Shifting Culture
Shifting Culture invites you into transformative conversations at the intersection of faith, culture, justice, and the way of Jesus. Each episode, host Joshua Johnson engages guests who challenge conventional thinking and inspire fresh perspectives for embodying faith in today's complex world. If you're curious about how cultural shifts impact your faith journey and passionate about living purposefully, join us as we explore deeper ways to follow Jesus in everyday life.
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Shifting Culture
Ep. 352 Heath Hardesty - How Apprenticeship to Jesus Is the Way of Flourishing in a Fragmented World
We live in what Heath Hardesty calls the age of disintegration - a world marked by fragmentation, distraction, and disconnection. I feel that deeply. So many of us are trying to hold our lives together in a culture that constantly pulls us apart. In this conversation, Heath joins me to talk about how apprenticeship to Jesus offers another way - a way toward coherence, union, and wholeness. Heath is a pastor in the Bay Area and the author of All Things Together: How Apprenticeship to Jesus Is the Way of Flourishing in a Fragmented World. We talk about what it means to move beyond simply knowing about Jesus to actually living with Him - to abide, obey, and become people who image His love in a fractured world. We explore practices like unhurried presence and compassionate gentleness, and how they reveal a kind of power that’s rooted not in control, but in love. If you’ve felt scattered, weary, or disoriented in your faith, this episode is an invitation to slow down, breathe, and remember that in Christ, all things hold together.
Heath Hardesty is the author of All Things Together: How Apprenticeship to Jesus is the Way of Flourishing in a Fragmented World (WaterBrook; on sale 10/14/25) and he serves as the lead pastor of Valley Community Church and is the founder of Inklings Coffee & Tea in the heart of downtown Pleasanton, California. Heath grew up in a blue-collar home and was a plumber’s apprentice in Colorado before becoming a pastor on the edge of Silicon Valley where he, his wife, and four kids now reside. He holds degrees in literature, leadership, biblical studies, and theology from the University of Colorado Boulder and Western Seminary in Portland. Visit him on IG@heathhardesty
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You know, our problem is not that we just don't go to church enough, or aren't, you know, just don't stop doing this or stop doing that. Our problem is that that our existence, our being, is disconnected from the only fount of everything good, beautiful and true and and if we try to fix ourself without that union, we're only going to fracture more and more and more.
Joshua Johnson:Hello and welcome to the shift in 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, did you know our world feels increasingly disjointed, disenchanted, disconnected and disembodied? We scroll through chaos, piecing together fragments of truth, beauty and meaning, and yet still feel thin, weary and divided. In this episode, I talk with Heath, Hardesty, pastor and author of all things together, how apprenticeship to Jesus is the Way of flourishing in a fragmented world, Heath invites us to recover the wholeness we've lost, not by trying harder or fixing ourselves, but by rediscovering the life that coheres in Christ, we talk about what it means to move beyond information about Jesus to apprenticeship with him. We explore how union with Christ heals our divided selves, how practices like unhearing presence and compassionate gentleness become counter cultural acts of power, and how the biblical story reframes our fractured reality into one of integration, delight and love. If you felt the weight of disintegration in your own soul or the pace of a world spinning faster than you can hold it, this conversation is an invitation to slow down, breathe and remember that in Him, all things hold together. So join us. Here is my conversation with Heath. Hardesty Heath, welcome to shifting culture. Excited to have you on. Thanks for joining me.
Heath Hardesty:Glad to be here. Joshua, thanks for having me. I'd love to talk a little bit
Joshua Johnson:about apprenticeship to Jesus and your your paradigm at the core of the book is you're talking about union to Jesus, going into abiding and obeying Him, and then imaging Jesus to the world as part of our our core way to move into this world of fragmentation that you talk about, into a place where it's more holistic and whole, and we want to integrate take us to the beginning. Where does apprenticeship come in? Why are you talking about apprenticeship to Jesus? What is that word for you?
Heath Hardesty:So quick back story, which is kind of the the genealogy of my my interest in this. So I'm a pastor now in California. I've been here for about 15 years in the Bay Area. But before I was a pastor, I was actually a plumber. So my father is a master plumber, and so I grew up in a blue collar home. I grew up vowing that I would never be a plumber. And life, you know, you know, threw me some curve balls. And I eventually, yeah, I became a plumber, a plumber's apprentice, rather. And you know, those were years that it when I was in them, I was not super happy about them, because I just never thought that's where my life was going. I didn't feel like it was my skill set. But now, looking back, I'm so thankful for those years. And there's a story in the book about a mentor of mine, a Pastor Tom hover, who kind of leaned into me one day and said, You're complaining about this stuff, but God's doing something in you through this, and you'll look back on it. And sure enough, Pastor Tom was right. So I learned a lot about apprenticeship through those years, and it was a special kind of apprenticeship, because it was my father who was a master plumber. So there was a familial relationship there as well. But moving on from that period really quickly, you know, and stepping into being a green pastor here in Silicon Valley, trying to figure out how to help people live a fully embodied faith. And then over the years, just seeing the fragmentary nature, not only of the world in which we live, but of people's understandings of the faith, just kind of piecemealing it, putting together these these little fragments and bits and pieces, and trying to figure out how to walk it out and in often reductive ways, I wanted to find A way to talk about following Jesus that was just deeply cohesive, that was that was coherent, that had an accessible story, a way of imagining it and then a way of walking it out, a way of inhabiting this world. So, so, yeah, you could say that the origin of, like, why I wrote this book, why. To talk about apprenticeship. Well, it's partly because I was a plumber. It's partly because I'm a pastor, and then I think ultimately it's because I believe it's the essence of following Jesus, that there's no Christianity without union to him, and true union will lead to a life of abiding with him, a life of obeying, not perfectly in any way, shape or form, but through progressive sanctification, learning, growing, taking on his wisdom and walking in his ways, and then ultimately, yeah, imaging him and looking more and more like Him, being conformed to His image, as Paul says in Corinthians.
Joshua Johnson:I think a lot of us, if we're looking at discipleship to Jesus, I think the an old paradigm is, you know, is classroom knowledge. You know, we're going to get the right information about Jesus, and that means we're going to then start to be discipled to him, because we have the right information. And that's part of it. We need the right information. But then the right information through apprenticeship feels a little bit different. I mean, you see this in like Paul and relationship with Timothy. Second, Timothy two, two, the things you've heard me say in the presence of many witnesses, teach to reliable people who also be able to teach others, meaning that Timothy has been with Paul as an apprentice, has been walking alongside of him for a couple of years, and then, you know, things will then start to multiply. How did you move from like getting the right information about Jesus into being apprenticed to who he is and what he does?
Heath Hardesty:Yeah, great, great question. So the pieces kind of came together over over the years, because, yeah, you're right. It's not just information, and that's part of the reductionistic way of our culture, part of the fragmentary nature of it is we reduce ourselves, you know, to like what James K Smith is called, like brains on a stick, right that, and then if we just download the right information, we'll be okay. But that's that's not a holistic understanding of the human being. So basically, what happened at one point I tell the story in the book is I found myself under under a sink laughing after we bought our home here in Livermore, California, we gutted it, and I was reworking a number of things, and I'm laying under the sink in the bathroom downstairs, and it just it hit me, like the pieces kind of came together. And it wasn't the water or falling sink part that hit me, but it was the realization. Thought was like, oh my goodness, like, I've become my dad, or rather, I've become like my dad. Because I was, I was holding a crescent wrench laying on my back, turning a faucet, and I was painted orange. My dad always painted the tools orange so he wouldn't lose them in a ditch or a vault or a crawl space. And it was the same brand. It was the same paint color, and I was turning the wrench the way I saw him do it 1000 times. And so here I am, like, 10 years removed from plumbing at that point, and, you know, hundreds of miles away, and I'm like, oh my goodness, here I am. I'm imaging the master. The pieces just started to fall together. Where I realized, you know, I had known for a long time, it was far more than information, and it needed to be fully embodied faith. But how, you know, how does a story string together? What's the narrative? What does apprenticeship really look like? And and so, yeah, like, well, I'm looking like my dad now, all these years later, because I have muscle memory. I learned to do the things that he did, because I had this new orienting relationship with him called apprenticeship. I was abiding with him. I was in the plumbing truck with him daily. I was, you know, in the bathrooms, in the crawl spaces, in the vaults. And then he put the wrench in my hand and said, You do it. And then it watched me. Things would fall apart, and I'd rework it until it got into my muscle memory. And so that's that's somewhat of how it came, came together, and that's why our faith isn't just meant to be intellectual alone. I'm all for the the life of the mind. We shouldn't check our heads at the sanctuary door. We should be thinking people, but we're an embodied being and and information gets encoded into us physically. So there's a lot that's caught, but there's also a lot that's that's taught. And so Jesus says, Come and see, and then you'll, you know, do the things that I'll do. And so we, we need to then live into what he teaches, not just have some mental reflection.
Joshua Johnson:Talked about embodied faith, like we want to embody the ways of Jesus in this world. And you've also talked about fragmentation already so far, and we're like, eight minutes in. And so these are the things that we want to diagnose. What is the world? Why is it? Is it fragmented? Are there? Are heaps of broken images all around like, what does it look like? What's the world like? And because it, if it is, it seems to be hard to move about into siloed images in this world. So,
Heath Hardesty:yeah, yeah. Well, I do believe we live in what I would call the age of disintegration. You know, there's always some kind of age. People are always putting a name to it, Age of authenticity, you know, you know, the industrial age, Information Age. But there, there is something I believe that is is unique to this, this time period that we live in, and I would call it the age of disintegration. And so I can explain that. I'll try in brief. There's, there's six different ways I try to talk about the age of disintegration in the book. And that's, that's disenchanted, dissociated, disc contextualized, dislocated, disembodied and disconnected. So it's a super happy, fun list. But in short, we live in an age which you could call disenchanted, you know. So we live in response to, you know, decades, a century, of secular forces that have tried to say there's, there's no God, or tried to exercise God from the world, and so reducing the world to just what is in the mechanical forces, right? And so we've exercised God from the world. We've disenchanted the world, yet we were still like trying to cling to transcendent things, because our hearts are designed for eternity. So it's disenchanted in that way, and then we become dissociated because we are spiritually we are spiritual beings, fully embodied beings, and we're designed for union with this God. But if we say now we're done with you, it's going to create inherent tensions with us, so we can't even be okay in our own skin, because we've broken the the most important core relationship of our life, and so we're dissociated. In that sense, we're kind of like, like Voldemort and Harry Potter, you know, who in in murdering in order to, like, maintain his own kingdom and live forever. He actually fractures his soul. So, so that's the dissociation. Then there's the discontextualized We live in a world that's radically discontentualized from the the technology and the social media flood that we swim in. And I say dis contextualized, not not just decontextualized, because decontextualized means, yeah, you're taking something out of its place. You're pulling it out. You're pulling it out of socket. But discontextualized is what I'm trying to get at. Is not only do we think take things out of their place, but then we situate them in other places, in incongruent and kind of nightmarish ways, kind of like Frank and stinian ways, you know, where we're putting together pieces in a corpse, like way and and that's a desacralization of the world. So here's a quick way of like, explaining, like, you hop on your social media feed, right, and you see an ad for some some Air Jordans, and then right next to that, there's an ad for some kind of medication, and then there's, there's a pornographic image, and then there's an image of a friend at Disneyland having a great time, and then there's a verse from lamentations, right? And all these things are just strung together and and these, it's like, it's like looking through glasses that were made up of 1000 different shattered prescriptions put together. The proportions gone, the context is gone. And so you're combining trivialities and traumatic things and beautiful things and terrible things in a hodgepodge way that's catechizing us, teaching us that this world is chaos and that there's no true order in it. So that's just contextualized. I'll be brief on these next ones. Dislocated living primarily is like digital natives. Now, you know, we're so disconnected from the place in which we live like we'll, we'll know more about a coup in some other country than we'll know about our local government, because we're just taking in stuff from all over the world. So we're very unrooted, less and less analog, more and more digital. We're kind of everywhere. We're on our phones, being everywhere. We're nowhere, and then disembodied. The ideologies of our age, the cultural forces have have put forward that you know, the human being is just kind of who you are inside, and the body is basically organic, plastic that we can do with what we will. And it's not truly who we are. But the Christian faith is an Hebraic thought, if you go back to Old Testament, it's just a earthy like really embodied faith, that the body is a gift from. God, and it's not just to be shed and done away with. It's actually to rise and and have eternal life, you know, and we're to be fully integrated in that sense. And lastly, disconnected through the social breakdown, through family breakdown, through attachment bonds breaking down, we've become more and more isolated and living more and more lives digitally and separated. So So I do believe our age has this unique hyper fracturing. Sin is a constant. There always was sin. There's still sin. The human heart was a problem back then. It's now, but it's like it's plugged into an amplifier, and it's created this feedback loop that's creating great damage.
Joshua Johnson:So what do we do about it? Like
Heath Hardesty:question,
Joshua Johnson:because I mean that, I mean not a happy list, right? Really difficult world that we live in. It's a hard world if I'm if dis contextualized, I'm not rooted to where I am. I don't know how to embody my faith. I don't know how to actually be with people in real life anymore in community. Is there a solution to bring us into a place where we can be rooted and we can be embodied and we can actually re integrate our lives?
Heath Hardesty:Yeah, you know, there's no push button, you know solution, but there is a grand, a grand story of redemption from this, from this fragmentation that be began way back when the garden went dark. So the answer here is union with Jesus, that the subtitle the book is how apprenticeship to Jesus is a way of flourishing in a fragmented world. You know, Colossians, chapter one has this brilliant passage. Colossians, 115, through 20. And a chunk of it, a piece of it, says that all things were created through Him and He is before all things and in Him, all things hold together. So that's the core. That's where this idea came from. Scripturally, that Greek could be translated all things cohere in Christ. And so the solution, the answer, is that in this fragmentation, in this condition of sin and entropy and things breaking down. What what needs to happen is we need to become more more truly human. We need to, as image bearers of God, follow, follow this Jesus, being united to him, let his spirit rework us from the inside out and conform us to his image. And what I would say is that it's only in relationship with him that the outward, flying fragments of our lives can actually cohere. So yes, apprenticeship is is the way, and by that, I don't mean us doing stuff. I mean us entering into the intended human condition of relationship with our Creator, being with him, dwelling with him, enjoying him, delighting in him, and then living in accordance with reality, doing what he says, and then growing more and more like him. The two basic ways that this happens, if you were to try to simplify it, which I try to do in the in the book, is first it's to re imagine the world and reimagine what apprenticeship is to re see the world like we're storied creatures. We stories help us take all the bits and pieces and hold them together. So I believe one of the things that we need to do is help people to re see the world. And Jesus did this all the all the time. It's It's amazing. And in the first part of the gospel, John the words see and look and behold are there, just over and over and over and over again. And Jesus invites the new disciples to come and see, right to come and see he's going to be about the work of re teaching them how to envision reality and then how to then inhabit that reality. So if we can envision reality in this cohesive way, understanding the scriptural narrative, the drama of redemption, what it means to follow this Jesus, not just have some data about him, then we can inhabit the world in a different way. So short answer, it's a whole lifelong process that's born of grace, that's empowered by grace, and he's at work changing us bit by bit.
Joshua Johnson:I think that's helpful, is the reimagination and reimagining the world of the way that it truly is. You talked about like walking into the reality of life. I think that we when we perceive what's on the surface of things and this fragmented world, I think that most people believe that that is reality like that is how the world is. Really is and how God actually designed the world. But you're saying that as that's actually a false perception of the world on the surface is like that, but God's intention and design is different. It's integrated, it's whole, yes, and so I think that reimagination and perceiving the world differently as God intended it to be is going to be really helpful for people. Can you help me? What does that look like, to reimagine, re image the world, perceive how the world is in reality,
Heath Hardesty:a piece of that is understanding the biblical story doesn't begin in chapter three of Genesis, right? It begins in chapter one. And that's that's deeply significant. And what we see in chapter one, chapter two, and then, you know, and start to fall apart in chapter three, is, is a good God, a good gardener who brings together space and time and people in his presence, and all those things are bound up in what you would call shalom, right? Active peace. Shalom isn't just the absence of people, you know, like bickering like it's it means fully active. It's a fully active, robust, thick piece where all the aspects are working together for mutual flourishing, right? So often, when we think of peace, we define it by the absent or the negative. It's like bad things are not happening. Actually, peace is way more profound and thick, thick than that, right? So God's created this world of shalom, all things integrated for for flourishing. So if we can look at the whole story again and see what he's done, and see how all those pieces come together for our flourishing and for His glory, and then to see what sin is that sin is this disruptive, disintegrating force that dehumanizes human beings and takes us further and further away from flourishing, further away from joy, further away from from Peace. Then that'll help us start to reframe our main problem. What is, what is the problem in this world? Well, it's, it's exile from God. It's disunion from the God that we are created to be united with and have a flourishing relationship with. And our problem is not that we just don't go to church enough, or aren't, you know, just don't stop doing this or stop doing that. Our problem is that that our existence, our our being, is disconnected from the only fount of everything good, beautiful and true and and if we try to fix ourself without that union, we're only going to fracture more and more and more so. So that that's a piece of it. Joshua is, I would say, reframing the story, going back looking at what the Scriptures say, seeing the scriptures as a fully integrated narrative that ultimately points us to Jesus versus just a hodgepodge of ancient wisdom. So seeing how it points us to Jesus, and then seeing how Jesus brings us in from that exile of disunion, overcomes the autonomy of the self, and then brings us into the family and restores us and helps us to love him and and love others. So it's really a zoom out to like to reimagine, right? We're zooming back out to the whole storyline. And one last thing I would say is that we would see apprenticeship, not as like something invented, you know, by the Greeks, you know, or something invented by the rabbis. But we're seeing it kind of like gravity. It's, it's part of, part of the principles of reality, right? That we are designed to be united to someone who will be for our flourishing, who will be with, who will teach us, who will lead us, who will guide us, and we'll become more and more like him. So apprenticeship principles are embedded there in the Garden of Eden from day one. And I think it's destructive, or it's unhelpful when we start to see like apprenticeship to Jesus as like a extra credit or a secondary tier kind of thing, because what we're saying is we don't understand the primary dynamics between the creator and the creation.
Joshua Johnson:Maybe the most helpful thing in my faith, in my walk with Jesus, has been to do a whole narrative, look at the story of the Bible and be then situate myself within the story, and situate our community and where we are in the story, I think is really important. What does that big zoom out look like for people like talk to talk to pastors and people within the church? How do we root people in the story? In the narrative of Scripture so that we can actually stand firm and know who we are and know where we are in the story, and not just, you know, be really hyper focused on this small little piece that's in front of
Heath Hardesty:us. Yeah, well, so this is why I'm a huge advocate of biblical theology, right? And by biblical theology, I don't just mean we get our theology from the Bible. I mean the discipline of biblical theology, which is different than systematic and biblical theology, is seeing how all, all the threads Hold, hold together, right? How there's this grand story of Scripture. One of the my favorite ways of talking about what Scripture is is that Scripture is the God breathed humanity, penned story, shaped library that leads us to Jesus and so as a pastor, one of the things I'm constantly trying to do from the pulpit, whether explicitly or implicitly while preaching a passage is, is to show the context of that passage is in that the near context, but also the far context, and then then the cosmic context, like and then, and then naturally weaving in. This is why in Exodus, God did this and and this is why in numbers this so, because it's all of one we've and so to help people to see the integrated nature of the scriptures, which is God's self revelation and revealing himself, then that helps us to see the integrated nature of reality that we're living in, and why the disruptions and fragmentations are so so damaging and so so ruinous. So that's one of the things I would say, is to to find ways to help people see the integrated nature of Scripture, and then to show how that actually applies to the life. And doesn't just remain abstract theology, but that all these threads leads lead to Jesus. It has so much impact on our life because it's he's the only way that we're going to be able to overcome the depressions, those dark spots in our in our soul, the the addictions, the the doubts, all these, all these things that that harangue us. We're only going to be empowered to enter further into soul health through union with Him. And so truly, like, we need a savior in every aspect. So, yeah, so that's I would start there, like, let's, let's get this bigger story in our vision, see how it fits together, and then live in light of that. And stories are powerful, right? They change us. You know, it's why we go and we walk. We watch a movie, whatever new movie it is, and we could be having a bummer of a day. And then we watch the hero in that two hour time frame, like overcome things, all the pieces come together. And it's like we saw a microcosm of how it could work, you know? And then we walk out feeling, feeling empowered. The difference with this story, with Jesus is it's not just a fiction. It's the ultimate reality and his spirit that empowers us to actually walk out our true identity and live differently.
Joshua Johnson:How does this work within a body, the body of Christ, where we are unified, we have unity. There's one God, there's one Lord, one baptism, you know, one church. But then there is diversity, right? Made up of different gifts of the body, made up of different ways that we move about and participate in the life of the Body of Christ. What does union with Christ look like in a diverse body of Christ, so that we aren't just hyper fixated on our thing, but we could actually be integrated together?
Heath Hardesty:Yeah, that I love that question. So one of the key practices that that I discuss in the book is simply called life, life together. And that's this, can this life of of deep, rich community that we live in, right? Because the reality is, if union with Christ is the core of what's going on, being a follower of Jesus, well, if we're united to him, Truly in spirit, and then you're united to him, and she's united to him, and she's United him, and I'm united to him, then that means there's we're united to one another, because the same spirit is within us. We are now truly in the deepest I don't even use, like, the word mystical here, like most mystical sense that we're united to him, we're united to to each other, so, so we're a body. This is reflective of an indicative of the fact that we're united to a Triune God, right? Not, not a solo God, not a lonely God, but a God who is one in three, three in one, a God who was always love, loving you. Each other. So we're invited into that life of perpetual and mutual delight, and that's embodied in this world as brothers and sisters. You know, in the church and man. Do we need each other? You know, how are we to grow? How are we to practice all the one another's that be patient with one another. You know, long suffering with one another. Love one another. How are we to grow in those things if we don't have, you know, finite, frustrating human beings with their, you know, with their quirks that frustrate us that we're sitting next to in the pew and in a small group with, I would say, like, what we need to do. How does this lived out is it's lived out slowly over a lifetime with a bunch of broken in process, image bearers who will get underneath each other's skin and frustrate the heck out of each other, but they are image bearers, and we're united to them, and the Spirit leads us in this journey of loving each other well, to look like Jesus, who loves us
Joshua Johnson:and Jesus loves us perfectly. And I'm gonna go into John 15. You're talking about abiding and obeying. There's a lot of that in John 15, right? If you abide in My love, you will obey my commands. If you obey my commands, you'll abide in My love. It's they go hand in hand fighting and obeying. Something that has struck me just recently in the last it's been staying with me is verse nine in John 15. It says, I've loved you. This is the contemporary English version, I have loved you just as my Father has loved me. And I'll get to the second part, but that thing right there is to know that I am loved as much as the Father. Father loves the Son, and that God loves God, like in that Triune God and Jesus loves me like that, like that changes so much for me. That is just amazing, the most amazing thing ever, like that, that is complete, full love. And then in this contemporary English version, it goes on to say, so, remain faithful to my love for you. And I think that's an interesting reframing. Is like to remain. It says remain in my love in a lot of different versions, but this one says, remain faithful to my love for you. And I think that what that does to me is that I now get to love others. I get to love the other people around me, to remain faithful to the love Jesus has for me. What does that do for you? What is it? What do you think
Heath Hardesty:I mean, I love that portion of Scripture. It's just, it's somehow so earthy and so like heavenly minded at the same time. It just Yeah. It just makes me want to take a long walk and process it for for a while. It just, it reminds me again of the fact that to image him is to love others, and to love others is to image him and and will you call that out abiding and obeying. They're they're those two live and breathe together. It's inhale, it's it's exhale. We're not just abiding. And there's this move in spiritual formation, and I love it. It's great to to abide with him, and it's fantastic because, yes, we are first those who are to be in to dwell with His presence, yet then we are also called to obey. And in our culture, that word obey is not the, you know, a fun fun. It's not everyone's favorite word. We'll just put it. Put it that way, but there's nothing. There's that's the truest freedom is to live in accordance with with God, and is designed to obey His good word to Shema. That's the Hebrew word. Shema like to listen, but not just listening with sound waves, but to listen with the heart, with your trust and affection. And that's only way Shalom will be rewoven, is that if we actually Shema, if we listen to him. So, man, yeah, abiding and obeying, that's that's the breathing in and the breathing out of this union with Him. And and it like, what a reframing thought Joshua, I love that like that we are drawn into this love that ever was. I mean, it's not what we all want. We want to be seen. We want to be known. We want to enter into an experience that the good the beautiful and true. And Jesus says you have that in ways that you will spend eternity, like teasing out and experiencing. So that creates a vision of Christianity that is so beautiful, versus, well, I better. I better go to church, you know, I gotta, you know, tick off my my morality, to do checklists and like fire insurance kind of mentality, like, that's that does nothing to the delight. But what you said, like, the fires of delight are just like stoked in that I love it, man,
Joshua Johnson:if this is the breathing aspect of union with Christ, is that inhale and the exhale, abide and obey? Yeah. Hmm, what are we to obey? Like? What does it look like to put it into practice this life with Jesus? What are we doing?
Heath Hardesty:Yeah, absolutely. Well, there's a lot, a lot of things in there. There's a lot a lot of teaching that you could say, well, here's a thing to obey here, here's a piece, here's a piece. The way I try to do it by the practices that I talk about within the book are to look at seven key practices that are kind of at an altitude where it's not like micromanaging every little thing you do throughout the day, but it's, again, it's trying to reframe how you see certain things and to walk in what we saw Jesus do so, for instance, a scripture meditation is just utterly, utterly huge, first and foremost, like God has spoken to us, right? Like he starts this whole thing, like he began the conversation, and then He gives us His Word, and then he draws us and calls us to His Word. So if, if you want to know the true narrative about reality, you better be soaking in Scripture, right? Because every day we wake up and there's a war of narratives in this attention economy that's just after us. You know, from you know, the things we watched on Netflix the night before to what streaming you know, in our our social media channels, all this, all the stuff is narratives about what is and what isn't. We need to hear God's narrative about what is and what isn't and be constantly reminded so first and foremost, like meditation on God's word, getting it in us, letting it reshape our interior landscape. So that's huge. Second, I would say, is this, this life of unceasing prayer, and unceasing prayer is just this constant communion with Him. It's talking with God first and most about about everything. So it's hard to obey God if you won't have any kind of conversation with him, right? It's hard to truly understand His word if you're not talking to him about his word. And so a life of prayer, of just fellowship with him that, I mean, absolutely essential. And we see Jesus doing it. I mean, he's getting up early to pray. He's praying in front of the disciples. He's praying for the disciples. He's teaching them how to pray. It's, how He breathed in this world, like it's his spiritual breath. Then I would say life together. We are called to live this life together. And Jesus doesn't just, you know, find one Pat one and one apprentice and go on a solo journey with them. He pulls together a community of people. It's an odd ragtag crew. So this life together of being known and knowing him and living and confessing community. That would be the third practice. The fourth one is unhurried presence. And you know all the times we're told, you know, by Jesus, don't don't worry, don't be anxious, do not fear. We're called to live a life present, to God's presence with us, and to not be bullied about by all the distractions and the noise and the things of this world and so that one's super, super key, joyful generosity, like to give our lives away. I'm not just talking about finances here. I'm talking about like to give ourselves away, our times, talents, treasures, as the old formula goes, but in a joyful way, like we're made in the image of the greatest, most glorious giver, right? God is is a giver, and he's a joyful giver, like there's a mirth at the heart of heaven, right? Like he loves to give himself away. He's not limited. He can just keep on giving. And that's who we're to be like. So we are to practice giving, and the more we practice giving, the more we are seeing what it looks like to be like this Jesus, who gave himself away, ultimately on the cross, and then, oh, so compassionate gentleness is another practice, like we are to use the power God has given us to steward it well in costly ways for the good of others. And this takes all sorts of forms and is found in Jesus' teaching all over the place. And then lastly, I would say that on obeying, what does it look like? We proclaim who he is in word and deed. So our actions are to live in accordance. But then we are also to verbally express who Jesus is and to be witnesses. And this, is a command for Christians, you know, to tell the good news. So those are some ways to obey.
Joshua Johnson:I love your practices here, and I want to get into two of them that, for me, struck me as something where not everybody has these practices. So it's both the unhurried presence and the compassionate gentleness. I think those are some practices that aren't always in like, Hey, this is what it looks like to you know, follow Jesus, obey Jesus, and I think they're really key to this fragmented world that we live in. So what does unhurried presence really look like? How do we be present with God and one another in. In this world, we have an attention economy. We have fragmentation, polarization. We have so many things that are vying for our attention, and we think the world is sped up so fast right now. What does unhurried presence really look like for us? This is I want to do it. I want to be like that. Yeah.
Heath Hardesty:Me too. Man, me too. So on that first one, unhurry presence, Jewish teachers, rabbis for for years, centuries, talked about what was called a Kavanaugh. This term simply means like intentionality. So it's living with intentionality and and focusing your attention on those things that really matter, versus letting the world dictate what your attention goes to. So it's thinking about what we're thinking about. Often we don't think about what we think about. It's it's paying attention to what we're paying attention to. And so it's an amazing thought, like, if the scriptures are true, if what Jesus says is true, which I truly believe they're true. And he says, I will be with you till the end of the age, that, like he's with us now, like in this here with this conversation, we're not just talking about somebody somewhere else, like he's here on my commute into my study here at the church, like I was in traffic. I was in traffic with Jesus this morning, like, and, and to, like, pause the crazy current of thoughts going through my brain, and just like, acknowledge you're here now, like you're you're with me, to be still for a moment, and to know that He is God, in other words, that he's there, that he's with, with me. So that's a huge piece of it is, is training our our brains, our minds, to pay attention to what we're paying attention to, and to think about what we're thinking about. It's what Brother Lawrence called practicing the presence of God. He worked in a Carmelite monastery in Paris, and he's well known for his book called practicing the presence of God. And he just realized, like man while peeling potatoes in the kitchen or cleaning the skillets or repairing, you know, brother sandal, like there was God with him, and if he could give his attention and sit at the feet of the master, right, that the great portion, no matter what he was doing, it would imbue whatever he was doing with something so beautiful that it would just continue to change him from the inside out. So, yeah, unhurried, unhurried presence. And, man, it's tough like because I'm in Silicon Valley and we're on a treadmill that's like cranked to 11, and just got to keep up with, with the Joneses and all these people who aren't even real because the accounts are filtered and the stuff isn't even real. So you're trying to keep up with, with an unreality, and it destroys the soul. You know, John Mark comer has written a lot about this. Dallas will it has written a lot about this, and I'm really thankful that there's a lot of attention turned to it, because our souls are are wearied and thin because the speed like it's it's hard to have a nice conversation with somebody, or to see the beauty of the scenery when you're in a race and you're driving, you know, the Formula One car, like, everything gets blurred. So we're living in very blurried lives,
Joshua Johnson:yeah? But hey, f1 does make for a good IMAX experience,
Heath Hardesty:yeah, yeah. It's no it's no hate on f1 at all. It's fantastic. It's just not the place for like, a long conversation while you're in the car. You know exactly.
Joshua Johnson:So, I mean, you're living in a place where it you know, if everything's going to 11, if every everything is hurried and fast paced, you're, I mean, Silicon Valley is like, Hey, we're going to we want progress, and we want to create more capital, more money, so that we could whatever it is, we're just like, we're just going, going, going. There's not an end in sight, right? We just have to continue more and more and more. What do you find helpful for the people that you get to minister to, to help people slow down in the midst of that really intense area.
Heath Hardesty:Well, you know, it's to repeat what I said earlier. It would be to, you know, call them into these practices. It would first be though to highlight the dangers and the damaging nature of of the speed and the life that we're living. Most people feel it in their bones, right? Truth will out, even if you don't have a way of articulating it, you're like, Why does my Why does my experience or my existence feel so blurry and and thinned out and fatigued? It's because you're running seven days a week and you're not designed for. That. So one, I would just like highlight, you know, what we're built for, and also show like doing more faster is not the answer, and to talk about the rhythms that God has created, you know, there's, there's a reason why it was six and one, and the way he created things right that we're designed to step away from all of our doings and all of our trying to hold the world together throughout the week and our jobs and all the things that we do, and to breathe and acknowledge like to liturgically build into our week, like, oh, oh yeah, you're the one who holds this together. Like, you're the infinite one. I'm a creature that is in desperate need of you for even like my my most shallow breath, like I need you. And so I'm trying to to help people see the beauty of those rhythms. We're designed for those rhythms. So, you know, that's the Sabbath thing. But it's also throughout the day, having times of of you know of solitude or quiet, turning again to Scripture throughout the day, building in some rhythms to help push back against the the forces that that just want to want to tear us apart.
Joshua Johnson:That's good. Let's get into compassionate gentleness for just a moment, briefly. But how is that
Heath Hardesty:power? Yeah,
Joshua Johnson:what is that like? You're reframing power for us and so give us. Why is compassionate gentleness?
Heath Hardesty:Power? Yeah. Thank you. I really appreciate that. That question, because gentleness is often deeply misunderstood that we see gentleness as like the opposite of power, right? We see it as like, maybe gentleness or meekness as like being mousy or like not not having a big voice, or not really engaging, but just being a little little quiet, or just only saying positive, affirming things or being nice. But the reality is, God is gentle. Jesus is gentle. When Jesus says that incredible thing that he's gentle and lowly in heart, like he's opening up, like the God of all creation is is opening up his chest and saying, let me give you an explanation of who I truly am, right? See, he's gentle, he's he's lowly in heart, so come to him all who are weary and heavy laden, and he'll give you rest. So it's a big deal that God is gentle. What does it mean? It doesn't mean he's like hesitant to have a crucial conversation. It means that he always uses his power for the good of others, and he will do it at at cost to self, and do it in sacrificial ways. So that's, that's what true power is. I i just think of the cross, and it just this staggers me, the display of gentleness and the display of true power on the cross, you know all the mocking, the jeering like Come, come down. And you know if you are who you say you are, come, come on down, and the things he could have done but didn't do, because he wasn't there to justify himself. He was there to justify humanity, to restore humanity. He would be justified. They would see who he was, ultimately, but he stayed at great cost to the self. And so what does this look like for us in conversations? Man, so often it's hard not to think of social media here, like we want to use our power to, like, step up and over other people and show just how incredibly smart we are, just how we have all the right answers or how wrong somebody is. So we want to like we want to trounce them. We want to see them verbally pummeled online. But maybe the right thing to do, though, is to find a way to say something true and kindly that doesn't hedge or compromise the truth at all, and then to trust God with the outcomes, versus trying to coerce somebody into it. And Dallas will it at one point said, you know, a great spiritual practice is the practice of not having to have the last word in a conversation that's that's a form of compassion and gentleness. And so gentleness is, is is strength. It's not the absence of strength, it's not the absence of power. It's a proper use of power for the flourishing of another, usually at a sacrificial cost to the self Heath.
Joshua Johnson:If you had one hope for the people who would read all things together and for the people that you wrote this book for, what would your hope be?
Heath Hardesty:I think ultimately it would be that that Jesus would be reimagined and reseen with such such delight, that we would look upon him and know that the Father's love has smiled on us through Jesus, and that there is this, this heavenly joy, this heavenly. Delight that is looking upon us, that is calling us in to wholeness, and calling us into what you and I had talked about with that relationship, that that eternal mutual love, that that's what we get to be a part of, and that's how all that the pieces will come together, all the aches that we have, all of the longings that are within the human condition, what will find harmony, and we'll find home in that union with Him. So I would pray that it wouldn't just be like, here's some new practices, you know, do these things and Okay, apprenticeship is this, but it would be like, oh my goodness, I am invited into the heart of reality, and the heart of reality is perfect, love and joy and delight, and the end is going to be better than the beginning and worth all the mess in the middle.
Joshua Johnson:That's good. That's good. A couple quick questions here at the end. One, if you go back to your 21 year old self Heath, what advice would you give?
Heath Hardesty:Oh man, 21 year old, year old me, I would have a conversation like this, this with him, because he had a very moralistic understanding, a moralistic framework of the world. And I would appeal to him through the beautiful, through through poetry, through song, through story, to show how those things point to to who Jesus is, because he needed to see the beauty and goodness of God, and not just like the truth and not data, and not just facts to do the right things, but he needed to see the beauty of who Jesus was.
Joshua Johnson:Anything you've been reading or watching lately, you could recommend. What
Heath Hardesty:am I reading lately? I'm preparing for a sermon series on the book of Romans. So I'm in Romans right now reading a book by a friend of mine named Joshua Butler called God is on your side. So just dive, diving into that. And what else I've been reading. I've been in a lot of poetry lately, reading a lot of Seamus Haney poems and diving back into a bunch of Gerard Manley Hopkins. So if you're looking for some poetry, man pull up. Gerard Manley Hopkins, start, start there and enjoy some incredible brilliance with written word. Awesome.
Joshua Johnson:Love it. Yeah, all things together will be out October. Anywhere books are sold, it's a fantastic book. This is something where I really hope that people don't just go and get the book. I actually hope that that churches will say, Hey, this is actually a way of apprenticeship that we want to orient our lives around to Jesus. It's, it's really, really good. I think it's going to help a lot of people, and I think it's going to help us figure out what discipleship looks like to Jesus in this fragmented world that we live in. I highly, highly recommend this book. So I loved it. I really, really love this, and I really do hope a lot of churches go and say, this is something that we could, we could take not just as a box and a model for us, but something where we could, we could say, Okay, I could actually image things and imagine what the world is really like and help bring people along with with that image of reality, of where we're headed, and say these are some practices that we need to do so that we can actually get to that space with union with Jesus. So it's fantastic. It's really good. So it's out anywhere. So go and get the book anywhere that you'd like to point people to. How could they connect with you, or what you're doing?
Heath Hardesty:Yeah, so you're right anywhere books are sold, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, you can get it there if you go to Heath hardesty.com is just my first and last name, Heath hardesty.com or.org that's kind of like the central hub for all sorts of things. You know, all my social media stuff is is there, but links to all the different places and podcasts and stuff. So yeah, if you want, you can go check that out.
Joshua Johnson:Perfect Heath. Thank you for this conversation. Thank you for actually taking us through what apprenticeship to Jesus really looks like, and how that we could take a fragmented world that we live in and reintegrate it with Jesus, union with Him, figuring out how we can abide in Him to obey what He has given us, and that we could actually see some reintegration in this world. And oh, it would just be an amazing so thank you. It's fantastic.
Heath Hardesty:Joshua, thank you. It's been a joy. I appreciate you having me on you.
