The Quest for Religious Experience | Theocast

Hi, this is John, and today on Theocast, Justin and I have a conversation about the quest for spiritual experience.

You may have felt this, where you're always trying to get back or reach that new high, where you feel close to God and you're loving him as he loves you, and yet you're falling short and you're wondering if there's something wrong with you.

But we look at history, where this possibly came from, and how it's the exact opposite of resting in the sufficiency of Christ.

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Thanks for listening. Welcome to Theocast, encouraging weary pilgrims to rest in Christ conversations about the

Christian life. From a Reformed, confessional, and pastoral perspective, look out, the man alive,

Justin and I are coming off the weekend. It's a Wednesday morning, and yes, we are excited to be here.

Your host today, Justin Perdue, pastor of Covenant Baptist Church in Nashville, North Carolina, and myself,

John Moffitt, pastor of Grace Reformed Church in Spring Hill, Tennessee. Someone got confused that I was in Columbia, but I am in Spring Hill.

Our church plant is in Columbia. If you live there, you can go visit Pastor Patrick Crandall.

He's doing a fantastic job. Justin, today's a fun subject. This is one that we will do our best to get everything in as fast as we can within a 35 to 40 -minute time frame, but as the title says, my friend, this is probably one that we will enjoy.

I mean, I think we enjoy them every week, but... Yeah, I think we do too. Let's just do it. One minute in.

One minute in. Let's do it. Let's get right to the subject matter of the day to serve our listeners well. Today's episode is entitled

The Quest for Religious Experience, and this is something that plagues the evangelical church.

It is a symptom, we're going to argue, of a systemic problem. It's a symptom of the subjectivizing, if I can use that word, of religion, where true religion is found in the subject rather than in the object.

It's found in the subject, if not in the objective. So what we're going to talk about today, in part, is the fallout of this.

There's a number of different presentations and manifestations of this where we're told that true religion exists in our affections, or that the great goal of the

Christian life is to be, in some sense, emotionally satisfied in God, or even to seek pleasure in God from a hedonistic perspective.

The way that we fight the other kind of hedonistic desires that we might have and hedonistic instincts that we have as humans, given that we're fallen, is to then be hedonists when it comes to Christianity, and to seek that kind of pleasure in our religion.

This stuff hails from a particular place historically. It hails from some of the revivals of the 18th and 19th centuries.

It also hails from a place where a movement called pietism that we talk about as well here on this show.

Here's the thing. People are on this quest for this religious experience.

We chase after feelings. We chase after experiences. We chase after this kind of satisfaction in God in this emotional, ethereal sense.

The understanding would then be, if I'm satisfied in God that way, not only am I legitimate, but if I'm satisfied in God this way, then everything else in my spiritual life will go well, and maybe even everything in my life on this earth will just go so much better if I can find this kind of satisfaction and this kind of experience in God.

We're going to assess that from a Reformed and confessional perspective. Is that how Christians through history, in particular, is it how the

Reformed understanding of Christianity would assess satisfaction in God? What does it mean to be satisfied in Christ?

We're going to talk about some of that. Then we're going to talk about how this whole project, it doesn't work.

It ends up producing a lot of despair and discouragement. In other ways, it could produce some self -righteousness.

It doesn't do good things in the church. It doesn't do good things for individuals. That's a kind of a setup,

John, of what we plan to discuss. I'm going to turn it back over to you and let you get this thing rolling downhill.

We'll see where the Lord takes us. Right. Well, one of the things that normally comes out of some of our podcasts, it's either feedback from listeners or subject recommendations.

This one probably comes from some preaching that Justin and I have been doing. I've been working through the book of James recently, and so this has been coming out in some of the issues that we've been dealing with.

As I think about just my religious experience, and then as the more research

I do about history, and then reading historians, there's this movement that happens, and this is what we're trying to get at.

Another way of wording this is that Christians fall into what's called the arrival fallacy.

Once you arrive at a certain spiritual part of your journey, then you go what

I call the withouts. There is a moment where once I arrive at this religious experience, then

I'm not going to really experience pain. It may be there, but I'm not going to experience it.

There won't be divergence. There's a constant state of joy and ecstasy, and there'll definitely not be a decrease.

There's no such thing as the stock market tick up and down. It's just one straight line. Justin Perdue Yeah, and the notion there is that if one is satisfied in the

Lord appropriately, then yes, you may encounter suffering and pain in this fallen world. We're all promised that, but it won't even really register because your joy is so transcendent.

The idea as well is that if my affections and my satisfaction are fixed upon God who never changes and who himself is transcendent, then my joy will be the same way.

Jon Moffitt That's right. That's right. Amen. So, there's that drive where we want to kind of hit that first, you know, there are these movies that are out there, and you'll watch them.

It's typically during either Valentine's or Christmas, and it's that emotional excitement of the first date, the first meeting, that new first love.

Justin Perdue The new relationship. Jon Moffitt Right. The newness of it. And that's what we're looking for, is that newness of our relationship.

And I call it the spiritual gentle and high. We've become spiritually gentle and junkies, where we're just kind of always trying to find that next pop where we feel like we're on top of the world and nothing can take us down.

And we're these strong, vibrant Christians. And when we use mechanisms to fabricate that, and there,

Justin, it's kind of like the potential of what

Christianity has sold you to give you that next to gentle and spiritual high. It seems endless from what kind of devotional book you read to what kind of music you have on a

Sunday to lights. And there's just so much that's given to you to say, here is what can get you into the presence of God, and you can literally just bask in His glory.

And then you walk away soaking in this experience of joy and happiness.

And then you're most people who walk away and they're like, I'm bone dry. I'm brittle and broken.

Whatever I'm supposed to be basking in and soaking up has not been my experience. So that's the two extremes.

And I think, Justin, we should talk a little about where this comes from and then how it is that it has become the norm and what the

Christian life should potentially look like. But I think you know where I'm going with this, but where does this come from?

Yeah, I'll talk a little bit historically. So you mentioned that the driver for this conversation has come from some of the things you're preaching and I'm preaching, and also some of the things that we're researching and learning about ourselves and studying ourselves in order to do some teaching in our local church context.

And so for me, I know I've been reading for a while now. I've been trying to read and survey history just from a perspective of learning more about the

Reformed confessional faith historically, and then also reading more about the history of American religion, particularly

Protestantism in America and revivals and all these kinds of things and revivalism.

And so this stuff that we're talking about today, this subjectivization of religion, this making true religion about the subject, like we're looking within to find true religion, that definitely hails from not only the movement of pietism, as it's so called, but also a movement known as revivalism, or just the project of revivals, particularly in, as I alluded to earlier, the 18th and 19th century in America.

And we're not going to get into a big historical survey of all that stuff, but suffice it to say that during that period of time, even in the first Great Awakening, that was certainly better in ways than the second

Great Awakening, so -called, but even in the first one, we have real concerns about that. That's another show for another day, because the locus of the, really the center of the

Christian life was removed from the gathered church in the local assembly and moved to this revival meeting.

And more or less what ended up happening, John, in part was religion in this period of revival became about the individual's response to a fiery preacher.

My own personal fervor for the Lord became a massive emphasis.

The level of my conviction became a massive emphasis. How I felt about the things of God became a massive emphasis in this period when these revivals were occurring.

And the Protestant church of an evangelical ilk in this country ever since have had this baked into the cake, where a huge emphasis on these things, my response, my feelings, my conviction, my fervor, my devotion, my intensity regarding Jesus and the things of God become the real measuring stick of my

Christian life and experience. And then you have other things through history.

I mean, Jonathan Edwards, of course, lived during the period of the first Great Awakening and his most famous work would be the one entitled

Religious Affections, where he is going to define true religion in this subjective way as it pertains to how we feel about God and what our affections are for God.

And just to be super clear before we go any further, John and I are all about personal commitment and devotion.

We are all about affections for the Lord. The Reformed have always been about these things. We want people who are affectionate towards God.

We want people who are committed and who are convicted of sin and who love the things of God.

I mean, amen to all of that. The real question is, though, how do you go about cultivating that?

And our answer to that question is different. So I don't want to get us too far ahead,

John, because I know what we're going to talk about, the Reformed perspective of these things. Do you have other comments that you want to add about where this hails from and maybe even how this shows up in the in the contemporary church even?

I mean, we chop that up a little bit. I think it's misinterpreting the Old Testament promises to Israel in that we lose sight that those promises were given specifically to a nation.

Like when we talk about restoration of land, restoration of health, protection, those type of things, we assume that God's mission in our life is our physical, mental, and material protection and blessing.

So then we equate the closer I am to God, the more affection I am to Him, the natural response to that will be

His affection towards me. This is even how we build relationships, not only inside of marriage, but outside of our marriages, where one side of the marriage party is not reciprocating and not building.

It can dampen. And so there is a give and take when it comes into a relationship. Most human relationships are based upon give and take.

I mean, Justin, you and I, if after our first conversation that we met on the phone years ago, if neither of us really returned and reciprocated that relationship, it would have fallen away.

But we assume that's how God is. So we treat the relationship in that way in which we have to increase our affections, our satisfaction and joy in Him by what we do.

And so it's always the energy going up instead of what we're going to get into is understanding that God's response and blessing to us is never based upon Him.

I mean, this is even James 1 where he says, every perfect gift comes to you, not based upon variation and change.

What I would say is that the greatest promise, and this is what's skewed, the greatest promise given to the believer is that you can have two things.

You can have full satisfaction and full joy in the midst and the guaranteed promise of trial, suffering and joy.

I'm sorry, trial, suffering and death. So what we confuse it to be is that if I'm on this quest for the spiritual experience, some don't necessarily always equate it to a physical side, but in the prosperity gospel, it definitely has progressed to that, that the ultimate experience and the ultimate spiritual experience is not only the spiritual connection, but also the physical.

I mean, we connect it to our wealth and to our job and to our health. So there's a kind of a broad barometer that can go between those who would say, well, it is that and it's not.

But anytime it morphs and you get away from the source, it can change into all kinds of things.

And so you can see how revivalism, in my opinion, has progressed into the prosperity gospel because that's all it is.

You are always trying to revive something for the sake of what you're getting in return. And they've just progressed it to its logical conclusion.

Yeah. And I think for many people, it shows up in a very emotional kind of pursuit sort of thing, where my religion is about sort of my mental, emotional well -being and my fulfillment in those ways.

And what I need to do is pursue these affections for God in this way. And I need to pursue feeling about God this way so that that will then be the transcendent experience of my life.

And that even when I encounter bad things, I won't be rocked by those because my affections for God are so strong.

And again, I hope the listener can understand we're not saying that affections for God are bad things. Of course, it's good.

And Jonathan Edwards or John Piper, whoever we may bring up today, those men both have known suffering and have written beautifully on suffering and pain and would agree with much of what we're saying.

I think our argument today is not don't talk about affections. Our argument is you've got to ground affections in something that is objective.

And the way to go about accomplishing the goal of stirring one's affections for God is not a subjective project.

It's actually an objective project where we point people outside of themselves always to Christ and the gospel.

I want to briefly maybe try to recalibrate the conversation on satisfaction really quickly, and then we'll just I feel like interjecting this here.

And if we go back and forth on some things, that's fine. Yeah, I think people today, maybe a la

Jonathan Edwards or a la John Piper and his perspective on Christian hedonism. Which is a big

John Piper, he's a huge John Jonathan Edwards guy. Yeah, totally. So Piper was very influenced by Edwards.

And, you know, let me just interject this too. I mean, there was a Thomas Chalmers, a Puritan, you know, is relatively well known for a work entitled

The Expulsive Power of a Greater Affection. And I think that what, you know, to an extent Edwards and Piper have done is maybe nailed that kind of thinking to the wall in a way that isn't helpful.

Piper in particular does this where, you know, if your satisfaction in the Lord is so great, then it will drive out the desire to be satisfied in anything else.

And I think due to the corruption of the flesh and the frailties of our frame, we will constantly be fighting that battle.

And John Piper, of course, would acknowledge as much in a book entitled When I Don't Desire God, you know.

So, again, we're not trying to be unfair to people that would advocate this kind of satisfaction in the

Lord, religious affections perspective. There's some overlap here. But to be satisfied in Jesus, what does that even mean?

Like biblically, what would that even mean? And I'll at least reference John Calvin, who

I think is very helpful on this topic. One of the areas where this would show up is in his commentary on 1

John, but he would write similar things elsewhere. When Calvin talks about the notion of being satisfied in Christ, what he means by that is looking to nothing or no one else save Christ for my peace, for my assurance, and in order to confirm me in the faith.

So to be satisfied in Christ is to be satisfied with Christ as Savior, to be satisfied with Christ as Redeemer, to be satisfied with Christ as sufficient.

And by that, I want to be super clear because I think a lot of times I'll tweet this or put it up on Facebook occasionally, Christ is enough.

We say that a lot here at Theocast, Christ is enough. And we even have ideas with how we're going to use that enough, maybe down the road, for things that we want to do together at Theocast.

When we say Christ is enough, we don't mean that in some sentimental, emotional way. We don't mean that in some sort of pleasure way, where Christ is enough and I just feel these things and so I don't go do other things.

What we mean by saying Christ is enough is that he is enough to save even you. He is enough for atonement and forgiveness of sins.

He is enough to absolve you of guilt. He is enough to provide you with all the righteousness that God will ever require of you.

He is enough to guarantee your bodily resurrection. He is enough for your eternal life, right?

And so look to him for those things and look to nothing else, including your own performance, including your own feelings for Jesus, including your satisfaction in God.

Because if you look to that stuff, it will come up far short of what it needs to be.

And so I think that Reformed understanding, man, that is objective, that's grounded in Christ, his person and his work, is a much better way to talk about satisfaction.

And it's actually going to produce real joy, which we're going to get to that at some point in either today or the next episode.

Real joy is found and real piety is found when one is satisfied in Christ in this way.

If you're new to Theocast, we have a free e -book available for you called Faith vs. 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. Agreed. In our next episode coming up, we are going to talk about there are things to do that give you joy.

It's the promise that's given to us by the Father and multiple other New Testament writers. So stay tuned for that next week.

But to add to what you're saying, what's really hard for the human heart to believe is that the world which we can see and we can touch and we can consume, the world's very tempting to the flesh that money and fame and sex and relationship will bring satisfaction.

And the Bible makes it abundantly clear that Christ is not only the spiritual satisfaction for our degradation against God, the way in which we have failed

Him, but He's also the full satisfaction of all of our desires, of all of our needs, and that there is what we call the already not yet.

And that not yet part is really hard for us in that while we wait, 1 John says, we are what we are not what we will be, which is in Christ, fully transformed into Christ, in the presence of Christ, enjoying the benefits of Christ and the new heavens and the earth.

And he says, but we're waiting. And that waiting period becomes really hard. And again, this, I think, goes to sometimes,

Justin, we're trying to bring heaven to earth. That's that arrival fallacy. And when we do that, we are missing out on the sustainability of what

God has given us. So a great example, again, I'm just going to go back to James, because where my heart and mind is at the moment.

James, the first epistle, arguably is writing to churches that have left

Jerusalem under spiritual and physical persecution. And they're fracturing underneath partiality.

They're hurting each other with their tongue. It's just a it's a massive church. And what he begins with is he actually is trying to ground them in their satisfaction and hope outside of the current circumstances.

He's actually telling them, you have every reason to have hope and joy and satisfaction in the midst of suffering.

This is why he says, count it joy, because when you suffer, you will see the power of the spirit sustain you and create within you stability.

Another way of saying this from a reform perspective. In the midst of trial, you have hope because God's the one who perseveres you through the trial.

So he is pushing you beyond the trial because he never says here's how to stay out of trials.

Here's how to avoid them or overcome them. He's saying in the midst of whatever trial you may be in, it might be a lifelong one depending on what year you find yourself in.

Yeah, you will persevere. And then he moves on to the thing that we feel like we're lacking, which is wealth in this world.

And what does he say to that person? He says, let the lowly brother boast in his exaltation because he says the wealthy pursuit will fade away.

So he's grounding them in how they're going to be sustained. Then he reminds them, hey, whatever you think you're lacking here will be given to you in tenfold because the exaltation is the inheritance in Christ.

Right. So he's saying what you think you're lacking, you are not because you have full promise of satisfaction to come.

And often we as humans, what do we want, Justin? We want gratification now. And Jesus is saying it is yours.

God is promising it is yours. But we can't be fully satisfied in a broken world.

That's impossible to have. So there's a third promise that's given to us, and that third promise is what we call hope.

And hope is what drives us in the midst of this pain and suffering.

And when our emotions are low and our affections are sideways, what remains and steady is our hope in that which is to come.

We can look to what's already been given and then we look to that which is to come. And we don't, as the

Bible says, lose heart. Yeah. So two big thoughts for me and two big theological categories keep rising up in my mind and my brain, like in my heart, as I'm just listening to you and processing what we're discussing right now.

So I'm going to comment on each of them. If I need to do one and then the other, I don't care. So the first is the theology of the cross versus a theology of glory.

And so this is a historical category theologically where the Reformed, both

Reformed and Lutheran, so Protestants hailing from the Reformation, both would uphold an understanding of something called the theology of the cross over and against the theology of glory in a way that, relevant to this conversation, that we might describe this.

Whereas a theology of glory would tell us that we live from religious experience to religious experience.

We live from triumph to triumph, from victory to victory. The Reformers would have said, no, no, no, no, that's not what life is.

It's not that kind of obviously glorious thing. We're not just living from great religious experience to great religious experience.

In fact, the project of this life is to trust in the Lord in the midst of weakness and in the midst of the struggle against sin.

And to acknowledge that we, in and of ourselves, are weak, we are frail, there remain in all of us these remnants of unbelief, right?

We struggle in various ways, and this will be our experience until we're resurrected.

And that's important when it comes to this conversation, that we would have these categories in view, because this theology of glory is kind of the, it's part and parcel of the evangelical

M .O., right? We're going to be living from experience to experience, from triumph to triumph, from victory to victory, onward and upward, you know, and it's an unhelpful paradigm.

Whereas realizing that we own our weakness and we are learning to be more dependent upon God's grace, we are learning to trust

Christ in the midst of suffering and pain, that is what the Lord is working in us by His Spirit from the perspective of the theology of the cross.

And this allows us to be honest about our lives, right? Like you read Paul in 2 Corinthians 1, where he says, you know, brothers, we don't want you to be ignorant of what we went through.

You know, things were so bad that we despaired of life itself, you know. But this is a man, too, who will say that the light and momentary afflictions that we experience now are not worth comparing to the weight of glory that's coming.

But it helps us understand what he means. It's not that we can't talk about pain and suffering. It's that what's coming is so great.

We can't even fathom it. It's the hook to which we've been called, which we should discuss more than we do. Amen. You know, but but that's not yet.

Like you already said, it's an already but not yet thing. And so it's important that we keep all this stuff in appropriate perspective.

Can I just make one comment? Please interject. And then I can do the second one. This is a quote.

Justin and I are trying to help listeners of Theocast understand that to be confessionally and can be creedal and confessional is not to put authority on top of the

Bible, but is to give a directive. You know, Spurgeon fought this in his own day. And he says,

I find it odd that those who think so highly of their interpretation given by the illumination of the spirit think so little of those who also have received interpretation of the spirit.

So it's so wonderful about the godly men and women that have gone before us. They have made the mistakes and recorded them for us and given us the corrective.

One of these is helpful in the chapter on sanctification underneath point two.

It says this sanctification is from the 16 sorry, 1689, which would be very, very similar to the

Westminster as well. This sanctification extends throughout the whole person, though it is never completed in this life.

Some corruption remains in every part. From this arises a continual, irreconcilable, sorry, irreconcilable war with the desires of the flesh against the spirit and the spirit against the flesh.

And what's happening, I think what we're trying to expose is this quest for the spiritual experience is that somehow we assume that war eventually goes away and it doesn't exist.

But here's what wise Christians who battled their entire life with the Christian life then concluded in this war, the remaining corruption may greatly prevail for a time, yet through the continual supply of strength for the sanctifying spirit of Christ, the regenerate part overcomes.

What they mean by that is going back to James chapter two is that they will persevere.

But there this concept that one can get to a place where it's almost you reach immutability and that like you're impervious.

It's right. And what I always am encouraged by that I am in a line of millions of Christians over thousands of years who have battled the flesh every moment of every day.

And that war that Paul talks about with the flesh against the spirit and the spirit against the flesh is normal.

And that times our spirit is going to be struggling because of the flair of the flesh.

But yet we can't allow that to drive us down into despair, which is what most

Christians end up doing, because they assume there should be on a constant, like I said, spiritual adrenaline high.

We should listen to those who come before us and say, that's not the case. Well, there's this notion that exists in the church,

John, though we would never maybe say it exactly like this. The whole idea of you should be better by now.

I should be better by now. How long have you been a Christian? You know, you shouldn't be struggling this way or that way. That's common.

Another thought I had about this whole theology of the cross and theology of glory, peace that's related to some things you were saying earlier is it's interesting, just an observation.

People in the evangelical church that rightly condemn the prosperity gospel as false teaching, right?

I would suggest in a way, peddle a kind of easy listening prosperity gospel through this kind of thing, right, where it's not about material well -being.

It's not about temporal blessing overtly, right, like the prosperity gospel is, but it is a promise effectively that if you do the right things, if you're dedicated enough, if you're disciplined enough, if your affections are right, all that, right, if you have enough personal fervor and intensity of commitment and all that, then your life will look like this.

You will become impervious to suffering effectively, like you'll just be able to weather that storm, no problem.

You're not going to get knocked off your horse. Things are just going to go, you'll just kind of boom right over everything and it'll be fine.

And I don't think that's helpful because we're going to find times in our lives, this side of the resurrection, whether it's through circumstance or just something that's inexplicable that just comes out of our fallen constitution, we're going to struggle in ways that we might not even conceive of.

And it's going to be as intense of a struggle and battle as we've ever had on our hands, even if we've been a Christian for decades.

And I think we need to be honest about those things and be able to stare them in the face and call them what they are and point ourselves, one another, outside of ourselves all the time to Jesus and what he's accomplished in our place.

The next thought I want to offer, just to kind of keep the train moving here, I couldn't help but think of the confessional perspective of Christians as pilgrims.

I think that analogy is so helpful in this conversation. Rather than a Christian being an activist or a crusader or a conqueror or whatever kind of word you want to use, a

Christian is understood from a Reformed confessional perspective as a pilgrim and a sojourner, an exile even, in this land, in this world, right?

And that is helpful on so many levels, but consider it this way when it comes to this quest for experience and the like.

If we understand ourselves to be pilgrims, we know, all right, I've been promised a homeland and God has said he's going to deliver on that and I believe him that he will.

But between where I am now and when I arrived there, there's a lot to traverse and there's a lot of danger.

And many of those dangers are spiritual and I am not strong enough. I'm not sufficient enough to weather these.

And I need not only just the grace of God broadly, but I need sustenance and nourishment and protection.

And in particular, I'm going to find that sustenance and nourishment and protection in the ministry of the church because that's what

God has set this up to be. And I need to go and be a part of a local body.

I know we talk about the church a lot and we can't help but do that. I mean, we're churchmen, we're Reformed guys, and this is how people have talked through history.

I need to go where I can gather with my brethren and I can gather with my sisters, other people who have been redeemed by the

Savior, who understand collectively our need of him and how weak we are.

And we can receive him in word and sacrament and we can encourage one another because this is how we together as pilgrims will make it to the homeland.

Right. And that is a much healthier perspective when it comes to talking about this quest for religious experience.

I'm not seeking after this, you know, mountaintop to mountaintop, experience to experience.

I'm just going to feel so good and strong as a

Christian. It's like, no, I'm I'm going to own my weakness and I'm going to lean into my brothers and sisters as we all cling to the

Lord Jesus together. And this is how we're going to make it home. Well, Justin, just to point out the obvious, you can't walk into church and receive that, unfortunately, in most cases around the year, in part because of what we're saying.

Exactly. Because the normal tone and tenor of the local church in America is it's not this understanding.

No, they've actually bred into this. You know, we walk into a movie theater because we are looking for an entertaining experience, whether it be, you know, depending on whatever, whatever your taste may be, horror or happiness or whatever.

But we're expecting an experience. And so people walk into a local church and they're expecting an experience.

And so you have seen that any time that you are trying to give the flesh an experience, there always has to be that it seems like you always have to increase the intensity.

I mean, this is why you see that anything that is wrong and sinful has this nasty progression to it.

But this can also be true of things that can be good, can be healthy. But when you're trying to gain an experience that can only be spiritually brought by the by the correct means, we're not using them.

We'll talk about this in just a minute. But when you think about walking into a modern day evangelical big box church, it is about the tone, the music, the lights, the the fog machine and what's this rotation of what's going on and what they're trying to create is this entertaining that would never say it this way, but they're trying to create this entertaining experience and then dub it as a actual spiritual experience.

I have had people, I'm sure, Justin, you've experienced this, too, where people come to our church and they've never really been in a

Reformed church where the heavy emphasis is on the sufficiency of Christ, the confession of sin and music that reflects that.

So our songs are going to be about the building up of a faith in Christ. We aren't looking for some emotional high.

In other words, we're not singing about us. We're singing about Christ. We're not singing about us and we're not trying to evoke emotion from the music.

Now, I will tell you the words and listening to my brothers and sisters administrate the gospel to me by voice evokes all kinds of emotions, but it kind of just happens and it doesn't happen every week at times when my heart's at the lowest is when

I am elevated in my encouragement of it. But the intention is not to create this moment.

It is to, as Paul says, to think about how to take the psalms and hymns and spiritual songs to administrate them to one another.

Because that is what sustains us in this fight against the flesh and against the spirit, right?

So when I think about people who walk into our context, it's been fun to watch them at first be like, yeah, the music's really boring and I don't get it to all of a sudden later, you see them fully enjoying being built up and grounded in the sufficiency and the satisfaction and the full, complete faithfulness of Christ, and they never once mention how they're going to be, they're going to do, they promise to be, it's like, no,

I can't promise be or anything. I am a failure under the law. I need Christ. And that's what changes.

So when you start changing your diet from Christ is sufficient for me because of what he has done.

This is why, Justin, in the covenant of grace, the new covenant, there is no you must do.

There are no requirements as God fulfills them all. Therefore, those who live in under a new covenant, we love the joy of hearing what

Christ has done for us. You flip this and you go to services that don't understand this perspective and it's what you're going to do for God in music and in sermon.

And the only thing they can do to motivate you is guilt you and tell you if you don't reach this emotional high, then there's something wrong with you.

And even you could go into the charismatic world, it's through speaking in tongues or healings or having a word from the

Lord. It's the endless pressure to hit that next level. And you can never say

Christ is enough. No matter where I'm at physically and mentally, he is enough. You are not allowed to say that.

Yeah. If I were going to offer a final parting shot here on like, hey, brother, what is the cure or what's the antidote to this illegitimate quest for religious experience, if we're going to put it that way, if you're saying that to be on a quest for religious experience is going to fail me, which it will, then what do you offer in its place?

And I think we've already kind of said this, but I just want to be crystal clear. What we would offer in its place is a theology, a piety, and a practice that is grounded in the objective realities of Christ for us by virtue of the covenant of grace.

So what do we mean by those things? The person and work of Christ, who he is and what he did, that stands outside of us, unaffected by us, that is rock solid, right?

That is extra knows the outside of me. I'm always looking there, not looking within,

I'm always looking to him as the ground of my standing before God, as my hope and my peace, my assurance, my confidence, you know, the guarantee of eternal life is him.

And then it's by virtue of the covenant of grace, meaning it's all received. It's given to me.

I receive it by faith. I don't do anything. I don't work anything. I don't render unto

God anything that would then result in him showing me his favor. That's not how it works.

And so we just continue to preach that and teach that. And of course people object to it.

And I don't have time to riff on this, but, uh, people sometimes get concerned that if that's what the emphasis of the church is, well, people, they'll say people aren't going to know how to live.

It's like, well, yes, they will. Cause we preach the law and third use of the law, right?

Right. The law is guide for the believer. We preach the law that way, but then also people will say, well, but what about the motivation for sanctification and the motivation for holiness to which we would respond, brother, sister, with all due respect, if you want sanctified people, preach

Christ. That's right. Right. And, uh, yeah, so that's, that's a decent,

I think, final thought from me, John, there's a lot of other things I could say. We'll save that for SR and, uh, yeah, I'll take a final part two kind of of this episode next week.

Right. That's right. What, what is it that actually gives us joy and, um, sustains, right?

That's right. Yeah. There's a difference between an emotional high and everlasting joy. We call that the joy of Christ.

So next week we are going to pick this conversation back up and we're going to be talking about what robs us as of joy and that's pietism.

And once we are set free from pietism, we are set free to enjoy piety and piety is what produces joy.

So we'll talk about that next week, but we're going to continue this conversation over into the Simple Reframanda podcast.

This is a podcast that Justin and I do every week. It's kind of that next level, somewhat application deeper.

I mean, it can go sideways in all the different kinds of ways. It's a really fun podcast. We really enjoy it.

Uh, if you'd like to participate in that, you could do so by going to our website and signing up for Simple Reframanda.

This is just a way for people to partner with us and help us continue to spread the good news of resting in Christ and the sufficiency of Christ that Christ is enough.

I do want to say one thing before I leave down in our notes, we kind of introduced and created a, scratched a problem, and there's a great solution for a lot of what, if we're going to build on in anticipation for next week, if you want to go listen to this now, we're going to really be building on this next week.

We did a three -part series called the Practical Implications of Covenant Theology, really playing this out from a positive standpoint.

We pointed out the negative today, positive. We're going to build on it next week, but to kind of get prepared for that, you can go listen to that.

Uh, we have an episode that Justin mentioned on Theology of the Cross versus Theology of Glory. That's in our notes. And I would say, um,

Law Gospel. When we talked about we used to use the law, Law Gospel is a great episode. And then this is something that's similar to what we talked about.

We did an episode long, long time ago. One of our first ones when we restarted, it's called More Than a Feeling. Uh, what a great, great graphic on that as well.

But, uh, all of that will be available down in our notes. We hope you take advantage of that. Uh, for those of you that are going to be in SR, we'll see you over there.