Tim Keller on How Culture is Changing and the Future of the Church

[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 keller welcome back it's so good to have you i'm glad to be with you i wish we could do this face-to-face but uh this is way better than nothing yes it is it is it is and we got that opportunity last time and don't take it for granted anymore like you know perhaps we would have in the past well the world has changed an awful lot since february of 2020 in your world as i'm sure many of our listeners would know has changed dramatically what would you say has changed most profoundly in your personal journey you got a diagnosis of pantry pancreatic cancer have been going through that i would just love to know over the last year what what are you thinking about day to day well yes the day after i found out i did have cancer um which was in may of last year the sat down and uh two words came to me as i was meditating and praying don't forget i'm presbyterian and you know not pentecostal so when you get words when you're presbyterian you really better write them down you don't usually don't get words and um they were uh your sanctification and focus and what that meant was first of all it was um and david knows this because uh his wife's been through this with a very very i also it's a similarly very bad cancer um the time is i'm not gonna die tomorrow you know i've got i've got some time left but it's it's very limited and uh so the number one i i realized that i needed to focus on certain things i had to figure out what that was i would say that a man who was 69 years old i actually was pretty unfocused because the reality is it doesn't matter whether you have cancer or not when you're approaching 70 you should actually know the time is short you don't really have decades anymore you've got years anyway and so i should have been more focused but i was tending to do whatever anybody asked me to do like most ministers get in the habit years before you just do you're a nice person you're a minister so you do whatever anybody asks you to do and um i had no focus i really didn't i wasn't saying what what do i really i only had one year left two three four five years what should i be doing i didn't have that focus now i did secondly the word sanctification was that god was it was saying if you would die of a heart attack at age 73 that wouldn't work because if you've got two years left or three years left you're really not holy enough for what i have for you you're not close enough to me you're not dependent enough on me too much of your faith is abstract and therefore i'm not going to take you suddenly by a stroke or a heart attack i'm going to give you a really serious cancer uh so that you are going to the last part of your year of your life you will be living with the prospect of death all the time in a way that you wouldn't if you were taken suddenly and therefore why why would he do that because he says actually you're not holy enough for what i have for you left to do so and you know it made perfect sense it was scary you you you sit down and you say this isn't right you know kathy always said i thought when we turned 70 we'd feel a lot older and we didn't and we were ready to go and ready to do all sorts of so why why this seems unfair and then as soon as i thought about it said actually this makes perfect sense i mean god probably has 100 million reasons why he's doing this to me and i can only disturb one or two but the two even i saw make ridiculous amount of sense i said of course so uh yeah that's that's what's changed i mean a lot has changed the focus and just being drawn just being pushed toward god in a way wasn't before thanks so much for sharing with us uh tim and you know these uh these windows into these moments for you uh i've been been trying to be faithful in in uh in a similar journey with my wife glioblastoma of uh leading as publicly and as openly and unafraid as we can about uh all that and it has been you know this this uh revealer of what i try to control where where real control comes from and and what doesn't what we do and don't really have impact on and uh it's been a thing that's softened my heart for you know the the place of the church uh and how we can really minister to people in their place of deep need and and also really recognizing through the pandemic it was almost like as soon as the pandemic hit it's like wow i've got three years i've been practicing what it looks like to to lead through crisis because my wife's had uh a terminal brain brain tumor and uh so anyway it's been too too many lessons to compress into a couple minutes but i appreciate you sharing that with us you uh wrote a very powerful piece you've written a lot of powerful pieces but your most recent piece in the atlantic on death and dying uh i thought was very very helpful you said something interesting i just want to pick up on a and and if i got it slightly wrong let me know but you know god is doing this to me it's interesting that sort of pushes at the theodicy i'd love your uh take on suffering um i thought what you quoted from was it charles taylor was really helpful in the atlantic and how are you rethinking suffering well i i um the word rethinking is interesting i mean rethinking could mean i'm just going back through what i thought before that's closer that rethinking sometimes can mean um uh thinking a new way about it in a different way i actually don't think i am thinking about a different way i mean i i think most of what i believed about suffering was more head knowledge and i hadn't really made it operational in my in my life that's that's the main burden of the uh the article that you read was to say when i went back and looked at what i believed i was suffering i did write a book on suffering a whole book which i was johnny erickson was kind of an expert on suffering said it was the best book she'd ever read on it which she told me that personally and i was thinking oh wow all right i mean that that's a high compliment and yet i you know i hadn't suffered as much as johnny erickson so i haven't used a lot i mean what you have you've got a couple of things the bible um christianity a is the only religion that gives you a god who actually has suffered i have to be very careful with the trinitarian language here because jesus christ you know was the son of god and he experienced suffering in his human nature okay i i do know all that so when all the letters come in from the trinitarian you know the trinitarians um you know you can say tim understands that um on the other hand you know jesus christ still has a body that is that is the teaching of all christian churches all orthodox churches and it still has the nail prints so when hebrews said says you have a god you have a savior who has experienced whatever you're experiencing which is no other religion gives you that so for example have did you put let me just be put feed on it have you ever lost a child you are lost a son you know outlived us well god has you ever been betrayed by your best friends well you know jesus has have you ever uh faced certain a certain painful death yes i mean so first of all you've got someone and hebrews says go to him because he knows he's been through it and then secondly you also have a god who is going to heal all suffering at the end of time and then therefore in the end uh and one way one way to put this is is if jesus christ really rose from the dead if he really really rose from the dead so that that means that that the the teaching of the gospel in the bible is true so if he really wants to guess what everything's going to be okay in the end everything's going to be okay david it's going to be okay carrie's gonna be okay my my wife is gonna be okay david's wife is gonna be okay we're gonna it's everything's gonna be fine so you put those two things together you've got a god who actually knows suffering so i can go through now when i'm in the midst of it and then i can know that eventually just hold on because it's going to be okay and i the other religions of the world actually don't they don't offer that sort of thing even people that believe in paradise we're talking about a new heavens and new earth christianity's saying when we say everything's going to be okay that means this world is going to be restored we're not going to get a consolation for the loss of this world we're actually at the world so uh okay so you say rethinking rethinking meaning i just have to go back and think again through all the stuff i already believe i didn't change it at all i i had to appropriate it i had to make it something that helped me get through the day and and uh in that sense yes i rethought it but basically i don't think right now the word rethink usually means i've changed i i haven't which is weird you know why because it's so it's so it's such a the christian theology of suffering the biblical theology of something is so potent it's just sitting there unused by most people so god has just said no go get it go use it you mentioned unfocused which kind of surprised me to be honest with you i think of you as very focused um any more on that and then if you could go back a decade 15 years pick a time window is there any way you would have changed your focus or become more focused knowing what you know now well i i think what it means is that they're the things that you know you ought to be trying to spend most of your time doing and then there's things everybody else asks you to do now maybe maybe listen maybe you will be different maybe you'll be different um than me i would think most people are like this though i mean i'm an oldest child um and so i'm kind of like i'm i mean there's a lot of ways in which i'm probably worse than most people are trying to please people and keep them happy i'm certainly worse than my wife my wife is way better as saying i just can't do that you know and knowing the person's going to be unhappy with her and i that's harder so it's harder for me therefore that might be why i'm more focused but basically when i say unfocused meaning didn't mean i didn't know what i should be doing it's just that i never get most of it because i was too busy with people who would say you know you can help me so much if you would write this look at this come speak here and do this so i i honestly think that uh that's what i meant that i just wasn't able to be disciplined enough and here's the here's a gift about this it's not only that i can really see that i have become more focused but actually frankly the people around me are allowing me to do that i mean we're all selfish we all say look i know you're so busy and i i hate to ask you this but you know could you please do this for me and uh now people are actually being a lot more careful about about it so anyway that's what i meant by focus i think do you have a sense of what you want to zone in on over the next couple of years what you really want to devote your time and energy to well it now here's the thing you actually do know about that because we talked about it last time we talked so so many of the things we talked about saying that there is maybe we can talk more about it now there really has been a cultural shift it's not just a cultural shift actually there's a cultural breakdown which maybe we want to talk a little bit about um that that therefore older ways of doing evangelism and christian formation i think are in this country are becoming obsolete and so the truth is not where i'm not going to change the truth but how we impart it how we shape people with it how we recommend it so all the things we talked about before maybe you should say okay the pandemic changed those things i know you're going to get questions like that but basically i would say um the things i talked to you about before that's what it really would most concerns me that the church is not able to form its own young people growing up the world is catechizing them in a way that we're not and then secondly even the way we do apologetics and evangelism i think just it's just gonna have to um it's just gonna have to change we talked about that so we can talk about it more right here if you want i'd love to hear uh one one thought about ways you think that the church could better catechize young people a lot of my life's work has really been focused on understanding this massive gap of those under age 40 and really under age 30 today what are often called millennials in gen z and i'm just convinced that we we've lost the heart of of so many of these young people the data to bear that out but even even those who are in the church are sort of being formed and malformed by culture uh what do you think some of the the reasons for that are and what would be a way we could think differently about that um as church leaders well i think i may i think i may have actually even used this illustration with kerry last time i can't remember but um that's okay because we look at it uh it's a new time and we have to talk about it again um i think i may have mentioned if you look at the real catechisms i'm not saying that we have to actually write literal catechisms so maybe we do but the real catechisms the older ones they you know it's a question and answer so if you go back and look at luther's catechism calvin's catechism westminster heidelberg all the various ones that were written during the reformation you'll notice things like this you'll notice that they they ask very they make two or three questions about the trinity but then they'll ask you ten questions about justification or the sacraments or the lord's supper and things like that and the reason is because you never catechize you never really are just only um teaching people what the bible says you're also inoculating them against the the dominant alternative so if you were not a protestant christian in europe in the 16th century you'd be catholic otherwise the alternative to being catechized as a protestant was you would be a catholic that's the reason why the catechism actually was inoculating you against the counter narrative now catholics and protestants have this very same beliefs about the trinity the deity of christ etc but they don't have the same beliefs about salvation how you receive salvation justification you know the lord's supper and things like that and therefore the catechisms are actually not just shaped by what the bible says but also what the alternative narratives are i would say today the alternative narratives we are are the way we train younger people doesn't take on the identity narrative or the freedom narrative or the science narrative or the you know what i'm talking about um they're very very profound narratives and and they're getting them they're getting them dozens of times a day in all sorts of ways and and unless we to me here's what inoculation inoculation is giving people a little bit of the disease but also one that actually uh stimulates the antibodies right that's that's i mean i just got vaccinated by the way but uh covey so i'm just reading about that and so what you want to do is you want to not just talk about the trinity but you want to say how does the doctrine of trinity actually differ from what people say about human life today i mean how does it or what what what the bible says about the gospel how's that different than the identity narratives that are out there that your primary identity is something that you find in yourself or your primary identity is a racial one is that your primary primary identity and you have to we're going to have to have to engage those things in the way in which we do doctrinal training because the kids that they're being engaged so you actually you really can't just give them the kind of traditional doctrine that we've been given for 500 years and then hope that they make the connection you have to say if you believe this and this is true then this doesn't work over here and so that's that uh i don't i haven't seen almost any material that actually does that it's all uh it looks abstract but it's basically based on by and large most most evangelical churches are really still trying to teach kids how not to be catholic that's actually not their biggest problem so interesting and i couldn't agree more i think i'm just observing that so much of your work in the city in new york and a world of ideas and in a world of um you know so many people who are who are socially and financially climbing and and the the sort of the uh sort of the contest for how faith fits into our largely secular age um gives you a context for that and for me what i've uh observed about this generation is that screens are discipling them that is sort of the primary means by which they're being catechized by social media and and technology and entertainment and so the the average church in not in new york city is now dealing with pressures that uh would have been would have been the case you've been dealing with for many years and so we really do need a complete reframe of the kinds of you know to use jesus metaphor the the the wine skins of helping to invest in younger generations so it's a it's a the way you describe that is very inspiring to me and i think it's so important yeah in some ways you know we talked about uh identity i remember that very clearly from our conversation a year ago how uh people are seeing everything now through the lens of identity whether it's gender identity sexual identity uh etc etc and that the gospel actually addresses that so in many ways our earlier conversation talked about disruptions that were happening and then kovit hit and everything got accelerated to what extent what do you see accelerated like any thoughts on because obviously the world has changed but like i mean what what has got your attention now over the last year from a leadership theological perspective that perhaps got accelerated or changed by the pandemic well i i think the things that were happening before are going to continue to happen i don't think it's completely clear to me yet how the pandemic is disrupting those trajectories i don't think they're reversing any of them i don't believe the pandemics reverse in them but some will be accelerated some will be decelerated and some will just be thrown off the older track i mean i'm just trying to think so for example uh we did not talk about this carrie one of the problems with even getting into this one is because it's actually unfortunately political but the reality is that the middle class is sort of going away and the reason is and there's a fair amount of good research that i believe in is that is that basically uh wage wager how do i say labor is not as valuable as assets so the people who can live off of their investments um are pulling away from the people who have to go out and earn a living you know with wage and and so and that's getting that we know the pandemic we know has made that worse because we did we definitely know that very wealthy people have become far wealthier during this pandemic virtually almost everybody who's really wealthy and has enough money to have you know a portfolio out there they've just done extraordinarily well and we do know that that there's a for a lot of reasons why blue collar labor is just a bit i mean blue-collar labor has been hit so hard there's a lot of jobs that may not come back and and so there's just one example of the the growing economic inequality that is really fueling a lot of the problems uh politically is not it in many ways getting worse uh on the other hand we just think about another one is um well i guess on identity okay here's a change gary here's a change um one secular identity approach which is non-christian of course is i call the therapeutic model which is you look inside you find out your deepest desires and whatever's in there you decide that's the real me you don't you don't identity is not found in god or in my family or in my duties it's found in i'm going to see my deepest desires and i have to realize those desires and that's my identity the other another approach which we already knew about before was um if i am a a minority that's my main identity which means otherwise because i'm i'm not white i'm not male i'm not straight um there's a there's a virtue in that and so my primary identity is i'm a um i've been a marginalized person and that's that's another approach which i think is certainly not the christian approach but here's the other thing is christian nationalism which is a fusion of america okay of course the canadians have no problems with this because they're just so sanctified here but we americans have this well actually you you don't have the same problem with it um and the reason for that is the event evangelicalism in canada is too small very small it's too small for this to happen but down here where it's bigger is you now have a a number of people who are saying you're not a real american unless you're a white protestant christian we don't want muslims here we don't want all these immigrants here and you're getting a few it's really a kind of it's a new a new identity politics only it's a right-wing identity politics and it's a fusion of christianity with being a white american and so in so there's that one there's a therapeutic individualistic one there's the kind of progressive victim one and now there's a right-wing one and they're all um what we would call in christianity they're all identity heresies i mean they're all ways of thinking about identity that are really really uh very destructive we think they're destructive to the people who are adopting them as their primary identities and all of them are absolutely against what the bible says i how identity works and so that's a change i i wouldn't even have said that a year ago with you that right wing kind of identity um and yet there they are so in a sense nothing is stopped but they're some things are going faster some things are going slower and some things are kind of taking taking some detours but they're all kind of all of our political and cultural and economic crises are still heading in that direction but we don't completely know yet how the pandemic is changing things but they it is still changing pretty profoundly but not not reversing anything one of the things we saw in our tracking research is this the profound impact that the pandemic has had on pastoring and on leading leading congregations which is which is primarily about bringing people together was about a lot of things but but the expression of that is on sunday morning worship yeah and so um we saw in our date of three and ten pastors say they've seriously considered uh quitting this year um and and speak about um how you find our um sort of deepest truest calling in ministry and a time when things sort of all bets feel like they're off yeah now you know you're talking to a person who actually because i was retired i'm retired you know i mean i stepped out of being a leader of a church three years ago so i'm not actually experiencing this but i mean i i can certainly speak to it because i'm talking to plenty of folks so i i do have to say uh to kathy i said you know i got pancreatic cancer but at least i'm not actually a working pastor right now i mean i've said that some days uh i said man i you would not want to be out there trying to pull things together here's the thing dave and kerry like there's not a single pastor recently that anybody has said you're doing a great job it's been because nobody is doing a great job because it nobody's there's no wins i mean in the very very beginning when you went online there did seem to be a little bit i say oh my goodness we have you know we have a church of 300 but a thousand people are watching us every every sunday well after a while people begin to realize okay there's a thousand people that are watching but we don't know if that one person is five got five folks in a family at home and we also don't know if that one person is somebody in iowa who's just tuning in to your church in new york because they used to go you know in other words and you begin to realize we still actually don't really know who we've got and what's going on and basically i think the main thing is not only is everybody tired but nobody's getting any positive affirmation see almost always you've got some wins every year some things isn't it great the lord's doing this and lord's doing that and oh no almost nobody's getting any pass on the back nobody's saying this is great um so you're you're just running and running to try to keep things together and there's no there's no hugs literally no hugs so it's it's like uh you're getting they're getting absolutely no no affirmation um and there have been uh and also there's uh there there's you know there are there's just a tremendous amount of loneliness a feeling of being separated from so many people that we care about we just can't live this way so i on the other hand i wouldn't say i'm not sure that pastors are necessarily more depressed than everybody else because i a young you know teenagers a friend of mine son just tried to commit suicide 16 years old not not all that unusual not up here in new york an awful lot of the kids are just feeling cut off and like there's no hope and so yeah anyway it's the biggest problem is you don't really know who's with you who's really left who's coming back you don't really get any kind of real decent feedback and the z there's we can talk a little bit about about remote zoom call stuff um it is way way better than nothing way way better but at the same time it's still not we're in our we have bodies and we we really do need to be in the presence of each other i think so yeah we uh we i want to be respectful of the time and i definitely want to talk about your new book uh which is which is about hope in uh in the face of difficulty and fear um but let's talk a little bit about digital church i think almost every church is now online and uh probably you know as david has written about at barna um hybrid church appears to be a big part of the future i'd love your thoughts on that what are the limits what are the potentials what are what are the dangers the traps huh well let me let me go let me let me be negative and then dial it back i don't know if i should do it that way maybe i should be positive then dial it back but wait for example um dr david martin louie jones um was it just a tremendous preacher uh uh for those of you my guess most of most of your audience will know who he is but he was a british preacher uh in a big church in london the heart of london for many years basically through world war ii and the 50s and 60s and even in the 70s i think it was and he he preached the big congregation for a long time he resisted allowing his sermons to be recorded and the um the reason for that was uh and we're all very grateful eventually he allowed himself to be recorded but his argument was pretty hard to refute um it wasn't a good enough reason not to listen i mean not to not to record them but what he said is do you really think that if you are walking along or driving in your car and listening to a sermon that will have the same shaping impact on you as if you're in the presence of the of the congregation uh you're in the presence of the minister who's preaching you have been uh you've been praying together in you know body next to body next to body audible you've been praying together you've been singing god's praises together and then the minister speaks to you do you really think you're going to be shaped by the sermon by the word of god as you're driving on your car as you would be if you were in that spot in the body in front of you know in the gathered community he says of course not and you know what when he says that you begin to say of course she's right and by the way i've been on just like you have a zillion zoom calls and the reality is is still easier i mean you know you're really only this sorry guys you're only about this part if i was in your presence you would actually be mine you would you would fill my field of vision you don't you're like this and everybody knows that people do look at their email during zoom calls and they do it in other words you are not as present you just simply are not and yet it's so much better i keep thinking boy ten years ago these would be conference calls on the phone it is still better because i'm actually seeing faces and so i'm seeing your body and i think i'm reincarnate beings and beings and even seeing a person's body is better than just listening to their voice nevertheless the the there is uh it will it can't replace i'll give you one more example this it can't replace in-person experience therefore what's on the other hand it does reach a whole lot of people let me give you two examples i've been teaching students and uh i teach preaching i teach ministry students in the city on the one hand the zoom zoom only which is what we've done is really helpful because people's lives are so busy they are so crazy and busy that the i get perfect attendance every time and before that you know what listen honestly people trying to juggle all the stuff they're juggling and still get ministry training in the city is um they you know always i had about 10 to 15 of the people could never make you know it was always some absenteeism and and they didn't like so this a lot of them say this is really helpful and yet at the same time they also realize that though they're staying with me they're not getting to know each other that's the big problem they're not getting to know each other which is a very big part of um being part of a if you're in a class of 15 uh other people who are learning preaching and you live in the same in new york city at least four or five of those people are going to become real good friends and they're really going to be a big help to you but what's happening with the zoom is they're not becoming really good friends they're all getting me really well and i'm not even sure frankly that they're if if anything i would say the vertical you might say that relationship getting the content from the minute from the instructor is probably almost as good if not a little better because there's a discipline to it and nobody misses but when it comes to the horizontal aspect of the education it's a lot worse and so all i'm trying to say is something in the middle brothers i think i think we can probably draw a lot more people in evangelistically if we're really smart on how we use a digital church i do not think we should just go back to the way it was i think there's a ton of people out there who are more online than they used to be and they're more afraid of commitment than they used to be and this is perfect for reaching a lot of people otherwise wouldn't even know anything about your church on the other hand is well here's my last example kate bowler uh you might know who she is she's a duke university she she teaches duke divinity school she's got stage four colon cancer i think she's got some kind of cancer young mother um she's kind of making it right now but once i met her at one point and she said the thing is frightening to her is that because she's written a couple books on her cancer and all that thousands of people through the internet are trying to say oh you're helping me so much and she's come to realize that people are so disembedded from community that they're trying they're looking to her as a celebrity sufferer to minister to her and she to minister to them and she's saying you can't do that you need a community and she's realizing and she's talking all these other people who are suffering like she is and they've got cancer they don't have communities like they used to they if things are so mobile they're not near extended family they're not near they just they they're all alienated from the church they don't like the church so they don't have any community and she said i'm sorry on a web a website for you know for a celebrity suffer is not going to be what you need if you've got cancer you need somebody to make you chicken soup you know i can't do that you need somebody to do those things for you and and so that's what makes makes me say i think we're going to be somewhere smack in the middle that when it's all over we're going to say there's a lot of things we can do digitally that are actually going to involve more people we're going to be able to do better education we're going to be able to do better outreach and at the same time we we we have to use the digital to woo people into face-to-face relationships or they're not really going to be changed by the gospel it's interesting you know because i think you're totally right about community and i'm sure you get those letters too you know tim i'm really struggling with x and you know i when i get them it's like you need to talk to somebody who knows you and knows the situation right like i don't know here's a question for you one of the critiques of large church and you pastored a very large church you're there with hundreds or a thousand other adults that's not really community either arguably you're in a moment you're in an experience one of the trends that's emerging is what we might call microchurches or distributed gatherings where perhaps we're not in a building owned by the church but i could be gathering in my home with 10 other christians and perhaps a neighbor who's experiencing jesus for the first time so it's like an iteration of small group any any thoughts on that and then perhaps you're you're watching digitally but you're gathered in person this is like post vaccine all that stuff well it's a little yes it's a little too impermanent is the big problem one of the things i know that here's where you you don't want you want to say to christians are you really being shaped by what the bible says or by your culture the culture is anti-institutional in the extreme and and what is an institution is something that actually um keeps going when the people are gone because the institution has its own its own uh its own being and one of the big problems we've uh over the years every i'll tell you i've been here 32 years we still haven't had a really great house church movement in new york city and the reason is what what what is the impermanence people get very excited but if you it's a it's a mobile world now and and something that really is just changing your life oh my goodness suddenly half the people move away over a six month period and it falls apart and there's no there's no bigger community that you can go to to form another one or to be part of and then you feel left out so rather than microchurch i still think though ev every city needs an ecosystem in which you have all size churches and i would just speak a church of five or six thousand can do things that no other church can do and they do them for the whole city you can they can start counseling centers they can start church planning center they can start things that everybody in the city gets to use on the other hand as a minister carrie you're absolutely right that there's a huge number of people that hide in a big church they say that's my church but they're really not being formed by it they're just too they they're really around the edges of it so in general i would certainly say that in general in general a city would be far better served and and that individuals in the church will be far better served by 10 churches of 500 rather than one church of 5 000. the neighborhoods would be reached better the people in them would be deployed better and pastured better in general and yet if you think i'm saying that there's no the city should never have churches of 5000 actually every church every city needs big churches so here we go i'd love to draft back and talk to us a little about uh the journey of suffering that i've been on uh this last four years with my wife's uh disease and then her passing in october and i mentioned to you before we started recording that i've been really benefiting from the book you and kathy your wife wrote um uh the songs of jesus daily meditation in the psalms and uh for me at least um the psalms have been one of the few places in scripture i can go routinely because it does express this full range of god i can believe in who can sort of be a recipient of all my anger and frustration and loss and questions and also my deepest place of trust and hope and um i'd just love to know what your what your rhythms have been like since your diagnosis uh you alluded a little bit to this uh in the atlantic article but i'd love to hear you tell our listeners a little bit how you're finding uh sort of finding peace and solace and to what extent you are uh in scripture and in your faith during this time well um first of all kathy and i i'll just tell you exactly what we do when it comes to just the the nuts and bolts kathy reads three chapters we do the mcshane reading calendar which is a way to get through the bible in a year i read four chapters a day which gets you the old testament once the new testament twice kathy reads three chapters a day um that's all she can take in she said but we but we do the three chapters she reads i'm reading too so it's a way of saying what's god saying to us today um secondly i still do the psalms every month you might that is to say i use the book of common prayer so i read pray uh songs morning and evening and you get through all 150 every month and uh david i mean if you the advantage of doing that is you you run the gamut of it and um every day there's something that just speaks right to you because the psalms go through every possible uh you might say emotional condition you can be in any situation right that human beings can have and so we're up and down a lot and as you know you know even if you get some good news or you know your wife or i you know in my case it's me really feeling good and we go do something and as you know uh ordinary things if you do them well and you're feeling good that day can be more precious than they used to be you took them for granted and so those days the psalms you just hit a psalm that's filled with thanksgiving and other days you hit a song that i mean you're always hitting songs that are exactly what you were feeling yeah right and it's just so i don't know what to say it's so empowering i hate to use that word i shouldn't have used that word it's just so overused um it's it but it is empowering to see it reflected in the word of god and then very often more eloquently sometimes the depth of the anger or the questions of god feel like wow you know it's even stronger than i would express it but it is it taps into something deeper in me it's one of the things uh i think my confidence in scripture as i've grown older has only increased because ecclesiastes feels like it's so written for an ambitious person like me who who realizes all the end of this ambition isn't going to amount for much or in the case of psalms uh a place for you know uh crying out to the lord lamentations if it's such a fascinating uh part of the story of lamentations like the greatest thy faithfulness uh that song actually is birthed in a lament and that was my wife's jill's favorite song and even sung at our wedding and so this idea of god was tying a whole thread of his his goodness for us even in our sorrow uh from the very first day that our wedding began and and so then she when she said hey i want you to plan my funeral to play you know great as my faithfulness it was a pretty tough day but the sense in which the the goodness of god to provide for us a scriptural basis for lament and uh and for you know for our suffering has been for me uh a place that i couldn't i couldn't have imagined going and i couldn't have imagined it providing a greater anchor to my soul than it has i feel like i'm on holy ground well i do want to talk about your book uh hope in times of fear um the world needs hope we need hope people are going leaders listening pastors listening i think you're right they're very unaffirmed for the last year there have been no wins or very few many listeners are navigating their own personal health crisis or the death of a loved one or um dissolution of a board or tribalization and politics and division in the congregation and so on close us on some hope tell us what's in the book obviously it's about the resurrection but i would love for you just to give us a pastoral word as we we close up well i read the book was originally um was supposed to be kind of a short book you might say a companion book to a book i wrote not that long ago on on christmas which was a series of little meditations on christmas so actually my publisher originally said how about a book on easter you know some meditations on easter so i had already started the book and then the pandemic hit and then i got that got the cancer diagnosis and and here i'm working on the resurrection and well that that it didn't change it technically it just it certainly expanded it certainly made this much more i don't know how to say it i mean obviously working on a book day after day when you're struggling with all the the bad news about your cancer and yet the book is just filled with all the good news i mean i mean the resurrection um is first of all if the resurrection happened then everything's going to be okay okay um and that's the first chapter in the book so i went back and redid the tom wright the ant writes so much of his scholarship not just his big thick book which is the resurrection son of god which is the best book written on the resurrection last hundred years but he's actually done other works since then and so i put all that together plus a few other my some of my own thoughts but not mainly his thoughts in chapter one because if the resurrection happened whatever else it's going to be okay the other thing though is we don't know what to do with the resurrection practically you know i have a i have a systematic theology of charles hodge who was a princeton theologian you know uh it is this magneology 128 pages on the cross on the rip on the death of christ four on the resurrection because we we tend to think well the resurrection it happened and that proves he's the son of god how does that change my life it's sort of like a magic trick almost that proves that god you know is real but actually the resurrection does change everything because if the resurrection happened only is there hope and that means confidence in the future but secondly the resurrection actually teaches the new testament teaches that when jesus rose from the dead and ascended to heaven he brought the powers of the age to come that's what into our world now so our the kingdom of god is present but not present as as you've heard before if you just read what jesus says in the synoptic gospels about the kingdom it's very confusing because sometimes he talks about the pres the kingdom is of its present it's going to be here it's here now it's in your midst other times it talks about when i come back you know with all my angels to to bring the kingdom and you say well is it here or is it not here and the answer is yeah uh that when jesus rose from the dead he brought the powers of the age to come through the holy spirit into our lives now the very the very power that's going to actually completely cleanse the world of all suffering evil and death at the end of time is already in our lives now not fully but partially and what's perfect about that is it's just perfect for every day you know why because on the one hand it keeps you from either um a naive optimism that if i really pray i'll be healed and anybody who's not healed you're not praying well that's an over realized view of the kingdom is that you're acting as if the kingdom is completely present well it's not but we're going to get out there we're going to change the world and get rid of all the systemic racism well you're not because not until jesus comes back on the other hand if you're just too pessimistic you know we're defeated there's no reason to pray god never heals anymore there's no reason we can make any changes things are terrible the culture is falling apart let's get the wagons together in a circle and just hold hands that's also that's not the doctrine of the resurrection you've got a real power the power of the age to come that's hebrews talks about that is in your life now and and amazing things can happen so it's like pastorally it's perfect and it's because it keeps me from being either cynical or naive and whenever i tend to cynicism like the doctrine of the resurrection pulls me back when i tend into naivete and and start to get like oh everything's going to be fine now because we started you know i got a good scan and then forgetting no i'm sorry it's not till the very end of time will everything be okay so the resurrection is not something that just is a wonderful sign of it's not enough just an apologetic proof that god exists whether jesus is the son of god it's actually something i get it got to get out every single day the other thing by the way carrie the other thing is it's the resurrection is paired with the death of christ it's the death and resurrection of christ the saviors which means god tends to worship weakness so that when you know you're going to experience a lot of weakness then you have to say but god brings resurrection elizabeth elliott was a good t a teacher of ours at gordon conwell she used to say everything in the christian life is is a resurrection after a death so she says for example if somebody wrongs you you might just say i'm just going to go pay them back i'm just going to tell them how awful they are or i could forgive them in my heart and then go and urge them to see what they've done wrong she says that that's like a death because you wanted to scratch their eyes out but you don't you i'm gonna forgive and so it's like a death but if you don't go through that death probably if you just go and scratch their eyes out that person will not listen to you they'll just get worse at what they're doing and your friendship is over but if you go through the death of forgiveness in a sense there's a possibility of a resurrection of that your your friend might actually see the truth and a resurrection of the relationship and she says everything is like that every time you obey god you're sort of dying to your self-will and yet you're rising again to become a person of virtue and eventually you're going to really die in order to be raised and so everything in the christian life and in life is about death and resurrection so that so it's not right now we have four pages on the resurrection i wrote 230. i've corrected charles hodge and i sure hope that he appreciates it tim you've been uh fantastically generous with your time and i just want to echo what david said when we began i i just personally am so grateful for you for your ministry for your writing um keep writing we're gonna keep praying for you we are in your corner and uh thank you so so much for being with us today i really think that the good scans and all that are largely because of prayer and david certainly knows what it's like to have your whole family just list you know basically kind of like moving along on other people's prayers you really you really you can tell the difference you know when people are praying so 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 careynuhof.com for leaders in business and leaders in 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 careynuhof.com and in the meantime i really hope our time together today has helped you lead like never before

Channel: Carey Nieuwhof

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Id: M1ekh6e5SIg

Length: 51min 48sec (3108 seconds)

Published: Tue May 04 2021