Shifting Culture
Shifting Culture
Ep. 298 Andrew Arndt Returns - How the Story of Jesus Changes the Way We See Everything
Andrew Arndt is back on the podcast today. He’s a pastor and author who's challenging how we typically understand the gospel. His new book, "A Strange and Gracious Light," explores what it means to see Jesus as a living presence that intersects with our real, complicated lives. We'll discuss how the gospel isn't just about personal salvation or afterlife insurance, but a transformative story that speaks directly into our current cultural moment - with all its complexity, pain, and potential. Andrew brings a fresh, albeit an ancient perspective on how Jesus encounters us in our everyday struggles, political tensions, and personal challenges. This conversation is about reimagining the good news of Jesus as something far more expansive and immediate than we've traditionally understood. We'll explore what it means to experience Christ's presence in a way that's both deeply personal and broadly transformative. So join us as we facilitate encounters with the living God.
Andrew Arndt is the Lead Pastor of New Life East (one of seven congregations of New Life Church in Colorado Springs), where he also hosts the Essential Church podcast, a weekly conversation designed to strengthen the thinking of church and ministry leaders. Prior to joining New Life’s team, he served as Lead Pastor of Bloom Church: a neo-monastic, charismatic, liturgical, justice-driven network of house churches in Denver. He received his MDiv from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, is working on his Doctor of Ministry at Western Theological Seminary, and has written for Missio Alliance, Patheos, The Other Journal, and Mere Orthodoxy. He lives in the Springs with his wife Mandi and their four kids.
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Paul says it's like weakness is where the strength of God is completed. So that might actually be the way in which we see the power of God begin to rush again into our culture. When we stop trying to coerce the culture into being the way that we want it to be said, we show up again as heralds, ambassadors of the good news of the glory of God.
Unknown:I Hello and welcome to the shifting culture podcast in which we have conversations about the culture we create and the impact we can make. We long to see the body of Christ. Look like Jesus. I'm your host. Joshua Johnson, Andrew Arndt is back on the podcast today. He's a pastor and author who's challenging how we typically understand the gospel. His new book, a strange and gracious light, explores what it means to see Jesus as a living presence that intersects with our real, complicated lives, we'll discuss how the gospel isn't just about personal salvation or afterlife insurance, but a transformative story that speaks directly into our current cultural moment with all its complexity and pain and potential, Andrew brings that fresh, albeit an ancient, perspective on how Jesus encounters us in our everyday struggles, political tensions and personal challenges. This conversation is about re imagining the good news of Jesus as something far more expansive and immediate than we've traditionally understood. We'll explore what it means to experience Christ's presence in a way that's both deeply personal and broadly transformative. So join us as we facilitate encounters with the living God. Here's my conversation with Andrew Arndt, Andrew, welcome back to shifting culture. So excited to have you back on. Thanks for joining me. Oh man, so good to be here. Thanks, Joshua, it's been two and a half years since you've been on. It doesn't feel that long, but it has been that long. Think back last two and a half years, and think of God encounters. What's happened? Where has God encountered you? Wow, in the writing space, in the life space, and pastoring in your life. Like and think, think of a god encounter. Think of something where, like this is, I feel the presence of God in a tangible way, wow. Well, by two
Andrew Arndt:and a half years. I mean, where Haven't we encountered the presence of God in two and a half years? I i gotta tell you, Joshua, I think when I started out in my journey of faith, I would kind of like read the Psalms, and you would see those moments when I was like the psalmist was crying out, oh, God, deliver me, and the Lord would deliver and I think I kind of thought, Okay, so that's a thing that can happen, you know, like you can get in trouble and you cry out to the Lord that you'll come through on your behalf. But surely that only happens once in a while, right? That that was the exceptional circumstance, and maybe I'm the only one in the room, but I think I'm coming to learn that, oh, God, save me, the waters come up in my neck is not the exceptional circumstance. It's sort of like the daily bread of our existence. So I can't, I can't think of a week in the last two and a half years where I haven't had some moment where my back was wasn't up against the wall, and I was going, oh geez, I don't Okay, like I, I'm pretty sure I'm at the end of what I can do humanly. I'm going to need God here. And I think as I think as I'm learning to trust in that more that's making life more joyful for me. So I'm, I'm I'm finding myself going, well, that's okay. That's the thing. That's the thing that happens. And in this, in this life, we're constantly going to come up against places that are the limit of what we can accomplish humanly. And that's what God which is what Paul says he's like, the power of God is not perfected in human power. The power of God is protected in human weakness. So how about you just plan on showing up in life, in life, and all of these places where it's just, you don't, you don't have enough, and God's gonna have to come through and and the surprises of the Spirit, you know, are like normal for you, and not the exception to the rule. So I don't know, and I you know, in church leadership, you experience it all the time. And we were just talking offline about some stuff that we've been walking through as a church. And, you know, few weeks back goes, I can think of three or four rooms I was in where the conversation felt really high stakes, and it was like, I, I want to be able to control the outcome here. And I kind of think for the good of the church, I might need to be able to I, it would be good for me to control the outcome, but I'm not in control of the outcome, and all I can do is show up with the truth and with my vulnerable heart and put it in the hands of the Spirit and trust the Lord for a miracle. And you know you ask like, where did you sense the spirit tangibly in those rooms? I watched sea changes in the feeling of the room happen. So yeah, man, it's not, that's not where have you. It's like we're having to,
Unknown:yeah, it's all the time, man, it's all the time. We're opening up. We're vulnerable. You get to the end of yourself constantly, and that's where God shows up and he he meets you in those spaces. I think that's what I love about your your bug, strange and gracious light is that it opens up the gospel for us, that it's not just a get out of hell free card, but it is more like the gospel is good news for all our life and the really difficult valleys and struggles that we have, and even the mountaintop moments like he's there and it's good news. And so can you reframe a little bit the gospel for us? What, what's a typical, say, evangelical message of what we may have heard, what the gospel is, and what are you trying to open up for us, of how gospel is? Yeah, thanks. I,
Andrew Arndt:you know, I'm, I'm born and raised in this movement. So I'm, I'm, I'm part of the evangelical movement, Pentecostal, charismatic tribe. That's kind of where I came from. And so our burdens and talking about the gospel have largely been the same, and I think that the way that I've come to understand the way that we understood the gospel, and the way that a lot of Evangelicals understand the gospel is that it primarily concerns your inner life, you know, so something called your spirit or your soul, and whether that's reconciled, whether you're at peace with God, and then the afterlife, where you're going to spend eternity. And both of those things are incredibly important, you know, so whether we have peace with God and and what the afterlife is going to look like for us, those are not small pieces of the puzzle, but if those are the only pieces of the gospel puzzle for us, then I think we're missing the broader scope of what the gospel is. And as a result of that, when we thought thought about, you know, the inner life and the afterlife, mostly, I think we kind of thought of the gospel as it's the death and resurrection of Jesus, and so that's kind of like, that's the good news part of the life of Jesus, and that concerns mainly those things that we just talked about. And I think that a practical effect of that is that we don't really know what to do with the rest of the Bible, most of it feels like Prelude, and then just kind of the afterward. And we don't know what to do with most of the life of Jesus. It just kind of feels like, can we get on with death and resurrection? And I just think that that's not right. There's no reason that the evangelists, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, are recording all of these details in the life of Jesus leading up to the passion. You know, here we are talking during Holy Week. And there's a reason that subsequent generation of Christians sought to collect all of these books together, including the Old Testament, to say, No, this is this is good news for us. So what I'm kind of a quote that becomes a pivotal quote for me in the book, is Robert Jenson's great mind, the late Lutheran theologian, who said that the gospel is the story of Jesus told as a promise, and so it's not just one piece, but it's the whole thing. And I think what happens if, if, if gospel is just inner life and afterlife, is that it leaves most of our actual life untouched by the goodness of the Lord. But if we, if we can say no, it's the whole story of Jesus, all of that is actually gospel from Prelude everything before the Gospels to the Incarnation, all the way through not only his resurrection, but his ascension in the pouring out of the Holy Spirit, and his return again and glory to judge the living the dead, what happens in our whole life is embraced by the goodness of the Lord, and we see our whole life as something that's capable of being transfigured by the Divine, by the divine goodness and glory. So that's I feel like. That's what I've been trying to do for 20 years of ministry. And this book kind of gave me, gave me an excuse to take a whack at it and just sort of like, say it as clearly as I can say it. You know, if you
Unknown:think about the gospel as interacting with all of our life, it's like it's a beautiful thing, like life of Jesus. I think a lot of people in the last 510, years have felt really unmoored. They think that they've believed this gospel. It's just about the afterlife. It's just about my interior life. Since we've gone through really difficult times in the last five years, people are go well, doesn't really have anything to do with my life. So why am I following this? Jesus, what am I doing in the midst of of those, those hard, difficult times when everything seems to be falling apart, How Is there good news, like, how does Jesus show up as good news when all I see around me is destruction?
Andrew Arndt:Wow. I mean, what a question. And I think I think that's hard to I think that that's always hard to answer in any kind of a super broad way. Right, other than by saying, but all of it is subject to redemption, all of it. He's concerned about all of it. He reigns over. I think where it gets really fun is where we're working in congregational life, and we're watching specifically how these trends, you know, you talk about, the last five years, we live through a global pandemic. We have wars raging all over the world, so Israel and Palestine and the Ukraine. We have an economy that's tipsy turvy. We have all this political and social chaos that's constantly fomenting. And you know, I mean, at the barest possible level, the Gospel isn't what you can be reconciled to God and go with go to heaven when you die, the bear is possible. I mean, like the early church, gospel is, well, Jesus is Lord, and so that's what you can say overall, that Jesus is Lord, Jesus. Jesus knows. Jesus knows what's going on with global pandemics, and Jesus is in charge of that. You know, Jesus is in charge of the wind and the waves of social and political chaos and and he's not just, he doesn't just have a plan for bringing that to a place of peace, but also he's working in all of that somehow to bring us where he wants us to go. Then Jesus is Lord in Israel and Palestine, and Jesus is Lord in the Ukraine, like he's Lord over all of that. And we can read, we can read the prophets, and we can see the fomenting of the nations and how God is at work and all of that. So, like, there's real broad thing. But I think what I love doing as a pastor is meeting people at the individual level and finding just where that anxiety point is, just where that point of fear is. And what you're trying to do is you're not trying to explain away what people are feeling. You're trying to announce the presence of Christ to it. And it's astonishing to me. You know that, like when Jesus, the resurrected one, shows up with his disciples, he doesn't try to explain away their anxieties and fears, he just kind of offers them the gift of His presence, and he's like peace, be with you, you know. And he breathes on them and says, receive the Holy Spirit. And then He blesses them, and he says, Lo, I'm with you always to the very end of the age. So I don't know, how do we announce the good news to people in the midst of all of this stuff? I think we might just say, you know that the incarnation is true, that God has come to dwell among us, that Jesus is present with us, and we don't have to wait for the world to burn to eventually see the glory of the Lord. We can see the glory of the Lord revealed in our midst now, and I, as a preacher, I just think that that's my job, is to say that week after week to people who feel like their life is coming apart at the seeds to be like, Jesus is Lord, and he's with us, and you could be okay, you know.
Unknown:And sometimes we have to, we have to speak that to ourselves so that we can continue to move on and to be with people when we are like, Hey. I mean, I believe it intellectually, I just don't feel it right now.
Andrew Arndt:Well, there's no doubt about no doubt about that. How can we offer the consolation of the Lord unless we're experiencing ourselves, you know? So I agree with that. I The Gospel must be preached to the preacher, to the leader, over and over again. We got to keep meeting the resurrected one. Yeah. So if you have have somebody say, you know, in your book, you talk about a story of a woman dying of cancer there, so as a pastor, or somebody that actually then announces that God is with you, how do you, how do you continue in that work? How do you, how do you do this? When you do see this stuff happening and go, Man, maybe the miracle of healing right now, it's not going to happen, and maybe it's just presence is, yeah, well, that's, that's the cool thing about it, is that I think this, again, the story of Jesus gives you a way to speak the gospel, speak good news to people at so many different dimensions. So for instance, with this woman that you're talking about, because we believe that, again, the gospel is the story of Jesus told us the promise. One of the things that we see in the Gospels is that Jesus is a healer. He just is. And there's never a time that anybody comes to Jesus and says, I need healing, that Jesus goes, you know, I just don't know if it's God's will for you to be healed. Like that just never happens. That's how we talk, you know, I'm just not really sure about healing, but that's not, that's not how Jesus talks. So it is the absolute will of God that human beings should be healed, thing that we don't know. And we know we understand this, because we live in the time in between, the times where the kingdom is, it's it's already, but it's not yet, because when exactly that healing is going to take place, does that happen in this like on this side of that or are we really just talking about the raising up of that person beyond the boundary of death? Which is that final healing? I don't know the answer that question, and I don't have to know my job is to announce the presence of Christ to that person. So when I'm sitting by the bedside of the person who's dying of cancer, you better believe I'm praying for healing, because that's part of the story. And I'm not going, Lord, if it's your will, I am. I am getting my hands smudgy with oil, and I'm smacking it on that person's head, and I'm calling. Upon the presence of life giving spirit to come and raise that person up. So that's one part of it. But when we come to that point where it's very clear that life is ebbing away, we also know that Jesus is our companion in death, and so he's not just it's not a failure of the gospel that this person didn't get healed. Jesus has actually taken them in that sense of abandonment that accompanies the experience with death. And he's holding them, and he's escorting them through to the other side, bringing them right through to resurrection life. So I don't see how you can lose and that's what the story of Jesus gives you. You know, is like the ability to speak fully and completely about the goodness of the Lord to all of the dimensions of human experience without feeling like you need to like it's not balancing. I'm not trying to balance it, which we can have full volume on all of the things, which is, I think what we're supposed to do. We
Unknown:were sitting in church yesterday, but we were in home church yesterday, so we were talking about the triumphal entry, and we were comparing it to Ephesians two as well, and going back and forth, which is fun, but one of the things that we were talking about was how the church often makes these types of church calendar type events as sanitized versions of what they actually were, that if you look at what what's happening, there's all sorts of of chaos, Like we're continuing to read and like Jesus is weeping over Jerusalem. He's throwing over over tables like in the temple, like he's, he's confronting people in a way that you know that he's going to be put to death for because he's. He's speaking clearly and plainly and but we usually sanitize it. Yeah, so just talk through then congregational life, Pastor life, like even the church calendar, is you're you're talking through your book, through the church calendar. How do we open up what's there and what it looks like? So it's not just a sanitized version that go, oh, that's a nice little you know? Yeah, worry, yeah. It doesn't really impact our life, but it actually does. Well, really getting
Andrew Arndt:such a great that's a such a great question. Joshua, because, you know, so I grew up in church. I'm going on 44 years old, so I was, I was coming of age during the flanagraph days. Man, yeah, these stories can be slow. And for any of your podcast listeners that don't know what that is, just Google it. Figure it out. But for any you know, these stories can be self flanographed that they get flatten out. And I think whenever they get flattened out, they lose their bite. So you asked the question about like, how can preachers, like, unlock the power of the gospel in the church? Well, I think that the way that we do that is by paying attention, not just to kind of the broad contours of the story, though, certainly that, but you also want to pay attention to the details of the story, because it's in so many of the small details of the story that the Lord is needling us into salvation. So I'll give you like one example from a text that I preached this past weekend. And I didn't actually touch this piece of the text, but this is an important point. It could have certainly been made good use of for preaching, because the triumphal entry happens, you know, this is Passover time. Jerusalem is normally 35,000 or so people, you know. But at Passover time, scholars tell us that it swells to 250 or so, 250,000 or so pilgrims, and maybe more, coming from the four corners of the Roman Empire to worship. And so you have Jesus. Here is this Jesus entering into Jerusalem on a donkey. He actually is. You would come into like the kings of Israel. You would go out on a war horse, but when you won the battle, you'd come in on the donkey, and so that's like, your reign is secured. So this is like a massive political statement he's making. So he comes in to Jerusalem, and what Matthew says is the whole city was stirred. And that word stirred is the Greek word a size today, where we get seismic from. It was an earthquake. It shook the city to its core. And everybody says, Who is this? And they say, this is Jesus, the prophet, from Nazareth in Galilee, which may not mean a lot to us, but Nazareth in Galilee would be like this. It's the equivalent of a bunch of New Yorkers having, you know, everybody's gathered together for a big party, and word gets out that somebody is running for mayor, and they think that they've already won. And this is a person who comes from a podunk town outside of Dallas Fort Worth. Can you imagine how the New Yorkers would freak out at that? Who does this person think that they, they are this Texan is going to come in here and try to be our boss and tell us what to do. Some people would be excited. Most people would be kind of ticked off about it, because there's like, there is like, some prejudice there, right? There's like, social gap, there's, there's, there's social distance between the two things. And that's actually a key theme of math. Matthews that he's trying to draw out. He's trying to show that there really is, like, some ethnic despising. There is like some some kind of pride and superiority going on in sort of the religious elites of Jerusalem. So when somebody says that somebody from Nazareth in Galilee is coming in to be king, what's happening is that kind of, like, uh, ethnocentrism would be what one way of saying it, but that's getting flushed out into the open so that it can be dealt with. And I think that wise preachers and leaders in the church will pay attention to the details of the story like that, because those details unlock what God is trying to do for us. I think that's
Unknown:helpful. We could do this. We could unlock something. We could open things up in a way where it actually it touches us, and we don't have to sanitize it. It's Yep, Jesus enters into a messy, messy place. Yes, and our world is messy, and if it doesn't touch the messiness, then you know what good is it? This is what he's called us to. You know the thing in your in your chapter around Christmas about encounters with Jesus, I think the encounter is a space where I think everything changes, like, because I've had, like, real specific encounters, like, like, you having an encounter when you're holding your baby first time and God is speaking to you in that And you're weeping over your baby. It's, it's a beautiful encounter, right? And you know what? What happens is that when you're in a difficult time, you could look back on that encounter like, Oh, God is with me. Like, I've, I've sensed his presence. I know he's there. How could we start to facilitate some of these encounters with Jesus for people, so that they encounter the living Christ in their day to day that really sustains them through a life of faith to move them forward.
Andrew Arndt:Wow. You know, that's a that's a great question. Facilitate is just the right word, isn't it? We can't make it happen for people, but what we can maybe do is set up circumstances where they could sense the presence of the Lord. And I think as, I think as church leaders in particular, so whether we're leading small groups or church services or one on one counseling, whatever it is, I just think that this is our stock and trade, like what we do is we try, like we're trying to live attuned to the presence of God, so that we can bring a sense of the presence of God into all of the spaces that we lead. And if in our leadership, we're helping people attune themselves to the presence of God in that space, then I think that is a training for them to begin to see the presence of God in all of life. You know, the worst case scenario for us is that people think that church services or religious activities are fundamental sacredness, and everything else is not sacred. But I think about the poet Wendell Berry, who said that there are no sacred places and unsacred places. There are only sacred places and desecrated places. And so what should happen when we come into sacredness is that we are we have our eyes open to see how all of life is sacred, and then we become the kind of people that can spot the presence of God. So I think as as like leaders in the church, I think that we can help people with that. But I also think even if we're not leaders in the church. I just think that having an awareness of sacredness, having an awareness of a depth of presence, the presence of Christ in all things, can really help us. And so that boils down to simple things like the way in which we, I don't know, engage our neighbors and our co workers. Do we engage them as though we're in a hurry, as though there's something more important than them, or when the divine interruption of their need or their life comes along, do we take that seriously as an encounter with the Lord? And if we do, I think it'll help them connect with the presence of God. So can we live lives that are driven along by a sense of the holy depth at the heart of all life, you know, and if we can't do it, I don't I don't know who else is going to do it. And I think that's what it means to be a people of the Incarnation. So we don't just believe that God hallowed, I think I quote Athanasius in that chapter to this effect. But we don't just believe that God hallowed one body, the body of Jesus, but because he is the hallowed and hallowing presence of God when He comes among us, the whole city, the cosmos, has been honored. So what we're doing, then again, is we're announcing the presence of Christ too, and discerning the depth of Christ in all things. And that's that's our unique vocation as Christians.
Unknown:So, yeah, yeah. I think a lot of people, especially in the last you know, five years when everything's hit the fan, people go, Hey, I don't know if I really like the church, like the congregational life, but I love Jesus, and I want, I want Jesus, but I I really there's something that we we miss if we don't have the congregation, if we don't. Have the body of Christ, right? Yeah, yeah. So if you're talking to somebody that is in that position, go, man, I've, I've seen the the church perpetrate things that haven't been healthy. But what is the good news of of the Body of Christ? What's the good news of the congregation? Why should we be with one another?
Andrew Arndt:I mean, the simplest answer to that is that God reveals Himself in Scripture as a God who's never without a people. And so you do have individuals in the scriptures that have individual encounters with God, but that individual encounter with God is always in the service of the whole it's always in the service of the people. So, you know, Abraham's encounter with God. God's like, there's a family. I'm going to build a family. Moses encounter with God on mountaintop. He's like, there are these people. Go rescue them. Elijah on the mountaintop. I've reserved 7000 year instruction, so we're always getting thrust back into the world of people. I that's maybe the most obvious answer. And I think the second most obvious answer is just that we're commanded to, and God promises that his presence is going to be among these people while I'm with, not just you individually, I'm with y'all always to the very end of the age. So for all of its flaws, and they are many, we are told in the scriptures that there's this peculiar density of presence that happens among the people of God, that if we'll stay with them, we'll keep bumping into Jesus. And I don't know how else to answer that question for me personally, except just to say, you know, I I guess I bump into Jesus more routinely among the people of God than I do when I just kind of on my own. And it is nice. I'm an introvert by nature, and I nature, and I love being on my own and out and all that stuff. But I see miracles when I'm with the people of God. I do think that for the person that then kind of burned out on it, I think that some of the sometimes, sometimes the reason that we get burned out on it is because we have churches that are either trying to impress us, or they don't take God very seriously, you know what I mean? So they're trying to impress us, so it's just like, it's like a rock concert with a TED talk. I can't do that anymore, or they don't take God seriously anymore. And that can take a lot of different forms. The rock concert thing, I think, can be one piece of that, but also in these churches that are so given over to traditionalism that the living presence of God has leaked out. They're just kind of going through the religious rigmarole, and that can really wear the spirit out. So I think for those people that are feeling exiled at the moment from church and they're not sure where to land, I don't have any awesome advice for you, other than go to a go to a church that you know that believes the historical gospel as much as anybody can. You know that he came among you. Christ came among us, and God, he was raised to life again. He's come again. And they and they take the Bible seriously. But try to be among a people that are not trying to impress you. Try to be among the people that you feel like are taking God really seriously, and chances are, you're going to bump into Jesus pretty frequently among those people. But if they're not doing those things, I don't know, move on to the next one. There's, there's enough, there's enough churches that you can afford to be choosy for just a second, because a decision like this does matter, you know, and I don't want people to be church shoppers or hopping forever. You should settle down as quickly as possible. But, man, if they're trying to impress and they're not taking God seriously, you gotta mosey on down the road. Hang worth your time, you know.
Unknown:That's a good word. That's a good word, you know. And I think one of the other things that has been problematic, as we see, is that we've gotten the wrong sense of what power is, or Jesus, as you said, you know, in your chapter on lent traditional human power of what we think it really is weak. Yeah, there is power in the weakness of Christ. There isn't power in who he is, as somebody who's came humbly to us and presented something different, yeah. How do we navigate that? And what is the good news of Yeah? Yeah, Jesus in the midst of power struggles today, because
Andrew Arndt:we have powers big, big ones. Well, we keep thinking that the world is going to be saved by power, and I just don't think that the scriptures bear that out. And I think, you know, folks will have to read the Lent chapter just to to get a better sense of what I'm trying to argue for there. But I think the world can be preserved through power. You know, there are checks on evil that can happen through power, and if you got, you know, if you got a mad man loose in your neighborhood, I'm real grateful for the police. Yeah, the evil, but all they can do is restrain the evil. You know what I mean. They can't them. Arresting this guy and throwing him into prison and having him stand trial and serve in a sentence. Does that actually? Does it change anything? And I think that what you have to admit to yourself is that it restrains the evil, but doesn't transform the heart. And the only thing that really transforms the heart is love, which is fundamentally weak and admittedly so it can't compel and it can't coerce. So, you know, my wife and I are going on 25 years of marriage this August, and that fell in love with her early on. We met in high school and and I remember getting to the point of buying a ring and proposing to her. And I mean, think about what you do. You're down on a knee,
Unknown:holding up a ring and going, would you
Andrew Arndt:and I you? I can't do anything to compel an answer to that question. I have to wait for the free ascent of her heart. And if that happens, that's when the magic takes place, but it might not happen. And there's a sense in which that's, I mean when we come, if we, you know, if we worship in in a church, for instance, that celebrates communion every week, something like that is going on, we're having all these announcements about the gospel and read the scriptures and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, but the pinnacle of the service is Jesus being like, Do you want some bread and wine? He's like, kind of, in a way, getting down on his knee and going, it's, this is here for you. And if you say yes to this, this will transform your life. But I couldn't compel you if I tried, and so I in a world that man, I think it's one of the saddest things about the evangelical movement that we kind of forgot this. We were gospel people, but we didn't think our Gospel, our Gospel out deep enough. And we keep thinking that if we just get the reins of power, then the culture will be able to save the culture from whatever calamity is coming down the pike. And I mean, how many times do you have to keep going through this before you get the power, you get the person, you get, your candidate, in office, and it doesn't work out the way you thought, and the culture is still going to hell in a handbasket before you go maybe that's not it. So, you know, I mean, so it doesn't mean that we give up on the political thing. That doesn't mean that we don't we, you know, we vote, we're part of this thing. So that's part of a how we shape the culture, and it's part of how we restrain evil. But if you want to bring about the transformation of any person or any culture, I mean, it's love does that, and love is freely accepted or rejected. And so it's accepting our powerlessness might actually be again, we go back to it. Paul says it's like weakness is where the strength of God is completed. So that might actually be the way in which we see the power of God begin to rush again into our culture when we stop trying to coerce the culture into being the way that we want it to be. Instead, we show up again as heralds, ambassadors of the good news of the glory of God. It's
Unknown:love. Jesus said, Take this bread, take this wine, take this cup. But before he did that, Last Supper, he washed feet, and he told us to do the same. He told His disciples to do the same, which I don't know. I've done it a few times in my life, but I don't do it like practically, like that, yeah, like foot washing. But what is foot washing? How does that show us humility weakness, like the power that that Christ is bringing and giving? Yeah, I
Andrew Arndt:mean, it's the willingness to in the first century world your foot. I mean, that is the dirtiest part of your body, just about the sandals. And you walk in the marketplace in all manner of filth. And the scholars will tell you that in Jewish society, it was seen as such foot washing was seen as such a degrading thing that you wouldn't even have a Jewish servant wash other Jewish feet. That would be something for a Gentile servant, or whatever to do. And so for the King of the universe, you know, to get down, the master to get down and wash the feet is, I mean, that's overturning a whole hierarchy there, and it's such a scandal. Peter's like, you can't do that. And he's like, unless I do this for you, you have no part with Me. So there's something about that extreme humility given and received, the abandonment of worldly power and the hierarchies given and received, it unlocks something, the kingdom of God. And I mean, I've seen it. We did at our church in Denver, many years ago, we did a foot washing service, and we had to set it up real cool, where it wasn't like leaders washing everybody's feet, but we had these like stations set up, and it was people washing each other's feet. And there were two guys in our church who had been lifelong friends and had gone through a real difficult time, the relationship experience of pulling out and nobody, I mean, for all we tried, we could not help them put it back together. And I don't know how it happened, and I know it was by sheer chance, because I checked with both of these guys later, but they wound up in the same kind of foot washing area, and they were forced by the circumstance to wash each other's feet. Right? And we, a bunch of us who are in church leadership, saw it happening, and we're like, elbowing each other like, you can you believe what's about? And we watched it as it took place. And tears are streaming down both of their faces, and they get up, you know, from the bin after watching each other's feet, hugging each other. And, I mean, it was a miracle of the Spirit that nobody really could have orchestrated. In fact, if somebody had manipulated it, it wouldn't have worked. You know what? I mean, it would have been like, no, no. It was a thing of the spirit, and it was an engagement, again, in this thing, where it's like, we're throwing off the way that the world thinks about how power works, and we're engaging in the humility of Jesus, and somehow it's loosening the kingdom of God. So I don't know, like, what are the analogs to washing feet, but that's where it's that's work along. Ponder, what are the analogs. How do I wash the feet of my co workers? How do I wash the feet of my neighbors? How do I wash the feet if I, if I, if I'm really committed to some political cause or side, how do I wash the feet of Democrats? How do I wash the feet of Republicans? How do I wash the feet of you? Know, you name it. And if you can figure out that you might just be the kind of person that can help open a door for eternity to come rushing in, you know?
Unknown:And that's beautiful having that foot foot washing service then, right? It's facilitating encounters with God, Spirit like, that's the facilitation. That's the work that we get to set things up, that he has to do it right? And he does the work. It's the work that's true, right? That's right. As we're walking through some of this and how Jesus encounters us, and he's good news, it then begs the question, a lot of people have been taught evangelism, this is the good news. This is how you you talk to somebody about then following Jesus. How do we then walk with people and proclaim the good news of Jesus with people? What does that look like for us to go and be with everyday people around the world and just proclaim the good news of Jesus? Yeah, it's not just a formula, yeah. And I
Andrew Arndt:love that you use the word formula. I was thinking about how often in evangelism trainings I've been in, it was a real we were so again, because we were so concerned to get the gospel right, we reduced it to a formula, and it lost all of its it just lost all of its power. You know, the beautiful thing about the gospel is that it's as large as life, because the story of Jesus is encompassing. And so we get to speak the presence of Jesus to whomever we're with. And so, you know the Samaritan woman, for instance, in John chapter four, she kind of, I mean, this is one of the most remarkable encounters in the New Testament. Evangelism encounters is that she has this conversation with Jesus that really opens things up for her. And, you know, it ends with like, she's like, when the Messiah comes, he's finally going to explain everything to us. And he's like, I who speak to you, am he? And she's like, Oh, but we don't have she doesn't She's not saying the sinners prayer, she's not getting baptized, she's not doing any of the things, you know. And so Jesus rejoins his disciples. She runs back to the town, and all she says is, come and see a man who told me everything I ever did, and she doesn't even have a conclusion. She's like, is this the Messiah? I don't know. So she speaks about what she knows and has experienced, and the scripture says that at that point, then the whole town came out to meet Jesus. And that to me, if that doesn't encapsulate, I don't know what does. Because there's not a human on this planet who has encountered Jesus, who only really has encountered, we have only seen partial glimpses of him. We don't see the whole thing. You know, Dustin said, if you can understand it or comprehend it, it's not God. If we could comprehend, if we could comprehend the whole Christ. It's not Christ for us, but we know what we have seen and heard, so we can take those pieces, and as the spirit moves us with our neighbors and our co workers and our friends, family, whoever who doesn't know the Lord, we can just go, do you know he's a healer? Have you met Jesus? You know I one of my favorite evangelism stories. I can't remember if it's in this book or not, but when I was a kid, we had this, this is so great. We had this traveling Minister come through town, and my pastor was hosting him, and the guy needed some new shoes, so they went. They went to a local shoe dealer at the mall in our little town, and they're there, and he's trying on his shoes, and he picks out this one pair. And the two of them are just kind of talking about whatever. And he gets to the checkout, and the gal rings him up, and it's however many dollars, and he gives $1 the money over. She gives him the change, and then all of a sudden, like, he stops, and he locks eyes with her, and he goes, have you met Jesus yet. And she's like, completely taken aback, right? She's like, but no, and this is the best part of the story. He goes, sorry. He goes, You sure have a lot to look forward to, don't you? And he like, he leaves. He flunked the evangelism class. He flunked. It completely. Zero. Credit, zero credit. You don't get to know you're out. But it's so beautiful. It that the elegance of that is so great. Come see somebody who told me everything I ever did. Could this be him? We're just announcing the presence of Christ as Christ calls us to and then we're trusting the Holy Spirit to deliver the results. I would love to know what happened to that girl and and Joshua, you, you and I will meet her and high five her one day. That's that'll be, that'll be a great moment. But that, man, you what a thing You sure have a lot to look forward to is incredible to me, man, that that's the freedom, that's the freedom that we're given. Like, hey, just, man, just tell them, just say the name and see what happens. You know, you're not in charge of the results.
Unknown:I don't know. Man, if, if somebody said that to me, I'm like, Man, I really want to know who this Jesus is, because there's a lot to look forward to. Like, I want to look forward. I want to I want to get there. Yeah, you go running out
Andrew Arndt:of the store. Man, what's crazy to me about the woman of the well story is the the good news for her is that Jesus knew everything about her, everything, hey, all the all the men that she has married, the the man that she's living with that she's not married to, and all so all of her shame and stuff that She has tried to hide from everybody else. The good news is that Jesus told her about it, yeah. But the good news is what she's now seen, yeah, truly seen. That's right, that's right. And yeah. And there's another little wrinkle there in that text. Now, we're now, now. Now, it's a couple preachers riffing on the Bible here. But he said, The truth is that you've had five husbands, and the man that you now have is not quite your husband. So now we've got six men in her life who have failed her, and the seventh will not fail. Yeah. I mean, the Bridegroom of Israel has just showed up, and he's like, gonna put the ring on her finger. And isn't that the good news, like, wherever you have sought solace, outside of the Lord, the Lord is the seventh, and he will not, he will not fail. He is what you have been looking for your entire life. You know, like to the girl that in this, in the, you know, have you met Jesus yet? No, you got a lot to look forward to, I, who speak to you and he, you know, there's something of that in there. It's
Unknown:so good. Yeah, it's so good you got there's this, this phrase that you said talk about in your ascension chapter, you talk about humanity being ascended, the Ascended humanity, yeah. And so my question like, What? Okay, unpack that for me a little bit. And what is the what is ascended humanity look like?
Andrew Arndt:Yeah. I mean, it looks like a humanity that has been taken into the heavenly realms. That this is Paul's language, you know, he says that we have been seated with him and the heavenly places. And so we always talked about in the evangelical movement, dying and going to be with Jesus in heaven when you die. And I've been tempted for a long time just to be like, that's not in the New Testament. Get that language out of here. But the truth is that when you look at the New Testament, the language is actually there just means something different than we meet. So the New Testament says, Oh yeah, no, you do go, you do die, and go to be with Jesus in heaven when you die. And the death is your baptism, and heaven is heaven as it takes place. In the midst of this world, you're seated with Christ. So there's a sense in which, because Christ, Jesus, has taken our flesh into the heavenly realms, and that is a completed, perfected flesh, and we are of that flesh. That means that, by the Spirit, over the course of our lives, what we do as we're sanctified is that we continue to manifest that perfected humanity to people, and that perfected humanity is everything that the gospel is calling us to, which is that we're kind and compassionate and we're good to one another, and we're solicitous of the poor, and we speak truth to power. Do you know what I mean? Like we're making manifest humanity as humanity was always intended to be. We're reigning as kings with Jesus. We're regal and what we are, so we're living the way that God intended us to live. So die and go to be with Jesus in heaven. Yep, but that's already happened. So the trick for us is then to continue kind of that trajectory of self mortification, where we continue to die to ourselves, so that the life of the Spirit can be more and more made manifest, that perfected life of the Spirit can be more manifest in us. So it's funny, you know, when you start digging apart all these peeling apart, all these layers of the Jesus story, just how relevant they are. And the cool thing about, you know, the ascension thing, is that it's nothing that we have to do. I mean, I think everybody like we're one of the words that you hear a lot in culture now is like optimization. Everybody's trying to optimize for something. We're trying to optimize our health, or optimize, you know, our nutrition, or optimize our career and blah, blah, blah. Well, what that is, is that's the old, like the ancient, ancient philosophy. All. Used to talk about this, the kind of ladder of ascent. So the idea is that by your own effort, you could kind of climb up into the heavens. Somehow there was, like, you know what I mean, like that peak experience. So we're just doing that same thing in a new key in the 21st century. But the amazing thing about the gospel is the gospel doesn't say that you you have to climb up there by your effort. The Gospel says, Oh no, Jesus already dragged your stupid butt up in the heavens. You're already there. And as you were to live with Him and walk with Him and rest in him like that, life will be more and more manifest. And you don't have any you don't have to do anything to ascend. You just have to keep coming with Jesus. And it's
Unknown:going to happen, man, we've been living life so small. Yeah, we don't get this. We've been living life so small, the life so much bigger. It always just shocks me that I have been like, lifted up into the heavens, that I'm a co heir with Christ, that I'm writing like that is dumbfounding like me, like, really? Yeah, humans, yeah. So it's just, it's just crazy, like, this is a big life that we could live. We could live a big, big life. It's
Andrew Arndt:a big life that's free from the stress of thinking that there's something that we need to do to get where we need to go. But we're just, my yoke is easy and my burden is light, like believing that he's already done it all for us. The task is just to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength, love our neighbors ourselves, keep company with Jesus, and the life will be made manifest in us. It's so it's so liberating. It takes us out of the realm of, I'll call it law, and into the realm of gospel. And when I say law, I just think about all the ways in which that logic of if you do these things, then these things will happen for you that is pervasive, not just in religious culture, but it's pervasive in secular culture. You know, the way that the gurus of self optimization are talking now is it's like, well, if you get your fitness just right, and you get your career just right, and you get your friends just right, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and you can listen to podcast 24/7, 365, until you're dizzy, trying to optimize your life and be more empty than when you started. What if you just believed it is finished? He did it. You're good, you're good, you're good as you are. You're good, and just keep walking. You know, there's a whole different logic in the Gospel. It's so liberating,
Unknown:it's so good. It's so beautiful. I love Jesus. No, I love Jesus too, man. So call if, if people pick up a strange and gracious light, what is your hope for the readers? What? What do you hope
Andrew Arndt:to bring about? Yeah, it's what I'm hoping for my readers. Is the same thing that I hope for my congregation every time I preach to them, and it's just that they would see that in Christ, Jesus, it's the unfathomable Depths of God, you know, and that everything in their life is touched that's all accounted for in who Jesus is, and that there's nothing that they can encounter or go through that is not the word of the gospel, is not spoken over that. And my congregation is going to be sick of me saying it, but I say it all the time, and I'm going to say it until they believe it. You know, Second Corinthians, 120 no matter how many promises God has made, they're all yes in Christ, and through him, the Amen is spoken by us to the glory of God. You know, God says yes in Christ, Jesus, and we say amen, and the magic happens. So I just, I hope that any reader of this book would just have a broader imagination for who Jesus is for them and who Jesus is for the world, and that they'd fall in love with Jesus again and be inspired to carry him out of the highways and the byways of their life, and maybe to say, maybe to say to some cashier, you know, you got a lot to look forward to and see what the Spirit does with that. I'd
Unknown:love to get some recommendations from you. So anything you've been reading or watching lately, you could recommend
Andrew Arndt:reading or watching. Man, I you know, I'm working on a new book on Augustine's confessions. It's like a 40 day devotional commentary based on this great Christian classic. So I've been up to my eyeballs reading Augusta and scholarly literature and the confession. So if anybody's interested in that, I'll give them the reading list. And I don't know, what are we what are we watching? These days, my kids have started their second watch through the Netflix series Stranger Things, which I just loved and thought was, like, the greatest thing I'd ever seen, partially because I'm a child of the 80s, and I was like, they nailed it. They nailed it, definitely nailed it. And so they're watching it through again, and we're doing that with them as we can, and loving every second of it. So modern health, those are the things, I suppose,
Unknown:awesome. Where would you like to point people to? How can they get three and some gracious lights
Andrew Arndt:available online wherever books are sold. Amazon is supposed to be the best place. And if you get it on Amazon and read it, leave, leave a good, honest review. That helps. And you might also see this brick and mortar bookstores as well. I think it's going to some barns and mobiles, depending on where you are, but I think online is the best
Unknown:way. Great, great. Can anybody? Yeah, just follow you and maybe read. Need anything else that you're writing, how can they? Yeah, yeah,
Andrew Arndt:on x and Instagram. I'm at the Andrew, aren't sub stack? Uh, I've been doing that pretty consistently for last year and a half. It slowed down some with the new project I'm working on. But if you just look up, Andrew, aren't on sub stack, I'm there, and same thing on Facebook. So would love to connect.
Unknown:Great. Well, Andrew, thank you for this. Thank you for like opening up the gospel of Jesus for us and just to really revel in the beauty of who he is, what he's done, that he interacts with every aspect of our life, that he is good news. And the good news is not just about where we go after we die, but it is good news for our daily lives, even in the midst of pain and destruction and difficulty, his presence can be felt and be among us and that we could be with him in our life. And man, Jesus is amazing, and this conversation was amazing. So thank you for this. I loved it. Man, thanks for having me. I appreciate it. Yeah.
