Open Table Talks | Session 2

we're gonna start off here and welcome everybody whoever's listening here we're glad you could come back we sure appreciate all the questions and comments and encouragement that we got yesterday God you were able to get the recording and be able to see that we should have Facebook up Facebook live up now if you're having problems with that let us know um yesterday we were talking about the truth of our being the way of our being those two ideas when it comes to the nature of God and the nature of humanity of us as human beings and I thought we'd pick up there again with some things that Katie wanted to share so Katie why don't you start us off well yesterday when you were talking about you know what is the sin nature after all I'd like to put an idea out there and see what you guys think of this I know we've talked about it some before but I tend to think of our sin nature as denying our humanity denying being created in the image of God you know if you think about what happened in the garden we often interpret that as disobedience but I think that in their desire to be like God the flipside of that is is that just is not wanting to be human denying that we were created in the image of God and I often say were the only creatures who deny what were created to be and I think of the two sides that there's these two sides to accepting our humanity and I use these two metaphors so first of all I you know going back to the diamond I talked about the diamond being created and an image of God but that's this beautiful thing that God called very good that's inside us no matter whether we know it or not but in these two sides of accepting our humanity I use two different images one of them is this little fetal baby and you know not just a little not just a cute little baby that's outside of the room but a fetal baby in that it's fully dependent fully finite fully just weak and incapable of really taking care of itself and in you know being on its own that were created for connectedness and ironically as much as Christians tend to be pro-life when I talk with Christians about this this is like repulsive to them to accept this about themselves like we want to save it for somebody else but we don't want to accept it about ourselves so the one hand part of our humanity is accepting our finiteness the other hand a metaphor I use is this three-headed dog which is our power it's the power within us and ironically it's three heads which I think is the distortion of the three parts of the Trinity that we can we have this power and we can use we will use it one way or another we'll use it either for good or for evil but the only time that this won't look evil is when we also accept our finiteness and if you think about the life of Christ Christ accepted the finiteness came in a week you know in the in the lowliest of circumstances and was tempted to use his power outside of his humanity I think of that passage in the desert there's three temptations of Jesus to use his power outside of what the father is doing and and each time he he says no I'm not gonna use my power apart from my finiteness apart from my humanity and so when I work with premarital couples I walk them through something called shadow vows and that's accepting the fullness of their humanity so that when they say I do they're accepting not just these flowery parts of like I will always love you and which I say when I'm sitting at a wedding when somebody says I will always love you I'm holding up a silent card I'm saying you won't you won't always love that person you will sometimes hate that person and and it's accepting our our humanity and so I I work with couples to do something called shadow vowels of accepting those dark sides I have been writing up shadow vowels that I think that we could use for ourselves there's a there's a writer called Robert Johnson who talks about owning your own shadow and in it he says we need an internal marriage before we have an external marriage and so I was wondering if Brad if you would let me walk you through these shadow vows that to give a demonstration of what it's like to accept the fullness of our humanity okay one condition i am i will not simulate it I will actually be doing this so if I have a breakdown I I know the therapist that can help you if you are good do you Brad accept that you created an image and likeness of God having a human nature that you share with Jesus Christ the Son of God I do do you accept that though you are created in the image of God you yourself are not God you are creature not the Creator do you accept the fact that your creaturely nature comes with frailty vulnerability and finiteness do you accept the fact that there will always be more that you do not know than you know yes do you accept that the power of God will always be in you whether you are turned towards the light or not do you accept that your power when you are operating from the light has the ability to bring light into the world do you acknowledge the fact that until your dying day your power has the capacity to rain a bit of hell on the earth if it is not used in the light with the humility of your finite nature yep do you Brad accept the fullness of your humanity in all its crap and all its glory until death do you part well geez okay I do that's my thought on sin nature dang Katie that's really good yeah and could you send those to us yeah sure so shadows yeah really really that's that's really powerful yes Brad go you'll see I still absolutely resist the idea of sin nature I don't believe there's such a thing we have a human same thing yeah yeah yeah all the vows that you said really do describe human nature so I had no problem with them back to you Paul because you might want to expand on that a bit exact I mean I was just saying what is in nature to me that's what it is it's just yeah our human nature and our frailty to our ability to turn away from the light to cause us to sin yeah I think what Brad and I are objecting to is the word nature itself because it's an ontological word yeah yeah actually an oxymoron yeah yeah describe it so if you say the way of our being is that we have this propensity to turn from the love move all of a sudden Holy Spirit that's one thing yeah but so you know sin nature is just such a problem right and so that's all I was gonna I was going to say what Brad said to in an excuse yeah yeah oh yeah expand on that Baxter because that is so important well you you the devil made me do it or in nature that happened you don't take responsibility for your your actions your thoughts your perceptions your behaviors just blame it on something else's it's so it's just what happens rather than seeing that the alienation is a better word to the separation and an alien I mean the nature we have a nature we share with Jesus but we are in the dark yeah so it's a form of illusion in blindness rather than a hey I can't blame it on the darkness I can accept responsibility for the things that I do and say in my in my blindness in darkness I wanted to add one more thing Katie there's a there's a passage that I want to read it's just two verses out of Isaiah 2 you know that when you held up the fetal baby mama my mind immediately went there and and it talks about being born and carried all the way even through our grain years and but let me let me give you some of the the Latin Vulgate when the when the Hebrew was translated to Greek and then it was translated to Latin and and the Vulgate was the Latin translation but some we get a lot of English words from the Latin and so when they use it sometimes the Latin makes more sense to us than even in English because it's so much more looted and it's not so messed up by some of our paradigms here's what it says listen to me o house of Jacob and all the remnant of the house of Israel you who have been born Beale are in II born by me from birth in the in the Vulgate it says carried mayo utero carried by my uterus and so you who have been born by me from birth and have been carried from the womb which in Latin is Mayo vulva you have the actual feminine language for the female womb and the vault the vulva and the uterus even to my old age I will be the same and even to your grain years I will bear you I have done it and I will carry you and I will bear you and then I will deliver you right and so it's even taking the concept of of death as the final delivery but in this interim period you're gonna be carried in the womb of God the entire time right that's rays of that I know they afraid of that Isaiah 46 three and four for anybody who wants to know where that's from thanks Paul yeah hey Kenneth glad you could make it okay anything else wanted to add to the in nature issue question never say that again yeah I just was I was profoundly struck you know embracing each of those vows with not as a simulation but as reality for me and it is about self-acceptance and my humanity and that's that that's good and and it's powerful and it's dangerous but this is this is the freedom this is the the hazards of freedom that lead to the glory of it right so I mean what up its I just was thinking about like one of the guys actors on Doctor Who he just went off quite a few times during the series just like humans are amazing you know and he would be saying this to these aliens who wanted to destroy humanity and I think even some of our theology has been about destroying humanity or scaping from it and it's just an end and this idea that this really is the pinnacle of creation at least as we know it on earth and there's a real even within environmentalism there can be an anti human kind of script that says we're parasite and the world would be better off without as well sometimes the world needs a breast from us but the thing is we're the hinge point between creator and creative in that you know Christ has United all that it is to be God and all that it is to be human and himself and then he's United himself to us in that way to image God in this world you know my pets have always been nicer than me but but they can't image God in the world the way mm-hmm and they can't bring hell into the world the way we can right yeah we can do both I think for for Christians people who have been raised particularly in this country people have been raised in a certain way of looking at all of this and the way that they read the scriptures I think it goes back to what we were talking about yesterday it's particularly Paul and Baxter things that you brought up that they see that they see the fall as fundamentally changing the nature of humanity from good to evil so that we are no longer good yeah so we're no longer good we're evil and how much does it take to change the value of the diamond exactly and so I think if if people can grasp that point then it it opens up the freedom to be able to go okay where do we go from here how do how do I understand my humanity and this this one nature that I share with everybody else on the planet it certainly causes us to look at each other differently I think better and I think you guys do too well and if if we can all accept that innate goodness and then are also our innate weakness and our capacity for evil like you too might have been the person who sent the jews to the to the gas chambers like you know if you were in that same thing you have that capacity to yeah well in between the the the truth of our being and our way of being we've managed to say that it's not a sinful nature but but it is blindness it is delusion and and that's the world that we grow up in and it's go found yeah it is delusion I've come to the conclusion that the right word is delusional we're unhinged from what is really real which is a presence not the absence of the father-son experience we're learning from beginning to see the light shines in the darkness yeah just a quick note I see Joelle from Uganda saying hi and I just want to say hi to Joelle he's so he's on hey Joel yeah there was somebody else had asked a question that they'd asked yesterday and we didn't address but I can't see it on my screen because I'm using the iPhone but I don't know if you've noticed that oh I don't have it in front of me either Brad this is this from joke one one question is from Joelle and he says I will once again ask the same question I asked in June last year when are all caps when are you guys thinking about bringing this message to Africa well we are right now we are Crowder we Citroen Crowder there well we sent you out there Wow yeah one of the things that came up Baxter I'm going to direct this one to you first and then we can discuss it Paul brought up the idea of wholeness and holiness and we had a question about is there a difference what's what's the link between those two how do we understand that in God in ourselves in our experience as opposed to our ontology if you might want to make a comment on that I can but I mean I just threw a softball you know well I think first the holiness is set apart in a class by itself nothing like it in the universe and in its first instance I think it's a reference to the love of the Father Son and spirit it is a holy law there's nothing like it in the whole universe and then from that we moved over over time in the West we've defined holiness not relationally but legally holy this has to do with the law or with being right or whereas it has to do with the the the beauty and the goodness and the righteous and the rightness of the love of the father son of spirit and then inside of that move in the West we've also added a notion but I don't think it's nearly as problematic it's part of the biblical concept of holiness and that is you know wholeness it's almost like the Shalom of your being you were whole you're not for the Apostle Paul uses a different word in in Colossians when he says that all the fullness of deity dwells in Jesus in bodily form in human form and you too have been made fool you've been play Roma trust that's the Greek word for fullness or one of them in Jesus and this is in the past tense it's a perfect tense actually if I remember correctly so well that's where we get the basic idea that what's happened to us in Jesus is we have been we have been made whole I think that begs a question is how does the New Testament understand what all was really wrong that that needed that is that something that's in it this fallible or broken in us or is that just being made is that just part of our humanity which is what Katie keeps coming back to you but I think it is fascinating to me that Isaiah and Isaiah 6 when he has his vision he says three times holy holy holy is the Lord of hosts the whole earth is full of his glory who can I send in any sense who will go for us and in John in John 12 he sees Isaiah's vision as a vision of Jesus but you have that Trinitarian idea of holiness is not it's not being removed in a sense of unapproachable holiness is defined in terms of the relationship of the thoughts on streets it has to do with the beauty and the goodness of their face-to-face relationship oh yeah holding this is not so much about sin as it is about an expression of relationship right in the right so then wholeness Baxter would you say is being inside the holiness an operating in with the holiness yeah that's exactly right the word fullness came to mind just from Colossians chapter what is that Colossians 2 and this and this is a fundamental shift for many people dramatically so well there the whole thing about that what was going on in the early churches that they were beginning to be consciously aware of the need to take ideas that are everyone's fluent with and it's in some sense baptize them or rememr rethink them in the light of the Trinity rather than just taking over something from Roman law or something from Greek philosophy there was a concerted effort to think it through they said what does it mean to be a Trinitarian and used to word homeless because holiness is in the Bible it's a it's a Bible word but it's even in the Old Testament it's a relational word yeah and that's that's key I think not a better so like you mentioned a word fullness and I've been thinking a lot about how fullness of life comes it is is perhaps a really good phrase for what's being offered in the Gospel of John like when he says when he talks when Christ talks about eternal life instead of flipping right away into heavens day when I die as he think about it on 10 life to the full fullness of life now that connects even the salvation project with you know here's your salvation is to bring you into the wholeness that is fullness of life where the truths of your beings becoming the way of your being but also did this idea of fullness in terms of of love loving relationship with a father son and spirit rather than just like a transaction what's been accomplished or something so it seems to me like you could really integrate all of this what we're talking about along those lines especially what John is our mentor yeah Sam was asking on the chat questions about that bread and that and and both you and Baxter talked about this but a lot of a lot of us who grew up the way we did we didn't see this as a possibility of living this kind of way here was always rejected into the the futuristic heavenly abode so suddenly you know that old phrase we were so heavenly minded we were no earthly good you know like we didn't know how to exist on this planet and mm-hm and as John was saying this is such a change of perspective that suddenly it makes the world right around us the world in which holiness dwells or the glory of God is filling up everything and this is where we actually participate and now this is everything that will be done now yeah exactly that's even but kingdoms here I think yeah I think Brad it comes out for me in particular in John 17 in the conversation Jesus has with the father this whole relationality and thinking everything through relationally instead of externally or some kind of moral code that we have to live up to which is is just very different which is the way I I always was taught to view it so symmetrically abut diametrically opposed I mean yeah if God's holiness means he's removed and and distant and unapproachable for us to be holy means we could have be removed and unapproachable and this it's the exact opposite of what it really is yeah think of the impossibility of coming into the present coming into the presence of God as if we could be separated from it but if we think that God's holiness can't handle us and we have to clean ourselves up but it's the very holiness that will help us to not operate like this three-headed dog by by turning back towards the light we won't use our power in that kind of way well let's put it let's put it a different way suppose we're not we were never ever meant to be holy we were never meant to be wise we were never meant to be righteous we were always meant to share in their holiness and righteousness and when we turn away from now you have to come up with a definition of these things and then figure out okay this is what holding this is and I need to do these five things and alienates people this was back in the garden right pardon it's the wrong week to tweet we go to the wrong tree in the garden I'm gonna get holiness autonomously you know my knowledge of good and evil that I then you know and so on it's impossible game yeah well we keep trying really hard yeah we do then ask the question do any of you have any suggestions for how to break out of a performance or law orientation when when you're interacting with Scripture because of the way we're trained it seems to just drop us right back into that way of being right the religious way of being I mean he could look at he could look at the blog posted on the three perspectives on salvation and a lot of that is about going from transactional which is I think what he's talking about quid pro quo Christian and shifting it to reciprocal so that it's that it's a love relationship but it takes time with that but it does help to remember that all of God's covenants are are about reciprocal relationship they're not about they're not legal contracts and as soon as you do that then even the commands stop being threats to you you know the like gee thanks command what are those it's like here's how here's how we're gonna love each other that's what that's what it's not like if you do this thing I love you oh you know that's it's a subtle but massive shift really my there get a copy of the mirror Bible too and read that he does a pretty good job of delivering us from the evil of transactional ISM or external ISM and legalism yeah my thought to Ben's question Paul is well in thinking back to the way that I used to think and teach it's this transaction this external was always kind of if I do then God does yeah or if if I do this then I grow but the transformation okay who's playing the music that was don't worry I know that was like a Taha that was these Nicanor my boys you better watch out the the it's not a cause-and-effect relationship right right so if I can begin to think away from that it's not cause and effect the growing is in the knowing the transformation is in the knowing just like it is with with my wife and I you know there's not a cause-and-effect relationship there as we know each other transformation happens so it's more it's relational that way to me so anyway there's also another book I've heard about written about infamous John McMurray that would help people make that transition yeah that's a great bridge book John well done on that brother thanks ma'am okay Brad I got a question we've got tons of questions here but I have one that I wanted to throw out because it it still is about this issue of the nature of humanity what do we make of Paul's statement of a new creation of being made new or becoming new in Christ in second Corinthians can you begin to address that for us we can all jump in no I think I think Paul should start funny all right so so here's what I'd say just off the cuff and maybe we can get Ken's voice in here since he's been sort of in the background the whole time you know but the word new is like you know new heavens and new earth it it's not like new in kind or new in nature it's it's the refurbishment of the truth of who we are it's like the movement of transformation and it's like an acknowledgment that no you're at the core of your being you are a very good creation but you know you've been buried under the the crap as Katie would say or the or the or whatever I mean the diamond Becca and so yeah so it's it's the refurbishment of that which has been good and beautiful the whole time that's the more of a renewing yeah yeah exactly it's a restoration of what is and in terms of and that was always the issue it's like I'm gonna give you a new heart well is it a heart transplant or am I gonna restore your heart and help um you're going to have new eyes what like is it uh is it eyeball replacement surgery or is he renewing our vision to remove the cataracts of delusion mm-hmm so cataracts of delusion Kenneth come on candor wine no one here you you're muted oh I'm good enough so yeah I do think that we come up in these ways sometimes and the various camps that we we encountered Jesus and with this idea that God even when it comes to the earth that it will be destroyed you know and that they'll be a neat like a like a completely new creation and that's really not the witness of the entire scripture God's not interested in destroying what he creates good I think we have to start with just thinking about it on this macro level this cosmic level God made the made made the universe good and he loves the universe he loves the cosmos that he made he made it because he's loved and and so you know the idea of destroying what he's made is not in the mind of God what he is interested in especially to those of us who we created very good he is interested in anything in us that is not in communion with love he isn't in destroying that and so I think one of the things that is happening in new creation is everything in us that cannot participate in love which is my definition of the word sin anything that is in us that is not participating in love will be burned away and all that's left is new creation so yeah so it depends on how you look at fire yeah yeah alright so so if the whole cosmos is destroyed by fire and that fire is actually love it's it's the love of God that sweeps over and through the cosmos transforming it and refurbishing it not new and kind heavens and earth but an absolutely cleansed and renovated and restored heavens and earth way to being the intention was yeah there's an old Tulsa there's an old Tulsa preacher I used to listen to when I was in college at oru and he would have said he would have said to what you just said he would have said praise Allah yeah [Laughter] okay now I think he loved this law he loves the cosmos and the fire that he's gonna bring to us and to it is the fire of of cleansing yeah absolutely and of course we can't we can't you know this this happens new creation happens what's the foundation of the cosmos the foundation of the cosmos is the cross so that's how remember the words that yeah well this is an artistic rendering but the on the Via Dolorosa and in the the film by Mel Gibson and Mary rushes to his side and he picks up his cross and he looks deeply into her eyes and says behold I'm making all things new so it is the cross it's the death of the human God for the love of cosmos that is what makes us a new creation there's a new sensation identification so that Kenny Wayne can do is Pentecostal Creed for us or that whatever that how did that go we've got five days we'll get you it okay and I think we all acknowledge a debt to George McDonald who wrote about this exquisitely and has shaped all of us to a large area I want to add one thing before we move on about the new creation there's it in the scripture the concept of salvation it involves a retrospective and a prospectus and it can Carl Barks writings for example he talks about Adam and Eve Adam and Eve needing to be saved uses the language needed to be saved before they fail because the end is not the Garden of Eden that's the beginning the Ascension of Jesus is the exaltation of the human race that was always part of the plan Jesus is not Plan B he's playing a and in Adam and Eve were never meant to ascend into the heavens on on their own that was always put into the hands of Jesus so there's a double there's the retrospective cleansing that happens in our crucifixion with Jesus and then our resurrection and ascension we are lifted up beyond anything that we could have done in 10 million years on our own that needs to be a part of the discussion or at least a note always good to end on something late Baxter are you saying that that isn't my way to have it not for you it is for you don't do it know how it works for you we are we already know how it works we've tried always end good to end with a theology class right there and in one minute from dr. Krueger anything else real quick before we close we got a couple minutes questions any more questions there's a lot of them yeah there's like I have I have a nice thought for meditation that I got from Joe father John bear he was just he was saying how all of us love the prologue of John so much how the word Kame flesh and I've I've identified that with the conception of Christ and he said what if instead of calling it the prologue we call it we call it the overt so as an overture it's this melody that plays through the entire gospel which is then finished on the cross that's a conception to the Cross and the entire Incarnation so the this overture you you hear it come up again and again like you do let's say in Jesus Christ Superstar if there's an overture melody at the beginning but then it it comes back again and again or likes Star Wars has it too right so there's an overture but it's not done with the conception um it is it is you hear that Jesus shows up in Cana and the melody begins playing again and then Jesus is is rescuing the woman caught in adultery and the overture is playing in the background and and then and then the foot washing and and then finally hung on the cross and it's that melody again the word is becoming flesh even on the cross and in fact comes to completion there in a sense is the creation of the new human so that's all John bear stuff for fodder for tonight so you don't sleep yeah that's really beautiful in fact the overture would show up every time Jesus does yes he's the overture and the song of the first Christians you know is in the lectionary for the Sundays at Philippians 2 verses 5 through 11 Paul takes that song that all the first Christians knew and puts it tastes it cut and pasted it right there into the letter said God you know Jesus doesn't equate the quality was God something to be held onto or but to be shared and the way he does this is to lay down you know his his power and to demonstrate that the weakness of God is stronger than anything else stronger than any other force in the universe is the weakness of God in the human flesh of Jesus so we have a song to sing and it's you know and every knee shall bow every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of the Father not because of not because of coercion but because the revelation of the love of God will will just buckle our knees yeah it's going to be something that every human being does because when we finally see love will embrace it that's my face how's my trust okay you guys thanks again for being here and for those of you that are have joined us and have been a part of this we thank you too for coming we'll be back tomorrow at 1:30 okay thanks 3:31 30 yard line 330 Central Time thanks Baxter all right see you guys later yeah bye

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Id: j0G9aMGKu10

Length: 39min 4sec (2344 seconds)

Published: Wed May 06 2020