Somehow we created a religious system in evangelicalism where love is not, it isn't the first thing. It's what you believe. It's your faith. Becomes the measure by which God judges where you're going to spend eternity, but it's not how much you love. You know? It's like, what if it was about how much you love? Like, why why is the measure by which God determines whether or not you get to hang in his hood for eternity? Why is that not your capacity to love? Why is it your capacity to believe something? That's really hard to believe if you really think about it.
SPEAKER_00Rhett is right. That is my point for this video. If you imagine that eternity hangs on your ability to get theology right, that the pearly gates swing open on a hinge that is your ability to drum up believing feelings within yourself. If you think heaven and hell depends on your ability to believe things that are difficult to believe, you are right to reject that kind of gospel. And Christians are entirely wrong to the degree that they proclaim that kind of gospel. Rhett is right, and Christians need to do a lot better. My name is Glenn Scrivener from Speed Life. We like to see all things through the lens of Jesus. If you like these kinds of subjects, why don't you give the channel a subscribe? Now, Rhett McLaughlin and Link Neil were on the podcast of Rich Roll and they were talking about their deconstruction. We're gonna go back a few minutes and we're gonna see how Rich Roll is interacting with them, and we're gonna hear what Rhett McLaughlin is saying in context. I really appreciated hearing what Rich Roll said about faith. He didn't grow up in the church in the same way that Rhett and Link did, but he has had a spiritual encounter through a 12-step program, and the God of the 12 steps met him in a really fascinating way. Let's hear Rich Roll talk about it.
SPEAKER_01There's a thing in AA, like I'm a longtime sober person, and you know, AA is fundamentally a spiritual program. And a lot of people who arrive on the doorstep of AA, these broken people with, you know, broken lives as a result of the places that their addiction has led them, um, also often come in with a very checkered or or broken relationship with religion or any concept of God generally, and are put off by the idea that like in order to get sober, there's these steps and it's there's this like sort of you know cloud of spiritual spirituality that hangs hangs on top of it. And there's you know, understandable resistance to that. And the way in, or the way to kind of um disabuse people of these notions around religion that that don't necessarily serve us, is to simply say, like, this program requires that you have a connection with a higher power, but that higher power is up to you to decide. And it could just be this group of people right in front of you right now who know something that you don't, which is like how to stay sober for today, right? Like it doesn't have to be anything more than that, that the collective group consciousness can be, you know, the higher power that um that you can invest your faith in.
SPEAKER_00Now, the 12 steps are profoundly Christian, but it's a Christianity that's been very secularized. And so the higher power is right at the heart of recovery, according to the 12 steps that began with Alcoholics Anonymous. Step one is we admitted we were powerless over alcohol, that our lives had become unmanageable. Now, this is a really interesting way in to spirituality. The 12-step program is not about can you drum up within yourself the spiritual resources to get you through the day. The 12 steps begin with your inability, and that's a really helpful place to begin, actually. Step one is not about a higher power. Step one is about admitting you need a higher power because you are powerless. Now imagine if Rhett took that seriously, and imagine if the kinds of Christianity that Rhett is critiquing took that seriously. I think we'd be in a much healthier place. Step one, we are powerless. Step two, we came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. Now, in the 12-step programs, they want to secularize it, they want it to be as universally applicable as possible, and so they don't name the higher power as Jesus Christ. The power could be God as you understand him, it could be the community, it could be the collective, all sorts of things. And that's why Rich says the sorts of things that he says about the community being the higher power. But notice what you do in step three of the 12 steps. We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood him. You need to be able to entrust yourself to this higher power. That's why it's very important that this higher power is capable and this higher power is caring. You need your higher power to be powerful, you need your higher power to be loving so that you can entrust yourself into the care of this God. And only once you've understood the higher power and yourself do you move on to step four. We've made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves. Having begun with powerless and the need for a higher power who you can trust, you then make a fearless moral inventory. Step five is we admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs. Do you see how very Christian-shaped this whole recovery process is? Step six, we were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character. Step seven, we humbly ask him to remove our shortcomings. This is a profoundly spiritual journey that people are on, a profoundly Christian-shaped spiritual journey. And in some senses, the 12-step journey is shaped more healthily than some Christian understandings of the gospel. Some understandings of the Christian gospel are merely about how you get to heaven and not to hell. And because Christians believe that we are saved by faith alone, faith becomes the thing. It's the golden ticket that I use in order to get through the pearly gates. But that's not Christianity, and that's not even the 12-step program, which has been so shaped by Christianity. Let's return to what Rhett McLaughlin says, and we'll get a run-up to his comment about faith, hope, and love. We'll see where he's coming from because what he is critiquing needs to be critiqued.
SPEAKER_02And what is the foundation of that community? I mean, I think this can be too simple of an answer for people about the virtues of faith, hope, and love, but the greatest of these is love. Somehow we created a religious system in evangelicalism where love is not, it isn't the first thing. It's what you believe. It's your faith. Becomes the measure by which God judges where you're going to spend eternity, but it's not how much you love. You know, it's like, what if it was about how much you love? Like, why is the measure by which God determines whether or not you get to hang in his hood for eternity? Why is that not your capacity to love? Why is it your capacity to believe something that's really hard to believe if you really think about it? So I think that communities that are actually exercising love and are serving people, I think my philosophy is migrate to those communities, and that is gonna be some churches, that's gonna be organizations and nonprofits that are doing work in places that need it. I think if you go to those places and you connect, like Link was saying, with the people who are who are leading with love, I think you're gonna find more spiritual water than you could ever hope to drink.
SPEAKER_01I think it's all about love. I think I think like uh that is the the question and the answer. I think it begins and ends with all of that. The more that I think about it and the more years that I've lived.
SPEAKER_00That is exactly right. It is all about love. It is about a love that is trustworthy because this love has proven itself to be capable and caring. You can entrust yourself to that kind of community. Where does that kind of community draw its resources from? Well, we should be at least curious about the fact that the community that has down through the ages been a community of faith, hope, and love for the longest time, across the most number of racial and ethnic and geographical boundaries, the community that has brought about the greatest amount of human flourishing in human history, the community that is the most diverse, inclusive sociological phenomenon the world has ever seen, that community has been founded upon Christ, who is love covered over in flesh. And no wonder the communities that follow him are communities that have love burst in them. But Rhett is wrong to think it's about our capacity to love. Rich Roll was much more correct when he points us to the 12 steps. The 12 steps do not begin with our capacity to love. The 12 steps begin with our incapacity, with our powerlessness. And that's right. I cannot drum up this kind of community, I cannot drum up this kind of love. I need a loving power from beyond me to love me in my helplessness, in my moral perversion, in my addictions, in my sin. I need the higher power to meet me in my powerlessness, to set me on my own feet, to love me back to recovery so that I can pass on the love to others. Life is not about my capacity to love, not in the first instance. Life is about God's capacity to love the loveless, that they might lovely be, in the words of the old hymn. It is about love, but it's not about our love first. We love, says 1 John chapter 4, we love because he first loved us. And you know what? There is a name for receiving the love of God when you're powerless. The name for that is faith. John chapter 1, verse 12. To all who received Jesus, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God. Notice how receiving Jesus and believing in Jesus are parallel terms. John is not giving you two different things to do in order to be saved. He's not saying, on the one hand, you can receive Jesus, on the other hand, you believe in his name, because John's gospel is all about faith. It's all about faith alone. It's all about believing, is the one and only thing that you do to become a child of God. Receiving Jesus is another way of speaking about believing in Jesus. Faith is the description of you having, in all your powerlessness, simply received the love of God that is offered to you in Christ. Faith is not a thing that you push out of yourself via willpower. Faith is pulled out of you by the higher power beyond you called Jesus, who loves you in your powerlessness. And having recognized your powerlessness and your sin, you see the love of another who loves you in the midst of your mess. And when you see that love for the loveless shown, you find yourself believing. But Christians commonly get this wrong, and they get this wrong for four different reasons. They boil down their gospel to four P's. They want to boil things down to the plain, they want to boil things down to the personal, to the pressured, and to the pragmatic. And it's we evangelists who are largely to blame. Rhett and Link were evangelists for a number of years before they got into YouTube on a full-time basis. And we evangelists constantly make the error of boiling things down to the plain, the personal, the pressured, and the pragmatic. The plain. We want to make things as utterly simple as possible. And so we take people through four spiritual laws, or we draw the bridge diagram, or we just boil it down to things that are utterly simplistic. You know, Einstein is meant to have said things should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler. And the evangelist is always trying to make things more simple than they actually are, more plain than they actually are. But that just makes things more rejectable than they actually are, because life is more complicated than that. We boil things down to the plain, we boil things down to the personal, and it becomes just about you and God. And how are you going to get through the turnstile and into heaven by yourself? We have very little interest in the kind of community that Rhett and Rich and Link were talking about throughout this conversation. We make it plain, we make it personal, we make it pressured. We reverse engineer our gospel from the existence of heaven and hell rather than beginning with the God who loves. If you begin with the God who loves, your gospel presentation heads in a certain direction. If you reverse engineer the gospel from the end and the existence of heaven and hell, you get to quite a different gospel presentation. But too often we're plain, we're personal, we're pressured, and we're pragmatic. It's about what must I do to be saved? And then the good Protestant evangelist comes along and says, Oh, what must you do to be saved? Well, you don't do the loving thing of good works. Instead, you do the evangelical thing of believing certain things. But it's the pragmatism that has utterly gripped you. Instead of doing loving deeds to get into heaven, you just have to do this faith thing to get into heaven. And that's just a ridiculous gospel. It's imbecilic, it's moronic. We did a sketch about this a few years ago with Paul and Andy. Check out how ridiculous it can get when you're so pragmatic as to think faith is your golden ticket to get you into heaven. Great Paul. Will you really impressed us with a life of tireless sacrificial service? Giving up both kidneys was a really lovely gesture, but I'm afraid it was Andy who actually got his theology correct. So, uh Andy, why don't you come on in and uh have a lovely time? The bar's just there on the left. And uh, Paul, uh, if you've got any complaints, please do take them up with management. Downstairs. It's an utterly foolish way of thinking of the gospel, but this is because of our pragmatism. We are trying to answer the question, what must I do to be saved? Rather than tell the story of the higher power, the God, Jesus Christ, who comes and saves we who are so powerless and unlovely. Rhett had encountered a lot of that kind of Christianity, and Rhett has deconstructed. And Rhett is right to deconstruct from that. But that is not the true Christian gospel. And simply drumming up love from within yourself is not the true Christian gospel. The true Christian gospel begins with the God who is love, who loves us in all our unloveliness. And you're starting to believe in this God. Well, then we call that faith. But faith is not your golden ticket. If you want to find out more about this God of love, why don't you go to 321course.com and check out the God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit bound together in love. This is where truly good news begins. You can get in, you can watch the eight videos, you can join the chat community, you can ask whatever question you like. We would love you to do 321. Go to 321course.com and have you tap that like button. Will you think about who you can share it with? And why don't you subscribe to us so that we can catch you on the next video? God bless you.