile of crap i'm not gonna do it i don't want to write today that resistance we have inside i was reading it i'm like my goodness christians have talked about this for thousands of years as have other cultures but you know he just talks about it as an internal battle and i feel like we're in a moment where our culture is starting to struggle going exactly to your point i don't know that these explanations about why you know we have sexual predators every generation if we were progressively getting better we should be able to eradicate this and we don't we don't we don't get rid of abuse all the statistics say it's getting worse and it's getting worse on elite progressive college campuses wow it's like we're all on steroids right now which is which is interesting okay well that that was well it's not interesting that is exactly what i would expect if you educate people from birth to believe there is no god all morality is a social construct often developed by elites in power to keep themselves in power and oppress other people and you are an animal aided by time and chance through survival of the fittest propagation of the species by domination and the meaning of life is to be happy and feel good in hedonistic moment just don't harm anybody else keep it consensual if you tell people that's the messaging they literally receive there's no god there's no transcendent morality you are an animal if that is the messaging that you hear from birth then we should not be surprised when people act amorally and in self-interest and in violent ways wow no again i'm not saying that all secular people are you know rapists no but that's not wonderful people who are more moral than christians i'm just saying that's that that and the secular worldview go perfectly together together in my mind yeah and if you follow a lot of what's happening in culture that is not an unrealistic narrative if you combine different strands of what is out there that is sort of the default message uh okay uh i want to talk i want to see where i go yet you you talk about dr larry hurtado for the end of the book who identified five marks for the early church can you walk us through these it's very similar to what keller says it's very similar um and i would love just to see it because again this pushes against progressive and right-wing it like kind of causes all out yeah yeah no keller i think keller was the one i've read her tattle destroyer of the gods is his the book that's referring to and keller did a great synopsis of it but yeah so larry hurtado is deceased now was a well widely respected historian of early christianity and wrote a number of books that are just fascinating he has one called destroyer of the gods that basically which is a great title um that's from an insult from a roman i forget who it was who basically was ranting against christians and calling them the destroyers of the gods you know christians were called atheists for centuries because they refused they didn't buy paganism and they said zeus is either a figment of your imagination or he's just a demon he's not zeus and there's one true creator god and his name is the father and he's come to us in the sun and in 300 years this violently persecuted tiny little jewish sect became the dominant force in the empire and eventually overcame paganism and the empire itself and so he just tells that story and his basic let me this is my my interpretation of his book he's basically saying that the church grew at such an extraordinary pace not because it was relevant and relatable to the culture but for the exact opposite reason it was distinct from the culture and different than the culture and that contrast was actually like the secret of its success otherwise why would people join a movement that you knew was likely to get you killed or at least socially ostracized it makes no logical sense unless if there was something so compelling about this jesus movement that was so different and so distinct from the culture that you would be willing to give up at least your economic and social capital if not your life itself and hurtado basically outlines five kind of basic features of christian distinctiveness many of which sound very common don't sound radical to us today specifically because christianity has so permeated the ethos of the west they are suspecting to do this from memory number one they were um the early church was had a very high value for kind of what we would call diversity equity and inclusion it was a multi-ethnic and multi-racial expression of church which was almost unheard of number two they were spread across socioeconomic lines so you had roman elite intellectuals next to slaves in these little catacomb churches and house churches and there literally was nothing like that in the ancient world number three their uh definition of sexuality was what we would consider christian was even more radical in the first century than it is in the 21st century of sex being between one man and one woman for life until death do his part that was a whether wherever you were in the roman empire that was an absolutely radical absurd idea what we think of as a traditional idea was not traditional at the time it was radical number four they were active in their um in their fight against infanticide and abortion obviously abortion was medically more dangerous so the exposure of daisies babies was the common way that you had aborted child you carry it to terms study sparta they did that and just leave them out in the field put them in a jar exactly put it out at the town dump they'd either just be exposed and killed by the elements or they'd be picked up by slavers and raised to be slaves and the christians became like the first adoption agencies in the world and would go around and would adopt these babies and bring them in and you were expected as a christian to limit your sexuality to your spouse and then raise up children and then finally christians were non-violent um for the first you know several centuries at least until augustine they basically was not okay to be in the military and a follower of jesus they were both politically and personally non-retaliatory they would not fight their enemies they attempted to love them and would rather die than take a life and what's interesting about those five distinctives i think keller is the one who points this out the first two sound like like if you map those five things onto american or north american politics the first two sound liberal because they're talking about race and class the second two sound conservative because they're talking about sexuality gender abortion and the last one doesn't fit either side non-violence doesn't really go with democrat or republican left or right you know and um and but it's these these five things that really don't exist in any other movement i mean name a political party that is built around these five ideas racial justice socioeconomic equality uh sexual what we call traditional christian sex ethics anti-abortion and non-violent non-militaristic i mean name who else believes that except christians and not even most christians today ancient christians you know so this this is i'm so glad you you you included that in the book and we just talked about it but this goes back to okay that's great john mark but you're in portland and someone says so that's your truth great that's what you want to do awesome good for you i have a different truth i have a different understanding of reality i have a different how do you get through because working in a postmodern just north of toronto we're you know we're very similar to the left coast of the u.s we've been post-modern for a long time and that truth is relative and you see this now on the right too more so than you did in the past the right is becoming more relativistic because these are my facts these are my theories this is my truth so it's funny because five years ago i think you would have said that was a post-modern thing now it's a cultural thing and everyone's like well that's good for you you got those five things going you know live a nice life have a good time married to your wife and take care of infants and you know be chaste and be inclusive and and don't kill anybody that's great but i got a different truth and my truth is what do we do with the subjective truth because you've worked with just countless like thousands of young adults you know millennials increasingly gen z who just really feel like truth is relative and i gotta find my truth and i am my truth what do you do it's like pilate what is truth what how what's the what's the answer to that well i mean first off i don't actually think that people don't believe in truth okay i think they say that you know i'm sure there are some like way down the rabbit hole post-modernist professors somewhere that may not but i mean if you ask most people if you actually press them and start digging most people believe that there is such a thing as truth and falsehood and even right or wrong they may have great metaphysical grounding for it or not they may have a coherent system they may not but i think if you press people most they do i don't know if this is if this is the right answer carrie i just know that if there's anything i've learned as a pastor it's that pastoring is not about coercion and control it's about example and invitation and every time you know i'm reading dominion right now by tom holland which is just riveting it tells church history and you know a subtitle is how the christian revolution remade the world every time that the church attempted to use coercion in any political form to mandate obedience to jesus it was an utter disaster and this is really one of the great gifts of late modern democracy is the gift that we don't have to persecute people who disagree with us you know we can an atheist can live next to a jew can live next to a quaker can live next to a calvinist can live next to a you know suburban mega church pastor like whatever you know we'd have to kill each other and there's still tensions and problems you know but that's a that's a real that's a real gift in human history that comes arguably out of christianity itself but i just am not a believer in coercion or control so um i always have to be careful in the portland culture where i live to not take on a survivalist spirituality where i just kind of hunker down and make the focus you know not letting the big bad world kind of corrupt me and i'm just gonna take care of mine and you know um i think actually we're more dangerous than the culture is and i think we need to actually have faith in that and not let the enemy fool us into thinking survival is the litmus test of success we need to actually think like the early church they didn't just think how we're going to be beleaguered and just hold on through persecution and survive they thought we're going to spread the gospel one meal at a time over bread and wine even if it costs us our life and we're going to see the world come to know that jesus is lord and that's not a of spirituality that's a resurrection spirituality and so i think we need i i can be prone to a survivalist spirituality especially when i'm tired come and have covet and a lot of criticism a lot of anger and ire and again in portland a lot of controversy here i have to be really careful to not lose hope and you know hope as in the expectation of coming good based on the person and the promises of god and i want to be a hopeful christian and a hopeful pastor and a hopeful mind and a hopeful person so i think part of what you're saying is going forward with a hopefulness and not just a survival mentality but i really am not interested in trying to coerce or control people i want to live in a way that begs the question and then i want to invite people to join me in our community in that i mean michael green from oxford his book evangelism in the early church basically sums up a couple hundred page academic study of early christianity he says basically this is how evangelism worked in the early church the church was living in a radically different and compelling life pagans were captivated and compelled by the way of life and then christians said if you want to join us you're welcome too that was basically how evangelism worked it wasn't a digital marketing strategy for jesus it wasn't massive events i mean the whole thing was illegal and persecuted it was just this beautifully compelling alternative way of life that hundreds of millions of people and now billions of people have found to be the truest way of life there is that's beautiful i want to get to a couple of practical strategies because you've got a monastic handbook that you show us how to write etc how do you guard yourself against cynicism it's been a battle in my life too i'm trying to trying to die an optimist decades ahead god willing i want to be more hopeful more alive more joyful than i was at any point but it's work dude how do you do it it's work i mean i i commiserate with you rest when i'm tired my cynicism goes through the roof when i'm well rested i'm a more hopeful and buoyant person friends play that role in me like i um i think you have to be really careful with the kind of people that you let into your brain and um you know cynicism feeds on cynicism so if your friends and your circle of people that you live with work with chat with are cynical people that will just feed that outrage monster in you and so i think i'm careful to make sure i get some time with friends that are not cynical that are either full of hope like you know um full of faith where i lack faith some that aren't in their heads all of the time thinking about foucault and darada they just are loving jesus and they're not stupid or simple they're just that's not how they're wired yeah so i think living in community um rather than finding an echo chamber of other cynical quote thoughtful people is really important for me as well and then honestly reading church history which at first can just increase your cynicism but then you know can really enrich it i'm reading um that beautiful book right now water from a deep well which is like through kind of ten of the best contributions of different streams of the church to christian spirituality and it is just i mean it will just fuel your hope for the future of the world stuff like that you know just it's just a gift um so how do we resist this you quote your friend john tyson our mutual friend john tyson calls it a beautiful resistance right so you don't want to be those people hunkered down there's eight of us left you know just make it to the end you you want to see and i mean the world needs hope i mean oh my goodness i think the world really needs love the world needs hope the world needs truth how do you forge a beautiful resistance how do you resist the pull of culture but also become those authentic followers of jesus in this culture i mean i think never speak for john because he's brilliant but i think what john and i would say to that and i love his language of a beautiful resistance and he's referring there to the church is you form a community around obedience to jesus as lord and you see what happens and i'm just really interested in whether it's a mega church or a house church whether it's around a stage or a table or both being with a group of people who are devoted to jesus as lord for whom obedience to jesus is the foundation of their life none of us you know live into that entirely but that is the deepest desire of our heart that we're attempting to live into and i think the more that we can build a community around obedience to jesus the more beautiful and compelling that resistance will become the more of a contrast community will be this is the irony of church strategies on both the left and the right that attempt to accommodate to the culture they sign their own death wish death warrant because there's nothing that would make you join them you know why join them when i can go to brunch on sunday morning or whatever why submit my sexuality or my money or whatever when i can just do whatever i want with my body and my money as long as it's legal um there has to be something more beautiful about what i'm joining than what i'm leaving behind and i think that that beauty comes from obedience you dropped this really casually but i wanted to pick it up so you apparently uh practice communal budgeting so i think your line is if you have over an expenditure of over a thousand dollars it goes to the group to approve a personal expenditure i'm not talking church this is like john mark comer's money that you've been interested with talk about that practice that discipline and why you do it there's not much to report you know we've been there's been different iterations of it but really trying to live in community uh you know not full-on communal housing although if you were to come over to our house there would be a lot of people here at different times of the week um but uh really trying to live in a thick webbing of community not just church around a stage but church around a table and i love both and part of living in community for me has to do with your finances and uh so yeah for many years myself and at least one other guy in our community have done our budgets together um uh every year i we use the same little excel spreadsheet and we do our budgets together we talk about how much money we made that year what we're being led into what our budgets are and we you know it's all everything's voluntary you know but kind of speaking to each other's budgeting process or a couple as couples and others have been involved in this and then yeah for many years we've had a rule where any purchase over a thousand dollars is not in the budget we have to get approval this mean we have to talk to each other about it which is really great because it forces you to articulate i want to spend a thousand dollars on this new bright shiny thing and then you have to think wait a minute do i actually wait a minute it forces you to articulate it you can't hide it you know and sin thrives in hiding i'm not saying it's sinful to buy something but sometimes it is you know so yeah i mean there's not a lot of backstory it is it is what it sounds like but it's rare do you do you confess your sins to each other gotta ask you is that is that a private discipline is it somewhat a public discipline no i don't think private confession is confession um so a mentor of mine who's been deeply shaped by a.a was talking about why the evangelical approach to the confession of sin which is basically on sunday morning in a crowd of people before you take the bread and the juice you say sorry to god in your mind which is not bad but why that does not have anywhere close to the liberating power as when you sit down in a church basement on a metal chair in an aaa meeting and say hi my name is whatever and last night i got drunk because the second one is a far closer to biblical confession repentance than the first one james says confess your sins to one another so that you may be healed and that's the problem with the evangelical view of sin is it's so legal in its outlet it views sin as like breaking a legal code and i don't think that's wrong but i do not think that's the dominant metaphor in the new testament the new testament seems jesus you know it's not the healthy that i've come to call but that are neither the physician but the sick he views sin as a sickness a disease for the soul that is literally killing us and we need to be healed this is the isaiah 53 view of the atonement it's the eastern orthodox it's the ancient really for the first thousand years of the church that was one of the major views of the atonement the healing of the soul and so i think confession is like your weekly doctor's visit visit when you're a deeply sick person in need of healing you know it's like how god is coming to you and healing your soul and confession has to be to another person so yeah i mean for last couple years i don't have like some great formula that i can export to the world yet but we've been trying to figure out how does confession become a regular rhythmic part of our life together in community it's really interesting you know i was raised in the reformed tradition and there's a four four-fold pattern of worship that goes back for centuries and it's approach confession word and sacrament response and i realized in evangelical ministry and i've led an evangelical church confession has disappeared like there's no more prayers of confession in so many churches and other times you can argue well they were liturgical and they were formulaic and yeah but like no prayer of confession like we're not even coming with clean hands and then since the pandemic started because we were in lockdown for a long time my best friend lives in atlanta and i said hey can we text each other every morning so it's simple simple well now we're doing a keller study but anyway uh it's uh best worst and pray that's it best thing to happen yesterday worst thing that happened in pray and it's moved into the territory of confession which i have found very helpful i've learned so much about him he's learned so much about me and uh i do think there is something to confessing your sins to each other yes it's very powerful because it's interesting yeah no no keep going no no no no no no you go i was done no i was just gonna say the then you keep going the mentor that i was referring to that was talking about a.a versus you know your experience in a reformed church growing up every morning at i think 6 50 a.m a.m he calls his best friend oh i know for a five to ten minute call to confess his sins wow and they've been doing that for decades right for forever i can't remember how long i got the chance to sit my best friend and i got the chance to go up to visit him and his best friend the four of us sat and had an extraordinary time just learning from these two older men how do you do friendship did you male friendship over decades at that level of confession vulnerability intimacy where you actually know each other's stuff you know how does that what what is what does that look like you know i'm glad you told that story there's a lot of power there so you also tell people how to create and i want to get this right i got to look at my notes um a neo-monastic oh oh wait what is what is what is the piece there it is your own monastic handbook for combating demons okay that's just sounds spectacular but it's in the appendix to the book uh talk about that oh i feel like that oh gosh that's a long conversation i feel like that's a whole other book down the road someday okay so that so that's a nod to a fourth century desert father that i am fascinated by avagrius ponticus also known as evagrius the solitary who wrote a book in the 350s sometime called talking back the subtitle was a monastic handbook for combating demons so that's his language not mine it's brilliant that book um is built around what he calls the eight deadly thoughts that later were became or the seed bed for uh the seven deadly sins of iniquity that are still around because two of his thoughts were really close it was like pride and vainglory so later thinkers were like ah that's they're kind of the same thing let's collapse it down to seven and it's built off of i go deep into this in this book but of the ancient kind of desert father and mother's view of spiritual warfare as being a war in your mind to believe truth over lies and so they took as their template for spiritual warfare matthew 4 and luke 4 and jesus experience in the desert where satan comes to him and they would say all right what happens in that moment satan doesn't come with a sword and an army of roman legionnaires to murder jesus body satan comes and it reads like a conversation where the devil speaks basically a lie into jesus mind it's a deceptive temptation it's subtle it's not like go murder this person or have an affair or lie or cheat or steal it's turn stones into bread and it's this subtle kind of temptation and they would say what does jesus do he quotes scripture and they would say okay that's not a magic incantation it's not a bible study what he's doing is thought redirection he's refusing to enter into conversation with the devil he's refusing to dialogue with the devil in his mind he's refusing to let that internal video of the lie plain as imagination it's thought redirection he's instead turning his mind to think about the opposite the the truth to the devil's lies god's truth from scripture to the devil's lies which is fascinating because this is in perfect alignment with the cutting edge of modern neuroscience right now that would point out the obvious that we can't not think and if you have a thought that's coming at you that's afflictive or toxic or negative or whatever that telling yourself to stop thinking that thought doesn't work so if i tell you hey stop thinking about purple elephants what are you thinking about right now purple elephant stop it don't no more purple elephants no stop thinking about purple elephants i mean you actually give that thought more power hebb's law neuroplasticity you actually begin to wire your brain to think more about purple elephants not less so how do you break that pattern once it becomes a pattern well you redirect your thoughts to something else and for jesus that something else was the truth of scripture so evagrius and the desert fathers and mothers had this incredibly sophisticated demonology i'm not even sure if they were right and it sounds crazy but i kind of think it was brilliant they basically argued that the devil's primary the primary version of spiritual warfare that we experience is demonic beings inserting thoughts into our consciousness and they would say which sounds crazy but then think about it if you suspend judgment for a minute and they would say have you ever had a thought that was negative or toxic or you knew it was a lie or you knew it was not helpful whatever you want to call it but it's like that thought wanted to be thought it's like it had a will to it and like it had a power to it almost like it had this dark animating energy like it was after you haunting you and you didn't want to think it much less believe it much less live it but yet it was haunting you couldn't get it out of your head they would say and these are ancients they would say that's because it is a demonically animated thought and that's the primary mean experience of spiritual warfare that we have and they would say that you fight these demonically and and they have to be fought you fight these demonically animated thoughts not head-on but through thought redirection to truth into scripture so a monastic handbook for combating demons which is a vagrious idea i just do an updated kind of template in the back of the book is basically where you spend some time you can do this just through a simple journaling exercise where you come to identify and you can do this through therapy you can do this through conversations over coffee with your best friend i do most of this in silence solitude and prayer and journaling you could do it however where you identify what are the lies that play in my mind what are the deceptive ideas that these thoughts that feel to have like an evil will to them that just keep coming back you write them out identify them see if you can do some internal work what's the trust structure below them what's the what's the fear that's attached to them that's driving me or the desire that's disorder that's driving me and then you in prayer just ask god to bring a corresponding scripture to mind and you write out the scripture and then whenever that thought comes you don't have to freak out or get anxious or all emotional you just calmly and quietly change the channel in your mind and think about the truth so a monastic handbook for combating demons is basically a discipleship strategy to curate your consciousness your thought life your mindstream to take on the mind of christ replacing one lie at a time with the truth of scripture so let's let's go back to what you said you know hey we got married young i should be able to have sex with whoever i feel like having sex with maybe i need some freedom in my life i'm you know just hit 40. i've only got so much time left how do you combat that lie with that by thinking on truth there's a private expression of that where i might have a thought like that as i'm driving home or lying in bed at night or after a fight with my spouse which theoretically we have once a year you know um and so i have several scriptures that specifically the spirit has impressed upon my heart one is you know peter husbands love your wives dwell with them as heirs with you of the gracious gift of life and i'll just quietly say that in my mind and then the other is in community you know with close friends or my spiritual director or therapist just vocalizing hey i've had this thought i have this feeling and letting them speak truth into my life calmly non-judgmentally and just and then of course the you know the daily reading of scripture all that kind of stuff okay but again it's not rocket science i think that's one of the reasons that there's so little talk about this stuff because it's not a lot of money to be made off of it you know like by my 17-step program right yeah and it's hard i mean it's not it's a life of discipleship um but it doesn't cost anything you don't need to be educated at a certain level you don't need to have a certain amount of money or even time you just need to have a desire to obey jesus and to bring your mind and surrender to the reign of god so you're talking about developing a rule of life and a neo-monastic church order with other churches around the world you want to give us a sneak peek into what you're working on well the the church order stuff's just a dream right now i mean i'm actively dreaming about it with close friends um you know yeah the basic take there is we talk about the protestant reformation there's been lots of reformations of the church over 2000 years the church is always being corrupted by culture and then experiencing a moment of reform and renewal by loving prophetic antagonists and leaders in the church that call her back to her true love back to the way of jesus back to orthodoxy back to holiness and lots of reformations before and after the reformation and most of them before the reformation did not split off from the church as i understand it you know if you read my taxes biography on luther luther never intended to split from the church that wasn't even in his paradigm he was trying to reform the church and they kicked him out you know um so they were trying to protest against corruption in the church not start a new arm of the church or whatever but prior to luther most of the time these reformations became church orders that we would know today the most famous ones like the jesuits or the dominicans or the franciscans or the carmelites and all of them basically started out as reform movements they were all kind of calling a corrupted church back to compromise with the political powers and cultural currents of the day back to discipleship to jesus rich life in community confession of sins simplicity forsaking money sex and power you know and there were these renewal movements i dream of something like that but for low church protestants what would it look like to be not a catholic and not a priest or a nun but to be in almost like a religious order where you're basically just saying i want i want to go to the deep end of the pool and discipleship to jesus and i want to find some other people to do that with and and what's they all were built around a rule of life what's a rule of life which is just what's a a lifestyle that is conducive to deep healing and transformation and radical counter cultural living in our day and age with an iphone and secularism in a city or metropolitan area how do we actually live today in such a way that deep healing change and and radical counter cultural lifestyle will become the norm not the exception to the rule so um yeah we're dreaming about that i don't know the current iteration we put the uh breaks on it a little bit we want to authentically live it myself and a number of other leaders are all living by a rule of life right now holding each other accountable to it we make an annual commitment to it meet together each year we want to live it for a while before we try to export anything or put it up on a website or you know build a digital brand or something and um and we also if we do create anything we want to be careful to create something that serves local churches not competes with them so we don't want to accidentally create like a spiritual elitism or something that would carve off people from mainstream churches we wanted to hear like if so and so pastor found out there were there's a little cell of six people in his church from that had joined this order we want that pastor to think of that as a great news you know so i'm not sure how to do that the current thought is maybe just starting a pastoral order just an order for pastors that really want to robustly follow jesus in this very secular kind of moment and lead churches to do the same so i think that might be where we start in the next couple of years but we'll see what happens love you to leave all leaders listening with a challenge a thought an encouragement what's what's on your mind as we close oh man just stay faithful you know which isn't just survival stay faithful to jesus stay faithful to orthodoxy stay faithful to the church stay faithful to your call in life your vocation and stay faithful to hope and you know willard used to say there is no problem for which the ultimate solution is not discipleship to jesus and when i first read that i thought that's not true and the more i think about it the more i think yeah that's absolutely true wow and that's it i mean what what is it at the end of the day it's about apprenticing under jesus with his community to become a person of love in god like that's what life is and is there anything more beautiful or more compelling or more freeing or more peaceful than becoming a person of love in god like that that that's a that's worth giving the life to but it's a slow work in an age of internet and clicks and instant gratification and visa and amazon delivery prime where this is the work of centuries or at least decades not days or hours or minutes so stay faithful a long obedience in the same direction i love that i really do john mark coomer the book is called live no lies that is the official title despite uh what is it the world that is it is not the world the flesh the devil recognize and resist the three enemies who we've just named that sabotage your piece it's a it's a fantastic book i think as much as highlighted in my copy as is not highlighted and i highly recommend it john mark your gift to me to just so many other leaders to the church but also to the world thanks for being with us today it's such an honor thank you for letting me ramble off and on but grateful to be along really grateful we do this conversation thank you [Music] well i hope today's episode was helpful to you you can always get more by subscribing to my channel i also have a lot more content over at carrienewhof.com for leaders and business and leaders and churches and you can get transcripts of this episode there and so much more plus some other stuff i do for leaders so head on over there to discover more at careynewhoff.com and in the meantime i really hope our time together today has helped you lead like never before