Ep. 438 Kyle Strobel - When God Seems Distant it Isn't Because You Failed

In this episode, I talk with Kyle Strobel about what's actually happening when God feels distant. Most of us start with passion - prayer comes easy, Scripture comes alive - and then a season arrives where the lights go out and we assume we've failed or been abandoned. Kyle offers a different reading than abandonment: the dryness isn't punishment or absence, but the desert where God weans us off the feeling and teaches us to abide. We get into the moralistic temptation that follows - how we turn disciplines, service, and even devotion into ways of managing God rather than meeting him - and why we have to relearn to live by faith and not by sight.

Kyle Strobel is the director of the Institute for Spiritual Formation at Talbot School of Theology, Biola University, who writes and teaches in the area of spiritual formation. He is the author of many books, most recently the co-author of the book, When God Seems Distant: Surprising Ways God Deepens Our Faith and Draws Us Near (with John Coe). Kyle regularly speaks at conferences, church trainings, and serves on the preaching team at Redeemer Church. He can be found at KyleStrobel.substack.com.

Kyle's Book:

When God Seems Distant

Kyle's Recommendation:

A Lifting Up for the Downcast

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Transcript

Unknown: 0:00

So, very easy to make this mistake if we make our transformation or our growth the goal, we will inevitably use God and make Him an instrument of our growth. If God's the goal, and as Dallas taught me, I remember when he said to me, Kyle, what you need to think about is what does it mean to abandon your life to God. That's what this is about, and the fruit of that abandonment is going to be your transformation, you

Joshua Johnson: 0:43

Hello, and welcome to the Shifting Culture podcast, which we have conversations about the culture we create and the impact we could make. We long to see the body of Christ look like Jesus. I'm your host, Joshua Johnson. You know, there was a season early on when faith felt electric, prayer came easy, scripture lit up the room, and you couldn't get enough of it. You gave things up without strain. You assumed that this was what the whole road would feel like. And then somewhere along the way, the lights went out. The Bible got boring. Prayer felt like talking to the ceiling. So you did the reasonable thing. You tried harder, more disciplines, more service, more gritting your teeth. You were certain you'd either failed or that God had walked off without telling you. Well, Kyle Strobel reads that season differently. He's a theologian in Talbot School of Theology, where he directs the Institute for Spiritual Formation, Jonathan Edwards Scholar, who had spent years on the question of what actually forms us with John Koh. He wrote"When God Seems Distant, the second in a trilogy on spiritual formation. His claim is that the desert isn't punishment, and it isn't absence. It's where God weans us off the feeling and teaches us to abide, but getting there means surrendering the strategies we use to manage God, even the religious ones, especially the religious ones, the ones that let us avoid Him while looking devout. So, when the passion fades and God goes quiet, what if that silence isn't a problem to fix? So, join us as we figure out what that season means and what is the path forward? Here is my conversation with Kyle Strobel. Kyle, welcome to Shifting Culture. Excited to have you on. Thanks for joining me,

Unknown: 2:31

Joshua. Thanks so much for having me, brother. It's good to be with you, man.

Joshua Johnson: 2:34

Yeah, it's going to be a good conversation, because I think that it's really important to have this conversation, because a lot of people feel when God is distant, they don't have any zeal left in their life. Their spiritual life seems static and dead, that God is not there, and nothing is actually moving forward spiritually. When you pose this question to say, let's actually walk through what spiritual formation looks like when God is distant. Why this question? Why is it important, and why do you think people are asking this question?

Unknown: 3:11

Yeah, well, that's a great question, and I think a pressing one. I, you know, what we have found is that not only in our own lives, but in the lives of all of our students, pretty much everyone I talked to is that one of the most confusing things that happens in the Christian life is we begin, we usually start, and we have all this zeal and passion and excitement, right, and everything seems to work, and then we go through a season and it's like, wow, that's not there anymore, and oftentimes we don't even notice it, like, you know, I think for a lot of folks what ends up happening is in these initials, see, what we used to call in our church, we call this consolation, the Lord infuses us with consolation, and one of the things that does, particularly early on in the Christian life, is it is it weans us off of the world, right. So, the things we used to kind of be gripped by, the things our passions used to grab onto, and maybe, you know, those are radical things - drugs, alcohol, you know, all sorts of sex, all sorts of things, or maybe they're just, you know, being trying to be a good kid, trying to get good grades, whatever it was, we're trying to kind of fuel our lives. Well, suddenly the Lord infuses us with consolation, and He kind of grabs our desires and our affections to the things of Him. The problem, though, would end up, what ends up happening for folks is we end up merging two things together into one that should be kept separate, and those two things are a kind of felt experience, and God's presence and acceptance, and because those things feel like they overlap early on, most of us actually come to kind of equate those in our minds, and so suddenly the Lord does what we always see Him doing in Scripture, as Deuteron. Eight two says he led them in the desert to show them what is in their hearts, and so after the consolation of the plagues and deliverance from Egypt, suddenly we're in the desert, we're experiencing our desires, and we're beginning to see our character, and all sorts of things that we thought had been transformed, we're realizing, oh, wow, that anger is still there, and oftentimes I find folks will go through this season because at this point, you know, they're usually years into their Christian life, they're involved in the church, and they're just like they used to leave every church service thinking, wow, what, that was a great sermon, what a, what I was.. the greatest worship set I've ever heard, or whatever. Suddenly they're in the car on the way home, going, yeah, you know that, that you know I wouldn't have chosen those songs. I really wish they wouldn't introduce new songs, you know? It frustrates me. All right, yeah, that I've heard that sermon before. And suddenly it's like, wow, I'm being critical. And then it moves into a season where, like, I'm just bored, you know? Like, now I wake up Sunday morning going, do we have to go to church today? And I think that's when something clicks, and they go, whoa, like, what's happened? And what's funny is, you know, though, we've always talked about these things, but we really have forgotten our own tradition on this. We used to constantly explain this to folks, say, "Yeah, of course, this is going to happen to you. And the invitation here is the Lord wants you to know ever more deeply the very things He meets you in and the very things He forgives in you. And so, when Jesus in Luke 747 says that the one who is forgiven much can love much, it's an implication of what He says there. What He's showing us is developmentally the Christian life is one where we'll ever increasingly grow into how much we need forgiveness, which means He's going to consistently show us ever more deeply how sinful we are. How desperate we are, but the problem is early on we don't think that's what's going to happen, right? Early on in consolation, we kind of think this is amazing, it's going to keep getting better. I'm going to, I'm crushing sin, I'm going to, you know, a couple of years from now I won't even have to deal with this. And then suddenly we see more of our sin than we did then, and now we begin to feel the weight of how it's hard to surf now, it's hard to love these people, it's hard to study the Bible, it's hard to show up, and so what we wanted to do for folks is we wanted to meet them right in the most confusing moments of the Christian life, and help them understand the gospel all the way down, so that they could kind of locate their life not in their feelings, but in the promise that no, actually, Christ, Christ invites you right here to know His kindness, to know His mercy, and to know His grace.

Joshua Johnson: 8:00

Yeah, I mean, every great spiritual life actually goes through, through this, you know. You have a passion and zeal, then you go through, you know, maturity into adulthood. You're going into the desert seasons, you're going into the darkness, you're going into something where you're actually going to start to learn and grab some wisdom and something that you could then return to and get to that that place where you're actually being able to sit in the love of God and to be with God. I found, as an example, I was a missionary in the Middle East, I led a missions organization. My wife still leads the missions organization that we led together. Now she's leading, but we see, especially with young missionaries, they have so much zeal and passion, and they want to do so much work for God that they, and then they believe that, okay, as on my shoulders, I have to produce the fruit to be able to, you know, go after it, and they hit this wall, and I think we all hit this wall. It doesn't matter if you're a missionary or if you're just anybody, you hit a wall and go, that's not working anymore. When we hit those walls, what are some ways that we think that we need to manufacture our own spiritual life at that moment,

Unknown: 11:04

yeah. No, that's so that really gets into the kind of heart of what the book's trying to do, where we're trying to kind of lead people into, okay, developmentally, how is what's actually Christian experience going to be like, but then how do we kind of subvert the work of God, and you know the hard thing is coming out of that early consolation. Most of us just assume one of two things. There's really two big ones, and there's all these like minor ones. The two big ones, we assume I need to get more passionate, and so we, we, because passion really feels good. It like it, it really feels like this is working, like we're back on track. And the problem is, if passions don't set a life on fire, and they don't give shape to a life, they're very ephemeral. And so, pumping your life of passion, it actually is what, like, psychologically would say is quite young, like that's a, that's what, like, you would expect, my, like, I have a junior higher, like, that's what that's what my junior higher has to do to get to school in the morning, like, we gotta, okay, buddy, let's get up for this, you know, and if that's the Christian life, it ends up feeling a little bit like a coach at halftime, where you're trying to just kind of infuse adrenaline into the system, the other side is again, I was a little older, maybe psychologically, but just as nefarious, which is just moralism, right? So now we just think, okay, I guess, I guess if, if I'm just good, like maybe if I'm good, then this will start working, and actually I would add to that, I've seen today one of the ways this shows up more today, maybe than it did 100 years ago, 50 years ago, 1000 years ago, but certainly in the last 100 years this is a bit unique, because of the spiritual formation conversation, and because of which I'm heavily invested in, and because of the kind of current cultural moment where we are a generation who's interested in life hacks, self helps just standard. The temptation now is to think not just I need to be good, I just need more spiritual disciplines, like I just need the spiritual life hack that could get me on track. So then we begin to think, how can I just fix my life, and all of this gets down to something Dallas Willard always warned about, where, which is what he called the gospel of sin management, where all of these are strategies where we're really just trying to manage our life and God, and we really are using God to try to get our life better, and that's where we say no. You need to name what is actually going on, and like, what are you trying to solve, and why? Why aren't these things actually driving you back to your Lord?

Joshua Johnson: 13:55

When I think of new heaven and new earth, I think of peace and shalom, a good life, and it's like all right. I want to get there, so why can't I do some spiritual hacks, and you know, these spiritual disciplines to get me to the place of consummation, where it's going to happen someday, like I can manufacture it now. What do you think? Then the purpose is of spiritual formation, if it's not just spiritual life hacks.

Unknown: 14:29

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, I.. so one of the ways that, and for those who don't know me very well, I actually direct the Institute for Spiritual Formation at Talbot School of Theology. So, like, this is not.. I'm not an outsider, this conversation, folks like Dallas Wither and Richard Foster have meant a lot to me personally. I actually used to go to church with Richard Foster for several years and got to know him really well, and I knew Dallas, and you know one of the things that has happened, I think, is not that we focused on the wrong things early on in the spiritual nation conversation, but rather we led with spiritual disciplines. When what we see, what we're doing in spiritual mission is, we need to think about, well, what is the nature of the supernatural life. We're not just talking about growth, right? We're talking about life in Christ by the Spirit. So, like, what's the nature of that life in light of that? What is the process of supernatural maturation, and in light of that, then what does it look like for God to transform a soul, and what's my role in that? Instead, we kind of led with spiritual disciplines, I think that was right by Foster and Willard, because in the 70s and early 80s, when they started doing this work, this wasn't a life hack generation, is what, like, self-help hadn't yet kind of emerged in the same way. I think what we need to remember now is spiritual disciplines cannot form you, that's not what they're for, that's Foster says, that Willard said that no one thought spiritual disciplines could shape your life, they cannot, because we don't believe in Aristotle. We don't just develop habits to be good. What spiritual disciplines do, and they're still necessary, of course. We still have to develop habits, even though they're not- they're not the end all be all solution to things. Habits now supernaturally are a response to God giving himself to you, and they're the way you present your body to him, and so the, the, the movement of a spiritual practice isn't your life, it's God. It's you giving yourself to God and abiding in Him in such a way that transformation is the fruit that's a byproduct of the movement of your life to God. See, that this is really like it's a very easy to make this mistake if we make our transformation or our growth, the goal we will inevitably use God and make Him an instrument of our growth. If God's the goal, and as Dallas taught me, I remember when he said to me, Kyle, what you need to think about is what does it mean to abandon your life to God. That's what this is about, and the fruit of that abandonment is going to be your transformation. I think we very quickly reverse those, and so if we remember that what makes eternity glorious is God as the center of that world, as Jonathan Edwards used to say, heaven is a world of love, because God, the fountain of love, is at its center. I've always loved that image, that that the society and economy of eternity is determined by the harmony of love, and, and, yes, to your point, like, in one sense, by faith, we are cultivating that world, like we are trying to kind of now embrace that reality, but what we're to know, as Paul says in Colossians 219 is to know the growth that comes from God, not the growth that we generate in ourselves.

Joshua Johnson: 18:12

Then what is abiding with Christ look like, and like practically, I think a lot of people think, okay, I guess I'm supposed to be a hermit in the woods and just give myself prayer and silence, and you know, but if it is unto transformation of where I'm, I'm giving, you know, my life back to God, God has given himself to me, what does that really look like to abide,

Unknown: 18:42

yeah, yeah. Well, this is where I think that Romans 12 one passage I quoted is particularly helpful, like the movement of our life is a presentation of our bodies to Him. And so the question you have to constantly ask yourself is, and I would just say, start with your spiritual practice. Every Christian is practicing something. Right, you're going to church, you're reading your Bible, you're doing something right. Like, why are you doing those things? Are you doing them to present your life to God and say I'm yours, or are you doing them to try to placate an angry deity, to try to get hooks into God, because you think maybe I can get him to do what I want, you know, as the psalmist would often tell God, God, you are my refuge. Well, are you? Do you make God your refuge? Like, do you turn to God for help? And some of this is, you know, one of the things we have to realize, going back to Luke 747 like as you develop and mature, you actually will see more of the distance between you and God. This is something that everyone has always said, but everyone generationally is always surprised of. I mean, Calvin says it, and it's like, this is weird. Edward just shocked by it, but he says, yeah, this happens. This is one of the key.. I think this is a very important difference between Christian growth and worldly growth in the world. Think of the gym at the gym, which is a kind of growth by habit, kind of Aristotelian growth. Develop habits and grow. Okay, go to the gym, you'll grow. They put mirrors everywhere because the anticipation is you're the first one to know if you're growing, like you know, and you want to see it, like, how do I look in Christian growth? You're often the last one to know about it. So, as you grow supernaturally, the expectation is someone's going to say to you, Joshua, man, you're so patient, and you kind of look around your shoulder a little bit, and you're like, do you know who you're talking, like, what are you talking about, like, you have no idea, and we actually need each other in that, in that way. So, the problem is very practically, the problem is you're often going to be looking at your life, going, 'wow, like I don't know, is God here? Like, this is, have I changed at all? Like, I used to be really excited, I'm not even like going backwards, like I'm not even excited about this anymore, and this is where the question now is. Well, where do you turn? Do you actually go to your Lord and say, Jesus, look, I don't even want to read your word now. Here's the irony of all of this. The person who's going to God, saying, God, I don't even want to be with you. That's a person who's living by faith. The person who's not admitting that and just gritting their teeth and reading their Bible more is living in the flesh, and this is where we really have to hear Paul in Romans three, and is the righteous will live by. Say faith, but the temptation is to go back to a kind of law that just says no, do this and live, as long as you do these things, you'll be good, and God will be happy with you, and, and so, very practically, I would say we need to just embrace the life we have, and this means you could, it doesn't matter what you're doing, whatever you're called to, the question is, Can I do this as a way to offer myself to God. I have an electrician. I love this man. He's so dear to me, my.. and it's sad that I know my electrician this well. I said something about the age of my home. I have a home for the 20s, lots of electrical problems. Very dear brother in the Lord is, is had a hard life, wrestled through a lot, and he's an electrician for the glory of God. Like this is a way that he presents himself, and he bears witness to Lord wherever he goes. He, he offers his life is a testimony. You don't have to become a monk to do this. This is available to you. It's, it's, am I actually doing this as an offering of my life, or am I just gritting my teeth and grinding it out, because I think that God's happy when I do. So

Joshua Johnson: 23:46

it seems like there's so many people then in that scenario that people are playing faith like they're playing their faith and saying,"Hey, it's really up to me, but there's really not much transformation happening. How do we start to realize that we're playing faith and we're not actually abiding?

Unknown: 24:08

Yeah, well, I like that. That the idea of playing faith is helpful. I think that's a good way to put it. Like, one of the things that I, I've realized, I grew up, I grew up at Willow Creek Community Church. I grew up in the mega churches, where everything was big and exciting, and you know, no one would have said this to me there, but what I learned in that place was that you need faith to become a Christian, but the goal is to never live by faith, and the way that was taught to me is every time we wanted to kind of find assurance or get excited, or we turn to sight, remember, we walk by faith, not by our senses, not by sight, but what I heard there was, well, look around, look how much we're growing, look how much God is blessing. So, like, every time we wanted to kind of discern God's presence, we left faith behind, and we turned to our senses, and so what we know to be true is that Jesus is trying to wean you off of that onto faith, and so I would pay very close attention to your fantasy life, you know, if you're sitting there thinking, man, if I just had enough money, I'd be benevolent, man. I could really help a lot of people, man. If I just got the right job, man. If I just spent the right spot.. if I just.. like, where is your hope? Your hope shows up in your fantasies. You fantasize about what you open. So, I say, pay very close attention to those, and I would say those are real gifts, because these are what you now can bring to God, or when you go to pray, and I'm not talking about at dinner here, like I'm saying you're going to sit in prayer, you're going to spend at least 15 minutes just sitting before the Lord, offering your life to the Lord, which means your mind's going to wander, and John and I talk about this, John Coe and I, who wrote this book, but we also wrote where prayer becomes real, where we unpack this, you know, when you draw near to God, which is what's going on in prayer, your heart will release its treasures. So, the problem isn't your mind wandering when you pray. The reality is, when you draw near to God, your heart's releasing its treasures. So, don't try to stop that. Don't shut that down. The Lord is opening your loves to you, because this is what you should be praying about. And so, when your mind wanders in prayer, I would pay very close attention to what it's wandering to and why. Maybe it's just fleshly, right? My mind will often wander to things I feel that I'm particularly good at, like maybe I'm outlining a book, something that that kind of I can look at as a mirror I want to look into, like, oh, look at this, I'm doing stuff, like I'm achieving things, right? Some people, maybe you're organizing your calendar and you're just like, oh yeah, I'll move that meeting, and yes, and I'll, you're, you're kind of controlling your life. It is very interesting when we draw near to our Lord, where we turn for comfort instead of turning to Him. I would say these are opportunities to bring this to God, to say, God, look, look what I'm doing, Lord. I so desperately want control instead of having to live by faith, and, and you know, I find for a lot of folks there's there's a lot of things that are very front and center in their life that don't show up in their prayers and. So I would say I would add to that, and say spend some time and just really consider, and don't just think about it, but actually bring this before the Lord. Say, what? What don't I pray about? Like, I know a lot of folks who are deeply angry, but they never come into prayer angry, so they never pray about anger in the present tense. They always pray about it in the past tense, and in between, they've usually tried to fix their life, so they're just saying what they're really telling God is, you know, I know I blew up there, God, I've got taken care of that, though, and what they're really saying is, God, I don't need you to fix this, you can look away, I'm okay, because they, what they deeply believe God wants from them is to get their act together, and man, what a tragedy that would be. I mean, that's not there's no gospel there. And so I would say, what? What aren't you bringing in prayer? Are you not bringing your career aspirations? Are you not bringing your real hopes, your real desires? Are you not bringing your anger, or your lust, or your greed into prayer and say bring those things and make God your refuge. Actually live by faith here, and so the way we play faith, I think, is precisely by actually just living by sight and then keeping for ourselves the things we think God either can't handle or simply doesn't want to, and therefore don't actually have a God-ward movement in our life. We have really a self-word movement in our life, where we're using God to try to achieve the things of the self.

Joshua Johnson: 29:12

You mentioned at one point that the closer we get to God, the more distance it feels like there is, which often

Unknown: 29:22

is, yeah,

Joshua Johnson: 29:23

really, really strange,

Unknown: 29:24

yeah.

Joshua Johnson: 29:27

It feels counterintuitive, like it's not supposed to work that way, but it does. But why do you think that that happens? Why do you think that there is distance, even though there's not distance? There's so many people, or say you just have to pay attention to God, and I think attention is really important, right. We need to be attentive to God at work in our lives, and where He is, and be attentive to the right things, and the beautiful things, and not the ugly things. But what is that, that separation, or distance, or perceived distance?

Unknown: 30:02

Yeah,

Joshua Johnson: 30:03

do we doing for

Unknown: 30:04

us, yeah. I think perceived distance is the real key there, and I think a lot of it has to do with our expectations, and I think we have to remember our expectations are often kind of solidified a bit in that early consolation period, and so I use Jonathan Edwards as an example of this in the book, because, well, I'm, I'm an Edwards scholar, that's not the only reason, um, but because Edwards is, is of a different generation. I like using other generations, because so much of this stuff we can get lost in, like, maybe this is just moderns, or whatever, but Edwards says that, you know, you know, he looks back in his life and he says, in his maturity, when he's seen as like one of the greatest living kind of, you know, evangelical pastors, theologians of his day. He's he looks back his life and says, you know, I think I was a better Christian for the first two or three years I was a Christian, and he specifically names I had more pleasure and I had more delight in the things of God. But then he looks, he goes, but I know I'm more mature now. I know I depend on it, and one of the things that's really clear for him is, man, when I was really excited and passionate and was filled with delight and pleasure, I had no idea how deep my sin went. He's like, now I'm not naive anymore, because the Lord has shown me what has really gone on in my soul, but it's precisely by showing him what is going on in his soul that he depends on God more, but the funny thing about it, so Edwards knows in his mind I'm more mature, but it's still like the way we tend to kind of discern things undiscerningly is by using our feelings, and so we can think, yeah, but man, I felt like that was really what it was about, and, and let me just say, there is still something right about that, because one day, in eternity, all of these things will be one, and we will be filled to overflowing constantly. We will be filled with delight and pleasure in the things of God. But in this day, we're called to live by faith and not in our senses. And so, you know, I remember, I read, you know, there's in John Calvin's commentary on the Psalms, he makes the same point. He says, yeah, the growth and holiness is kind of weird. The more you grow, and the way I like to put this is, if you think about our expectation is the longer we're Christians, the better it will get, and in our feelings like that. No one, again, we're not saying that out loud, we just haven't turned. Analyze that, but we have to remember that we, the kind of growth, the Christian life is growth in oneness with the God who is the purifying fire, and to draw near to purifying fire is to experience impurities leaking out of you, and so, on the level of our feelings, we're often experiencing and seeing impurity, but that experience is also the same experience of our becoming more pure, but again, that you know, when the Puritans talked about this, one of the things they said is when people experience, like, the desert, or what they would call, like, oftentimes we throw around the word "dark night of the soul. The Puritans talked about that as well. They would call that spiritual desertion, and they would say Christians experience a gift from God of God's abandonment. Biblically, this is the thorn of the flesh from Paul, basically. And they would say the one of the things they feared most is that when Christians experience this, they would start asking if they're Christians or not, right? So they would start trying to discern their standing before God, and they say, no, no, no, no, your hopes out there, your hopes in Christ, that's what faith like you turn your, like, turn your life to Christ, but then they would say their fear was they wouldn't have a spiritual guide, because when you experience, like, you might be hearing this and thinking, oh, okay, this makes sense, it won't make sense in the midst of it, like, you, you really do need to rest on another, you need to remember, and hear, like I remember, I was just tossed by the waves by this, and I just thought God's abandoned me. I've been condemned, I guess. I, there's nothing else that can make sense of this, but it was having a kind of older brother in the Lord who had once explained a bit of this to me, that it was like, oh no, there's a map to these waters, I know where I am, and then it reframes enough for, say, I can give myself to Christ here and trust myself to Him, and so it's not, it's not your job to kind of fix this, but it is your job to offer this to Christ, say, if this is what you have, Lord, what does it mean to be faithful here? And I think in those moments we begin, we can begin to trust. Oh, Lord, I actually don't need to kind of feel my growth in real time. I can actually entrust that to you, or to put it in the biblical language, I actually have to even look at my own life by faith and not by sight.

Joshua Johnson: 35:25

I was thinking about this earlier in our conversation, and you brought up the fire that takes out all of our impurities. There are a lot of evangelicals where they think of, like, a refiner's fire, like they're like, I need to get more passionate to be more on fire, so that I can be then more holy, and the fire doesn't come with more passion. It's the Lord's fire, it's not our fire. So, how then, if it's not us manufacturing the fire of passion, then how do we actually then enter into that fire that is actually painful that takes out our impurities,

Unknown: 36:10

yeah. Well, the language I like here is from the book of Hebrews, right? So the book of Hebrews is meditating on Exodus, right, and and the book of Exodus is don't know, don't draw near lest you die, and Leviticus is going to figure out, oh, how do we draw near, sacrificial system stuff. Well, the book of Hebrews then kind of takes this in light of Christ, and now the imperative is boldly ascend, right? It's draw near to your Lord. Well, the question is, well, how? How do we draw near? How do we present our bodies as living sacrifices, and I'm going to say, well, the only way to do that is you, the true you, actually have to show up, and so if you find yourself bored out of your mind, not zealous at all for the things of God, your responsibility is not to recover zeal, it's to go to God with your lack of zeal, and saying, Lord, you are my only hope here, Lord, I can't, I can't just make this, I can't generate this. See, even the idea of creating, like, if you hear a command and your response is okay, I gotta try to do that, can that's just law. Do this and live. No, the righteous live by faith, and faith is what leads you to Christ. And so, the.. and, of course, you still have to do things, but the question is, How am I doing this in such a way where I'm offering myself to Christ, no matter what my current experience of it is? Is, and so you know, I think of the Apostle Paul, right, with the thorn of the flesh. Paul was given a gift by God, which was a messenger of Satan to harass him. So, right away, that's that's that's where you're off the map, right? That's where you need someone to go, what, what is happening here? Paul, who's healing people, whose prayers are answered, of praise, Lord, take this away. Nope, my grace is sufficient for you. Okay, that's interesting. Well, Paul now says, well, now therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my.. if, if God, if your powers may prove to my weakness, then then I'm going to bring all of this with me to you. And so this is where we need to, to kind of, instead of trying to fix the things in our life we see, we need to take those things and we need to bring them to God. So let me use a really obvious example, you know, God loves a cheerful giver, and maybe you're just not a cheerful giver, like you right now, all you could think of is there are so many other things I'd rather be spending my money on, and there's that QR code that you're looking at in the worship booklet, and you're thinking, yeah, I didn't set up the automatic thing, I should really do something like, should I give now? One way to think would be to go, well, not a cheerful giver, so I'm not going to give, and maybe then you pray, oh Lord, make me a cheerful giver. Well, no, no, that's not right. Like, you don't, you don't wait until you're cheerful. Give it now, you, you're going to scan that QR code or do whatever you do as a way to present your body to God, and the prayer of that becomes, Lord, I'm giving this to the church, or I'm, I'm, you know, I'm gonna.. I've decided I'm gonna sponsor that missionary. I'm gonna do whatever, Lord, as an act of giving myself to you, because, Lord, I'm not a cheerful giver. Lord, you've provided for me abundantly. Lord, I'm not nearly as grateful even for what you have offered, and yet, Lord, here I am. Lord, I want to be a cheerful giver, but the act of doing that isn't a way, it's not a strategy to become a cheerful giver. It's a strategy in obedience to offer my life to the Lord, just entrusting myself to Him, trusting that as I do so, the fruit of that, the fruit of my abiding in Him will be one day. I'm going to actually just be a cheerful good. I'm going to actually rejoice as I hear back of the goodness of these things, as I get to share in the abundance of what the Lord is doing. But I think for a lot of us, we begin to think I've got to first create the desire, and then I'll obey instead of saying no, I'm going to give myself my, I'm going to give my life to the Lord here, or we think I'm just going to grip my teeth and obey, and then I'll be cheerful, and what we, what we do is we become increasingly more angsty because now we're just obeying out of our own fortitude, and at some point we'll become the older brother, and we'll be like, what am I getting out of this? Like, I, I've been out here working all day long, you're giving this guy grace, you're throwing a party for him, are you kidding me? Like, well, that's that's a. there's some angst in that, in that young man, and it's, it's because he never became a child of the family, and he never really had embraced the abundance of the family, and so, you know, we used to call spiritual disciplines means of grace, and grace is God's self gift to you, it's not, it's not just, you know, favor, it is God's given himself to you, and so a means of grace was a means of embracing God and reciprocating by saying, Lord, here's my life, and trusting Him enough to embrace the fact that if, if I give myself to you and remain in here, what I'm going to see is fruit at some point, but I'm going to see it through other Christians first and foremost, and that's again, that that confusing thing is, is as I draw near to him, like my experience is often going, I'm not nearly as cheerful as I should be, and others being like, well, you're such a cheerful giver, you know, like that is the weird dynamic.

Joshua Johnson: 41:59

The other thing you, you, you talked about in your walkthrough was the dark eyes soul or the desertion of God period. You talked about, you know, when you started to feel that way, it was an older brother in the faith that actually said, "Here, there actually is a map. These things do happen. One of two things happened when you hit that wall of

Unknown: 42:23

yeah

Joshua Johnson: 42:23

dark night, one is you just give up and you go, okay, I'm done, and I don't like it's not there, so I'm done, and the other is like you actually get through the wall into the other side into this this deeper spirit. Virtual maturity and this deeper walk with with Christ than ever before.

Unknown: 42:47

Yeah,

Joshua Johnson: 42:48

what do you think the difference is of people who make it through it and people who give up?

Unknown: 42:54

Yeah, I'm.. I think it for folks who have some semblance of teaching, even if it's really minor, where they just kind of know, oh, this is purposeful. I think that is what often allows them to press into the dark and trust that this is going somewhere. I mean, I think of my kids when they were little, or you know, they would sometimes wander in my bedroom at night, rubbing their legs and saying, and my legs hurt, and it was growth pains. And the second I told them was growth pains, it didn't make the hurt go away, but it was a little like, because, of course, kids really want to grow, so like, oh, like, that's kind of cool, like, so suddenly it kind of reframes the experience in a way that they can actually press into, I think, a lot of times what happens, and we make a differentiation in the book, so I tried to stay a little closer to the kind of, I use the word desolation, but we try to talk about the desert, and then something else called desolation, and there's different languages, we've never really settled in the Christian tradition on the right language for this, but the way we distinguish it is the desert is just a period of dryness, and what ends up coming to the surface is your character, and so the reason the Christian life feels so dry and boring is you're, you're now the Lord's showing you you're trying to sustain it in yourself, and you, you need to learn faith in me. Well, the hard part about then desertion or desolation is now there's something else happening, and that something else is God's going to actually reveal to you that what helped lead you through the desert in part was you still were grabbing onto the virtues of your life and your spirituality and your faith and these things, and the Lord's now saying, I'm actually going to show you now that even those things are veined with vice, that actually you study scripture because you like winning arguments, because you're grandiose, that you go to church, you go to church because you like being a part of the right group of people, and there's a lot of envy and jealousy attached to that, right? Like, and I think a lot of the folks who really spin off, they hit that wall and they just fall away, or as we would say now, they kind of just deconstruct. A lot of them have been sold a bill of goods that has told them this is going to work. This is going to make sense of your life, and you're going to be able to find it in your feelings. And so, you know, a couple years ago, there was two - I'm thinking, particularly very high-profile Christian figures who deconstructed away from the faith, and they were interviewed. It was - they were so high profile, they're getting, they were doing interviews about and stuff, and I remember listening to these interviews, and what was so interesting is they both ended up saying the kind of same thing, which is like, don't worry, I'm okay, I'm actually feeling great now, and I remember thinking, like, wow, like you're locating your life in your feeling like again, this is a very, a very kind of adolescent way to approach reality, and I began wondering, like, what were their churches doing, and were they, and you know, let me say, how don't ever underestimate how easy it is to embrace this vision of reality. If you have ever said, 'Wow, God really showed up, you have embraced this reality, right? Because notice the person that says 'God really showed up' is equating, because what they're really saying is that was awesome, and when God shows up, awesome things happen, whereas what I'm suggesting is, guess what, experiencing God's desolation and abandonment is God showing up. The thorn of the flesh for Paul was also God showing up, the desert for Israel, where God's showing them the heart, was also God showing up, and, and I think for a lot of folks that end up hitting the wall and going backwards, is they've actually been taught when God is with you, life will work this way, and so they're just, there just is no hope in the desert, and they, they begin to just, and I want to say rightly say I've been sold a bill of goods, like this is, I just been sold a lie, like this is none of that was true, and and I, and this is where I would say I would say most churches I've been to do a really great job with early consolation, young brand. New believers, young believers, we get them excited, we get them involved, we get them, we integrate them in a community. We do great with that as they grow increasingly, we do less great with these things, because I don't think we help people navigate the maturation process of how God does lead us into the desert. What do we do when God exposes what our character is most of the time? Because it's simply easier, we just try to infuse passion back into them and tell them, keep going, and some people will do that, you know, and again, generationally the boomers will just do that, they just would, they would just, okay, like I'm doing that, I'm doing that at work, I guess I just do that here, like I'll just keep going, like that's what I guess that's what we do, like my generation, at some point we just say I'm calling it. I think you're full of it, and then we just spin off. So I think we have to begin to narrate a developmental spirituality, and just the weird reality of Christian maturation that that the Bible, in very explicit terms, shows us whether you're walking with Jesus, and he's constantly and very shamefully exposing you to everyone around you, or is it learning the Proverbs and then having to read Job, where all the bad guys only speak in Proverbs, like Christian formation is just unearthing, like it is just a kind of violent reality, and therefore the church needs shepherds to kind of guide, for I mean, as you know, like, I mean, missionaries, missions is such an obvious example of this, or the other ones, adoption, like the amount of folks who are so benevolent, who were allowed to adopt naively, and the fantasy is this child has internalized this deep and abounding gratitude for what you rescued them from, and they'll just be grateful to realize, and then you have these parents just bewildered, 2345, 10 years into this thing that you know, and again, I just think we need to be honest. We need to start being honest with one another about the reality of the faith, because if we're not, we have rooms filled of people in the desert who are all looking at each other, going, well, they get it, like, and we're.. it's puberty all over again. I don't know. I guess I'm the only one, and the reality, it turns out, is far different.

Joshua Johnson: 50:31

You take this turn in your book of relearning the path of love, and so after then this desert.. what is that? Relearning the path of love, what does that look like, and what does that for those emotional people? What does it feel like?

Unknown: 50:47

Yeah, well, and that's the thing I think feelings are profoundly important. And right now I see either people saying yes, they're important, and then just kind of following them, they like they think they project like reality to them, so they think they have outward-facing realities, or people are saying don't follow your feelings, and what that really means is shut them down and ignore them. Like, I think both those are wrongheaded. Your feelings are profoundly important because they're kind of like the dashboard on your car, like your feelings are telling you how, like, wow, like I left that conversation. Wow, I'm filled with anxiety. Like, you need to navigate now with the Lord. Like, Lord, what's going on in me? Like, what is the deep belief I have? Why am I doing the dishes, and I'm just enraged? Or why did that person cut me off, and I'm just like, like, this is now an opportunity to come to the Lord, and I would say, you know, we have to remember that, and the old language - I always like to think about the old language - the old language is, you're never called to legal obedience, you're called to evangelical obedience, and evangelical obedience is the obedience of a child who knows their beloved, and again, that's different than the child who doesn't know, right? The older brother, the child who just is, even though they're a son, is just doing legal obedience. And so we ended there, in part, because I mean, a little bit, as this, this is a part of a trilogy, so we're actually pointing a little bit to what the last book is going to be on, the first book on where prayer becomes real was what does it mean to draw near in truth. This book is kind of what are ways we actually avoid God, and what is the developmental experience of the Christian life. But we wanted to end on a positive note, and we really wanted to just before we talk about the kind of training of love. Than grace, we did want to cast a vision for the fact that you probably are already doing quite a lot. The question is, are you doing these things in light of the grace of God, in light of His love that He's pouring into your heart, as Paul says in Romans five, as a way to give yourself to him, or are you not, and and we wanted people to get a sense of what is the kind of felt experience of God's presence and love as as given in scripture, because again that felt experience is important, and it turns out it's unusual, as we've been talking about, right, it turns out that if you're going to grow in love, right, so if you look at your life and think, well, I don't love my neighbor as I should, which, of course, is all of us. Well, the problem isn't that you need to try harder. Jesus told you the one who is forgiven much can love much, which means like you actually don't really know all the way down how loved you are and how forgiven you are, and so you're going to have to wrestle with, well, why don't I love my neighbor as I should? Well, I just don't want to do, I got other things on my plate, I got, okay, like there's a kind of selfishness in you. What would it mean to meet the Lord in His kindness to you, receive His mercy, and then offer your life to Him, and moving toward your neighbor in love. Well, again, that that pathway of love isn't a pathway to just acceptance without needing anything from you, but it's being able to embrace the love of God, and being open to the Lord, surprising you, that actually, so often it is in giving ourselves to Him in service that we come to discover love, grace, mercy, kindness, forgiveness from others, right? It's like in this communal movement that we come to enjoy and participate in the abundance of God's community, and so there is a real training to the Christian life, but it's not you gritting your teeth, it's you receiving God and offering yourself back to Him.

Joshua Johnson: 54:57

What hope, then, Kyle, do you and John have for when God seems distant?

Unknown: 55:02

Well, you know, our hope for this book is that, you know, we were trying to build on that where prayer becomes real book, although it obviously serves as a standalone book as well. But our hope is that people would abandon their life to God in full, and that they wouldn't be afraid of really showing up in prayer, of really offering themselves to the Lord in all they do, and they wouldn't be afraid of being who they actually are in those places. And so our hope is that as we're narrating kind of what the Christian life is like, that you could really embrace the fact that the Lord actually won't form your avatar, you can't send the Christian you wish you were into prayer. You can't send your ideal self on the missions field and think it's going to be fruitful, like God only works in reality. And so don't be afraid of seeing that you're actually trying to avoid God in your passion, that you're actually trying to avoid God in your goodness, in your devotion, in your, in your, your spiritual life, but see that as an invitation to embrace ever more deeply the forgiveness of Jesus, so that you can abound in love.

Joshua Johnson: 56:14

Couple quick questions here at the end, Kyle.

I like to ask one: 56:16

if you go back to your 21 year old self, what advice would you give?

Unknown: 56:20

You know, my 21 year old self was a mess, and so I.. it really would be the Lord knows, bring the truth to him. It's not a.. you don't have to fix this. He actually has received you because of Christ. I wish I would, as a Bible student at the time, I wish I would have known that the most, some of the most obvious low hanging fruit of the gospel is, but I was trying to become good by knowing more Bible, and it was, it was destroying me.

Joshua Johnson: 56:56

Anything you've been reading or watching lately, you could recommend?

Unknown: 57:00

You know, I've been reading a ton, I, you know, I've been steeped these days in a Puritan named William Bridge, and he wrote a lovely book called A Lifting Up for the Downcast. I actually, I was looking at my desk, I was sitting right here, and, you know, Bridge, like, I like a lot of, a lot of theologians, and I, a lot of you might not realize this, but a lot of theologians, a lot of Bible scholars are also highly neurotic spiritual people, right. So they're what the traditional scrupulous, so like they're they're they're like there's there's a lot of fear, a lot of a lot of trouble, a lot of wrestling with God, a lot of wondering if they're really saved, a lot of can I be forgiven, I kind of, and Luther historically is one of. Great, for these folks, as he was one of these folks, but this bridge book, Lifting Up for the Downcast, he does such a masterful job at saying, presenting Christ to you, and then saying, now some of you weren't able to hear that, and here's what you say to yourself and what you say to me, and then he deals with that, and then he goes to another person. Well, some of you now say this, and it's this, like, like jujitsu, like he's like constantly like taking your, your momentum away from you, and that has been a real gift to me, because I, you know, I still wrestle with the fact that one of my favorite verses is First John three, because it, it has, I have experienced so much of this, like when you are before him and your heart condemns you, God is greater than your heart, and He knows everything, like bridge helps shepherd a soul to know that.

Joshua Johnson: 58:36

Yeah, when God seems distance will be available anywhere books are sold, how can people connect with you? And what you're doing, is there anywhere else you'd like to point people to?

Unknown: 58:46

Yeah, the best place to find me is just Kyle strobel.substack.com So, I do every Monday, I do a Substack post on spiritual formation, and so that's.. I'm kind of committed to that, but I also do a lot of other things on there. I have many courses. I actually have a kind of a silly podcast on Jonathan Edwards called 10 Minute Edwards. If you could do a silly podcast on Jonathan Edwards, I tried to do it, but I also have a podcast on that I'm hoping to reboot. I did a first season, I'm hoping to start a second season soon, just called Spiritual Formation, an invitation to drawing near, but Substack is the place where I'm most easily found. Certainly,

Joshua Johnson: 59:25

perfect. Kyle, thank you for this conversation. Thank you for your walking through this journey with us. It was fantastic. It was deep. It was helpful for a lot of people. I think that people could start to grab a hold of these things, and when these, these seasons, these, this dryness actually happens, and appears we're not going to be surprised. We know that God is actually drawing us deeper into the formation that He wants in us, through us, so that we could actually draw near to to Him, that we could abide with with God. And so, thank you. It was a fantastic conversation.

Unknown: 1:00:00

Oh, thanks so much. So good to be with you, brother. Bless you. Bye.