An Evening With Christopher Watkin - Living Biblically in a World That Isn't
Download MP3Good evening, everyone. Good evening and welcome to Redeemer Community Church. We are so glad that you all are here to join us tonight. If I haven't had the chance to meet you yet, my name is Matt Francisco. I'm one of the pastors here at Redeemer.
Cole Ragsdale:This evening, as I'm sure you are already aware, we are privileged to have doctor Christopher Watkin coming to speak with us on the topic of living biblically in a world that isn't. If you have never experienced one of our talk backs before, you are in for a treat. Basically, the format is this, doctor Watkin will share for thirty to forty minutes. We'll take a brief break and then we'll have these two microphones set up here in these middle aisles and you, Lord willing, will come forward and ask doctor Watkin questions until our time runs out. The goal of these talk backs is to dive deeper into some important topics and conversations that we simply don't have the time or space to cover on Sunday mornings because we are walking passage by passage trying to preach expositionally.
Cole Ragsdale:Doctor Watkin, if you do not know, he is a professor in French studies at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. He serves as a fellow with the Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics at the Gospel Coalition. He's also a fellow of philosophy and culture at Reform Theological Seminary. His book, biblical critical theory, it was Christianity Today's, book of the year. It was the gospel coalition's book of the year for public theology.
Cole Ragsdale:It is, as many of you have already heard me say, simply put, the most helpful book I have ever read about what it means to think critically and biblically about what it looks like to faithfully engage the world today. From Genesis to Revelation, biblical critical theory, it exposes and evaluates the assumptions and desires of our culture. It examines them through the lens of the biblical story, and winsomely and with great wisdom demonstrates how the Bible offers something far more beautiful, true, and profound. I think over the course of this evening, it will be easy for you to recognize doctor Watkins' brilliance. But his brilliance is matched at least as much by his humility and his love for the Lord, his love for God's word, and his love for the church.
Cole Ragsdale:A few years ago, I had the great privilege of sitting in one of his classes, and I benefited greatly from, that time together. But one of the things that struck me the most, I hope it's okay for me to share this, I didn't ask your permission, sorry, I'm gonna go ahead and do it. It's too late now. It's too late now. We had the opportunity to talk for a little while over lunch, and I shared a little bit about what was going on in my family and some things that we were wrestling and praying through.
Cole Ragsdale:I had to leave early to catch a flight back here. I was teaching Sunday school at 8AM on on sex and sexuality. And as I got up to leave the classroom, doctor Watkins stopped the class and followed me out into the hall to pray over me and my family and you guys, our church. Just really struck me. Lord, using him to help shape the way that I minister, but also his ministry to me in prayer.
Cole Ragsdale:And now it's my privilege, doctor Watkins, to pray for you and for all of us. So if you would join me in prayer and then join me after in welcoming doctor Christopher Watkins.
Caleb Chancey:Father,
Cole Ragsdale:we are grateful for this opportunity to be gathered here together, and we ask that by the power of your Holy Spirit, you would speak to us in the few minutes that we are here together. I pray that you would give doctor Watkin clarity and wisdom, that he would speak truth according to your word, and that you would use it to pierce our hearts, to help us more rightly understand ourselves, the gospel, and the world that we live in. That we might more faithfully walk before you, and we might love our neighbors, Jesus, as you have first loved us. And I pray that tonight you would, sharpen and humble us, your saints, that we might be more used for your glory's sake. Because that's why we're here, that the name of Jesus would be lifted high at Redeemer and in Birmingham into the ends of the earth because you are worthy of the praise of all of the people that you have made in your image.
Cole Ragsdale:We love you, Lord. We pray these things in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. Now if you would join me in welcoming doctor Christopher Watkin.
Speaker 3:I'm a little overwhelmed by that those warm warm words of welcome. Thank you, Matt. It's a wonderful joy to be here. I wonder if I could begin by thanking you, if that's okay. Our time is precious, isn't it?
Speaker 3:And you have decided among the thousands of things that you could have done this evening to be here. And it's a privilege for me to be able to do my best, prayerfully under God to make that time well spent. My aim is to encourage you and to point you towards Jesus so that you can go home thinking, I'm glad I spent my time this way rather than the many other ways that you could have spent it. And to that end, I would like to begin by asking one of the fundamental questions of our cultural moment. It's a question that is asked in almost every film that we've every movie that we've seen and every book that we've read.
Speaker 3:It is, of course, the question, who am I? So many of our stories are about that question, aren't they? Someone discovering who they are. And my way into thinking through that question with you as Christians this evening is to tell you a story. And as I tell you this story, I want you to try and think, does it strike you as a story of heroism or as a story of tragedy?
Speaker 3:Here it is. Some of you may know it already. It's the story of this gentleman, Hiroo Onada, who was a counterinsurgency officer in the second world war in The Philippines trying to disrupt The US war effort in that country. Only no one told him when the war finished. And so he continued to hide out in the jungle from 1945, when the war ceased until 1974, would you believe?
Speaker 3:Thinking that the war was still on trying to disrupt The US war effort that was no longer happening. And then when he was discovered in 1974, he didn't believe that the war was over. People told him that there's no war you can go home. He thought it was a trick. He thought it was the Americans trying to convince him to abandon his post.
Speaker 3:And what they had to do eventually is very sweet. They had to get his old commanding officer out of retirement who was a very old man by that point to go and tell him directly, no, the war really is over and has been over for almost thirty years, you can go home now. How do you read that story? As a way of reading it isn't there? That is heroic and ennobling.
Speaker 3:Here is a man who stuck to his mission and his principles come thick and thin even when there was only him left whereas you can see in this picture, had to mend his own clothes in the jungle. I assume he was sort of eating berries and roots or however you survive in the jungle for thirty years. He did it. He kept going. He lived through that story of the war until the bitter end.
Speaker 3:It's a rather heroic thing to do, isn't it? Because there's also a way of reading that story as a story of great tragedy, how heroes family missed out on thirty years of their father, because he was living a deluded fantasy really, in the woods thinking that the war was still raging when in fact it was long over. He had one story that he thought he was living in, the story of the second world war. Whereas the rest of the world around him understood, that that story was over and a new story had begun. It's a very vivid illustration, isn't it, of the principle that is true for all of us that the story that we think we're living in really, really matters.
Speaker 3:And if we get it wrong, if we think we're living in this story over here whereas in fact this is reality, although we may think in our own lives that we're being heroic, there's a great tragedy about that, isn't there? There's a great sadness, a great loss of living the wrong story. Stories are powerful. We all have a set of stories in our head that we're living in and that make sense of us. Philosophers call it the idea of narrative identity.
Speaker 3:I understand myself as a character in a story. That's how I make sense of my life. That's how I make sense of my sufferings and my my victories, my losses. I tell a story to myself about who I am. And and we think of life this way quite naturally, don't we?
Speaker 3:We talk about losing the plot, for example. And that there's such a thing as as narrative therapy, helping people to to pick apart the story we tell about ourselves and perhaps tell a different story in order to heal. For example, after incidents of trauma, stories are really, really powerful. They're in many ways the fuel that we live by, the way the glasses through which we see the world. Indeed, stories can be the difference in some cases between life and death, they certainly were for this gentleman on the screen.
Speaker 3:Many of you may have heard of Victor Frankel, who was a psychotherapist who ended up in two concentration camps during the Second World War, Theresienstadt and then Auschwitz later on. And during his time, interned in those, death camps, he observed the way that people lived under those conditions of unimaginable hardship. And he noticed something very poignant, that the people who survived the longest, who seemed the most resilient, were the people who were living out a story that was bigger than the camp, who had something that they saw beyond the end of Auschwitz, that they were longing for afterwards. And he developed after the war a way of treating people called logotherapy, from logos, the idea of word or truth or story. It's so powerful.
Speaker 3:He tells one very poignant story, in this book, Man's Search for Meaning. Well, one thing that the Nazi officers would do in the camps in order to break the will of, those prisoners, There'd be a large pile of boulders at one side of the camp. And in the morning, they would get the prisoners to take the pile of boulders all the way over to the other side of the camp. And then in the afternoon, they would get the prisoners to take the boulders all the way back. And it was a picture of futility, expending energy for nothing.
Speaker 3:The boulders end up exactly where they began. And it was intentional. It was a way of breaking the will of the people in those camps because there's no direction to that story, is that you move the boulders, you bring them back. You move the boulders, you bring them back. Living a story like that with no beginning, middle, and end, story that just goes round and round where all your energy is just poured out for nothing, it is debilitating, isn't it?
Speaker 3:That does destroy the human spirit. And I hope that none of us will ever experience mental torture on that level. But nevertheless, the stories that we live can have the same debilitating effect, not not as dramatic as that of course, but we can experience that as well. There'll be many people in the room including myself who will have worked hard on a particular project at work or perhaps at home only for the boss to come along one day, after long hours, sweating over producing a document or a spreadsheet and the boss, oh, we're longer doing that. We've moved on.
Speaker 3:Different project now. And all of your hard work, all of your sweat, all of your perfectionist energy, suddenly useless. Nobody cares. It's not going to help you get a promotion. It's not going to help the company to move forward anymore.
Speaker 3:You just throw it in the bin. It's debilitating, isn't it? It's draining. Or how about a story that is very close to my own heart? So we got two young kids.
Speaker 3:Benjie is is 10 now and and Emma is, nearly eight, eight in two weeks. She will tell you if she was here. And, the the days the holiday the holidays are not holidays, are they? If you have little kids. The holidays are intense workdays.
Speaker 3:So we get up in the morning, the house is tidy, the kids wreck it by midmorning, you tidy it up by lunch, they wreck it again by midafternoon, you tidy it up by the evening, you put them to bed, do all the tidying up. You get up the next day, and you do the very same thing. You are constantly tidying up the house and preparing meals again and again and again. And after a time, it really gets to you. It gets to me anyway.
Speaker 3:This repetitive you're laughing as if I'm the only one. I'm nervous now. You go, no. No. I love it.
Speaker 3:I love it. Okay. Sorry. It might be with I find that debilitating. Or I don't know if you've ever had a pyjama day.
Speaker 3:You know what I mean? You sort of get to five in the evening and you realize you're still in your pyjamas and you look back over the day and think, what have I done? Like I've been busy, I've been doing stuff, but like I can't think of anything I've actually achieved. And it's the evening, where's it gone? Do we have these relatively trivial but nevertheless humanly significant moments of futility, don't we, in our own lives?
Speaker 3:And at times like that, it matters what story we're telling ourselves about the big picture. When I'm cleaning up the Lego box for the tenth time that day, it matters what I see this as part of, where I see this as going, what story I'm telling myself that this is a tiny chapter of. The story is told and it's everywhere on the internet, so it must be true. That when JFK visited the NASA headquarters in 1962, He was having a tour around and he saw this this guy sort of in the background who was a janitor. And, the president went over to the janitor, to cleaning a floor or something at the time and said, you know, what are you doing here?
Speaker 3:And the janitor is said to have replied, and I I hope this is true, this was a killer line. He said, I'm sending someone to the moon. Now, in a very concrete sense, no, wasn't. He was cleaning toilets. What's he doing?
Speaker 3:But he saw his particular role as a key part of a much bigger project, didn't he? I am part of the story of sending people to the moon. This is my particular role in it, but that's the big story. He saw himself as part of a bigger story. He understood what he was contributing to.
Speaker 3:So what stories do we tell about ourselves? Well, course, if we had time, it would be enriching, I think, to go around every single person in this room and for each of us to tell the stories in which terms of which we understand ourselves, and that would be a wonderful experience. As I suggest two or three general stories, now see if any of these resonate with you and just be thinking in your own mind, how would I tell the story that I think I'm part of? What am I doing? What am I on the road to?
Speaker 3:What is my past and my future? How is it cohering? Here are some examples. I am a loving carer because I have a relation, perhaps it's a parent, a sibling, or a child who has a severe disability. And so I see it as my mission in life to be there for that person.
Speaker 3:I am their support. I am their advocate, and I will make sure, that their life is as good as it can possibly be. That is my mission, that is my goal, and I am proud to do it. Or perhaps, I'm an innovator. This was the case of an Uber driver that I was with the other day just here in Birmingham.
Speaker 3:She was telling me about her life. She is driving Ubers while she builds a food truck business. She said eventually I'm going to have 200 food trucks all around The States and I'm going to sell healthy food. I'm going to sell quinoa and salad, and I'm going to sell it for a reasonable price. That is my mission, and I'm driving towards that goal.
Speaker 3:That's the story that this Uber journey is part of. Or perhaps you're a family person. This is true. I'm gonna tell you the story now of my own father, and I only realized this after he died a couple of years ago. I was sort of aware of it, but it really brought it home to me at his funeral.
Speaker 3:He was a man and many of us will be people who could have risen a lot higher in his job than he did. But he chose not to because he wanted to be there for his family, I. E. For me and my mom. And so he made a series of choices that meant that he didn't get the promotions that other people around him were getting, because his goal in life, was to be there for us and to love us, and to be there when I came home from school.
Speaker 3:And he was. And I am eternally grateful to him, for that choice that he made. Was his story. That was his mission. That's what he was doing with his life.
Speaker 3:Or perhaps you're a teacher, and you deliberately chose to go to an underprivileged area because you believe in the power of education to change people, and you fight. You fight against government regulations and lack of funding and bureaucracy in order to give these children the very best education they could possibly receive in order to see lives changed. And whenever a former student comes back to you and says, Thank you, that is the deepest feeling in your heart, and you are thankful to God for the difference that you've made in someone's life. Now, those are only a very few vignettes. There'll be many many more variations on this story, many more ways that we see our lives.
Speaker 3:But there's something, if you think about it, constant in all of these stories. They've all got the same shape. They begin with a call. So here I am just living a normal life. I want to live it this way.
Speaker 3:I want to be different in this way. I want to be the father who's there for his children. I want to be the teacher who inspires young people. There's a call to a mission. There's a trial.
Speaker 3:It's not always easy. Have to forego being promoted, for example, work in a disadvantaged area in difficult situation. There's on the way. And then there's a prize at the end when the student comes back and says, thank you for teaching me. You made a difference in my life.
Speaker 3:Or when your relative gets the care that you know they deserve because you were there to give it to them. Many of us will know this pattern by a particular name. A little while ago, a few decades ago, a man called Joseph Campbell wrote a book called The Hero's Journey. And it tells this shape of story of a call to adventure and then going through trials and then finally winning a prize at the end. And it is the story that we tell ourselves over and over and over and over again in our society.
Speaker 3:He wrote another book called The Hero with a Thousand Faces. In other words, all of our heroes are some version of this story. If we go back to the origins of Western culture, this is fundamentally the shape of Homer's Odyssey, where Ulysses is traveling back, to his home. It's the shape of Hamlet, with a few nuances and differences, one of the greatest plays in the English language. It is fundamentally the shape of the Lord of the Rings.
Speaker 3:It's why that story has such a pull upon us. It follows this hero's journey as Frodo, the unlikely hero, finally vanquishes Mordor. It is sort of characteristically the story of A New Hope. Star Wars A New Hope. Luke Skywalker's call out of obscurity on Tatooine, finally, after going through a series of trials to defeat, the Death Star in the final climax of that.
Speaker 3:It's not a spoiler, is it? If that's a spoiler, where have you been for the last like forty years? The Death Star blows up at the end of Star Wars. Okay. I've said it.
Speaker 3:Sorry. It's the story of The Wizard of Oz. It's the story of The Lion King. And it is the story of every single Marvel film ever made. And every one that will be made probably.
Speaker 3:It is the story we like telling ourselves because it resonates with us. We feel ourselves in this story of the hero's journey. Why? Let's have a think about that for a moment. Why does this story resonate with us so much?
Speaker 3:I think it does two things. It it fulfills two fundamental human needs that we have. And the first one I want to call fitting in. We want to be part of something bigger than ourselves. And we want to be part of a story that doesn't just begin with my birth and end with my death.
Speaker 3:We we want to fit cosmically or at least socially somehow, don't we? And remember these wonderfully evocative lyrics. Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name and they're always glad you came. You want to be where you can see our troubles are all the same. We want to be part of something.
Speaker 3:We want to be known somewhere, don't we? Not just want to go through life in our own little individual path. We want a community where we're known, where we fit, where we belong, we want to fit in. But that's not the only human need we have, is it? If I went home to my wife, for example, and I said, honey, I love you so much.
Speaker 3:You're just as good as the next person. That would not be a good evening for me. I would have to start again. We don't just want to fit in, do we? We want to stand out for who we are, not just one more person, not just good as the next person.
Speaker 3:We want to stand out as an individual. We want to be loved and seen and appreciated and recognized for who we are, not just as one replaceable human. Here are some more lyrics. See if you can see where these come from. I tried this in Australia and they didn't know.
Speaker 3:I said, see if you guys know here. It's a competition. Alabama versus Melbourne, come on. No one could ever know me. No one could ever see me.
Speaker 3:Seems like you're the only one who knows what it's like to be me. Someone to face the day with, make it through all the rest with. Someone I'll always laugh with. Even at my worst, I'm my best with you. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Anyone? Friends. Yes. Friends. These are the next Everyone will get it when I put the next bit up.
Speaker 3:It's like you're always stuck in second Okay. It's the Friends theme tune. But it's it's really evocative, isn't it? Because isn't this what we want as well? No one could ever see me.
Speaker 3:Seems like you're the only one who knows what it's like to be me. Not just to be a generic worker, a generic person. I want to be seen for me. I want to be known for who I am. That's another fundamental human need.
Speaker 3:So we've got these two really deep human needs. I wanna fit into something that's bigger than myself, and I want to be known and seen for myself, not just a a non playing character in that story. I want to be someone in that story. And this hero's journey, it plugs into both of those really deep needs that we have which is why it tugs on our heartstrings so much as a story. Now let's come to the bible.
Speaker 3:And what we find is that it messes really quite impishly with this hero's journey. Sort of a hero's journey, but really not in other ways. It's not your average hero's journey. Let me tell the story of the bible in five sentences really quickly, and then we'll see how that interfaces with this idea, of the hero's journey. So God begins in the bible by creating a world.
Speaker 3:He doesn't have to. There's no sense that he was obliged to create the world. As far as we can tell in the bible, he created it out of love. Secondly, he created people like just like you and me, human beings in the world to to have a special place in that world. Genesis one uses the language, doesn't it, of being in the image of God.
Speaker 3:Whatever precisely that means, it means that people like you and I have a special status in this world. We're to take care of it under God. We have a mission, multiply, fill the earth, be fruitful, have dominion, and we've a job to do in this world. Thirdly, our, ancient, ancestors and we ourselves as well try to write our own story. We try to write God out of his world.
Speaker 3:I'm going to decide what's good and evil for myself. I'm going to write my own script. Thank you very much, God. You are free to leave. But of course, God doesn't leave us to the consequences of that mortal choice.
Speaker 3:He writes himself into the story of this world in the incarnation. He becomes a human being just like you and me with flesh and hands and fingernails and bodies and breathing and sleeping, just like you and me. He writes himself into this story in order to win the greatest victory of all through death on the cross, to bring people back to God, one Peter three eighteen. And therefore, finally, the way that the story ends for people redeemed by Christ is that death is not the end of the story. There's another chapter, as C.
Speaker 3:S. Lewis very evocatively says, at the end of the last battle. We go further in and further up into an expanding world. Think of C. S.
Speaker 3:Lewis as the great divorce, a world more real than this one. It just gets better and better and better as we see God face to face. That's the story of the bible. How does that relate to the hero's journey? Well, it disrupts it.
Speaker 3:Remember that the hero's journey is the key story of our culture. That's the story we're telling ourselves all the time. The bible disrupts it, I think, in two fundamental ways. First of all, in this story, I and you are not the hero. Sorry to break it to you.
Speaker 3:There is a hero of this story, the Lord Jesus Christ, but it's not us. And therefore, I think my parents were trying to teach me a very fundamental lesson when they bought me a Star Wars toy when I was young. I was, young as the Return of the Jedi was coming out and those little Star Wars figures were all their age. Which figure did my parents buy me? They buy me Luke?
Speaker 3:No. Han Solo? No. Leah? No.
Speaker 3:They bought me, would you believe, two one b, the medical droid. Seriously. Two one b, like, who's he? What scene is he in? Now, I'm not sure that they were trying to make a theological point at the time, but it was quite apt.
Speaker 3:Your role in this story, little boy, is not the hero. You are a bit part character. You are not the one who wins the final battle, who flies the x wing into the death star. The little guy that nobody remembers. But it's true, isn't it?
Speaker 3:In the story of the bible, we are not the big hero. There's one big hero and he's not us. And therefore, when we read a verse, like this, it reorients our sense of what the hero's journey looks like from a biblical, from a Christian point of view. Let me just read Matthew 16 verses 24 to five. Jesus says, Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.
Speaker 3:For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it. I just want to focus on that last little sentence. Whoever wants to save their life will lose it. Whoever wants to be the hero of their own story, whoever wants to write their own script, be their own Luke Skywalker, Jesus has a chilling warning for us. It will not end well.
Speaker 3:The final chapter of that story will not be one of the blowing up of the death star. We try to write ourselves as the hero, end up losing everything we're striving for. But notice also the second half of that verse. It's not all doom and gloom, is it? Whoever loses their life for me, what will happen to them?
Speaker 3:Well, they'll find it. The paradoxical logic of the gospel, isn't it? The upside down world of following Jesus. You want to find the wonderful story that you're part of? You want to be part of the great victory, the ultimate cosmic once for all victory?
Speaker 3:Then renounce your title to be the hero. And you will be written into that story that is bigger than any death star blowing up, bigger than any Hollywood movie, bigger than any novel, any individual human life that you've ever read. It's the story that begins with the creation of the universe and will end with its being rolled up like a carpet. If you want to be in that story and experience that victory, you've got to lose your life. You've got to be okay with not being the hero.
Speaker 3:Do you see how the bible both subverts our idea to be the hero, it can't be, it's not going to end well, And also fulfills our desire to be part of something heroic. You will find your life with Jesus as the hero, and it'll be a bigger heroism and a greater victory than you have ever dreamed of. It only goes via the cross. It only goes via you giving up your rights to be the central character in this plot called life. So the first way that the bible messes with the hero's narrative is that we, you and I, are not the hero.
Speaker 3:The second way that it messes with this story is that as we join the story, the victory is already won. So the shape of all the novels and movies that I had on the screen earlier is that the victory comes at the end, isn't it? You know, when Odysseus finally clears his house of the suitors who are pestering Penelope, or when the death star is finally blown up, or when Mordor is finally nuked at the end of the Lord of the Rings. Now, it would be strange, wouldn't it, if at the beginning of the fellowship of the ring, Frodo and Sam are talking to each other in the Shire and Frodo looks over at Sam and says, it's a bit awkward, isn't it? Mordor's already been blown up.
Speaker 3:What are we going to do, Sam? Sam says, oh, mister Frodo. I don't really know. We've got three volumes to fill. I hope I hope Tolkien knows what he's doing.
Speaker 3:You don't write stories like that, victory comes at the end. It's the great climax. But where's our victory as Christians? Two thousand years ago. It's on the cross.
Speaker 3:It's done and dusted. Death has been defeated. Christ has won. We're in the mopping up operation now. What what sort of hero's journey is that?
Speaker 3:What are we supposed to do? There's no heroism left. He's done it. Let me come to another verse from the bible, that shows us the different way in which this story of heroism rewires the way we think about the narrative of our lives. Ephesians two, verses one and then four to five.
Speaker 3:You, writes Paul to Christians, you were dead in your transgressions and sins in which you used to live. But because of his great love for us, God who is rich in mercy made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in our transgressions. It is by grace you have been saved. Now I'm no script writing expert but I reckon that you probably don't have your hero dead when the decisive victory is won. That's not sort of hero material, is it?
Speaker 3:But that is what Paul is saying. When the thing that needed to be achieved happened, you were out cold. You were dead in your sins and transgressions, and it is God who has made you alive. You are not the hero. You didn't do anything.
Speaker 3:You did not achieve this great victory. It is There's nothing further away from achieving things than being dead, is there? You can't get further away from heroism than just being flat out doing nothing, not breathing. That's Paul's vision for how we were. But reading on in Ephesians, for it is by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is a gift, this is, not from yourselves, it is the gift of God.
Speaker 3:Jesus is hammering it home. You're not the hero. You're not the hero. You're not the hero. Not by work so that no one can boast.
Speaker 3:Look how he finishes. It's very interesting, isn't it? For we are God's handiwork created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do. So the same elements of the story is just that the order has been reversed. For people like Luke Skywalker, it's the great works that lead to the victory, isn't it?
Speaker 3:But for us, it's the works that flow from the victory. There's still stuff to do. There's still a life of good works to live, but it's in the light of the victory already won. And that, dear brothers and sisters, that makes all the difference, doesn't it? And to live out this order of events in a world where everyone's trying to be their own Luke Skywalker looks very, very different.
Speaker 3:Let me just show you two ways in which it looks really different. First of all, it gives you a secure identity. Everybody is trying to define themselves in society today. I am I don't know. My achievement, my productivity, my bank balance, my circle of friends, whatever it is.
Speaker 3:There are many many different ways to do it. My social media profile. I am this, that, and the other. Problem is that's never secure. So you can always lose it.
Speaker 3:It can always change. There's this very poignant moment in Aristotle where he says, say of no man that he is happy until he is dead. Why? Because you never know what the final chapter is gonna be. You never know whether it's gonna all come tumbling down at the last minute.
Speaker 3:So you never know that you've lived the life you wanna live until you're dead and then it's too late to know. So identity in this world is is fragile. It's never secure. But for Christians, our identity was secured at the cross two thousand years ago. I am who I am because of what Christ did for me.
Speaker 3:And what that gives me as a Christian is, first of all, I don't need to struggle now to be somebody, to be who I am. That case is closed. That's secure. And that gives me two things. It gives me peace.
Speaker 3:Wonderful, isn't it? To know that I am somebody in God's eyes. I am reconciled with him. And none of my stupidity and nothing that can happen to me will ever take that away from me. It gives me whatever frenzy there is in my life on the surface.
Speaker 3:It gives me a very deep sense of peace. It is finished. I'm okay. It's good. And therefore, it also means that I can take risks because I don't need to prove myself.
Speaker 3:I don't need to create myself. And so throughout history, we see Christians doing reckless things. When there were plagues in the ancient world and everybody who had means fled to the hills to get away from the plague, what did the Christians do often? They stayed in the towns. They cared for the sick.
Speaker 3:They risked their own lives. Why? Because I know who I am. I've got nothing to prove. If it demands my life of me, then I'll give my life.
Speaker 3:I know where I'm going. I know who my savior is. I know who I am. It allows you to take risks, doesn't it, with your life? It's a wonderful freedom in having the great victory won two thousand years ago on the cross.
Speaker 3:The last chapter of our lives is written. It was written on the cross. So however we get there, we know where we're going. We know how this ends. The only thing up for grabs is the route to that final destination.
Speaker 3:And therefore, we come back to our two fundamental human needs, what does the gospel do to them? Well, in terms of our need for fitting in, there is no richer and deeper story that we could ever conceive of being part of than the story that begins with the creation of the universe and that ends with the new heavens and the new earth. You want be part of something? Do want to fit in with something cosmically significant? You can't do better than this.
Speaker 3:Every other story looks like a scribbled note compared to this universe defining story. You want to fit in? Deny yourself, take up your cross, follow Christ. There is no richer and deeper fitting in. But it's not only a cosmic fitting in.
Speaker 3:It's not only this sort of grand story. Mean, look at us here this evening. People gathering in a local church building physically, bodily being together. Now I was here on Sunday. It was wonderful talking with people and learning about people's stories and learning how people have found friends here and found a home here, raising their kids here, fitting in in a local church community.
Speaker 3:And the church is quite an extraordinary institution, isn't it? The church is one place where everybody is welcome. My church back home in Melbourne, there's all sorts of different people. There are people of all socioeconomic backgrounds and there's young and old and in between and people who are infirm, recovering from cancer, just been diagnosed with cancer, never had cancer, all sorts of people who have no right to belong together in any worldly sense. I mean, even nerdy academics like me fit in.
Speaker 3:We hardly fit in anywhere. It's it's a wonderful local instantiation image of this global fitting in the local church, isn't it? So it's not just sort of up there some cosmic fitting in. You belong here in God's family as God's people. And how about standing out?
Speaker 3:Well, my wife loves me very deeply and very dearly. And we, by God's grace, will be together for all of our lives. But to nobody, not even my wife, do I stand out as much as I stand out to God. Nobody knows me like he knows me. My wife knows a great deal about me.
Speaker 3:Parts of my life that she doesn't know. There are deep dark corners that only God knows and loves me yet. Amazing to be known so individually and yet loved by the one who knows you. I wonder if we even love ourselves when we contemplate some of the things in our lives, find it hard to love ourselves. God loves us knowing everything about us.
Speaker 3:One of my favorite parables in the bible is the parable of the stupid shepherd who very economically, rashly, makes a really unwise decision to leave the 99 sheep, and to go after the one who's gone astray. It's it's very I mean, you'd never teach that in an MBA, would you? Really. You're you're risking your own life. It's only one sheep.
Speaker 3:Laming season will be around the corner. You'll get another 99. Laming season, just let it go. It's not worth it. And it is worth it, isn't it, to God?
Speaker 3:He goes after the one persistently until he finds it, leaving no stone unturned, puts it on his shoulders, takes it back to the flock. That's what God thinks of you. You wanna stand out? You wanna be one, not one of the 99? There is nowhere you stand out more than to the God of this universe, no one to whom you matter more.
Speaker 3:Not even your spouse, not even your parents, who love you dearly, I'm sure. Not as much as this. You really wanna stand out. You need to know this God who goes after the one and leaves the 99. So there we go.
Speaker 3:Our Sorry. Woah. It's creasing to a halt. The end. Let me just say one sentence.
Speaker 3:The deepest desire of our heart, and we know that it is the deepest desire of our heart because it is the story we consistently tell ourselves again and again and again. The story we pay money to go and see at the cinema again and again and again. The story we love to hear. It's a story where we fit in and a story where we stand out. And nowhere are those deep human needs met more fully, more resonantly, and more finally than in the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ.
Speaker 3:So let us finish with a word of prayer to him. Our wonderful savior, we rejoice to belong to you this evening. We rejoice to fit in your universe, to be part of this big story, the story in which all of the stories are contained. Thank you for riding us in to this cosmic story and for giving us this local church where we can live out the wonder of being in that story, shoulder to shoulder with our sisters and our brothers. And thank you, dear Lord Jesus, that we stand out.
Speaker 3:Thank you that you are the God who would leave the 99 sheep to go after the one until you find him or her. Thank you that you have done that with us. Thank you that you love us even though you know the depths of our hearts. We'd joy to belong to you. Lord, there's no privilege or satisfaction or peace in the world compared to knowing you.
Speaker 3:We are so happy to have been found by you. Thank you. Amen. Amen.
Cole Ragsdale:Thank you, Doctor. Watkin. Over the next few minutes, we've got about fifteen, twenty minutes, if you have a question that you would like to ask, if you could go ahead and start making your way down to one of these two microphones stationed up here, ask it straight into the mic, and doctor Watkin is going to amaze you with all of his perfect oh, sorry. So if you could go ahead and make your way forward, I know all of you are so thrilled to stand in front of everyone and ask your questions. I wanted to thank you for everything that you said except.
Cole Ragsdale:Can I say that? I'm gonna say it. I'm preaching in two weeks and Viktor Frankl was going to be my main illustration. So I guess I can take that page of notes and just throw it away. I'll go ahead and ask you the first question if that's okay.
Cole Ragsdale:You started talking about the beauty of church towards the end, And I would love to hear, maybe you just speak to the role that community has to play in helping us see the lies that we are believing in in the stories we are telling ourselves and the role that we have in in speaking the truth about our stories to one another.
Speaker 3:I think it's the New Testament pattern is that you can't be a Christian by yourself, isn't it? That you need the church. And also the church needs you in that sort of one Corinthians 12 sort of way, the body has many parts. And you can't, you know, a body doesn't work in the same way if like he's got a foot missing or an eye missing. Everybody is necessary and that there's that sense of the church is an irreducible we of different people.
Speaker 3:I'm trying to find the verse in Ephesians. Mark, perhaps you can help me where it talks about the powers and authorities in the heavenly realms. Do you remember where that verse is? Sorry. I didn't mean to.
Speaker 3:That's so bad. I just help. There's But there's this beautiful verse about the church. Give me a moment. 610.
Speaker 3:Beautiful. Thank you so much. 610. Ah, not that one. Okay.
Speaker 3:I just let me keep digging up here. You're fine. There's a verse in Ephesians somewhere, someone will tell me, I'm sure. Where it talks about the way in which the the powers and authorities in the heavenly realms look on God's church and see his wisdom. That three ten.
Speaker 3:Three ten. His intent was that Hi. Thank you so much. Give give Matt a round of applause. Okay.
Speaker 3:That's right. You can stay. Here we go. This is just Listen to this. This is astonishing.
Speaker 3:His intent was that now through the church, that's you and me. Okay? Messed up people. People with lives that are going all over the place, people with houses that need tidying up, know, you and me. His intent was that now through the church, the manifold wisdom of God should be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly realms according to his eternal purpose that he accomplished in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Speaker 3:So what does that verse say? The angels look down on us, you and me, and say, isn't God incredibly wise? Look at that. Look at what God has done. And one of the reasons, one of the many reasons that that verse is so beautiful is that it marries this local story to the cosmic story, doesn't it?
Speaker 3:It shows how this tonight that we're doing and when we meet on a Sunday morning, you know, and you're sort of still groggy and you need a coffee, all of that sort of normal humanness, that social awkwardness after church where you you you want to speak to the new person but you don't know what to say. All of that is demonstrating God's wisdom to the angels. It's amazing to to think that there's that cosmic significance to what we are doing. We're not just moving our bodies from one place to another on a Sunday when we come here. We are a lived out performance of God's wisdom, cosmically.
Speaker 3:There's a beautiful marrying of this local story, this ordinary everyday mundane story with the cosmic story of the universe. It's very thrilling to think that we're part of that. Thank you for the verse.
Speaker 4:Hi, Chris. Thanks for being here. Of all the places you could be in the world tonight, thank you for being in Birmingham, Alabama. Thank you
Speaker 3:for being here. Delighted to be here.
Speaker 4:I have so appreciated hearing your perspective on contemporary issues. And a couple of days ago, getting to hear you address AI gave me so much more hope on the issue. I realized I was feeling kind of defeated about certain things. And you spoke with such biblical perspective and was very encouraging. So I'm gonna throw another hot topic at you and just kind of ask you to riff on it.
Speaker 4:Gender. Uh-huh. As as we are in a culture that's questioning why? Why male and female? Why even those two?
Speaker 4:Why? What's the good in that? Maybe what kind of hopeful elevator speech do you have Mhmm. That we could plagiarize from you and tell other people about?
Speaker 3:Look, I all I can do is is point us to Jesus and and I will try and do that in the following way. So I think with all the sort of hot and cold cultural issues like this, the question one helpful question to ask about it is which Jesus do I need to be in this situation? And the situation may have a number of different ways that it presents itself. So in the gospel, we encounter lots of different Jesuses. We encounter Jesus with the pharisees, especially in John's gospel who it would appear is shouting at them, you brood of vipers, you know, before Abraham was, I am, you children of the devil.
Speaker 3:It's very confrontational. Jesus shouting people down, giving no quarter, being in their face. Right at the other end of the spectrum, there's the the Jesus of the woman caught in adultery who doesn't even address her. So Meek holds back his power at that point, draws in the sand. There's the Jesus at the well with the woman in John chapter four.
Speaker 3:And all these different Jesuses. And the thing about Jesus was that he had perfect pitch. He always knew how to be in every single situation. And the problem with us is we don't. And we will often, so to speak, treat Pharisees as if they were women caught in adultery, be very gentle with them, and treat women caught in adultery as if they were Pharisees, be inappropriately angry with them.
Speaker 3:And therefore, the question is for us as Christians, in each moment that an issue like the issue of gender presents itself to us, which Jesus should we be? And of course, that will depend on individual circumstances. So if I'm speaking with someone who's burdened with gender dysphoria, for example, and he's saying, I just I don't know who I am, really struggling, I'm not gonna unload both barrels on them at that point and go really theological immediately. But if I'm in a sort of a public debate context, where people are throwing arguments at me, you know, then I will open the bible and say, look, this is what it says. You know, here we stand, we can do no other.
Speaker 3:If you want to be a Christian, this is what you need to believe. You know, male and female, he created them and so forth. And so part of the issue for us is not simply having a generic line, it's discerning the individual circumstance in which we call to intervene on it and not having Jesus' perfect pitch. I think what we need prayerfully to rely on him, don't we? But we also need to rely on each other.
Speaker 3:And in the past, I found it really helpful, say, I'm presented with an issue or if someone's emailed me or or or confronted me about an issue, to ask wiser Christians in my church family. How would you respond to this? Like, is this is this a moment where I need to be very clear and strident? Or is this a moment where I I need to sympathize with with someone who's really suffering or or something else? And I think we can help each other in those contexts.
Speaker 3:But I think what we shouldn't do is just have one mode of engagement that we always bring out if a particular issue is raised because that's not Jesus' own pattern. Yeah. Thank you. The other one's working.
Speaker 5:They're very loud. Oh,
Jeffrey Heine:there it
Speaker 5:You're good. Check. I said I should have gone first because this is about to go not that serious and then serious. Before I ask you the question, would you mind telling I'm five chapters in to biblical critical theory and loving it. Would you mind sharing with everybody your nickname for Adam that made me laugh so hard in my house by myself?
Speaker 5:And if you don't remember it, I will. Which was Soily McSoil Face.
Speaker 3:That's right. That's right.
Speaker 7:Yes. I laughed very hard.
Speaker 3:I'm if nothing else, I'm pleased to have provided you that moment.
Speaker 5:I got the boating boat face, and I loved it. I loved it.
Speaker 3:Put it on the back cover. No. I laughed at the nickname
Speaker 5:of that. Loved Soylie McSoyl face. As someone who has a lot of family members that might have different views And sometimes trying to play not play, but trying to be the gentle Jesus or sometimes being the the strong voice, often accused of being in the middle of things. And, you know, you can't be in the middle of this is an often criticism. Your introduction to the diagonalization has helped me so much.
Speaker 5:And I would love for you to expand on that just a little bit if you don't mind because it was it's been incredibly helpful to me.
Speaker 3:Well, praise God that it's it's been helpful to you. Let let me just take it from the beginning for people who are not familiar with that idea. So in biblical critical theory, I have this idea that I put the label diagonalization on it. The label is not significant that what the Bible is doing is the significance. It's the idea that particularly in the modern world, we tend to understand things in terms of dichotomies.
Speaker 3:And if this was a philosophy lecture, I'd go into lots of different modern dichotomies, but it's not so don't worry, I won't. But what the Bible does is it shows that all of those different dichotomies are Imagine that biblical truth is a beautiful body, a harmonious body. And what the modern world does is it rips the limbs off and then opposes those two ripped off twisted parts to each other. So you've either got to be this or you've got to be that. And originally, they were parts of this wonderful body.
Speaker 3:Let me just give you an example. It's easier to explain with an example. So image of God motif in Genesis one. There's both a great human dignity in that, isn't there, in the whole of creation, only you and I, only all human beings, tiny little babies, senile, older people, everybody is in the image of God. There's a great dignity there.
Speaker 3:Not the Mona Lisa, not a wonderful school of whales, not a beautiful sunset. Only human beings are in the image of God. But in that very same motif, there's a humbling of us because we are the image. We are not God. We find out who we are by reference to one who is outside ourselves.
Speaker 3:In order to understand the image, you've got to understand what it's the image of. We're not self defining. And so we're both exalted and humbled by the image of God motif. But there's no sense that those two things are struggling against each other. There's no sort of fight to the death between the exalting and the humbling.
Speaker 3:But what the modern world does is it rips apart those two principles. And on the one hand, it says to us in many certainly sort of academic books of the sort that I will be reading, you're only an animal. You might think that you're special, but there's nothing particularly special about you. Your brain might be more sophisticated than that of other animals, but that's just a freak of evolution. There's there's nothing inherently unusual about you.
Speaker 3:Or increasingly in the age of AI, you're you're just a machine. You're a very sophisticated machine, but give it long enough and AI will catch up with you. There's nothing special about you on the one hand. And then on the other hand, we're encouraged to treat ourselves like gods because our society tells us to do the things that in the Bible, God does. So in the Bible, it's God who says, I am who I am.
Speaker 3:God self defines. Nobody tells me who I am. I say who I am. Well, society in many ways is saying that's how you should be, you do you. And in the bible, it's God who decides what is good and what is evil.
Speaker 3:And our society is telling us, you must find your own way in life. You must have your own values. And so what what we're confronted with in modernity is two incompatible stories. Two stories fundamentally in tension with each other. They cannot both be true.
Speaker 3:You are an animal and you are a god. And the tragedy of modernity ity is it says, now go and live psychologically balanced life with those two stories. Like And it is it is funny but it's also tragic, isn't it? Like good luck living that. You know, I'm an animal and I'm a god.
Speaker 3:Anxiety, stress, confusion, that's what we see in the world around us, isn't it? It's a tragic story to tell people. You can't ride both those horses. But what diagonalization is showing is that they're dismembered limbs of a beautiful biblical truth. They belong together.
Speaker 3:The bible shows how they belong together and it was God's first intention that they be together. So God's truth comes first, then modernity comes and messes around with it. And so to diagonalize those modern truths, to to make sense of the fact that modernity is saying to us, you're an animal and you're a god, Deal with it. Is to show how the bible cuts across that distinction and returns us to God's original truth which is the image of God where both dignity and humility are harmoniously married as as as part of who we are.
Caleb Chancey:Hey. So I'd love to ask a question really about I I just look and see this beautiful large growing church that has become larger and larger over time. And as we get larger and as more people kind of come into the fold, naturally perspectives and opinions, if you can believe it, not everybody has the same opinion in this room. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Caleb Chancey:And so I guess one of the questions that I'm curious about is when we were kinda growing up, I think there was this idea that there's like this this way over here or this way over here, and then Jesus was the third way. Right? And this third way is kind of, like, presented itself, like, even politically as this concept of centrism. Right? And where centrism can sometimes be criticized for being kind of standoffish and not really making a decision on things.
Caleb Chancey:Right? And so with people in this room, we all have different perspectives and opinions. Right? And and even like perspectives and opinions and understanding about what God's wisdom and truth is like you answered earlier about Ephesians three. Right?
Caleb Chancey:And so how do we as a group grow together? I hope that this would be a question on many people's mind in this room. How do we grow together when we are not necessarily aligned on what we think God's wisdom and truth is? And, you know, I think I think specifically for me, some of these questions started coming up with Charlie Kirk's assassination. And mostly because of this idea that I would have walked into conversations thinking we unanimously might have thought one thing, and then you certainly see perspectives that are different, really different.
Caleb Chancey:And there could be a little bit of we don't say enough or we say too much. And I think just as a church, I would love to know how do we grow in unity together when maybe we prospectively differ on either politics or our understanding what God's wisdom is and how we articulate that, you know, so that others can see that. I know this is a fully loaded question. I probably should have queued you up with that, you know, ahead of time.
Speaker 3:Look, I'm I'm leaving town at the end of the week. Sure. Say what I want.
Caleb Chancey:But I think just my heart is that this group of people could grow together despite I think what probably is this ground swell of like some underlying maybe tensions or differences that we would have with one another in this room. Yeah. Not even with what we may have out there and boy, would really like to be more aligned with the folks in this room as best as we can. So help us do
Speaker 3:that. Simple. I mean, we've got to start haven't we with with pressing into the bible and discerning what is the basis of our unity. Now, is it a political unity? What what what is it that draws us together?
Speaker 3:What's at the core of this gathering? And the the verse that comes to mind is is one Corinthians 15. Let me just read a couple of verses there. Now brothers and sisters, I want to remind you of the gospel I preached to you which you received and on which you have taken your stand. By this gospel you are saved If you hold firmly to the word I preached to you otherwise you believed in vain.
Speaker 3:In other words, this is a deal breaker. This is the hill that you die on. For what I received, I passed on to you as a first importance. Okay. So the hierarchy of importance, this is the top.
Speaker 3:That Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the scriptures and that he appeared to Cephas and then to the 12 and so forth. So right at the heart, our first importance is Jesus' death and resurrection. That is the glue that holds us together. Now, there will be issues of second and third importance that will not hold us together. And if we fall back to a verse that Matt wonderfully helped us out with before, there's also a beauty and a gospel wisdom in that.
Speaker 3:In that if the world looks at us and says, wait a minute, you're not politically on the same page. Like you don't all live the same way. Some of you are rich, some of you are poor, some of you only eat organic food, some of you eat McDonald's every day. Like there's no on any of these other issues. Like there's no reason for you to be together.
Speaker 3:The only thing that's left is that the gospel is what's uniting us. So I think we shouldn't want to be the same in all these other ways because then in a sense, God's wisdom is is watered down because it's the gospel that keeps us together. Now, the the danger in our society I think, and there are various reasons for this that we can go into, is that there's a terrible pressure on us to raise some other issues up the hierarchy and to use them as a litmus test. If my church does this or says this or has this program, then it's green light. If it doesn't, then it's red light.
Speaker 3:We need to be very wary of that. So I think there's a danger of diluting the Ephesians three dynamic, which is you have no right to be together were it not for the gospel. And so there's a sense in which we should rejoice in the differences that are in the congregation. And if for example people have a different sense of political events, then I think there should be a tolerance among God's people for those differences of opinion. What have I written down here?
Speaker 3:I think part of the issue is that you may or may not know a particular YouTube channel called Speak Life by a guy called Glenn Scrivener. And he had a series of really really thought provoking videos in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk's tragic murder, brutal murder. And one of his videos pointed out that depending on your social media feed, you would have a very different, a radically different sense of who Charlie Kirk was. So some people were fed only videos of him being racist or provocative or whatever. And other people were fed only videos of him appealing to Christ and seeking to present the gospel.
Speaker 3:And I think part of the issue is that if we're not careful, we end up living in quite different universes with quite different truths. And so the picture of the world that I have in my head as I come to church on a Sunday morning might be a very different world to to the picture that you have in your head. And I've been thinking about this quite a lot over the last few days. And I was asked a similar question this morning. It's like, what do you do?
Speaker 3:Because social media is everywhere. We we are so much on our phones, know, hours a day. That's such a bandwidth in our lives giving us different versions of reality. And I think the only thing Feel free to push back on this later. My thinking at the moment is the only thing that is wider bandwidth than social media is face to face relationships.
Speaker 3:Like everything else, the Sunday morning sermon for an hour, good luck trying to counteract thirty hours of social media use during the week. It's not going to happen. Like sermons on audio compared to social media on video. The only thing that outflanks it is physical bodily presence in the like you are filling my horizon at the moment. Yeah.
Speaker 3:This this experience is on so many channels. I can smell it. I can feel it. I'm bodily here. That is full engagement.
Speaker 3:And it's by cultivating embodied proximate relationships. I've just written a chapter of a book on hospitality. It's by sitting down and sharing meals with people, sensory experience. What's your story? Tell me about your story.
Speaker 3:And it it doesn't necessarily mean we're all going to agree. It doesn't necessarily mean I'm going to change my opinion. But it's the one thing that out bandwidths social media today and people are pretty agreed at saying that social media is damaging social relationships and driving us further and further apart. So this being here tonight, doing this face to face rather than doing it on a screen is part of the response. And you know the conversations that you guys are going to have afterwards, turn to the person next to you, hey, where did you come from this evening?
Speaker 3:Know, nice to see you here. And you know, I'm Chris and so forth. That sort of boring. You know, it's just it's just relationships, isn't it? But it it is so crucial for a church that we are in each other's homes, eating each other's food, hanging out with each other, know, studying the bible together in little groups, chatting with each other.
Speaker 3:I'm not suggesting that some sort of panacea or silver bullet, but it is the way that we can One of the ways that we can stay together despite these very real differences that there are among us.
Speaker 8:Test, is it working? It's okay. I promised my wife I wouldn't talk about politics tonight but here we are. I I am a Christian trying to figure out how to make often binary decisions in a very secular world Yes. On issues that are complex, and often the decision implicates many different issues.
Speaker 8:And the easiest example of that is at the ballot box, but but my question transcends the ballot box. I'm also not as concerned about you know, when you answered my friend's question earlier, you were you said you have to think about the person that you're ministering to. And then the second question, you were focused on unity as a church. I'm focused on me making an otherwise unknown binary decision in my life. And whether it's a complicated issue or a or a really simple yes or no to this thing or oppose that thing or say yes to this, etcetera.
Speaker 8:Can you speak to what it looks like to discern truth today making complex choices in a secular world about secular issues, where it often just personally feels like the Bible doesn't doesn't squarely address what I'm supposed to do at the ballot box.
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 8:And and so that and and and in other contexts, if you could speak to that. And I'm just speaking for myself. I I am not a fan of the ish of the answer, it's complex. I just I need some like practical steps to take. Yeah.
Speaker 8:I appreciate it. I'm gonna go ahead and
Speaker 3:sit down. You've to go and sit back next to your wife now. No. Thank you. It's it's a really important question and very very eloquently asked.
Speaker 3:Let me let me try and not say that it's complicated while implying that it may be. I've got a couple of things at least to say. The first is that we are presented today and this is another feature of our media ecology with a series of huge problems to which we can make almost no difference. So dial it back a century or two, most of the problems that I would be faced with, would be able to do something about. There would be problems in my village, my town, in my family.
Speaker 3:The scale of national politics is so big that even if I devote my life to it, I can only make a tiny tiny little difference. And so the first thing that I would want to say is if we reduce the scope of our action in the world to the ballot box, I think we've already seeded the ground of local municipal politics, the police, the the group of people, in a way that disempowers us, disenfranchises us fundamentally. So I would want to always make the case that politics is more than the national level and if we reduce it to national level, we frustrate ourselves because good luck trying to change that huge system. Secondly, let's take the ballot box example because it's really clear and we all know we've all experienced that. How do you make a meaningful choice in that moment?
Speaker 3:I think you can only make a meaningful choice in the ballot box if you have a framework for understanding what's at stake that's bigger than the platform of either party. Because all you can do otherwise is just become a slave to one particular ideology. You have to have a framework that transcends that binary choice in order to make a meaningful mark on that piece of paper. Now, that doesn't mean that you say, well, I don't think the gospel is fully aligned with either of these parts. I'm gonna like, I don't know, put my cross in the middle.
Speaker 3:Not in either. No, of course, you need to make that binary choice. And you know, you make it before God in good conscience seeking to express your understanding of the gospel as best you can. But unless you have a way of looking at the world that's that's bigger than that binary choice, your choice is meaningless. It's it's just a sheep like, you know, fish swimming with the current choice.
Speaker 3:And so there's no tension between saying neither of these parties fits what I think the bible is saying and making a meaningful choice in the ballot box. In fact, they necessarily go together unless you have something bigger. That choice has no meaning. And then you bring alongside that, well, as well as that important democratic moment, I might also be engaged in a local level. I might be helping politically in a way where I can make a significant difference in my community or my municipality, and so to to expand politics bigger than that.
Speaker 3:So those would be my two points. We shouldn't think there's a tension between being uncomfortable with both positions and having to make a choice. In fact, they go together and they make that choice meaningful. And let's not just think that the choices we're making around that national level which is incredibly disempowering in which none of us individually can make much difference at all.
Cole Ragsdale:I really hate that we're going to have to close our time together, but would you join me in thanking doctor Watkins?
Speaker 3:Doctor
Cole Ragsdale:Watkin, before we dismiss, would you mind just praying for us as a church?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Love to. Dear Lord Jesus, it gives us great relief and joy to be reminded from your word that all wisdom and knowledge lies with you and therefore not ultimately with us. And therefore, we pray that you would take what I've said this evening, questions, the answers, and that you would very graciously sift them. And everything that was of you that speaks faithfully of you, you would sear into our hearts so that we might love you better and understand better how you've loved us.
Speaker 3:And that all the rest would blow away like chaff. And I do want to pray for my brothers and sisters in this church congregation that I've had the privilege of spending time with this week. Lord, they desperately need the Lord Jesus just like I do to grow both to grow in Christ and to grow in numbers. And so I pray that by your spirit, you might so feed them through your word that they grow up and grow out and make much of Jesus commending him to this local area and holding his name high and rejoicing in the victory that he's won. Amen.
