Leaving Pietism | Theocast

Hi, this is Jimmy. On Theocast today, John and Justin and myself, we talk about one of the favorite things we love to discuss, specifically the idea of pietism.

We talk about this a lot in our regular podcasts, and one of the things it can create is kind of this disorienting feel to the

Christian life. And so we've titled this Leaving Pietism, where we discuss all of the different effects that it can have on the

Christian life. We hope this conversation is helpful to you, and we have a second part of this podcast normally in our members portion that we encourage you to listen to, and that's really where we land the plane of this conversation.

Thank you for listening. Thank you for your support, and we hope and pray that this podcast encourages you to find rest in Christ.

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slash give. Welcome to Theocast, encouraging weary pilgrims to rest in Christ, conversations about the

Christian life from a Reformed perspective. Your hosts today are John Moffitt, pastor of Grace Reformed Church in Spring Hill, Tennessee, Justin Perdue, pastor of Covenant Baptist Church in Asheville, North Carolina, and myself,

Jimmy Buehler, pastor of Christ Community Church in Willmar, Minnesota. Gentlemen, we are in the midst of a blizzard here in Willmar, but it is good to see your lovely faces.

It has been far too long. Yes, it's good to be back on the mic with Jimmy.

Why is Jimmy crying? Because he's been so busy.

Froggy Fresh. That's a great video, Why James Crying. That's right. If you haven't seen that, get on the old

YouTubes and check that. There's your hot take for today. Froggy Fresh will lighten anybody's day.

There it is. I have so many hot takes. I've just been building them up since I've been absent for so long.

I'll just save them for Twitter. It's probably not a bad thing.

Twitter seems to be the appropriate place where you air all of your grievances and build an audience.

That is exactly right. I'm pretty sure Twitter deleted one of my tweets the other day.

It probably did. I think so. That big tag. It was a funny tweet.

All I said was, YouTube is the father none of us ever had. It's where I go to learn things.

It's like the things your dad should have taught you. I go to YouTube and learn them. It got deleted.

I don't know what the deal was. I think your actual father reported the tweet in offense.

Probably. Public service announcement from Theocast. Just a reminder lovingly that Twitter is not real life.

It's not. I'm offended by that. I tweet, but I don't read anybody's tweet unless Jimmy sends it to me.

That's true. I apologize if you're offended by that. Anyways, going in.

You put all that work into composing those tweets and John doesn't care. He doesn't read them.

Not really. We're in 2020, but this is releasing the new year.

We know that. Theocast has a lot going on in 2021.

We are trying to do more than we've done before, so stay tuned for that. We've got a lot of great announcements coming on.

We're really excited about today's podcast because with all of our schedules, it seems like it's getting harder and harder being church planners and working jobs, so it's always an encouragement to have

Jimmy here back on the mic. I think we're going to grab quite a few over the next few of these holidays, so that'll be encouraging to have him back on.

Anyways, today is a big moment for our podcast. It's a podcast we have been contemplating and talking about.

We have skirted around the topic. We've mentioned it, but today is the day that we record a very important conversation, and the subject is leaving pietism.

I can remember the first time I heard that word. I had no idea what it was. It sounded puritanical, which was very much connected to that.

I remember once it was described for me for the first time, as Jimmy had said before we recorded,

I had that, oh, I'm not crazy moment. There are many of you that probably are hearing this podcast for the first time because a friend of yours shared it with you.

We're going to hopefully, and as graciously as we can, peel back the

Christian layers that have been laid upon you that we call pietism. Let's start with, guys, what is piety and pietism, and then we'll talk about why it is that this is a good subject to be discussing this morning.

I think first we need to make a sharp distinction because whenever we have this conversation with people, there seems to be a misunderstanding of the terms that are being utilized.

What we like to say here at Theocast is piety is good.

Holiness is good. No person, no guy on this podcast would go ahead and say that a life of sin, rampant sin, is okay.

Nobody would say that. Piety is good, but what we are pointing out is pietism is bad and unhelpful.

What we mean by that is pietism is this hyper -focus on the personal sanctification of the believer, a hyper -focus of what we would call the inward

Christian life where it's obsessive about feelings and the popular word you could say is my affections.

There is a hyper -intense focus on the personal faithfulness of the

Christian. After a while, what you can begin to feel in a pietistic realm of the

Christian life is this, I'm never doing enough. I never feel like I'm living rightly enough.

There's always something more to be done. We're going to get into that here shortly, but I want to throw it to J .P.

to help flesh out this idea of the difference of piety and pietism and specifically what we mean.

J .P.: Piety, I think we can define simply as godliness.

In particular, it is the work of the Holy Spirit in and through us. Piety, as Jimmy has already said, is all kinds of good.

We're all for it. We trust the Holy Spirit of God to be producing godliness and genuine piety in us, and he is faithful to do that work.

Pietism, as Jimmy has already said, is a hyper -focus on the obedience, the performance, the affections, and feelings of the believer.

The emphasis seems to be almost exclusively upon the believer's own personal improvement.

In that sense, I think it is fine to say that it's a focus on the believer's own sanctification, but it is always this hyper -individualized reality that becomes the emphasis of everything in the local church.

What we want to try to do here on this podcast is do a few minutes of defining terms and pulling back the curtain, helping people see what this is and maybe what this even looks like in their own personal context.

Then we want to do some reconstructing. How can we help lead you and lead many out of pietism into a different place that is focused upon the

Lord Jesus Christ and his finished work, where there actually is rest and peace and assurance to be found as we together are being sanctified by the

Holy Spirit and built up in love unto maturity in the body of Christ?

John, is there anything else that you want to do by way of talking the field before we maybe talk about what this looks like and how this affects us in the local church?

I know when we say something like hyper -focus on individual sanctification seems almost like an oxymoron.

We're de -emphasizing the importance of obedience. That is part of pietism.

Part of pietism has so rebranded the Christian life.

It has changed the way in which the Bible has put the emphasis.

We assume that all of Christianity is the constant affirmation of our election.

Pietism is almost a denial of God's sovereignty that he who began a good work in you will complete it, that our faith rests not in our works but the work of Christ.

All of that would be affirmed in pietism. In pietism, they would say, yes,

God is sovereign. He elects us. But all of our sermons and books and the way in which we think, the way we process this relationship with God is

I must meet these watermarks. If I don't meet these watermarks, then

I should call into question whether I truly am a child of God. There's this feeling of onward and upward, this constant pressure of growth.

What's hard is that you aren't quite sure where the watermarks are.

It seems like they're moving. As Justin has used in an illustration in the past, it's like Lucy keeps moving the football.

The goalposts keep moving. You never truly find rest because of the requirements on you.

If you're doing five minutes a day of devotions and prayer, really you should be at 10 minutes.

Then really you should be, and then you should be, and then you should be. You have people who will go into a men's or women's

Bible study and confess a struggle with a sin, and they are looked at. The question they receive is, how long have you been a

Christian? Shouldn't you be over that by now? There is no place for struggling with sin.

There is no place for doubt and fear and anxiety. When you do have those, you suppress them because pietism basically says you should be looking like this.

People, in my experience, become fake, superficial, and you suppress any real doubts that you have because you do not want to be known as a baby

Christian. When we say hyper -focus, what we're saying is you are more focused on what you are doing for God than what

God has done for you. Hyper meaning inappropriate emphasis. It's an inappropriate emphasis on the individual's sanctification because you don't assume that you can actually sanctify yourself and God is there cheering you on.

Pietism is essentially a prove -yourself kind of outlook. It's a prove -yourself kind of theological framework where there are these standards that need to be met.

Again, nobody can define those biblically. Nobody can tell you how much is enough, and we've talked about that before.

There needs to be a certain amount of improvement, a certain amount of performance and obedience, a certain kind of trajectory in my affections.

If I am not meeting that standard, then I should be very concerned. If I'm not meeting that standard, to your point,

John, my entire union with the Lord Jesus is called into question. It's a fundamentally different understanding and presentation of the

Christian life than what we see in the New Testament. In the New Testament, the apostles seem to convey that you are in Christ Jesus by faith.

You have been united to him, and thereby you are legit. Now, live in the

Lord Jesus Christ and conduct yourself in these ways as the redeemed saints of God.

Instead, Pietism flips that on its head and says, if you are legitimately in the

Lord Jesus, then you will do all of these things, and you need to go prove that you're not a faker through your obedience, through your performance, through your improvement, through your affections and your feelings.

That has all kind of fallout for the local church and for the life of the individual

Christian. The heavy emphasis on fruit. Are you demonstrating fruit? Jon Moffitt Well, in a

Pietistic framework, the Christian life becomes one of constant self -discernment.

Jon Moffitt Sure. Jon Moffitt There is this intense focus on motives. It's not just, did

I do this particular Christian act, but did I do it with the right motives? That isn't to say that motivations are unimportant, but it is to say that that is an endless well that you can get very much lost and go into a downward spiral as you focus on all of the things that you should be doing.

Not only that you should be doing, but that you should be doing with the right motivations. Jon Moffitt Your motivations aren't swimming in grace.

You're in trouble. Your motivations must swim in grace. The harder you flail and struggle, the further you sink down in it.

Jon Moffitt I would say in Pietism, the eyes of the heart are always pointed inward.

You're constantly looking to yourself. Just speaking from personal experience, when

I lived in a Pietistic world, it actually produced the opposite of what it promises.

I would think that spending time in personal prayer and Bible study would produce a greater holiness and love for the saints.

But often what it did was the exact opposite. It made me really neurotic as I tried to fulfill self -imposed laws of, did

I do it enough though? And did I do it with the right amount of reverence? I would constantly remember reading my own

Bible and saying, am I doing this for the right reasons? Or am

I just doing this to gain God's favor? We can maybe shift the conversation to hear that the

Pietistic life can ruin a Christian. There's really two ways that it does that.

One is that Pietism can produce some really self -righteous people, but also it can produce some really self -conscious people.

I want to throw that to you guys and flesh that out. What does Pietism do to the

Christian and maybe even the local church? Justin Perdue Just very quick interjection for the sake of clarity.

When we talk about Pietistic contexts, we do not mean that in those contexts the gospel is not preached.

It generally is. When we talk about Pietistic contexts, it's not as though people in those realms don't believe in the sovereignty of God and salvation and things like that.

Oftentimes they do. It's this very strange, almost schizophrenic reality where, on the one hand,

I'm being pointed to Jesus and what He's done for me, and I'm even being told to find peace and comfort in the sovereignty of God over my life and over my salvation.

But then, on the other side of it, I'm being robbed of any assurance that I could ever have because I'm always being pointed inward and being caused to question the legitimacy of everything that I do and the sincerity of everything that I do.

To your point, Jimmy, did I feel the right way? Were my motivations appropriate? Did I do enough? Am I zealous enough?

Inevitably, anybody who has any self -awareness when they're trying to measure themselves according to those standards, we're going to fall short.

We're going to fail. We're not going to pass the test. To your point, and I'm going to hand it back over to John, I think the results of Pietism in the local church or in the individual believer's life are one of two things generally.

I think for some people, and this would be a smaller subset, it can fan the flames of self -righteousness and pride because for some folks, they think they're doing pretty well and maybe naively think they're crushing the

Christian life. For those people, they're just driven further into that self -righteousness and that proud place, and they tend to look down on others and be condescending and all that.

But I think for the majority of us, what it ends up doing is it ends up crushing us and producing despair.

We're anxious and depressed all the time because life in a fallen world is hard enough as it is, and then the only thing that could ever give us peace and hope and assurance has been taken from us because we're being pointed to ourselves and we realize, oh my gosh,

I haven't done well enough, and maybe I'm not legitimate. We really are just floundering, and we're distraught and despondent, frankly.

Justin Perdue Hopefully you hear that these are three men who know the pietistic tendencies of their own heart, who have drowned in it themselves.

One of the things that Jimmy has said is that all pietists hate legalism.

They will say that legalism is bad, that you cannot and should not earn your salvation before God.

And they would be offended if you called them a legalist. They would say, oh, that is an inappropriate description of who

I am. Pietism is really sneaky. It's very, very sneaky because pietism is not the emphasis of earning your salvation.

The sneaky part of it is it's maintaining your salvation. It's proving that when you say you are saved by faith alone, that you really mean it.

There is a lot of worry about lordship salvation and radicalness and even some of the things that come from your desires and affections, as Jimmy has said.

What it does to you is that you obviously are going to quote

Ephesians 2 .8 and 9 from the rooftops, but in your bedroom you're totally afraid saying, but is that really true of me?

Is that really how I feel? And so you live in that constant fear and dread.

Those who have grown up in a dispensational background, you're worried that Christ is going to come back and you truly aren't one of the elect because you don't seem to be showing enough.

And so you don't live in confidence of Christ. You live in doubt of Christ because of you.

You are denying faith alone, because if God truly saves you,

I said this on Sunday, salvation is a person. It's not a process.

Jesus saves you. You don't do something to be saved. If you're new to Theocast, we have a free ebook 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 does it mean to live by faith alone?

We wrote this little book to provide a simple answer from a Reformed confessional perspective.

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This is a monthly membership where we provide additional content each week. Your support is what allows us to keep spreading the good news of resting in Christ.

You can learn more at theocast .org. I think one of the favorite phrases of Pietism is the if -then, the conditional statements that if you truly are a

Christian, then you would necessarily do these things. Ultimately, what that points us to is that the litmus test of our faithfulness, the litmus test of our

Christianity, often becomes the things that we do. That is where the focus is.

Now, I want to be clear. That doesn't mean that there aren't necessary consequences of the Christian life.

That is not what we are saying. We are not saying that you can have faith in Christ and then go on and live however it is that you good and well please.

But what we are saying is that there is a fundamental different posture to the Christian life.

The litmus test is not the faithfulness of the Christian, which waxes and wanes as the difficulties of a fallen world press in on the believer.

But the litmus test of the Christian life, the litmus test of will I be finally saved, is always and forever

Christ and Christ alone. That has to be it. Otherwise, the minute that we begin to add our own works, our own maintaining faithfulness to the

Christian life, we actually begin to taint the purity of what the gospel is, which is that Christ has saved us by grace alone, through faith alone, on account of his precious work alone.

That has to be it. Justin Perdue Amen, brother. I just thought about it this way.

If I were going to try to reduce it down to piggyback on what you're saying, the litmus test in pietism of the

Christian life and our legitimacy is what we do, not who we trust.

It's just soul crushing for so many people. I think that all the statements that you made,

Jimmy, by way of clarification are important. We are all for good works and the pursuit of obedience.

Let me just briefly interrupt myself. The concern of every holiness movement in the history of the church has always been that if we tell people that redemption and salvation are finished, that Jesus has done it, there's nothing left for you to do except to trust

Christ and receive what he has done for you. If we tell people that, then it will produce lawless living and lax

Christianity. Our response to that is always and forever going to be no.

The preaching and the heralding of the finished work of Jesus in no way produces those things because of the reality of our union with Jesus and the reality of the work of his

Spirit in us to conform us to his image. The Lord will do it. It's very interesting how people who love to say that salvation is of the

Lord from beginning to end will lose their minds somewhere in the middle.

God has justified us. God will glorify us. But in the middle, you better get to work.

It depends upon you, your effort, your diligence, your sincerity, whatever, to make sure that this thing goes according to plan.

You may very well mess it up, to which we would say, if that's true, then we may as well be doing something else because we're wasting our time.

If we can mess this thing up, we will. Piety really is rooted in the concern for the lazy or lax

Christian. Pietism is. Pietism, correct. There are entire movements and ministries and well -known men who have created massive followings because they have convinced people that lazy

Christians are not Christians. They're constantly calling into question the intentions, desires, and works of the individual.

This is a concern I've had. I've been doing this for five years on the air, so I've received a lot of criticism over the years.

These guys are experiencing this now too. What we are offering is not an either -or situation here.

You are either doing no holiness or you are doing holiness. This is not an either -or. As a matter of fact,

I can't remember how many times it would be interesting to go back and see us quoting Ephesians 4 when it says, "...walk

in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called." Paul starts with your resting in Christ for three chapters and then talks about the motivation for your obedience.

But it has nothing to do with this individual hypersanctification. It's all outward. If you've been saved, love your brother.

What pietism tells you is, if you've been saved, prove it. Do these things to prove it and increase it.

What's interesting is that Peter says, Christ has sovereignly chosen us.

He saved us. He's the one who's moving us forward. Then he says, now add to this love, kindness, meekness, gentleness.

The point of it is that the adding is building upon the foundation. The word add there is kind of a tricky translation.

It really should say more of the outflow. You must now demonstrate.

At the end of it, he says, if you're not doing this, you have forgotten that you've been cleansed.

That is an appropriate understanding of our good works. Pietism would change what

Peter says. It would say, if you aren't doing these things, you should question if you've been cleansed.

Peter says, you forgot you were cleansed. Pietism says, you should question your cleansing. Something I'd like to point out is that Pietism can also be called the tag your it theology.

It's like when Christ died on the cross. When he said, it is finished, what he really meant was tag your it.

I did my part, now it's your turn. J .P.,

I like the word that you used earlier, that maintenance of the Christian life is really up to us and us alone.

Jesus is coming back, so you better, within fear and trembling, await his return and stockpile your life of love and good works.

Make sure that when he returns, there is enough. What the

Bible mysteriously points us to is that Jesus is the founder, but he's also the perfecter of our faith.

The book of Hebrews talks about that. Philippians chapter 1, that he who began a good work in you, verse 6, will bring it to completion.

Paul says, I am sure of this. Exactly. Where we want to be so primarily concerned often is with the quality of my personal holiness.

I think the Scripture constantly wants to draw us out of ourselves to see that Christ has accomplished so much for us in the cross and in his resurrection.

The Scriptures want to point us to that. The Scriptures also want to point us to that one of the fundamental postures of the

Christian life is what we call status forward. Our status in Christ is forgiven, cleansed, made new.

We have died and risen with Christ. It's the same thing that we talk to about our kids.

When our kids disobey in the Buhler household, something that we constantly say is,

Buhlers don't do that. Charlie, Owen, and Nora, you better shape up or else you might prove yourself not to be a

Buhler. That's not it at all. No, you are a Buhler. Therefore, we don't hit our sister.

In light of that, we don't lie to mom and dad. It has nothing to do with our love or affection for them as their parents.

We point them to their identity. It's like, no, Buhlers don't do that.

It's the same within the Christian life. Even outside of a pietistic framework, what we're pointing to, the framework that we're pointing to, it doesn't actually lessen the battle against sin.

It just puts you in a completely different mindset. However, you're going to start to notice that.

I can hear it. I can see it. The people listening to this podcast right now, it's like I can see them like, uh -oh,

I feel crazy. Suddenly, everything is being shifted.

JP, go ahead. I think you want to jump in. I want to speak to that you're not crazy thing. That is, in one sense, what we're saying to people.

If you are sensing this stuff and perceiving this stuff, and you're in a context where you do feel like something is off here, we want to tell you you're not alone, and you're not crazy.

I've tweeted this before, and I don't think I got some flack for it.

Many agreed with it. I think that pietism is an evangelical version of gaslighting, where in the church, we're constantly being pointed inward.

We're being pointed to ourselves in our own performance and obedience and affections like we've been saying. Thereby, we assess ourselves.

We fail to meet the test. We're not doing well enough, and so we're unsettled. We lack assurance.

We're despairing, and we're despondent. We go to the leaders in our church or to our pastors, and we ask the questions.

We present this struggle that we're having with, I have no peace. I have no assurance. What do you have for me?

I'm concerned about my eternal state and whether or not I'm in grace or not.

The answer is always, we don't know what you're talking about. We're saved by grace through faith in Christ alone.

There's nothing wrong here. You're fine if you're trusting in Jesus, but then we turn right around the next

Sunday, and we're being pointed back in on ourselves again. It puts the believer in this state.

If anybody's seen that movie back in the day, the gaslight movie, it's this situation where we're thinking that we're losing our minds because we're struggling with assurance.

Something must be wrong with me, when in reality there's this very confusing message that's being presented.

You better be doing enough, but then on the other hand you ask about it. It's like, oh no, we believe in salvation by grace through faith in Christ alone.

Then you leave thinking, well, I guess the problem lies with me. Clearly Christianity has not worked for me, or maybe

I'm just not of the elect or whatever it is, whatever you conclude. It's tough.

Jesus' phrase when he says, come unto me all you who are heavy laden, he's talking about, to be frank, he's talking about pietism.

He's talking about the law. He's saying, those of you who have been put under this pressure by the

Pharisees, come to me, and I love it. He says, I will give you rest.

This is the tagline of our ministry, helping weary pilgrims to find rest in Christ, because this is what

Christ does. Then he says, my burden is easy. He's not saying there's nothing to be done.

He said there's nothing to be done. That's right. For I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.

A yoke, just so you understand, is something that two animals would wear.

It was something you did together. Christ comes around, and he holds us, and we rest within his work.

This burden, as we wait for his return, is not a burden we cannot bear.

I know a lot of times we get to this point in the conversation, and I get this question all the time.

Where did this go? Where did this come from? I'm going to tell you right now. You heard your grandparents tell you, there's a box up in the attic.

If you want it, it's yours. You go up in there, and you start millaging around, and then you see this old box of books.

You're like, I wonder what that is. You pop it open, and all of a sudden, you see a title that just grabs you, and you start reading it.

This book is old. It's like 300, 400 years old. All of a sudden, you're realizing this book is flaying you apart.

It's describing you to a tee. This is what's happening to the three men that are talking to you right now, except for that box of books is called a confession.

We started to read how the Reformers, aka

Christianity, this is what the Christian life was supposed to be, is supposed to be, and it is grounded in Scripture.

It is always focusing on the finished work of Christ. This isn't new. We aren't describing something like, you will not believe what we have discovered.

What we have discovered has been written, and we're rediscovering it.

We're reteaching that which is old. You need to find assurance and find safety in that what we are pointing out is new, and what we're asking you to leave and walk towards.

We're not asking you to leave something. We're actually drawing you towards something. You're walking away from something towards a sure foundation that is far older than anything that's ever been handed to you, which is purely, for another podcast, based on revivalism of the 18th century.

Unless people want to criticize us, which we have, when people say, you focus too much on what the

Reformers have said. But really, the Reformers were going back also to the original sources, ad fontes,

Latin, back to the sources. They were focusing on what the earliest church fathers were writing and the scriptures themselves.

What we're not saying is, whatever Luther says or Calvin says or Knox says, these guys were always right.

No, those guys were doing what we are seeking to do today back then. One of the things, a mantra that came out of the

Reformation was extranos, which means outside of us.

Something that I like to point our church to and something that I want to point the listener to is that the Christian life is outside of yourself.

That the realities of the gospel exist outside of you. That we need the gospel to come to us from outside of us and declare forgiveness and grace over us.

Then the Christian life is also outwardly focused. That our status in Christ has been made right.

That we are justified by grace alone, through faith alone, on account of Christ alone. Now, in total freedom, we can love and serve

God and our neighbor. Pietism actually wants to rob you of that because it wants to place the posture of the

Christian life, the focus of the Christian life, inward. That it's a battle of emotions and it's a battle of feelings and it's a battle of motivations.

That isn't to say that those things aren't important, but as we said earlier, that is an endless well that will only cause you to downwardly spiral the rest of your days and produce this opposite of what we are saying because it's going to produce a neurotic person.

Tell me this. What's it like being around an insecure person? What's it like?

Frankly, insecure people do a lot of things, but some of the things that insecure people do the most is they become intolerable, they become rude, and they become bitey because they're insecure and they're trying to make up for something.

Or insecure people are almost insufferable to be around because they're always talking about themselves, focusing on themselves.

That's what Pietism does to the Christian. It just points you inwards so much to the point where you are actually in an effort to be fruitful, you become fruitless because you're constantly focusing on...

You become burdensome to others, frankly. Exactly. Just to go back on real quick to add to what

Jimmy had said about inward versus out, one of the things you realize is that...

Let me just phrase it this way. The Christian life was never designed to be lived alone. And Pietism just isolates everyone.

That your growth, your security is all wrapped up in you. And what you will learn through the

Confessions, through Scripture, just read Ephesians 4 and following, that your health, your growth, and your effectiveness have nothing to do with your own personal piety.

Your personal piety, which is absolutely important, how you obey, is designed to draw you into the community of Christ, the body of Christ.

Paul never says, when you do this, you will grow in Christ. He says, when the body functions properly, it builds itself up in love.

And that is the difference between a confessional outlook of Scripture, that it's drawing you towards a congregational, towards a body, versus Pietism, which is drawing you inward and individuals.

I think it's really important to understand as you're walking away from Pietism, you're walking away from this isolation, being by yourself, constant living in fear, to this massive choir, to this massive gathering of information from outside of you, where you are constantly being told of what

Christ has done for you by others. I know I've picked on this before, but I'll pick on it again and I'll throw it to Justin.

That whole phrase, preach the gospel to yourself. Sure, and it's helpful. And I do, and I think on Christ, and I love to think about Christ, but that is never as effective as it is when

I receive the table and I hear the gospel proclaimed over me because we receive Christ outside of ourselves.

That's the design of Jesus in the Holy Spirit and the power of the body. Justin Perdue Yeah, we're not as good as we would like to think we are at preaching the gospel to ourselves.

We need the saints. We need the gifts Christ has given to the church. We need the sacraments. We need those things.

Amen. I want to reiterate a couple of things that you guys have said and maybe put it in my own way, and maybe this will be helpful to somebody.

I want to reiterate what Jimmy said about the history of all this stuff. I think the listener needs to understand that not only are we not saying anything new, we are, in looking back to the

Reformers, we are standing in line with them as they look back through church history to men like Augustine, for example, and Augustine's infamous

Miserable Sinner Christianity, where we are desperate for the grace of God in all things, and where he says,

Lord God, you command what you will and grant what you command, and we're completely dependent upon you to work these things in us.

That sounds very Reformed. Obviously, Augustine and the Reformers alike are looking back to Scripture.

But a few big words in my mind. Guys, if I was going to give people some handles,

Jimmy talked about extranos. One handle is objective. The gospel and the work of Christ is objective, meaning it's outside of us.

It's unaffected by anything inside of me, how I'm doing, how I'm feeling, how

I'm thinking. It's not subjective, it's objective. Then it's also the work of Christ and the gospel are declarative, meaning they're done.

They're finished. There's nothing to be added to them. We rest in what Christ has done, and we receive it. Also, the

Christian life is corporate, to John's point. We are saved from God's wrath to God's people, and the project of sanctification, the project of salvation, is a corporate project.

It's a community effort where we cling to one another as we all cling to Christ. This is

God's plan. Objective, declarative, corporate are good words, I think, at least in my backpack that I think about regularly.

Those are different than what is often presented to the Christian in the pew. I think they're freeing, they're liberating, and their paradigms are shifting.

I think we want to ask a question now that we may try to answer. I think we're going to transition into our membership, and John's going to explain a little bit more about what our membership is and what it looks like.

I remember when I was younger, just got married, and I was inheriting all of these tools, all of these tools to work on the house and things like that.

I remember there's one specific tool. I'm going to leave it unnamed so I'm not super embarrassed, but I remember there was one tool that I was just using incorrectly, massively incorrectly.

I thought I was a guy, I was a man, I can do this. I can do this.

I can figure this out. I remember using this tool, and one time this guy was like, you know you're using that wrong.

Then he showed me how to use it, and it shifted everything for me. It was like all of a sudden,

I wanted to use this tool on everything. It was like making eggs using this tool.

It was just so exciting. Now on the members podcast, you got to tell everybody what it is. I'm not going to do it. You got to do it.

It's safe. It wouldn't be prudent at this juncture. Have you guys seen that YouTube video of the guy using the jackhammer, but using his own arms?

Oh my gosh. Totally. Anyway, kind of what we're discussing

I think is going to do this for a lot of people, that it's going to be like, wait a minute.

I'm realizing that I'm stuck in pietism, or I'm stuck in a pietistic context.

Now what? What do I do now? I have all these realizations. That's what we're going to talk about on our members.

JP, you want to say something, and then we'll throw it to John to kind of close this out. If somebody were to ask me,

Justin, how would you summarize the kind of theology that you guys are articulating here at Theocast?

Give it to me in a really brief synopsis. I would say that what we are aiming to articulate and emphasize is simply the sufficiency of Jesus Christ.

It is that He is mighty and able to save to the uttermost all those who draw near to God through Him.

At the end of the day, that's it. Amen. Amen to that.

Well, we are going to be moving over into our membership. 2021 has a new membership for us, and we're kind of changing up how things are done.

What we want to do is provide for you additional resources, ways in which if you love what you're hearing and you want to learn what does it mean to rest in Christ and what are other

Reformed resources and what articles should I be reading, what books should I be reading, and we're offering more classes.

We have a class on covenant theology, a class on Calvinism, we have a class on Reformed spirituality. There's a lot that we're doing.

But the biggest push that we want you to hear is that your partnership with us is what allows us to keep this going.

We've been doing this for a while now, and I can't tell you how many emails, how many comments, how many messages that we receive from people literally from around the world.

We have over 125 different countries who have listened over a million downloads, and all of that is possible because we have people who basically jump on our teams and become supporters on our support teams.

And so we just want to thank you for doing that. A way that we kind of add to that is our membership podcast, and it's where kind of like the gloves come off and we really kind of get down and dirty into the weeds and express some things that we probably just don't have time to do in the regular podcast.

So we encourage you to come over there and join us on our private podcast feed. You can download that right onto your phone. Well, guys, this has been a fun conversation.

We've been looking forward to this one for a long time. And so we want to thank you, the listener, for tuning into this episode.

And we would encourage you, if you are not a member, to get signed up for that. You can find more information at theocast .org.

But now we're going to head over into the members portion of the podcast. And we hope to see you there.

Maybe I'll talk about the tool. We'll see. We'll see how I feel. You gotta do it. You gotta do it. Thanks for listening, everybody.