Welcome to Theocast - A Podcast about Reformed Theology

Theocast’s Mission to Encourage Weary Pilgrims

Welcome to Theocast, Encouraging Weary Pilgrims to Rest in Christ, conversations about the Christian life from a reformed perspective. Our hosts today are Justin Perdue, pastor of Covenant Baptist Church in Asheville, North Carolina, Jimmy Buehler, pastor of Christ Community Church in Willmar, Minnesota, and I'm John Moffitt, pastor of Community Bible Church in Spring Hill, Tennessee.

Today is a little bit of a unique episode. Jimmy, why don't you talk about what we're doing in Episode Zero.

Today is what we affectionately call Episode Zero. It's where we get to help the listener understand who we are, what we're about, sort of the theological grid by which we see and understand things. And so today on the podcast, you'll be able to get a really foundational view of Theocast.

So, Justin, do you want to kick us off?

Christ as the Point of Scripture and the Redemptive-Historical Framework

Yeah, happy to, bro. So here at Theocast, our tagline is Encouraging Weary Pilgrims to Rest in Christ, and we are sincere about that. We really do believe that Jesus is the point of the Bible, that the Bible is not just a collection of stories.

It's certainly not a collection of moral fables and things like that. It's not a handbook for godly living. It is the story of God's great redemptive work, how he planned an eternity past to save a people, and how God the Son, who took on flesh, Jesus Christ, came to accomplish our redemption.

And we understand that he's accomplished everything that's necessary for our salvation. And so we believe that Jesus is enough and that the fundamental battle of the Christian life is to trust and rest and hope in Christ completely.

And so that's what we're going to be pointing people to always here on Theocast.

I think that's an interesting topic because as you think about this, nobody would really say in their church that.

Jesus isn't the point of the Bible.

Jesus isn't the point.

So true, man.

Jesus isn't the point, right? If you asked any pastor or any Christian, you know, what's your church about? You know, by and large, they would probably say it's about Jesus. So perhaps we should flesh out what we really mean.

Right.

Because everybody will say that.

Sure.

Yeah.

I think it's more about the application.

Absolutely.

So if you sit down with anybody who is trying to be true to the text, in other words, they're reading the verse, they're explaining the verse, and now it comes to that famous part in a sermon or a book where they're applying the verse.

And over time in the history of evangelicalism, we do this a lot in the podcast, where we'll start pointing out where we have been psychologically trained to view the Bible as a handbook for the Christian life.

Right.

So we look at David and we look at David's decisions, whether they be good or bad. And then we say, here's how to make good or bad decisions based on the life of David. And the point of the passage is basically morality, how to be better, how to not do that.

And in the end, it has nothing to do with Jesus. So even though we'll say it's about Jesus, it's really not.

The Law-Gospel Distinction and Why the Rich Young Ruler Was Crushed

Yeah, I couldn't agree more, bro. So you hear many sermons in evangelical circles. Some of it is just morality, like you said. Some of it is helpful advice. Here's how to improve this, how to be better at that.

And the thing is that in so many of those contexts, you don't need Jesus for any of it. So you've told me all of these things that might be good, they might be helpful, but where is Christ there? Why do I need Jesus for that?

Whereas for us, we're always wanting to point the believer to Christ as your ultimate hope, your confidence always.

Absolutely.

Jimmy?

Yeah, perhaps it would be helpful to the listener to say, really what we are focusing on is not, when we look at Scripture, it's not what do we do? Rather, it's what has been done in Christ.

Yeah, and we use this phrase a lot. We call it a redemptive historic framework or understanding of the Bible. And Justin, explain when we say that, just in a simple sentence, how can someone walk away going, what does that mean?

Yeah, the redemptive historical framework of the Bible, we've already alluded to some of this. It's the fact that the Bible is about God's plan of redemption accomplished through Jesus Christ. And so when we come to any passage of Scripture, the question is, where does this text stand in relation to Jesus?

And we understand the entire Bible in light of that framework.

Right.

So the question then has to be, well, what about all of these imperatives or these instructions, the to-do lists that are in there? Paul tells us we have to do this and we have to do that. How is that related to Jesus?

How would you answer that, Jimmy?

Yeah, I think it's always important to remember the imperatives of Scripture are rooted in the indicatives of Scripture.

So what are those two words mean?

Yeah, so by indicatives, what we mean by that is who God is, what God has done for us in Christ. And so it's the idea of always putting the horse before the cart, if you will, because in basic evangelicalism, the cart typically goes before the horse.

How do I do this in order to get to Christ?

Yeah, right.

Justification, Adoption, and Security in Christ

Yeah, and I agree, man. And one way that I often like to frame it, I think we all do, is that the Christian life is status forward, meaning status being justified. And now we talk about how we're to live.

Or it's identity forward. We are in Christ, and now we can talk about these imperatives and what our lives should look like in Christ.

Yeah, you drop a kid off at the fair, or a kid loses his parent at the fair. Their security and their status is now, I'm alone and scared, right? But you have a child who knows that their parent is walking right behind them, and that child has zero worries.

And what are they thinking about? What's next? And I think that's the Christian life, where you are often afraid of what you may do, what's required of you, what may attack you. And when we say status forward, we're saying there's a sense of security.

You're resting with that security of knowing, I'm an adopted child. I've been redeemed and saved and cleansed. Nothing can remove that. There's no condemnation, right?

Since having been justified by faith, we now have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. That's what we're saying.

Absolutely. Yeah, it's Romans 8 .1. There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.

So, almost every podcast is going to be exposing you to almost this prism, where you hold up a prism and there's so many different sides of it and reflect things that are reflecting Christ. We're going to be looking at every area of theology, life, and the Bible and showing you how it shows the beauty and the glory and the reason why Jesus Christ can be trusted and rested in.

He is trustworthy.

Despair, Romans 7, and the Burden of the Victorious Christian Life

Many of you are probably thinking, that sounds great. I'm excited about that. I actually do know a lot about theology, but I still find myself, I do know a lot about the Bible. I grew up in Christianity.

I've been in church for many years, but I still find myself in despair, questioning my assurance. Jimmy, how would you help someone like that?

First, I would recognize that despair and the Christian is a real thing. Despair and the Christian is a real thing. The Romans 7 idea of delighting of God in my inward being, but seeing a war waging with my members.

So, perhaps you've heard the phrases, do you treasure God enough? Do you treasure Christ above all things? Are you living your life radically enough? Missionally enough? Those were famous buzzwords when I was in Bible college and kind of the circles of that.

And still are.

Absolutely, yeah. And I know for me personally, those things, they sound good. They sound great. Do I treasure Christ? Well, obviously, I want to treasure Christ. I want to treasure God above all things.

But I also have a realistic view of myself that I don't. I don't wake up naturally treasuring God above all things.

There's a really important theology within. We can thank Luther for this. This idea that Jimmy is getting at is that, yes, we've been redeemed and cleansed and made new. And we have a new heart and we have new desires, but we're still a sinner.

We still live in a sinful body in a sinful broken world. And so there's this battle. Paul talks about it all the time, right? The things I don't want to do, I do them.

Romans 7, Galatians 5.

And that's what leads us to despair. There's almost a side of theocaste where we want to put our hand on your shoulder and say, You're not crazy. And you're not alone. And you're not the only one who feels this constant pull at your soul, where you have the desire to love Jesus with all of your being.

And yet your flesh just fights you constantly, for sure.

And so we're really taking up the banner after the Reformers. This is what you're alluding to, John. We aim to comfort the weary Christian and to come alongside them and acknowledge that the struggle is real, that you're experiencing.

You are at the same time justified, and yet you're still a sinner. And so that internal war, it's a new thing for the believer. You didn't have that internal war before you became a Christian. Now this battle is on your hands.

And so often in the evangelical world, weariness is a result of the system of the whole thing, where there's always more to do. Things can always be done better. And so when, as we've alluded to a little bit, we're going to talk about more later, when we're constantly being pointed inward rather than outside of ourselves to Christ, it ends up putting us in this endless cycle of despair.

It's just on loop, where we're just getting crushed and being weighed down by those burdens all the time.

Perhaps if you guys have ever seen the movie Schindler's List, at the end of that movie, the main character who had devoted a lot of his time and energy and resources to helping Jews in the Holocaust, one of the famous last scenes is him saying, I could have done a little bit more.

I could have gave a little bit more. And I know that there are Christians out there that feel this.

And are on this table.

Absolutely. That are afraid to really voice those things. Because a lot of them have been fed. And I know we have been fed the idea of the victorious Christian life.

This kind of continuous upward trajectory, this system of constant improvement. But I couldn't agree more. None of us on our deathbeds are going to be comforted at all with the notions of what we have done.

It's like, well, brother, look at this. It's like, look at how you battled sin. It's like, oh, but I could have battled so much more.

Absolutely.

Oh, I could have sinned so much less. I could have loved so much better. No one could ever find comfort in that. Comfort is found in the work of Christ in our place.

And that's it.

That could be a false comfort. When you lower the standards of requirements.

You relativize it. Right.

Because I don't think this is possible because of the limitations of humanity. But if there was truly a way for us to be exposed to all of our sin. I mean, we sin not even knowing we sin. So if you want to compare your intentions for good acts versus all of who you truly are in your sin, you would never want to try and point to, well, look how well I did.

Look what I've accomplished. Because you'd be humiliated by the garbage that goes along with this. And I think this is why it's so important that we say your identity can never be in your own faithfulness, in your own obedience.

Law and Gospel, the Rich Young Ruler, and Why Jesus Often Preaches Law

And a lot of the confusion, because people will say, but John, Jimmy, Justin, in the Bible, there are all these commands. Like Jesus says, unless you are perfect, unless you follow me, unless you radically, it sounds radical, unless you forsake your mother and father.

I mean, so guys, how do you hear these law commands? And yet you guys were over here in this podcast saying there might be some confusion. So what's the confusion here?

It's a mixture really of the law and the gospel.

So explain what you mean by that.

The law says, do this and live. So we recognize that. We recognize that there are places in scripture, both Old and New Testament, do this and live.

And you mean live acceptable in the eyes of God.

Absolutely. Yeah, even when Christ speaks, one of the mistakes I think we make, we see where Christ is speaking in scripture and we assume because Jesus is saying it, it's gospel.

I'm preaching through the gospel of Mark right now, and I'm making this distinction regularly. And people's minds to a degree are being exploded because that is the assumption, Jimmy, you're right, that we assume that because Jesus is speaking it, it is necessarily gospel.

Christ actually speaks more law than he does gospel because he's encountering people in his context who are trusting in themselves that they're righteous or they are trusting the fact that they can somehow achieve righteousness through their performance.

And so then when they come to him and say, how can I have eternal life? He tells them, well, do this and you'll have it.

What does he tell the rich young ruler?

Exactly. That's a great illustration of this law gospel distinction. One quick way I would describe this that's I think a good formula for people. Jimmy, you've already said part of it. Law says do this and live.

The gospel says Christ has done it, now live in him.

Absolutely.

So that's critical. But yeah, the rich young ruler illustrates this beautifully because this rich young man comes to Christ and says, hey, good teacher, how do I inherit eternal life? And Christ says, why do you call me good?

Nobody's good but God alone. We can talk about that another time. But he says, you know what the law says, keep the commandments. And the young man says, I've done that. Christ doesn't argue with him and say, well, no, you haven't.

He then turns the temperature up on this young man. And he says, okay, well, you still lack one thing. And he gives him this threefold piece. He says, sell everything you own, give it away to the poor, and come and follow me.

And the young man goes away discouraged. But what has Christ done there? So often in the evangelical world, I know I heard this so many times, that passage was preached as gospel. Give away everything and follow Christ.

Surrender all and follow Jesus. That's the good news. To which we would say, no, that is not what Christ is doing. He is dumping the full weight of the law on that young man's conscience, and it crushes him.

The disciples see this. How do they respond? This is key. They say, Jesus, who can be saved? And then he says, well, with man it's impossible, but with God it's possible.

Pietism Versus Piety and the Motive for Obedience

So as you continue to listen to Theocast, read our blogs, our books, you're going to hear us really encapsulate this entire concept that we have kind of unfolded for you into a phrase called pietism. What we say is it's the difference between pietism and piety.

Pietism really is an overemphasis on the inward Christian life, or we would say faithfulness. It's this focus on what you must do in order to be saved and acceptable before God. Piety is the exact opposite of that.

Piety is good. It's what we'd say holiness. It's this idea of looking at Christ, being drawn towards Christ, and then the goal of what we'd say, even in 1 John, where it says when we look at the glory of Jesus Christ, we are transformed.

We set aside which that is, preventing us from that.

Piety is the transformation of life by the Holy Spirit of God who sanctifies.

Absolutely. That's right.

Versus pietism, which the scary part is you're going to start seeing it everywhere. You're going to start seeing it everywhere.

Pietism really, as you think about the individual experience, really what you're going to see with somebody who is struggling in a pietistic context or perhaps in pietism themselves, if they're really honest with themselves, you're going to see a lot of those guilt, shame, inward realities of I'm not measuring up, I'm not doing enough, I'm not praying enough, I'm not meditating on Scripture enough.

And we want to be careful here because what we're not saying is, oh, you don't have to pray and you don't have to read Scripture and you don't have to pursue holiness. But again, as you said earlier, Justin, we're doing these things status forward where we're finding ourselves as sons, as daughters of God.

Yeah. And the thing is there's a fundamental reorientation of the Christian life from this perspective where the motivators for obedience, the motivators to pursue holiness are completely different. It's like, who knew that safety in Christ could motivate people towards holiness?

It's like, well, actually, I think God knew that and he's revealed that to us in his word. Joy and love and gratitude, peace, propel us forward in the Christian life rather than it being this posture of always scolding people and threatening people toward holiness and obedience.

Now, as pastors and theocasts, we've been doing this for many years of walking people to the edge of pietism, where they're standing on the edge going from pietism into piety, or we would say from faithfulness, focusing on your own faithfulness, leaping into faith.

It is a very scary moment to leave pietism.

It's disorienting, very much so.

It's like that child who's standing at the deep end of the pool and their father's arm's out there and they've never made that jump. It's a little scary.

To use the cliche, it's almost like this can't be real. The news is too good, and that's what we're seeking to say. The gospel truly is good. It's not okay news. It's not decent news, if you can measure up.

It's good news.

I do think, as you've already said, John, people do experience this moment of disorientation, even weightlessness. You have people regularly look at you and you're like, okay, so Christ really has done it all.

Yes, that's what we're saying. So what do I do now? It's a good question. I love when people ask me that question. I know you brothers do too. Then what I say to them is, you know what the great irony is here?

You're actually going to continue doing pretty much the same stuff. It's just going to be for a very different reason. As we've already said, we're actually now putting the horse in front of the cart rather than it being backwards.

That's right. It's the difference between a child who obeys their parents because they're just excited about living in this home versus they're afraid when their parents get home from work because they're going to be disciplined.

Absolutely.

It's just the idea of the joy, living for joy versus dread. Delight versus dread is what we say. If you're intrigued by what we're saying, let me encourage you to go to theocast .org. We wrote a little book there.

It's called Faith Versus Faithfulness, A Prime Round Rest, and it's free. You can download that and you can really engage on a deeper level of what we are trying to lead you to. If you like that book, we have a larger one.

It's called A Pilgrim's Guide to Rest. You can find that on our website or on Amazon. We're looking forward to taking you down this journey. We've got four years worth of information. If you get to a place where you're like, wow, I want more of what they're offering than just the 10 episodes that are available, you can have access to all of that.

It's on our website. We would love to have you a part of our Total Access team and be able to interact with you there. We hope this was helpful.

Thank you for listening to Theocast. If you'd like to contact us or find out additional information about our membership, you can do so at theocast .org.