Across the Counter
This podcast is a passion project where we interview a diverse blend of musicians, authors, podcasters, pastors, and thinkers about semi religious topics.
Instead of listening to respond or debate, we listen to understand through finding common ground and hearing our guests’ stories.
So grab your beverage of choice and pull up a seat Across the Counter!
Learn more at www.atcpodcast.com
Across the Counter
Grace Upon Grace | Tullian Tchividjian | 50th Episode Special
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WE HAVE RELEASED 50 EPISODES!!!
In this ATC 50th episode special:
• What if the Christian life isn't about doing more or trying harder, but simply about basking in the gift of grace? Join us for our milestone 50th episode of Across the Counter as we celebrate with a heartfelt conversation featuring Tullian Tchividjian.
• Tullian returns to discuss his transformative book, "Carnage and Grace," offering a raw and unfiltered look into his life's darkest moments and the overwhelming grace that followed.
• Grant’s wife Raygan makes a special appearance.
• In this episode, we challenge the notion of presenting a sanitized version of life within the Christian community. Together, we explore how embracing our imperfections can foster a more genuine and supportive environment. Tullian shares the therapeutic process behind writing his book and the importance of keeping it real, while we contrast the nurturing grace-filled atmosphere of a supportive family with the often demanding expectations of the broader Christian community.
Don't miss this powerful discussion about authenticity, grace, and creating spaces where realness is celebrated and people feel truly supported!
Connect with Tullian:
Buy his book here!
https://www.amazon.com/Carnage-Grace-Confessions-Adulterous-Heart/dp/1632966387/ref=sr_1_1?crid=15CQXF0G4V6HQ&keywords=tullian+tchividjian+books&qid=1706444604&sprefix=tulli%2Caps%2C228&sr=8-1&fbclid=PAZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAab0OSSldTkxmB2xSEVINtPy-xgf4xK2UZXG7-1mD2lUYplqof7ZmzWvudM_aem_ASoPQ-_1ZxUunZsGj9c9YyIIpNp179mzeG3zdun0t0Onyx2elV5MTYTkLyWO6G0pTEa7WkJF4AUKwbYuKXCHF2JA
Building Community Through Shared Experiences
Speaker 1What's up y'all? This is Grant Lockridge on the Across the Counter podcast. This is our 50th episode and we are pumped about it. I can't believe the amount of support that we've gotten from you guys the questions, the comments, the concerns all valuable to us, so that's been a lot of fun. We have released 50 episodes now, which is crazy. I did not expect to be able to do this for at least 50 weeks straight. That's kind of ridiculous because I'm a pretty inconsistent human being, so that's kind of wild 50 weeks.
Speaker 1In the weeks ahead we are starting to do second round interviews. So anybody that we really enjoyed from the last 50 episodes we've asked again to be on the podcast and we're going to be releasing those. So stay tuned for some of those. But just thank you all for being with us for this long and anybody that's new that's coming into this podcast. I appreciate you guys listening. You really have helped us a lot just keeping us going. So this is my wife, regan Lockridge. She's been keeping me accountable to not release anything. That's super horrible. So, reagan, say hello to the fan base. By fan base, I mean a couple of people that enjoy this second hey, hey, reese.
Speaker 1That's my brother, he listens every week. Yeah, reese Hall is the best man alive, and's it. That's all there is to it, and yeah, so we are pumped. I just wanted to bring my wife in just as like a fun little thing, because we like to have fun with it. So rock and rock and roll. Regan, you got anything you want to tell the people?
Speaker 2Thanks for supporting my lovely husband.
Speaker 1You've probably listened to more episodes than I have, yikes. Well, there you have it. I hope you guys enjoyed this next little interview. We've got Tullian Chavijan on this bad boy and we're super excited. It was me and Jared. We interviewed him a little bit ago and we're excited to release that. So, without further ado, tullian Chavijan and yes, I said that right, pull up a chair across the counter. Your one-stop shop for a variety of perspectives around Jesus and Christianity. I'm Grant Lockridge and I'm here with my co-host, jared Tafta. Today we have on, for the second time, talion Chavijan, and I'll tell you what. I read your book, talion, and it was a banger man. Carnage and Grace. I read it in two, three days, something like that and that was such a fun read, such an honest like I mean you cussed like nothing I've ever seen in a Christian book.
Speaker 3That was mild. I mean I was getting some pushback for it and so I went back through it. I'm like how many cuss words that I actually write in this thing?
Speaker 1and there's like eight or nine, yeah but the eight or nine ones were the worst ones right, yeah, yeah, I uh.
Speaker 3Well listen, it took you two or three days to read it. It took me 18 months to write it and you described it as fun. I describe it the writing process as a revisiting of every dark corner of my life, which was incredibly difficult, incredibly painful but at the same time very therapeutic. Incredibly painful but at the same time very therapeutic. There were some really amazing, surprising things that happened inside me during the writing process that were incredibly healing, that were unexpected. So, yeah, I pretty much bled on every page and when I set out to write it, it took me years to decide whether or not I even wanted to write a memoir of the last 10 years of my life, because there is so much carnage but also there's so much grace in those 10 years.
Speaker 3Once I finally decided that it was time to write it, I determined that it was going to be honest, bloody, real raw. I didn't want it to be sanitized. That's why I wrote it before I had a publisher, because if I had signed on with a publisher first, they would have had a lot more control or, say, in how the book was written, and I didn't want that kind of pressure. I wanted to put it out there exactly the way I lived it, exactly the way I felt it, and I'm super grateful for Lucid Books for deciding to publish it. Lucid's a smaller publishing house, but they were completely on board with the message and the way I delivered the message, and so I'm, you know, I'm grateful that it's out of me and I'm grateful that it's out there for everybody to read, because I'm hoping it will be helpful.
Speaker 1Yeah, I mean just your thought process on grace is massive and it genuinely like I don't know why I didn't. I'm learning how to understand grace more and more and your content specifically has helped me a lot as far as just like because I feel like you're always preaching the grace and it's like whoa man, that's too much grace there's no such thing Grant.
Speaker 3That's too much grace. No such thing Grant. There's no such thing as too much grace.
Speaker 1But yeah, I hear you.
Speaker 3I hear you. Yeah Well, thank you. That's incredibly encouraging. I appreciate it very much. That means a lot, so thank you.
Speaker 1What you got.
Speaker 3Jared, this is your first time meeting old tully yeah, jared bailed on us the first time around.
Speaker 2There's no doubt there's no doubt just all these, all these kids, my wife and I, um our families, watch. What is that movie? A christmas movie where the die got the guy dies, dies and sees the world without him.
Speaker 3It's a Wonderful Life, nicholas Cage.
Speaker 2No, it's a Wonderful.
Speaker 3Life, oh, it's a.
Speaker 1Wonderful Life. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, the OG one.
Speaker 2Yeah, so there's a line in there. We had four kids in five years and my wife has been bedridden ill for all four of them for about four months at a time. And he says at the end of it why do we have to have all these kids before he blows up on everybody?
Speaker 3Yeah, you feel that, don't you?
Speaker 2Yeah, we definitely say that sometimes and Grant will message me on the fly and be like hey, can you just happen to record today? I'll be like can't swing it, bro, and then he'll just text me and be like, yeah, that makes sense, that's a fact.
Speaker 3Listen, I'm one of seven kids. I'm the middle of seven kids. My mom and dad had seven kids five boys and two girls. So I know what it's like to have a lot of kids around, grow up with a lot of kids. I know what it's like to have a lot of kids around, grow up with a lot of kids. It's fun as a kid because you've got brothers and sisters and chaos and playmates and all that kind of stuff. But yeah, it takes a toll on the parents. So I had three. I had three and then I quit. I got married the first time when I was 21,.
Speaker 3Had my oldest son at 22,. My second son at 24, my daughter at 28. And as soon as she was born and the doctor said she's healthy, everything's good, I got a vasectomy. Like a week later, literally like a week later, the doctor, when I went in for my consult, the doctor was like you know, you're pretty young, Are you sure you want to do this? And I was like, doc, I should have done this when I was 16. It would have seen a hell of a lot of problems. But the cool thing is now I'm still relatively young. I'm 51 and my oldest son is 29.
Speaker 2My middle son is 27. My daughter's 22. And they're three of my best friends in the world. Yeah, we talk about that a lot Our parents. At the end of the day, the people that our parents want to hang out with the most are us. It's cool to think that you're building your crew for the.
Speaker 3Yes, I have a crew man. They're all different and yet they're similar. I have a crazy one who will kill someone if I ask him. I have a rich one who will kill someone if I ask him. I have a rich one who will send me money if I need it and I have a sweet one who will go with me to every music festival I want to go to.
Speaker 2I've got all bases covered it's like Psalm 127 says that children are a heritage of one's youth. Arrows in the quiver and you're making me think of like Green Lantern, like he's got an exploding arrow and he's got like a quiet arrow.
Speaker 3That's right, I've got, I've got them, I've got, I've got all my arrows. That's awesome.
Embracing Grace and Realness in Christianity
Speaker 2Well, grant has just sung your praises. We've interviewed a lot of people and you know like we love sitting in front of others and everybody's story is powerful and interesting, especially when it, as it relates to God, which is what our podcast is about just had an impact which I kind of like that I wasn't on the podcast because it just allowed space for God to move and work in you guys' connection, but I'm interested now in you know you just said when I wrote the book I wanted it to be real and raw and unsanitized. To be real and raw and unsanitized. And tell me more about the kind of like, this spirit that the converse of that in the Christian community because, like, what you're saying is essentially like a, it's addressing something in your writing that maybe the supposed community of Christ, like avoids.
Speaker 3Yeah.
Speaker 2Does that make sense? So, like, tell me more about why. Like, why is that important?
Speaker 3Well. Well, the question why is that? The case is slightly different from? Why is it important to be real, raw, unsanitized? In my particular case, my story is real, raw and unsanitized, and to tell it any other way would be dishonest, which is why I use some of the colorful language that I use, because that's exactly the way I felt in that moment. And to sanitize that would be playing into what I think is the greatest problem facing Christianity today, and that is a misunderstanding of what the Christian life is, and that flows from a massive misunderstanding of what the gospel is.
Speaker 3So you know, when I was growing up and going to church, the gospel was what non-Christians needed to believe in order to become Christians. But then, once you become a Christian by believing the gospel, now it's all about cleaning up your life, cleaning up your behavior. The more sort of lofty terms would be pursuing holiness, practicing godliness. Phrases like sanctification I mean words like sanctification and all of that stuff get thrown in there, and what it ends up doing is putting the focus back on us. So it's like it took God's blood, sweat and tears to get me in, but now it takes my blood, sweat and tears to keep God happy with me. So the primary message that has been going forth from the Christian community for decades now is essentially that the focus of the Christian faith is the life of the Christian. And so you know, in order for that, in order to sort of flesh that out, we've developed a whole vision of what it looks like to be a Christian based on that assumption that doesn't allow for dirt, messiness, failure, sin, really. I mean.
Speaker 3One of the things I say in the book is it shouldn't surprise me, but it still does, that the one institution left in the world that at least theoretically, believes in original sin is so shocked when they encounter it, which is mind-blowing to me and as a result, people have concluded that church is the scariest place, rather than the safest place, for fallen people to fall down and broken people to break things. And I just I don't think. In fact, I was telling my wife the other night, my wife Stacey, I said it is scandalous to me that pretty much anybody can walk into any church, and I know that there are remarkable exceptions to this, thank God but for the most part, generally speaking, anybody can walk into any church of any denomination and not hear the gospel. They don't hear, it is finished. They get a to-do list. They get a sort of do more, try harder inspirational message to be better. They get a get cleaner, climb higher for God kind of message but they don't simply get it is finished, full stop, that we live our lives under a banner that reads it is finished, that everything necessary that needed to happen in order to get us right with God forever took place 2000 years ago. We're in, it's finished, don't worry about it anymore.
Speaker 3God's not keeping score. God's not up there keeping score and deciding to dole out blessings or curses based on how we're doing or how we're behaving or whatever. Now, that's very different than saying that we don't experience the horizontal consequences of our decisions. We do, obviously. That goes without saying that every decision we make, good or bad, has consequences to it and we experience those consequences horizontally. But it's when we conflate the horizontal experience with the vertical reality that God has us and loves us and approves of us, no matter what, because of Jesus, that things get really murky, things get really cloudy and things get really confused.
Speaker 3So you know part of the method behind my madness, part of the method behind my madness in, even writing the book, deciding to tell my story.
Speaker 3As raw and unsanitized as the story is, is to kind of break the mold a little bit, to kind of push the envelope. Not because I'm trying to be some shock jock, that's not it. It's just the fact that I think we have turned Christianity into a sanitization project instead of a real life, real broken people living in a broken world with other broken people and yet loved forever by a gracious God. So people wear masks, people pretend that they're better than they are, people try to live up to other Christians expectations and everybody's just faking it. They're just faking it. They don't feel the freedom to tell the truth about themselves, the you know the good, the bad and the ugly, um, and so I don't know what kind of effect me telling my story will have on people, but my hope is that it will set them free to tell the truth about themselves, knowing that God loves them, even if other people reject them for it.
Speaker 1So what is the Christian life to you? You tell me a lot of what it's not. So what is it?
Speaker 3Enjoying the gift period. That's it. I mean, I'm a dad of three kids, as I mentioned a few minutes ago, and Christmas mornings, when they were kids or birthdays, I looked forward to buying them gifts that I knew they wanted, knew they would enjoy, and it was pure joy for me to watch them open their gift and just be ecstatic about it and then play with it and enjoy it. I got tremendous satisfaction and joy from that, and I think so often we think that God's given us this amazing gift and we have to spend the rest of our lives paying him back for it, and we do that under the umbrella of thinking that that's what really honors God, that's what glorifies God. Someone once said they pose this question how do you glorify a water fountain? You simply come thirsty and drink. You get your thirst satisfied by drinking from the fountain. Drinking from the fountain, you don't come with anything, and so I routinely and regularly describe the Christian life as simply enjoy the gift. Just live, laugh, love, dance, cuss, enjoy, feel everything that there is to feel in this broken life the good stuff, the bad stuff, all of it. Feel it all, experience it all and trust that God is good through it all, trust that God loves us through it all. He doesn't love us more when we're being good and he doesn't love us less when we're being bad. And just enjoying the radicality of his gift of grace to us is something that I, like I said routinely. That phrase, enjoying the gift, is a phrase that I use to routinely describe the Christian life.
Speaker 3I think we spend way too much time thinking about what the Christian life is supposed to be instead of just living. Just live. Pray for wisdom along the way, pray for protection along the way, pray for guidance along the way. Trust that God is guiding you and protecting you, even if you're not praying for those things, that his guidance of us and his protection of us is not dependent on us routinely asking him for it. He loves us no matter what. And then just live. Enjoy the people in your life. Don't worry about sin-sniffing everybody else. Don't worry about sin-sniffing yourself as you make stupid decisions in life and you suffer the consequences of those decisions. Hopefully become a little bit wiser, and your decisions become a little bit wiser over time.
Speaker 3Um, but I really think that spiritual growth is coming to a deeper understanding of our daily need for grace. That's what it is, and and and there's, you know, biblical support for this, of course. Um, you know, in Philipp Philippians 3, when the apostle Paul is describing his spiritual journey, he says I now consider all of that stuff nothing compared to Jesus and what he's gifted me. And then he says things at the end of his life like you know, I'm the worst guy that I know, I'm the chief of sinners, I'm the least among the saints, blah, blah, blah.
Speaker 3And so I think we typically think that spiritual growth is I started low, this is the way I kind of heard, no one ever said these words, but this was implied very strongly that spiritual growth is I'm becoming stronger and stronger and more and more competent every day, whereas according to the Bible and life, what we discover is that spiritual growth is not I'm becoming stronger and stronger and more and more competent every day, it's I'm becoming increasingly aware of how weak and incompetent I am and how strong and competent Jesus was and continues to be for me, how strong and competent Jesus was and continues to be for me.
Speaker 3So if we want to talk about spiritual growth at all, it's more of a downward growth than an upward growth, if that makes sense, it's. You know, I have a friend named Jean Leroux who says if you're not the worst sinner you know, you don't know yourself very well, and I love that. Jack Miller, who was a well-known Presbyterian minister in the latter part of the 20th century said, used to say to his congregation cheer up, you're a lot worse off than you think you are. But. But God's grace is infinitely greater than anything you could ever ask for or imagine. So that's sort of my long. I've got the short answer enjoy the gift and then the longer answer about spiritual growth being downward, not upward in the way that it's typically presented to us.
Speaker 1Man, that's a lot to take in. So what about-.
Speaker 3I'll tell you why. It's a lot to take in. I mean it's. I've been there. It was a lot for me to take in a number of years ago too, because we've heard the exact opposite our entire lives literally. And so I tell people. For the most part they're like oh my gosh, your message is so freeing and I'm like timeout, it's not my message, um, it's message, and it only seems new because it's so old and has been lost for so long that it seems like something new. But the kinds of things that I'm saying are the kinds of things that Protestant reformers like Martin Luther were saying 600 years ago or however long it was, 500 years ago, whatever, in the early 1500s. So I mean, this is stuff.
Speaker 3I think we've turned Christianity into a behavior modification project, a self-betterment project. We call it Christianity, but in reality it's moralism. Morality is good, moralism is bad. And I think that when you read the Bible through the lens of God's grace, you start reading some of those very familiar passages that you thought said one thing very differently. So I was telling my wife this morning. I said, first of all, we have this internal problem with receiving this truth Because since the Garden of Eden we've been wanting to do things our own way, we've been wanting to earn our own way, we've been wanting to secure our own rightness, our own righteousness, we've wanted to be our own God.
Speaker 3So we have this sort of internal, natural, hardwired inside of us drive to sort of do it on our own. But then we have these outside messages coming from supposed respected religious or Christian leaders, preachers and writers and things like that, that reinforce that inward drive. So we're told do more, try harder, get better, climb higher. And that's everything we want to hear Do more, try harder, get I can do more, I can try harder, I can get better, I can climb higher.
Speaker 3And and it seems temporarily inspirational until life happens, when the shit hits the, the fan, that kind of message falls flat, completely falls flat, um, and you bump up against the lack of your own resources and you start to realize if grace isn't everything, I'm screwed like I'm screwed, um, and that's when, for me anyway, uh, it felt like I became a christian all over again when I started to see that and Jesus became more important to me, the work of Jesus became more important to me, who God is and God's tenderness and love and care, and and all of those things became so much more beautiful and so much more important to me.
Speaker 2So anyway, so in there's two things, kind of well, three, kind of swirling around in my head. I'll give them to you and you can pick door number one, two or three. One is I don't know any direction the spirit leads. One is the first door is how do you deal with the anger? The first door is how do you deal with the anger, because there can be a lot of resentment or frustration related to, you know such a shallow expression of faith. Door number two is how do you deal with and you don't have to answer all of these. But door number two is how do you deal with?
Speaker 2You know, in my experience, what you're talking about. In my heart it feels like being in communion with people and just begging them to break, Like would you just stop trying to be so together. But sometimes that can feel like a, it can be a burden that, like people just don't want to be vulnerable. So there's the anger issue, there's a vulnerability issue, and then three, which is completely off the wall. But sometimes in my experience, I feel like when we talk to authors, you know that that was the darkest corners of your life and there's. You know, that book is written and it was hard. But I also want to know what's happening in Tullian's life, like what are the new revelations? What are the revelations today? Like what is, and then, what are the revelations or the things that you're beginning to piece together for tomorrow? That god may be saying so?
Expectations in Christian Community
Speaker 3I think I can probably answer all three in a short span of time. I've had had to deal with the anger stuff on a lot of levels and specifically directed at the church in 2015. That's when I bottomed out got divorced, lost everything, scandal, whole deal. But some of my anger was stoked before that because, as I was coming to a deeper understanding of just how radical the gospel is, I started thinking about all of the sermons I heard growing up, the Sunday school lessons, the youth retreats, even the college classes. I took the seminary. I went to all of that stuff and was kind of wondering why didn't someone tell me this before? I mean, I kind of grew up in Christian royalty. I was surrounded by the best that Christianity had to offer. My entire life and apart from my family in terms of my mom and dad and those sorts of things, everything I heard from the Christian community outside of my home was this kind of do more, try harder, get clean, behave better version of Christianity.
Speaker 2Okay, so there was inside of your home really right representation, but then the immediate outside of your home, so like just for clarity, the way that your home was being perceived, and then what was asked of you by the expectation, the way my mom and dad taught us Christianity was very much along the lines of the things that I say now.
Speaker 3There was a lot of grace in our home, there was a lot of laughter in our home, there was a lot of hospitality, warmth, comfort, security, all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 2But was there an expectation on the outside of your home? I just want to make sure I'm hearing you. Was it because of the Christian royalty, as it were, that there would be a certain expectation?
Speaker 3Well, I mean, there probably were, but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about. I'm talking about just the whole sort of the overarching message that came from just about every church. We went to every youth group. I went to every Sunday school class. I sat through and then, like I said, the Christian college, I went to the seminary. I went to, got it, got it. Okay, it was just this. I was.
Speaker 3We were never in a church that was like explicitly and overtly legalistic. You know like some people think about these. You know Southern Baptist Bible thumpers that are the or the fundamentalists. I didn't grow up in an environment like that, um, but it was almost. It was. It wasn't hard legalism, it was like soft legalism. You know it was like Jesus died for you. So now you gotta do, you gotta live your life for him. And what living your life for him means is you know it was like Jesus died for you. So now you got to do, you got to live your life for him. And what living your life for him means is you know you got to, you got to stay pure and you got to watch your mouth and you got to not go here and don't watch those kind of high school, I got kicked out of my house.
Speaker 3I kind of abandoned the faith altogether because I determined that Christianity, from what I had been taught, told whatever shown by the Christian community, that Christianity was for good people, and I knew I wasn't good, so therefore Christianity must not be for me. So I had to deal with when I sort of had this awakening to the gospel in my early mid thirties, I started thinking about all of the things that I had assumed were true and all of the things that I was taught, and it did frustrate me to think why didn't someone tell me this before, like I mean the first time I ever heard? Now, mind you, I went to great churches, bible believing, bible preaching churches, went to a Christian college, went to a very academically astute graduate school, a seminary, and it wasn't until after I was out of seminary and had already started a church and was pastoring that church for three years, that I heard for the very first time in a tape I think it was a tape, maybe a CD, I don't remember. Some of your listeners have no idea what the hell I'm even talking about, but it was that long ago and I heard Tim Keller, who was a pastor in New York City and a remarkable guy across the board. I heard him talk about the fact that the gospel was for Christians too. And I'm like what the hell is he talking about? What does that even mean? And as I heard him unpack that, all of my paradigms started to I mean, explode. And so that's when I really started thinking, okay, why didn't I hear this before? And I really, from that point forward, it was almost like I now have one bullet in my gun and I'm not going to say 10,000 different things. I'm committing myself to saying one thing 10,000 different ways for the rest of my life period period. So I had to deal with some anger, some frustration with that before I crashed and burned.
Speaker 3But then, after I crashed and burned and bottomed out, I just felt utterly abandoned by the Christian community. I mean, I was sort of the golden boy at one point. You know publishers banging down my door asking me to write books for them. Every conference in the country wanted me to speak. You know I was traveling around the country. I was. You know, my sermons were broadcast on the radio every day and on TV around the world every week. And you know, I was like the golden boy.
Speaker 3And then I bottomed out. I cheated on my first wife. That got exposed and from that point on it was like done, done. I was ostracized out the door, off to the far country you go, and I was after I.
Speaker 3Sort of the hardest thing to deal with during that time, first and foremost, was the hurt that I caused people that I love my three kids, my first wife, the pain that I caused my family. That was the most gripping pain that I had ever felt, um, and still feel it to this day, almost 10 years later. Uh, but once you know, as I sort of process that, uh, then I started thinking about all the people who I thought were my friends, all the people who I thought would be in the foxhole with me if anything tragic ever happened, if anything catastrophic ever happened. And they bailed not all of them, but 95% of them did. And I've said to people for years now that it's really difficult to know who your friends are when you're at the top and you have so much to offer, when people benefit from being around you, but when you're at the bottom and you have nothing to offer people but liability and leprosy, if they get close, you discover pretty quickly how few friends you have. And I discovered, sadly, during that time that I had very few friends and so that stoked my anger. And, interestingly, I had to go through I mean basically an entire recovery process to not only come to grudges and things that were plaguing me in some ways, especially with some specific people who I felt really hurt me bad and betrayed me and abandoned me when I needed them the most.
Speaker 3And, interestingly, it was in the writing process of this book, revisiting the hardest parts of my life and thinking through just how badly people handle crises in the moment of the crisis. No one behaves perfectly in crisis, whether it's your crisis or my crisis, or simply I'm being compassion for those people that I had previously held a grudge against, and it felt so liberating to feel like I'm not angered by those people anymore. I forgive them. They may never ask for my forgiveness. We may never talk again this side of heaven, but I forgive them. They may never ask for my forgiveness. We may never talk again this side of heaven, but I forgive them. I genuinely forgive them, and that's just a work of God. I mean, that's just a work of God's grace. Reckoning, the way that I put it is, I didn't become more forgiving by reading a book on how to forgive better or by, you know, hearing sermons about how to forgive better, or by uh, you know, hearing sermons about how to be a better forgiver. I, I, I'm more forgiving now and I was able to forgive those people simply because I've had to reckon with God's forgiveness in the face of my failure so often that it's just kind of softened me in that regard, and the book writing process was a catalyst for that. So there was, you know, anger before the crash, anger after the crash, and the only hope in dealing with any of that is, you know, the grace of God working his forgiveness down deep into us. Down deep into us In terms of, yes, that chapter of my life has now been written, documented, put out there for public consumption. What am I doing now? What does the future look like? So I am.
Speaker 3Five years ago, my wife and I moved to Jupiter, florida, which is about 40 minutes north of where I grew up, where I was, you know, where I was raised and where I ministered for almost my entire life, adult life. We came at the request of a group of people who asked us to consider coming here and starting a church which I did not want to do, did not want to do, and this was, you know, four or five years after I had crashed um and did not want to go back into the church as a leader in any capacity. Uh, I didn't trust Christians, to be honest. Um, I was traveling a lot and speaking a lot, um, and I just didn't envision myself pastoring a church again, um, but one thing led another and God made it very clear that this is where he wanted us to be. And so I have said from the very beginning that the sanctuary, which is the name of our church, that the sanctuary, is really a recovery place masquerading as a church. That's what it is.
Speaker 3It's not your conventional church, not because we're trying to be unconventional, but because the gospel is so unconventional and we're so committed to that particular message that it sets me free behind the pulpit. To be honest, real raw, unsanitized, just like the book. The way the book reads is the way I am behind the pulpit every week, and that attracts a certain kind of person. It attracts people who know they need grace, the kind of, you know, clean, buttoned up church lady people they may visit but they leave after a week or two because this just isn't their cup of tea. They want their pastor to look different, they want them to sound different, they want them to talk different. They want them to talk different. They want it to be a much safer environment, spiritually speaking, than ours is. And so we are having a blast leading this group of ragamuffin misfits, and they're all walks of life rich, poor, young, old, red, yellow, black, white, you name it. I mean we have people in our church that are very wealthy and we have homeless people in our church, and I love it. A self-awareness of their own messiness, their own shit, their own crap, their own all of that to where they know. I need. I need this. I need to be reminded every week that it is finished, that life may be topsy turvy and the road of life may be have a lot of difficult turns in it, but as far as God is concerned, I'm good. God's made me good. He's walking with me through the valley of the shadow of death over and over and over again. He's never going to blink, he's never going to bail. His love for me is not dependent on what I do. It's dependent on what Jesus has done for me. So, as far as God and I are concerned, I know that I'm loved, I'm accepted, I'm approved. And when you really start believing that all of the approval you need you already have, you stop editing yourself so much, because now you're no longer primarily concerned with getting the acceptance and approval of other people, which is the catalyst to our editing ourselves, photoshopping ourselves, all of that stuff. I'm trying to get love, I'm trying to get acceptance, I'm trying to get approval. And when that stuff doesn't matter to you anymore because you know you have God's love and God's acceptance and God's approval, you start telling the truth about yourself more. And so me doing that, um from behind the pulpitpit attracts other people like that and I love it.
Speaker 3We jokingly refer to the Sanctuary as sort of an underground punk rock band. It's a church in a sense, but it's not. If somebody moves into town and is looking for just a sort of a typical church, this isn't it and I'm totally okay with that. So that's kind of where we are. I am week in and week out. I'm able to flesh out the things I'm saying to you guys now from different passages in the Bible, different books of the Bible, showing people that this isn't my message. This is here, here's where it is, here's what it says. So I love being able to do that. We have a lot of different recovery groups that meet throughout the week at our church. We're very under-programmed. We don't really have anything going on except Sunday morning and recovery groups. That's it. That's all we got and that's very intentional In terms of, you know, sort of revelations that I've had.
Speaker 3I think it's not so much new revelations as much as it is embracing at a deeper level, on a daily basis, the revelations that God has already given me, which is, as I've mentioned, just the radicality of his amazing grace and his outrageous mercy, and teasing that out in the details of my life more and more and more and living out of that freedom, adjusting to that freedom, uh, ongoingly, day in and day out, learning what freedom looks like, what it feels like, how it affects other people around me. So it's just, you know, it's a, it's a journey of recovery that is lifelong and it's um, it's challenging and liberating, and exhilarating and hard all at the same time.
Speaker 1Gosh man.
Speaker 2One. This is kind of part of the last thing you said which caught my attention. A lot of things I wrote, but you said we're very underprogrammed intentionally, just the Sunday morning, and recovery groups, um, and I'm assuming that recovery groups is what it sounds, not just like a name for small groups but actual, like we have recovery AA, all of that. So, um, can you tell me more about that?
Speaker 3The intentionality, yeah, so currently my wife is leading, uh uh, a recovery group called discover, where she's literally walking through with a group of about 25 women on Tuesday nights, the 12 steps of AA, but from the vantage point of the gospel, which is what some people are familiar with, which is loosely based on the 12 steps but far too sanitized and far too little gospel in that as in my opinion and so she's leading a group of women through that. We have a sexual addiction recovery group that meets on Tuesday nights. Also, we have a men's group that I facilitate called the Vault, which is a recovery group. I mean, it's relationships, but in the context of our meetings it's like an AA meeting. Everyone goes around the room, introduces themselves, talks about a particular area of their life where they are struggling, and then they typically identify one area in their life that feels like a win. Right now we have an Al-Anon group that meets at our church on, I think, monday nights. I think it's Monday nights, but you know that's a recovery group for people who are either married to or in some way intimately connected to an addict Maybe they're married to an alcoholic, or their son's a drug addict, and you know, they just think how do we handle this? So those are the primary ones that meet, those are the primary ones that meet, um, and and then out of those groups or smaller groups that meet, um, that sort of you know, deal with the same thing. I think what we've been able to do, what God's done through us here at the sanctuary, is, um, it's kind of like there's this culture of recovery that has been created here, and so everything we do has a recovery flavor to it.
Speaker 3And when I say recovery, I'm talking about you know. Oftentimes, when we hear that word, we think about you know, recovering alcoholics, recovering drug addicts, we think about people in recovery places, we think about recovering sex addicts, food addicts, shopaholics, whatever. And while my definition of recovery includes those things, it's not limited to those things. So I always say if you're a human being, you're in recovery, you're recovering. You have felt rejection, you have felt betrayal. You have felt rejection, you have felt betrayal, you have felt disappointment, you have felt the pain of unmet expectations, you have felt the pain of guilt and shame, all of those things. You're a broken person and you're living in a broken world and you're surrounded by broken people, and that means we're all in recovery. So there are really two kinds of people in this world People in recovery who know that they are, and people in recovery who think that they're not. But there's no one who's not in recovery.
Speaker 3Um, and so we've, we've, we've so beat that drum here at the sanctuary that it's created a culture, and with a recovery culture comes a real commitment to a deeper self-awareness. I mean the theological way of putting this you can find in the first part of John Calvin's Institutes, written over 500 years ago, where he essentially says a deeper knowledge of ourselves increases our knowledge of God and a deeper knowledge of God increases our knowledge of ourselves. Basically, that's what we're talking about. God increases our knowledge of ourselves. Basically that's what we're talking about that the more self-aware you become, the more aware of God's grace you become, the less judgmental you are, the less self-righteous you are, the more tender you are, the more empathetic you become. All of that stuff starts happening as you become increasingly self-aware, and for me it took crashing and burning massively big time to sort of develop a much deeper self-awareness than I had.
Speaker 1Yeah, so you're on a time crunch too, right, I'm good? No, you're good, okay, just making sure. Are you on a time crunch too right, I'm good? No, you're good, okay, just making sure. Are you on a time crunch, darlene?
Speaker 3I mean, I got about probably 10 minutes.
Speaker 1Okay, sweet yeah. So, grace upon grace upon grace upon grace upon grace upon grace, right, yes, okay, is this a code a?
Speaker 3correct, you're right. Yeah, I mean I can nuance that and tease that out more, but yes, so what do you?
Speaker 1what do you do with? Like sin, like so you're walking in grace, right, and there's freedom in Christ 100%, but then there's all this stuff about you know, don't cause your brother to stumble, something like that, all quote-unquote rules of like you know commands really, and there's things like go and do not sin, and all that stuff. Do you just throw that away? Like, what do you do with?
Speaker 3do with that, yeah, I just ignore those parts of the bible.
Speaker 1Grant come on man, no, so I just want to know. You said I know you don't, but I just yeah, no, no, no of course not.
Speaker 3So, man, this is, I can answer this. Uh, let me see how simply I can answer this. So hermeneutics is a big word. Here we go.
Speaker 2It's a big word.
Speaker 1We're in seminary Frick, here we go.
Speaker 3Just for a minute. Let me just, you know, indulge me for a minute. So hermeneutics is one of those big sort of theological words that essentially speaks to how to interpret the Bible, how do we read it? And Martin Luther, my historical hero from a long time ago, identified that the primary lens by which we should read the Bible is through the lens of law and gospel. Is through the lens of law and gospel that God speaks two words to us law and gospel. The law is God's word of demand and the gospel is God's word of deliverance. The law is God's word of expectation and the gospel is God's word of exoneration. The law says do. The gospel says done. We need to hear both law and gospel. The law exposes us and shows us that we're worth than we think we are.
Speaker 3Be perfect, as your father in heaven is perfect. That's intended to expose our imperfection. Some people read that verse in Jesus' Sermon on the Mount. They go well, obviously we can be perfect, because why would Jesus say that if it wasn't possible? That is a borrowing from a German philosopher from 500 years ago by the name of Immanuel Kant. 400 years ago, immanuel Kant, who essentially posited the idea that an ought implies a can. So if someone says you ought to do it, that implies that you can do it, whereas in God's economy an ought implies a can't. So be perfect, as your father in heaven is perfect, is intended to expose our imperfection so that we will redirect our trust from our ability to Christ's ability for us, okay, christ's perfection for us, his substitutionary work. So we need to hear the law, because the law reminds us of what God demands and, at the same time, exposes the fact that we can't meet those demands. No matter how hard we try, we can't meet those. Even our efforts to try to meet those demands are tainted by sin. They're not perfect efforts and we certainly don't reach perfection.
Speaker 3So I go into any passage in the Bible asking myself is this law or is this gospel? And it's not super simple to be able to do that, obviously. But when I read a verse like 1 Corinthians 10, 31,. Whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God. We ought to do that, we should do that. The fact that we don't do that is a travesty, but we don't.
Speaker 3And the fact of the matter is that exposes the fact that I do a lot of stuff for my glory. Some of it I'm aware of, some of it I'm not aware of. But that verse exposes me. It exposes me so I can say things like I wish I could say I do everything for God's glory. I can't, neither can you. What I can say is that Jesus's blood covers all of my efforts to glorify myself. So there's that whole dynamic. How do we read the Bible through the lens of law and gospel? So on the flip side of that, I would say you know, in terms of your question, what do you do with sin? You can't avoid it, but you should try to mitigate its effects in your life as much as possible, because it wreaks havoc when you don't.
Speaker 2So I was doing a talk on race I mean seriously.
Speaker 3Like it's just common sense. I was doing a Q&A.
Speaker 2Hey Dad, it hurts every time I do this.
Speaker 3Right, yes, dad, it hurts every time I do this.
Speaker 2Right, yes, exactly.
Speaker 3I was at a church on the west coast of Florida and I was doing like two or three lectures on grace and then, at the very end, I opened it up for Q&A at the end of the third lecture, and some guy said you know, based on what I've heard you say about grace, then what's to prevent me from? If God's love for me and his forgiveness of me and his acceptance of me is not dependent on what I do, then what's to prevent me, for instance, from cheating on my wife? And I said simply. I said because it'll screw up your life. That's why It'll hurt people that you love. That's why we don't not cheat on our wives, because by not cheating on our wives, god loves us more. We don't cheat on our wives because when we do, people we love get hurt.
Speaker 3The consequences are harsh. It makes life harder, complicated, heavier. The God's with us in all of that hardness and all that heaviness and all of that complication. But my gosh, the pain is real. So the consequences of foolish decisions are painful.
Speaker 3So I'm always saying steer clear of stupid shit, not because God's feelings towards you are going to change, but because you're going to make your life a hell of a lot harder and heavier and you're going to hurt people that you love and you're going to have to deal with the guilt and the shame of that. And it's hard and it's harrowing. And you just why do that? Like you're. It's sin promises what it cannot pay. It promises all of this stuff and you get to the other side of it and you're like man that was fool's gold and in the process, now I'm dealing with the wreckage of not only my life, but the wreckage of lives of people that I love, and it's a that is a hard thorn to live with for the rest of your life.
Speaker 3So, um, so I would say in terms of you know, what do we do about sin? Well, my gosh, we, you know. I mean, it sucks that we have to deal with it. We'll deal with it for the rest of our lives. The apostle Paul talks about it in Romans seven man, the things I don't want to do, I keep on doing, and the things I know I should do, I don't do. And who's going to rescue me from this body of death, a wretched man that I am? Thank god for jesus. So you know, oftentimes that's actually what he says.
Speaker 1Um, so sorry I mean that's sort of that's sort of?
Speaker 3yeah, I mean that's I mean, that's, that's it. And so I go. Yes, my, the exposure of my sin pushes me deeper into the gospel, and so that's. I have a friend named Steve Brown, who's 84 now. He's been preaching. So much of what I've learned I've learned from him. He was a well-known TV personality, preacher, written a lot of books, very well-respected guy, and he said he preached for me last summer and he said your sin is your greatest gift when you know it and your goodness is your greatest enemy when you know it. And the point he was making was the better we think we are, the more self-righteous we become, the more judgmental we become and the less aware of God's grace we become. But the more aware you are of your sin and your messiness, the softer you are, the less judgmental you are and the more appreciative of God's grace you become. So that's what he meant. But yeah, so I mean, look, you guys need to have me on two or three more times and we can go through law gospel.
Speaker 1We're out of time on our end because our next people just walked in. But, dude, thank you so much for being on. That was an absolute jam, thanks man.
Speaker 3Thank you guys for having me.
Speaker 2Yeah, absolutely yeah, I would. Just it was a blast. You're making me. I know we need to close out. The last thing on my mind is you're just making me think so much of. We can just end with a scripture. Martin Luther has a quote that is love God and sin boldly. It's in a larger paragraph that's argued about a lot, but 2 Corinthians 3, because you mentioned 2 Corinthians was just so much about the confidence of Christ and how there's so much more glory now in him, and so we look on him boldly, and so that's what I hear so much of what you're saying yes, yes, yeah, that's it.
Speaker 3That's it, man, that's it. Put all of your eggs in his basket, all of them.
Speaker 1That's so cool man, this is awesome. Thank his basket All. That's so cool man, this is awesome.
Speaker 2Thank you, Talion.
Speaker 3Yeah, thank you guys so much, appreciate it.
Speaker 1Thanks for listening to the Across the Counter podcast. If you enjoyed the show, please rate us five stars, wherever you got this podcast. Thanks, y'all.