My Personal Relationship with Jesus? (w/ Chad Bird) | Theocast

Theocast Introduction and the Topic of a Personal Relationship with Jesus

Hi, this is John, and today on Theocast, Justin and I have a special guest with us, Chad Bird. And in this particular podcast, we have a fun conversation around your personal relationship with Jesus. As we look through scripture, we can see that there is a design for us to be in a relationship with the Father, but it's not disconnected to the corporate reality.

As Justin says, we have a church-shaped life. So we have a fun conversation with Chad about a recent video he had put out and an article he had written about our personal relationship with Jesus. And in the Semper Ephraim Manda, we talk about the theology of cross versus theology of glory, and we get to have some fun questions with Chad about some of his favorite books and podcasts.

We hope you enjoy.

If you'd like to help support Theocast, you can do that by leaving us a review on iTunes and subscribing on your favorite podcast app. You can also follow us on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. Plus, we have a Facebook group if you'd like to join the conversation there.

Thanks for listening.

Welcome to Theocast, encouraging worried pilgrims to rest in Christ. Conversations about the Christian life from a Reformed, confessional, and pastoral perspective. Your hosts today are Justin Perdue, pastor of Covenant Baptist Church in Asheville, North Carolina, and I'm Jon Moffitt, pastor of Grace Reformed Church in Spring Hill, Tennessee.

And this is take number two, because I don't know how to push the record button.

Why record once when you can record twice?

That's right.

I mean, come on.

That's right. It's so good.

As you see in our title today, we have a special guest who is definitely special and dear to us, Chad Bird. For those of you that may not be familiar with Chad, Chad does a lot of things. He works with 1517 and he is a book factory.

I'm not even sure how many books he's got out and how many are coming, but the man knows how to pump them out. And I'm really grateful that he has a couple of ones that I recommend that has been extremely impactful for us.

We've interviewed Chad in the past about this, is his book Night Driving and also Upside Down Spirituality. We'll put those in our notes. But if you haven't read those, I highly recommend that you do.

I would also recommend The Christ Key. So Chad, I recommend this book regularly, even to some hermeneutics classes at a local private school. I was like, this is a book you guys need to use. I give it to people in my own church because we believe that Jesus meant what he said in John 5 and Luke 24, that the whole Bible is about him.

And it's so refreshing, encouraging, liberating, all of the above to understand that in more.

Depth.

And your book is helpful in that way, bro. So thank you for writing that. And we look forward to all the stuff you got coming out. Limping with God is another one. I've read the pre-release copy and wrote a little thing on it.

That's great. I mean, really helpful book.

So.

Yeah.

Well, thank you both. Thank you both.

Yeah.

It's great to have a job where I get paid to do what I love.

That's true.

One of the things I love to do is to write. I tell everybody. So my job is to tell others about Jesus. And I mean, that's a pretty awesome job.

Yeah.

Whether it's through writing or podcasting or videos or whatnot, just be able to get the good news out there is just it's a wonderful privilege and a gift.

Amen.

That's good.

Well, one other thing before we move on. I know JP has he's going to introduce our topic here in a minute. But for those of you who don't know, Theocast has been around for a long time. We were underneath a different host for a while.

And I went through just some challenges a couple of years ago and I wasn't quite sure what I was going to do with the podcast and I had the opportunity to call Chad. This is back when I think you were driving trucks still.

Yeah.

I remember that. So it's been a few years ago.

I was in the cab shifting gears that day.

That's right.

And Chad was able to just love and care for us. And not long after that, I found Justin and so we kept the podcast going. So it's good to have Chad back on because without Chad, most likely I would have shut it down.

So thank you.

And this is this is the 150th episode that John and I are doing.

That's right. Today is 150.

So there you have about three years worth of content that we've done together now. So there that is. Chad, it's great to have you on today, man. And I am excited. I know we all are to have the conversation that we plan to have today.

So you've seen the title. If you're a thoughtful listener, you've already grabbed that. I don't need to repeat it for you. But we're going to talk today about the idea of a personal relationship with Jesus.

This is something that is pervasive in evangelicalism. This is just kind of the capital we trade with. We talk about a personal relationship with Jesus all the time. It's ubiquitous. It's white noise.

We're so used to people talking in these ways. But where did that even come from? How long have people been talking like this? Is it a legitimate category? Is it a good way to talk? Is it helpful? Is it not?

We're going to consider all of that. We're going to talk about the American evangelical church and the cultural things that have produced that and the historical things that have produced that that make a personal relationship with Jesus appealing to us.

We're going to talk about Protestant religion in our context, where we value so much the personal devotional life that we tend to think that what happens when I'm alone is the most important thing in terms of my relationship with Christ, and we're going to probably poke some holes in that.

We don't mean to offend anyone, but we hope to unsettle people in good ways in thinking about the Christian life and be helpful to folks as they consider how we live life this side of the resurrection.

What is the Lord's plan for us as we are pilgrims and sojourners in this world? Stay tuned for about the next 30 minutes, and we're going to try to get to all of that and more. Chad, we're going to hand it over to you first, man, as our guest, because we try to be good hosts here and let our guests actually talk.

You can go any direction you want to get us started, and we'll just interact a little bit with what you say.

Hyper-Individualism and the Myth of the Self-Made Christian

Yeah. Great.

This is a wonderful topic. I've addressed it a few different ways through videos and through articles.

Chad is on TikTok.

Yeah, I've done a TikTok video on it. He wins the cool factor because I'm not on TikTok. My wife finally convinced me to start the account, so I did. It's been actually a positive experience because it's just a great opportunity to get the word out there into a social media channel that's got a whole lot of...

Yeah.

Yeah, it's not a lot of good theology out there on TikTok, let's put it that way. But what I was going to say is every time I bring this up, I get a lot of pushback, almost more pushback than any other topic that I address.

And I think that in and of itself is indicative of how pervasive this ideology, this spiritual ideology is in context. So a lot of different ways we can start this out. One thing that I do like to point out is that the phrase itself, personal relationship with Jesus, is a relatively recent phenomenon.

So you can do a search of literature that's been published for several centuries. You can search for words or phrases. And if you use the search engine for a search of personal relationship with Jesus, you'll find that before the 1960s, it was virtually non-existent.

And that in itself is kind of the me generation. And so you have, at the same time, this me focus where the ego drama, as someone has once said, it's all about me. While that is happening in culture, you also have the rise of the me focus of Christianity, me and Jesus, personal relationship with Jesus.

And so it's a relatively recent phenomenon that we begin even talking about this way. But the theology that undergirds that is hyper individualism, where it's all about my private or personal relationship with Jesus.

I mean, that that's kind of part of the waters in which we swim in America. That's right. I mean, we are the land of rugged individualism where, you know, it's me. It's all about what I want. It's all about my dreams.

It's all about my independence. I think it's difficult for us to even wrap our minds around if we grew up in this context of just how pervasive this is in every aspect of our lives, this idea that life is all about me.

And as I like to point out, the whole thing is a lie. If you just stop for a minute and consider the fact of your own life, where you live, what you do, the people around you, everything about your life shows indisputably that our lives are enmeshed in this web of interdependence with other people.

I mean, if you're listening right now, if you're watching on the video, just consider the ability for you to listen, the ability for you to watch. Everything that enables that has been created by other people, by millions upon millions of people.

The very fact that you can understand the words that we are speaking right now means that someone else taught you this language. The very fact that you exist means that two people came together and you are the product.

Of that.

So that is one thing that I think is important just to kind of wrap our minds around the fact that no one lives an independent life. No one is just about themselves because that is a sheer impossibility as a human being.

God created us to live lives in which we are always dependent upon people who are around.

Us.

Now, that kind of factual reality then translates into the theological reality as well. Christ did not come to establish a personal relationship with individuals. He came to establish a relationship with his body, the church, of which we are individually, individually, individually members.

And that is clear in the New Testament. Paul did not go around just talking with individuals and telling them, believe in Jesus, the Messiah, and you are good to go and that is all you need. No, he went around establishing churches with pastors in order that as a corporate body, the word could be heard and the supper celebrated and baptisms administered in order that a corporate life could be lived.

So that is the way that the New Testament is set up. That is the way, that is just basically a continuation of the Old Testament as well. You already have the corporate body of Israel that lives under the covenant with the Lord.

Then what has happened in our circles is we have taken the rugged American individualism and we have also taken kind of this fundamental navel-gazing tendency that they already have as sinners and we have translated that into this now Protestant spirituality, which is all about just me and then my relationship with Jesus.

And I've been talking for a while, so I'll shut up.

No, it's good.

I'm just trying to decide which direction we want to take.

It's a great setup. It's a great setup.

Yeah. So let's talk a little bit more about, I think, everything that you observe culturally and about America and rugged individualism. I think that all makes sense. Let's talk a little bit more about the Protestant religiosity, though, in terms of how we are inherently, I agree 100 percent with you, as fallen sinners with a legal spirit, we tend to navel-gaze, we make it all about ourselves and our performance and all that stuff anyway.

We don't need encouragement in that direction. Yet a lot of times we are taught, like it's just sort of doubled down on, right? We're taught that what really matters is our personal, private, devotional life, and that's emphasized in a whole host of ways, which is we inherently assume it, we're then taught it in the church, which is probably part of the reason why we get so much pushback when we start to talk like this about the inherently corporate nature of the Christian life and about devotion to Jesus being church-shaped.

It just sounds insane to the contemporary evangelical ear. Chad, do you want to riff on that at all? Like just any of the religiosity components that many of the listeners are probably steeped in knowingly or unknowingly?

Church-Shaped Devotion and the Gift of the Word

Yeah, I can speak about it from personal experience. I grew up in a church body that accented that very heavily. You kind of come away with the impression that the Christian life is all about making sure that you have your quiet time, your personal time, your devotional time with Jesus in reading the Bible and in prayer.

And if you got that, then you're set. You're good to go. I think you've called it the sacrament of quiet time.

It's the modern evangelical sacrament.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And again, to kind of go the direction I went when I introduced this, think about that historically. The very fact that I have, I got a Bible right here in reach of me. It's a bound book.

All these individual books of the Bible are together under these two covers, or you got it in your phone these days. Well, that was not a reality for most of the church's existence until Gutenberg came along.

And even after that, just because you had books didn't mean that everybody could afford a book.

Correct. I mean, it was sixteen, seventeen hundred years easily. Yeah. I mean, before the average believer would have had a chance to have a copy of the Bible.

Yeah. And there's no way, unless you were a very rich early Christian, you didn't even have a scroll, one single scroll of a biblical book in your home. So they were in the synagogue or later they were in the churches.

So the ability of Christians, we'll say, for the first seventeen hundred years to sit down with their Bible and have a quiet time with Jesus, it was an impossibility. You didn't have Bibles, you didn't have individual biblical books.

What did you have then? Well, you had the same thing that believers had always had. You had the body, the corporate nature of the body reflected in this weekly gathering in which everyone came together and the scriptures were read aloud.

And you had a teacher, you had a preacher, you had a priest in the Old Testament who would expound these scriptures. You would have discussions. That's the way that the word of God lived richly among the people of God.

It wasn't me with my Bible. It was me with all my fellow believers, part of the body of Christ in that one place, gathering around the word of God, listening to it, thinking about it, having it preached to us.

And as a result of that, then the word of God lived richly, yes, in my life, in my family's life, but also as we are part of this greater body, the church. So, I mean, now let me say this because I want to make sure no one's out there is going to mishear me.

I'm not in any way saying, hey, don't read your Bible at home. I mean, I read my Bible every day. I hope that other people do too as well. That's great. I mean, we can't get enough of the word of God, right?

But what I am saying is don't elevate that as if that is of primary or even secondary or even tertiary importance, because that's not the way the whole church, that's not the way the church was set up.

That's right. It's great to always reflect upon the word of God. It's great if you if you have devotional time. That's great. I do. I listen. I pray the Psalms. I read the scriptures. Oh, that's wonderful.

But I have to keep reminding myself that that's not that's not the life. That's not that's not the way that Christ set up the church's life. He set the church's life up where we come together, where we leave our little individual spaces and we enter into the corporate space of the church.

And it's truly there where Christ is present, speaking to me through his word, speaking to me through his through his preachers.

If we want to know Jesus tangibly in this world, we know him that way in the gathered church as we assemble in his name, covered in his blood and righteousness to to receive him in the word, receive him in his table, all of those things.

Yeah. John, I know you. You were wanting to go somewhere.

What's interesting about, you know, James says, be doers of the word and not hearers only. And I always chuckle when people emphasize so strongly this personal relationship side, because I'm like, have you have you actually read the Bible?

I mean, you're arguing for something the Bible doesn't argue for itself. Like if we're going to argue, how about we argue about what the text says? Now, if you are completely ignorant of everything evangelical and you grab the Bible and you start in Genesis, you start working your way through, I can see how you could look at this as an individual pursuit for a while.

But eventually you're going to go, wait a minute, it seems like there's like this people of God and he's always dealing with the people of God. And then all of a sudden these people of God are expanded to include other nations into it.

And then there's this thing called the church. All of a sudden, if you're going to apply what you see, you're not going to be able to apply it individualistically apart from now. We apply it personally.

I agree. But you can't apply it individualistically apart from the church. Like one of my favorite questions I love to ask people is from Colossians three. And, you know, we always are emphasizing the word of God, the word of God, which praise God, let's keep doing that.

And so Paul says, let the word of Christ dwell in you richly. And we're all like, amen. Yeah. And then I was like, now finish the verse. And if they haven't memorized it, well, you know, we need to memorize it and read it.

I said, nope, this is what he says. Teaching and admonishing one another. Paul understood it to be corporate, not individualistically.

Encouraging and then keep going. Yeah. Yeah. It says singing psalms, hymns and spiritual songs to one another.

That's right. With thankfulness in your hearts to God.

Yeah.

So in other words, you can even go to Hebrews or Ephesians four, which I don't know if there's a podcast has gone by and I haven't mentioned Ephesians four. But what does he say? He gives us preachers and teachers to what?

To train us in the work of ministry so that we are all what? Growing up into the knowledge of Christ and we are tossed about. That's right. And so even going back to Acts, when he says that the elders are to dedicate themselves to the study of the word, why?

Because you're paying them to go to the temple and the synagogues to read these manuscripts so they can come back and say, OK, here's the way of the Lord. Here's the way of the Lord. Free these men to do that.

Yeah. So anyways, I got my bit in.

All right. So we use the phrase, at least I do, and it's not unique to me. I've read it places. Church shaped devotion. That sounds, again, like very foreign to the modern evangelical ear. And Chad, I'm not trying to put you on the spot, but you did agree to be on the pod with us today.

So I'm going to I'm going to ask you when I use that phrase or when we use that phrase, church shaped devotion, what all would that entail as a positive presentation of what the Lord would have for us?

Yeah, I think, well, we can we can just continue with this, first of all, with this idea of the word. Yeah. So my church shaped devotion with regard to the word of God is centered around the fact that, first of all, the word is something that is given to me.

So it's a gift from outside of me. It's something that God gives to me by means of both the red word and the preached word. So I receive his gifts. I receive this word of God from him. And with that, of course, the forgiveness and life and salvation that we have, we have in Christ.

And that shapes then that experience in church of hearing and receiving that word of God. That then shapes my understanding of who I am, both in church as well as outside of church. So when I step out the doors and I enter into my vocations, I understand that I am a receiver of the good gifts of God.

And this word that has come to me is then going to actually flow out of me in a life of love and works by which I serve my neighbor. And then you could really say the same thing about the supper. It's really at the Lord's Supper that I learn about my vocation in the world, because when I go to the supper, God feeds me.

He gives me Jesus. And then what happens? Well, again, I leave church. I go into my vocations and Jesus, in whom I now live and who lives in me, he uses me as his hands and his feet and his mouth and my vocation in order that the fruit of what I have received in him then is witnessed in my life, in my vocation of love and service toward others.

And, you know, so we could go on with baptism. We could talk about all the elements of the church's life are designed to fill us with Jesus, to fill us with his word, with his gifts, with his forgiveness.

And then having been filled, God takes us out into our various callings, father, mother, husband, wife, workers. And there he continues to do his work in us by using us in order to love and serve those who are around us.

Now, I think just to add one more thing here, that the church-shaped devotion also does shape my, what we usually call devotional time at home. So for instance, when I pray the Psalms or when I read the scriptures on my own, I'm not just coming up with my own interpretation.

I'm not, I never act as if, you know what, I'm going to pretend as if I am the first one to read Ephesians, or I'm going to pretend like I'm the first one to read the Psalms. First of all, I'm not. So I'm just, I'm just fantasizing here about some unreality.

Secondly, that is a very, very dangerous thing to do because that leads to private interpretation, which inevitably is going to go astray.

You're going to draw some wax.

Oh, yeah, absolutely. So I'm going to let my understanding of the word of God be shaped by what I've been, what's been preached to me and taught to me in the corporate setting of the church, which hopefully has happened in accordance with this long and rich tradition that we have throughout the history of the Christian church, where you have this, all these expositors of the word of God over the centuries, you have the creed, you have the councils of the church, you have this rich heritage which continues to shape our reading and our hearing of the word of God.

So the church shaped devotion shapes me as a person in my vocation, but it also shapes the way that I pray, the way that I study the word when I'm at home, doing it individually or with my family.

If you're new to Theocast, we have a free ebook available for you called Faith versus Faithfulness, a primer on rest. And if you've struggled with legalism, a lack of assurance, or simply want to know what it means to live by faith alone, we wrote this little book to provide a simple answer from a Reformed confessional perspective.

You can get your free copy at theocast .org slash primer.

The reality is that the corporate drives the price. It's not that the private doesn't matter, but the corporate is primary.

John?

Yeah, I mean, I can, I'm thinking of James when I finished James, confess your sins to one another and pray for one another that you might be healed. This corporate reality, I mean, even going to Jesus's instructions on prayer, our Father, our daily bread, our debts, it's a corporate prayer.

We're praying together in this reality for each other and for the benefits of one another. You know, as you were talking, Chad, one of the things that we were discussing before, which is some of my favorite conversations is before recording, but we were talking about kind of the flow of a relationship with the Father.

When we talk about this personal relationship with God, you do.

Yeah.

He personally loves you. He personally chose you and adopted you and called you his own. Then he goes, Hey, guess what? You're in my family and you're in my kingdom. And this is how it looks now. Now that you're a part of this, this is how this looks, but we ignore all of that.

And I think the reason why, you know, if we were to all step back, we can't really get angry at the weak, astray Christians today.

Why?

Because I think the church is, well, it's failed. You know, there's so many churches that have gone commercial and it's all about numbers and it's all about, you know, self-help and the theology of glory versus the theology of cross and theology of cross doesn't draw a crowd, but a theology of glory does.

And so if you're sitting here and you're listening to us, you're like, guys, this is great, but the churches around me, they are junk. I can't even find one that'll preach me the gospel, let alone just crack open a book called the Bible and give me something out of that.

I understand that. And this is where Justin and I would all say, well, then either drive or move and find someone to be, you're not going to stay in a city that can't get a job and provide for your family.

I think the same applies for church. Go find a church and be a part of it. But going back to the structure, you do hear, I mean, Christ says, right? Seek ye first the kingdom of God and all these things will be added to you.

Inside of God's kingdom are outposts and those outposts are called the gathered church or the gathered people. And it's, I love what Chad, you were saying is that we gather together in the sovereign location of our Lord, which is the church.

He feeds us. He prepares us. He equips us. He strengthens us. And then we take the light of the kingdom out so that we might find the factors who want to leave the kingdom of darkness and bring them back in.

Well, that's how the rest of your life is to function. It's not just, well, I need to make sure I don't disobey so God doesn't take my good job away from me. That's not the aim of your life to not sin.

There's more to life than just not sinning.

All right. So brief observation. I think this is a dead giveaway as to the church context we find ourselves in. If somebody were to ask you the question, what is God teaching you these days? I think the instinct is what?

To respond about something very individual, very private. It's this personal insight that I've received, generally speaking, in my quiet time with the Lord. The Lord told me today. That's the expected answer that I'm going to give something like that.

If somebody asks me, what's the Lord teaching you these days? And I look at them and I say, well, you know, the pastor, like when we gathered in church this past Sunday, we were actually looking at the first 14 verses of Obadiah and here are the things that I saw and here are the things that the preacher communicated and I was struck by this.

That seems like a cop-out answer. It's like, well, what you learned in church on Sunday, like what effort does that require on your part? What kind of devotion does that require of you? And that's problematic.

I mean, it's an illustration, I think, of where we find ourselves. Another thing, Chad, I'd love to hear you talk about this because you already said some of these things and I think it'd be good for the listener to hear your perspective on it.

I think one of the problems we have is just how we view corporate worship in general. We think about corporate worship, I mean, some of us look at it as, you know, it's a supplement, it's a vitamin or whatever, but I think even serious-minded types come to church on Sunday with the mindset of, I am coming to glorify God.

Like, I am coming to give the Lord something. Maybe I would never say that he needs, but I'm coming to give God something rather than the understanding that we come in need and we come to receive from the Lord and he is glorified in that.

I mean, we can say that in hardly a minute, but talk about that perspective on corporate worship and how that reorients a person's thinking about all this stuff.

Divine Service, Corporate Worship, and Receiving the Gifts of Christ

Yeah, that's a fantastic question. So, consider the very use of the word worship as a verb. So, when we think about worshiping, typically the focus is upon what I'm going to do, so I'm going to praise God, I'm going to glorify God, I'm going to pray to God, I'm going to give to God these things as I worship him.

And so, well, then the worship is all about what I do, right? If that's the way we define worship, it's all about what I'm giving to God. Whereas historically, worship is all about where we go in order, first and primary, to receive the gifts that God desires to give us.

So, in my tradition, we talk about the divine service. So, rather than a worship service, we'll typically talk about a divine service. In other words, God's service, okay? So, when you go to God's service, the divine service to worship, what's happening?

Well, God is there serving you, which is exactly what Jesus said, right? I didn't come to be served, but to serve and to give my life as a ransom for many. And that didn't change. Christ still serves us in the sense of he's here to give to us the things that we need.

We come dirty, he washes us. We come full of sin, he forgives us. We come hungry, he feeds us. So, it's not like we show up to church and Jesus is like, oh, I'm so glad you're here. I've been needing you.

I've been needing your praise and your glorifying of me. We come empty and Jesus is like, I'm glad you're here because I'm going to fill you. I'm going to give you all of these gifts. And then, of course, you're not just going to sit there with your lips shut.

You're going to thank me, praise me, glorify me.

And you're going to respond to what Jesus is doing.

Yeah, I mean, it's impossible not to. I mean, if I'm starving and somebody feeds me, I'm not going to walk away without saying thank you. I'm going to be a little lavish.

You're going to be overcome by how good that is.

So, the deeper awareness that we have of our own need when we come to worship, then the deeper awareness we're going to have what worship is all about. And that worship is all about what God is giving to us.

And then we respond back to him. And notice I say we, because this is a corporate experience. And while I'm on that topic, another thing I think that's important to remember about the corporate nature of the Christian life is that there are times when you go to church and you're in a very, very different place than someone next to you or behind you.

So, I had a tremendous loss in my life a few weeks ago. We lost our son and we've continued to go to church every Sunday. But you know what? It's hard for me to sing because it's hard for me not to get emotional when I'm singing some of the songs or even some of the elements of the prayers or the responsives or whatever it might be.

So, it's hard for me to keep it together. But you know what? There's a person beside me and behind me and in front of me and all around me who are, as they say, cheering me up. And it's not like I'm not singing.

I'm singing, but I'm using this person's voice behind me. Or it's not like I'm unable to say the prayers. I'm praying, but I can't verbalize the word sometimes. And so, I'm praying through this person beside me.

So, it is the speaking to one another in hymns and psalms and spiritual songs. And I'm hearing the words from the preacher. And in this time of my intense weakness and sorrow, other people who are in a better place are bearing me up.

So, thank God for the corporate nature of the Christian life because we're not always going to be able to hold it together. And so, we have these other people around us who are doing that for us. And when we're honest with ourselves, we're always in that place in one way or another.