Discipling In An Age Of Deceit

Truth doesn’t usually get rejected because it’s obviously false. It gets rejected because it gets repackaged, renamed, and blended with just enough Bible language to feel familiar. That’s the tension we sit with here, especially as we mark America’s founding ideals while admitting how many of us have grown intellectually lazy, outsourcing conviction to feeds, algorithms, and talking heads.

We’re joined by Mark “Moose” Bright, director of the Relational Discipleship Network (RDN), to talk about discipling in the age of deceit. Moose lays out RDN’s core claim: you cannot divorce the methods of Jesus from the teachings of Jesus and expect the results of Jesus. We dig into what relational discipleship looks like in practice, why pastors must know the audience they’re speaking to, and how “presumption” becomes poison when culture no longer shares Christian assumptions.

Then we take the hard turn toward discernment: false teachers, incomplete pictures of Jesus, and the hidden appeal of any worldview that removes personal responsibility. We talk about Marxism’s oppressor-oppressed framing, why repentance is non-negotiable for salvation, and how America’s ideas of rights and self-government only hold together when conscience and moral formation stay strong. We also get practical about cognitive dissonance, limbic fight-or-flight, and how to have conversations that actually lower defenses instead of building walls.

If you want a clearer biblical worldview, stronger spiritual warfare habits, and a discipleship model that produces resilient men and families, press play. Subscribe, share this with a friend, and leave a review so more people can find the show.

You can learn more about the Relational Discipleship Network by visiting their website at www.rdn.org

Chapter Markers

• 0:00
• Welcome And The Inner Fight
• 0:40
• Founding History Meets Modern Deceit
• 1:51
• Meet Moose And RDN’s Mission
• 4:02
• Why Culture Changes How We Hear
• 11:23
• Marxism And The War On Repentance
• 17:00
• Rights Self-Government And Greed
• 23:28
• Hermeneutics False Teachers And Truth
• 26:02
• Cognitive Dissonance And Limbic Defense
• 29:15
• Where To Find RDN Resources
• 30:39
• Self-Awareness Mentors And Next Steps
• 32:39
• Closing Prayer
• 33:09
• Outro And How To Reach Us

Visit www.thesavagepath.com for more on David, his book The Savage Path: A Memoir of Modern Masculinity, and the Savage Path Ministries Corp.

Transcript

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Welcome And The Inner Fight

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Wrestling with the Inner Man. Because the first fight we face each and every day is a fight with our own flesh. Do we listen to our stealth, sinful nature or to our divine nature guided by the Holy Spirit? Your host David Stabage is a product of the West Texas Desert and Energy Industry. His desire is to inspire and help other men win spiritual warfare. We hope you're ready to rumble because wrestling with the inner man begins now.

Founding History Meets Modern Deceit

SPEAKER_02 0:40

Welcome, wrestlers. This month we're celebrating the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, but it is a tragic fact that many, and possibly most, of our citizens have a very poor understanding of the history of our founding documents and the context of the time that they were written in. Much like the Bible and other ancient wisdom, modern man feels these documents and books are no longer relevant or applicable to our present way of life. To make matters worse, we have become intellectually lazy, forsaking the work of study and relying on AI and other computing tools to answer nearly all of life's questions. Second Peter verse 2 warns us of what to expect. But there were also false prophets among the people, just as there will be false teachers among you. They will secretly introduce destructive heresies, even denying the sovereign Lord who bought them, bringing swift destruction on themselves. That's a pretty serious warning. So therefore, the question we must answer is how will we keep from believing the lies and deceitful teachings of the false prophets?

Meet Moose And RDN’s Mission

SPEAKER_02 1:51

My guest today is the director of the Relational Discipleship Network. Their mission is to restore the Great Commission of the Church in America and beyond, rooted in the belief that Jesus provided the most effective model for discipleship, RDN empowers pastors and church communities to cultivate cultures where discipleship is not just taught, but lived. So RDN's approach is deeply relational, emphasizing coaching, mentoring, and community as a foundation for spiritual growth and leadership development. Mark, otherwise known as Moose, welcome to Wrestling with the Inner Man. Please introduce yourself further to our listeners. Maybe tell us how you got Moose for the nickname and how long you've been using it. And his last name is Bright, Mark Bright.

SPEAKER_01 2:35

Hey David, thank you for having me on. You and I encountered each other at the Disciple Making Forum in Houston. The RDN, the Relational Discipleship Network, holds this belief. You cannot divorce the methods of Jesus from the teachings of Jesus and expect the results of Jesus. So when he said go and make disciples, he was intending to, and they understood that he was saying, Do it as I have done it. And so he did that in a relational way. He was interconnected in their lives, he knew them, he understood them, he introduced truths to them and intersections of their life that was relevant. He was able to coach them through, he debriefed with them, he sent them out, he came back, he worked through the problems with them. And we believe that we have lost that methodology in the process of westernizing the church. And our heart is to take it back to that core and say, man, the more faithful we are to model and to imitate Jesus, the better results we're going to have. My friend Brandon Ginnon will say it this way: we need a lot less innovation and a lot more imitation. And so we help churches, if you're historically conservative, historically conservative and biblically committed, we are your tribe. We will come alongside you with pastors and leaders who have implemented this model of disciple making in their churches and help you refind your center and model after Jesus and what he did.

SPEAKER_02 3:56

Outstanding. I think that's a terrific mission. I think it's a little bit overdue. And I'm so glad y'all

Why Culture Changes How We Hear

SPEAKER_02 4:02

are doing it. Now, as you said, we met in the woodlands at the National Discipleship Forum, and I decided I was going to go check out this session, and it was titled Discipling in the Age of Deceit. And when you're going to these forums and conferences, you look at the curriculum and you look at the sessions and you're trying to choose because there's usual multiples to choose from. So here's a description that was in the program, folks. It says, in an age where truth is blurred and culture is rapidly reshaping belief, presumption has become a poison to disciple making. This session equips leaders to navigate a world without shared assumptions by returning to Jesus' clear relational model, learn why clarity matters, how cultural deception forms people, man, that's true, and how to build disciples who are rooted, discerning, and resilient. Discover practical tools to align language, strengthen worldview, and make disciples who stand firm in a confusing age. So we do seem to be living in an age of deceit, for sure. I don't know that anybody would really debate or argue that. So how did RDN decide to feature this topic for the national forum session?

SPEAKER_01 5:11

Yeah, I coach and work with this year, I'll sit with a hundred church leaders and pastors from around the country. A thousand, actually, sorry, a thousand. We do a hundred per session. We do about ten this year. The the thing that I've been noticing is as they're trying to teach and preach and talk to their people, they don't understand the underlying meta-narrative that's been introduced. So historically, America was Judeo-Christian. It was the culture was growing in the same direction as the church. So you had cooperation. And then as that deteriorated, you had a culture that kind of went into a neutral, I'd say even 90s kind of framework where it was more neutral now. But we're currently operating in a culture that is decidedly against and rowing against the principles of Jesus and Christianity. And if pastors don't know that, when they preach things, it's going to be received differently. So you have to know your audience. Jesus was familiar with the culture of his day, Paul was familiar with the culture of his day, and they were both able to contextualize and teach and preach in those settings, knowing how their audience was going to receive that. And so just had a heart to say, hey, pastors, if you don't realize Marxism is the underpinning of the cultural movement that you're seeing, then when you preach, your audience is going to misunderstand you because you're not writing on a clean canvas. And so you must understand. And then I have a real heart to always drive to the meta-narrative to understand the underpinning of what's going on. And so watching this Antifa and pro-Palestinian and LGBTQ community coalesce in the most unnatural, I call it the cult of victimhood, the chimera of our day, super bizarre coalescence. That's the most strange bedfellow pitch that you could make. It stands against everything that Palestinian government would enforce. The Palestinian government would kill the LGBTQ community if they were in their culture. And the LGBTQ, LGBTQ plus, whatever you want to call it now, if they were to live in that setting, would absolutely either rebel or leave the country because they'd be killed. So how do they get together? And the answer is Marxism. Marxism's basic premise is there's two classes of people: there's the oppressed and the oppressor. And anybody that's in a position of power is the oppressor. And if you can identify and give yourself the label of oppressed, then you are entitled to overthrow the oppressor by any means necessary. So that's how those that grouping gets together. And there's probably quite a few cultural influencers of it who noticed that connection, but the spiritual underpinning of that is this Marxism removes the requirement for personal responsibility. Its premise is all of society's problems are built on a governmental system of oppression. And there is no personal responsibility. And so there is the key lie that Satan is introducing, because the the prerequisite for salvation is repentance. The prerequisite for repentance is personal responsibility. And so if Satan can disarm the idea of any personal responsibility and shift all of that to the culture and the framework of government, then he's disconnected the need for salvation altogether. It's also why you never see communism is diametrically opposed to religion because communism believes that government structure is the solution to all of humanity's problems. So we just wanted to communicate that point to the pastors and leaders in the church.

SPEAKER_02 8:44

Yeah, I thought you very eloquently stated the problem there. And but it's ironic that it's after the 20th century, which saw the two world wars and the rise in popularity of Marxism, and then its failure and its implementation, and millions and millions of deaths are responsible for that. And that here it is, what they're great at is relabeling. So they'll just tweak words, they try to change vocabulary, and this is why it's deceit. So it's not anything new, though. So you and I talked about some of the other books that I've read, and I've read this terrific, deep, chewy philosophy book. It's called The Cave and the Light, and it's the battle for between Aristotle and Plato for basically how Western civilization evolved. And in that book, there was Socrates who lived 400 years before Christ in Athens, Greece, so that's 2,500 years ago, and wrote about the inevitable cycle of decay and collapse of political systems. He explained that the dissolute freedom of democracies like that of Athens at the time, which treat all men as equals, whether they are equal or not, must lead inevitably to moral corruption, civic disorder, and mob rule. The chaos that results will inevitably lead to one man rule, he says, in order to restore calm. And that was basically in the Old Testament, how the Jewish people, we want a king. We want a king that one man rule. So at first, one man rule will be accepted and even invested with the legal trappings of kingship. As the ruler's appetite for power grows, kingship too degenerates into its corrupt but associated form, by which I mean tyranny. Tyranny triggers resentment, revolution, and violent overthrow again, and this has happened repeatedly in the cycles of history. Now out of the rubble of the rule of one emerges the rule of those who have led the revolt against it, namely a jealous and self-interested aristocracy. Yet this too eventually decays into something corrupt and ugly, namely the naked rule of the rich, which breeds a bitter wave of resentment among the underprivileged masses. And according to Plato, society now splits into the two factions that you just talked about, the rich and the poor, the haves and the have-nots, the proletariat and the bourgeois, who live in the same place but are always plotting against each other. When this class struggle reaches its climax, the poor rise up in their massive numbers to claim power themselves, and so democracy is born again. So this cycle of the one, the few, and the many has been going on for 2,500 years. And after these two world wars in the 20th century, how is it that we see Marxism enjoying a revival in the United

Marxism And The War On Repentance

SPEAKER_02 11:23

States today? What is its appeal? Is it this, hey, I just don't have to be personally responsible? That's a big part of it.

SPEAKER_01 11:29

Yeah, I would say if we go back to the first time we encounter sin, Adam's response to the encounter with God and asking him, What's led you to this place of hiding, is it's the woman you gave me. So Adam's first move is to shift responsibility to someone else. And so if that's the we have a doctrine of origin in the Bible, if we see something in its first origin, its first expression, it's meant to anchor our understanding of the human response or the interaction or God in that moment. And so there's always going to be a desire within humanity to shift its responsibility as someone else, some and really the premise of Marxism, this is the core doctrine. Are we under the endemic curse? Is humanity inherently good or evil? And this is the pivot point for all philosophies of government, rulership, leadership, family dynamics. And so Marxism's premise is that humanity is inherently good, and the only thing that we have to do is put the perfect system of governance in place. The Christian doctrine is that man is inherently evil, fallen, broken, separated from God, and needs redemption. I believe that God is going to sit us down at the end of eternity, and we're gonna, as we're in heaven, he's going to say, I'm gonna let you guys play out every scenario to solve the problem of humanity. And I'm gonna show you by history that the only conclusion is Jesus is king. That is the only way for humanity to thrive and be successful. And so God is letting all of these permutations, iterations play out and is then going to justify Jesus by saying, Look, this is you are broken, fallen, and it requires a redemption, it requires a salvation, it requires a sacrifice, it required Jesus. And so I think humanity is doomed to repeat this loop over and over again until we come to that conclusion.

SPEAKER_02 13:24

Yeah, it's so true at the individual level, too, because we don't want to accept responsibility, as you pointed out, in blame shifting. It's not my fault. It's got to be somebody else's fault. And then we still have our problem. And so then we're like, okay, I'm going to raise money, I'm going to work harder, I'm going to elect different officials, I'm going to do we until finally we exhaust all of the possibilities within our human power, control, influence, whatever, wisdom, if you want to call it that. And then we find the problem still sits right there. And so we have to, and that's what this show is about. It's wrestling with the inner man. Everything that we talk about on this show is spiritual warfare. And we don't have any weapons or going into a realm of a spiritual realm where we are naked and we have nothing, and we're just going to be dissected by the enemy unless we tap in and say, you know what, I'm going to select Jesus as my champion, and he's already won all the battles. And it's, I just think it's so contradictory to rugged individualism of America, which guys like you and me really, that our biggest victory begins with a complete surrender. And that we have to, okay, I've given up. I've finally given up. And I've been through that cycle multiple times myself, and it's always pride that gets in the way, and then I'm and I get crushed. And then it's like, okay, all right, I'm back on my knees. Forgive me, Lord. Thy will, not my will. You know, there's probably people who are already kind of like checking out on this, going, man, I thought this was a spiritual conversation. These guys are talking about Marxism. But from the perspective of the church and the mission of RDN, why is it necessary to name the enemy and point out his strategy? And that's what we're doing by naming Marxism as the enemy in this case.

SPEAKER_01 15:09

So, in particular, we saw this as a cultural movement, but then it's now worked its way into the church. And so we've talked about, you and I talked about this before, this idea of the incomplete Jesus. And so people are harvesting concepts and ideas about Jesus and mercy and kindness and social infrastructure and support in mixed minusing, taking out all of the places where the Bible talks about individual personal responsibility and a need for repentance. So if you're talking to an audience and you're talking about God's grace and mercy, and that audience has got a Marxist underpinning that's been disguised in the form of a Jesus cloak that is about his mercy, then they're going to justify their worldview based around that. And so you've got to understand there is a spiritual battle that Satan is trying to forward this idea that you don't need repentance, you don't need personal responsibility, that the thing that's broken is the other people around you, your government system, your local infrastructure, and that's the solve. The solve is the government, and the solve is the social structure. And it's like we've deleted the end of the book. We've deleted that the only time we're going to experience that is on the other side of the veil. Now, born in the Christians and even in his instructions on how to pray is thy kingdom come, thy will be done. There's something within us that drives for once this state of redemption, the garden, that to go back to the garden, to be in perfect with God without sin. But the idea that we're going to accomplish that, this side of the veil, is the deception that's being introduced. I'm not saying that we shouldn't strive for and want and desire a more just governing system, but just starts with individual responsibility. And that's the thing that's being torn away from us, torn away from the idea of cultural requirements of social structure.

Rights Self-Government And Greed

SPEAKER_02 17:00

Yeah, I I read that article in the imprimous publication from Hillsdale College, and it was such an eloquent description of what the founders did at the time and how God ordained it was and how special our nation is. And it's all about these rights. In the opening of the Declaration, we hold these rights to be self-evident. They're available to everyone, they're not given by man. And again, that's why communism and Marxism is a government has to be the enemy of religion because we can't have anything higher than the government. I read another book that we talked about a little bit, and it's the righteous mind, and it's why people are divided by religion and politics. And in that book, he talks about when Alex de Tocqueville came and visited the United States of America back in 1835. And it says, on one side, I know of no country, Tocqueville wrote, where the love of money has taken stronger hold on the attention of men. Remember, this was written in 1835. But on the other, none where reverence for religion was so widely and evenly spread. In America, liberty regards religion as its companion in all its battles and triumphs, as the cradle of its infancy and the divine source of its claims. So this is like somebody coming to the World Cup today, visiting America for the first time, and going, hey, what am I observing about America? It's not Bucky's and Texas barbecue and ranch tracks. It's like he was looking at this new country because the French Revolution had just taken place. And so again, he goes, indeed, it considers religion, and he's talking about America, as the safeguard of morality, and morality as the best security of law and the surest pledge of the duration of freedom. So do you agree with this observation made by Tocqueville and Democracy in America, written back in 1835?

SPEAKER_01 18:53

Yeah, I would say if you look at the seven deadly sins, the sin of America is greed. That is our sin. I fully condemn slavery and every part of that along with that. And I'm so grateful that our nation, our country, Christian men, overthrew that system. What was driving the South's desire to keep men enslaved was greed. Greed was the engine, slavery was the sin. And so, yeah, greed as is intertwined with, and it's also why the capitalist system is the closest functioning system that we have for humanity because it aligns with our selfish interests. So that's why capitalism is the best solve in a broken world. But what that leaves us with is the sin of greed. And the Bible does this incredible job of bridging the gap between self-interest and personal responsibility and social interests. And we maybe as Protestants, a lot of times, can lose sight of the fact that God is requiring us to care for, take care of, honor, not diminish people that are in poverty. But Jesus also recognizes that this side of the veil, you will always have poverty. You are not going to solve that. And so it's the balancing of those two things. That's why government is so absolutely floral at solving this problem, is because if I receive government funds and money from a blind third-party source, I feel no obligation to the burden of responsibility that comes with that. Where if you walk into our church, we have a food bank, we have a thrift store, we have all these services and desire to help people that are less not as well off, even coaching them on, hey, let's help you get your finances in order. But that's the church's mission. The result of the Great Depression was this social construct that came into place that began to make that the government's problem. And the government is just not good at solving those social problems in large part because if I don't have David, if you give me money to help my family, I feel an obligation to honor that. You have made a personal sacrifice. It is interpersonal in its connection. If I go into a government building with a glass window between me and whoever's working behind it and they hand me a check, I feel no such obligation. I feel entitlement. And so, yes, our sin of America is greed, but it's something that we can solve as the church.

SPEAKER_02 21:20

How about the moral part, though, that he observed, which was interesting, and I don't know if that applies as well today, but uh certainly agreed capitalism is definitely what is attacked because you leave people behind. And that's why we have government, we have regulatory issues because we have things, the Ponzi schemes that have been so tremendous with oh, I can't remember the guy's name, Maddox or anyway. He's saying that liberty regards religion as its companion in all battles and triumphs, as a cradle of its embassy, the divine source of its claims. So, how that's really what the founding documents they were trying to escape persecution, they wanted freedom of religion, they wanted they didn't like the king. And we built this on these self. Evident. It's self-governing. And I think that's what people miss today is that look, if you're going to self-govern, you have to have personal responsibility. Without it, that self-government just completely falls away. And you need to have a moral conscience and I believe a faith in God so that you can care about others and keep that greed in check.

SPEAKER_01 22:26

And so the basic premise, and this is where people get get lost in our constitution. The Constitution doesn't grant us any rights. The Constitution acknowledges our God-given rights and then limits the government from infringing on those God-given rights. And that is a massive difference from the Constitution granting us rights. Because if it can grant us those rights, it can take them away. By acknowledging the divine granting of those rights, it puts it in a power beyond their reach, beyond our reach. And then our founders were so concerned with the overreach of government, the structure of a violation that they wrote those codified our the government's inability to take away those rights.

SPEAKER_02 23:09

Yeah, the checks and balances is a remarkable system. The fact that it hadn't ever existed before, and we were lucky enough to have a nation where they put that together. And it still works. And the Constitution still works, and the Supreme Court keeps things. We check power on the other, and Congress and the executive branch. I'm still a big believer in it. It's the best thing out there.

Hermeneutics False Teachers And Truth

SPEAKER_02 23:28

So bring us home on the subject of false teachers, which Second Peter warns us about how discipling helps the church to overcome these heresies.

SPEAKER_01 23:37

Yeah, so the motive is a difficult thing to assign. You have people that are highly compassionate, highly driven by mercy. They have this selected view of Jesus, but it's driven out of sometimes a desire to fulfill that part of the scriptural truth and then leave behind. It's like we all have our own personal hermeneutic. David, you have a personal hermeneutic. How you read the Bible is in large part by how your character was formed, how you journeyed through, and then the only way to successfully disarm your personal hermeneutic is to acknowledge it, is to understand how you might be biased towards interpreting the scripture and then disarm it. But a lot of people aren't doing that work, and so they're bringing their own brokenness to the scripture. And then they're reading that, and it's like Jesus preaching to preach the truth in love. So there's some people that have truth and all caps with an exclamation point out of it, and love in this tiny script that you can't read. And there's other people that have preached the truth, and truth is blanked out or minus out, and then love is all caps. And so that drives people's way that they interpret the Bible, the way that they preach. And you have to have those in partnership. The idea that you're going to preach love without truth driving underneath it means that anyone can define that. You've seen it. I've seen it. I was walking through an airport in Denver about a month ago, and I saw a gentleman wearing a shirt that says love is love. And I was tempted to sit down with him and ask him to define that. And this idea that it can be anything you want to put it into, this huge, giant bubble. And then that's influencing other pastors and leaders. And the other part that's going on is you used to have the ability to reach your little community. So if I was a false teacher and I lived in outside of Cleveland and I preached to 100 people, then that was the hundred people that I influenced. But now with our ability to broadcast globally and share those things, it's infectious nature is driving that. People that used to be kind of isolated kooks that think the world is flat or whatever their conspiracy is, they were isolated and so they stood alone. And so people were able to say, okay, that's crazy. But now you can get 300 people together, and it looks like they have structure, right? It looks like they have more than one opinion. And that begins to grant it credibility to the people that are looking in from the outside. You know, we're told not to be ignorant of the devices of our enemy. And so if we are ignorant of that, then we don't understand how we're interacting with people and how they're receiving what we're

Cognitive Dissonance And Limbic Defense

SPEAKER_01 26:02

saying.

SPEAKER_02 26:02

I like this hermeneutics illustration because in this book, The Righteous Mind, he uses this terrific metaphor. He says that there's this elephant. He's huge, he's strong, and basically that's your subconscious if you want. This is how your worldview, how you were raised, everything determines the direction. So you're moving along and you're riding this elephant. But then the rational brain is the person on the back of the elephant. And he's got, I'm not really steering it. He's going where he wants, but I can rationalize some of his decisions, or they even call him in the book the press secretary. Like today, Trump says all kinds of stuff, you know, without really running it through his team. And then they have to scramble and try to piece that together and say, no, this is really what how it fits together with the whole strategy. And but I think this the elephant, you don't realize you're elephant. And you're right. I think there has to be a level of personal awareness. That's right. I really do have all this other stuff that I'm not even that aware of that is driving my biases and my choices and my values. And I'm and then I'm using my rational blank brain to try to justify those directions because I don't want to just blow that whole thing up. It's a fascinating book.

SPEAKER_01 27:16

But yeah, so cognitive dissidence is the idea that you're talking about. And that is, we've all built this Jenga puzzle of how we view the world. And when we encounter truth or information that challenges our presuppositions and how we're operating in the world, our brain responds with a defensive mechanism that's equivalent to you being physically attacked. Literally, the brain chemistry between you being physically attacked and the brain chemistry that matches that when an idea or information is introduced that threatens one of those lower base Jenga piece puzzles of how you built the world, you have the same response. And yeah, people are formalizing that, weaponizing that, using that, and they're responding from that. And you have a limbic system that's responsible to protect you. And it is at the lower stem of your brain. And that information reaches that 20 times faster, 20 times faster than your prefrontal cortex. So once you hit somebody's limbic response, you need to stop talking. Because if you continue to talk, what you end up doing is each word, when they're in that fight, flight response mechanism, each word that you speak after that is triggered becomes a brick in their wall to reinforce and build their and further expand their belief in what they've already assumed. And so you've got to get people out of that state and bring them back to where they can engage in their their prefrontal cortex and have a logical conversation with you. I love the genius of God and how he's built us to malfunction. He's other things of the how it comes to the surface, right? It says, out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks. And so God has been faithful to build humanity in a way where we can't conceal those things. But the question is whether we're paying attention to it or not.

SPEAKER_02 29:04

Yeah, I that sounds like you listened to Pink Floyd when you grew up too. Yeah, another brick in the wall. Yes. Look, I love this conversation, but we're getting into deep, chewy stuff.

Where To Find RDN Resources

SPEAKER_02 29:15

I want to direct our listeners to where they can go to learn more about the relational discipleship network. Where can they find information about your ministry and what you do if they want to kind of look into this a little bit more and try to be more aware of the deceit and how they can disciple in an age of deceit?

SPEAKER_01 29:31

Yeah. So the heart of our ministry is again that Jesus made disciples in a relational environment. And so we help churches prioritize, reshift, build their culture around individual, personal, and small group settings to build disciples. So if they go to rdn.org, that's rdn.org, they can find out about these conferences that we do all over the country called disciples. And it's really helping churches shift away from programmatic, propositional truth, preach from the pulpit, hope people get it, to a discipleship model. Leaders in that church, we've been assigned a job, and that job is to equip the saints for the work of the ministry, not for us to be the entertainers and them to be the audience. And so we will work with you, help you, put you in a coaching cohort with other pastors and leaders, with a pastor who has led this shift in their church and built disciple making and resilient people who can resist the deception that's coming towards us. So rdn.org is a great place to start. Disciple shift conferences are happening all over the country, and that would be your next first step.

SPEAKER_02 30:38

Man,

Self-Awareness Mentors And Next Steps

SPEAKER_02 30:39

that's fantastic. So if there's a listener out there right now who's going, I think I might be getting part of Jesus. I'm getting the light stuff and I might be getting fooled, what would you say to that person as your final word?

SPEAKER_01 30:51

So the first thing is, are you self-aware? Do you understand how your life has shaped you, driven you? Do you know the lens in which you look at the world? And if you don't, if you haven't done the work to bring that before Jesus and say, okay, Lord, what am I holding on to? What am I allowing to shape my view, my truth, my ability to see you accurately? Man, that really is the first step. And I would encourage people to journal that, to pray through that, to write down, to think about, reflect on. Jordan Peterson has this great series or this great teaching on basically facing the dragon. And the thing that you're the most scared of is the thing that holds the treasure that will unlock your life. Now, Jordan's an interesting cat. I'm not, I think he's Catholic or bi-Catholic, if I could say it that way. But his view of the scripture, he holds it in high regard and talks about that and even links that to the idea of redemption, that redemption is the small ongoing sacrifices of our own view of the world in favor of God's view of the world. And so just to face that reality, to run into your pain, to walk that through, if you need to find someone to do that with, do that. Honestly, a good friend will serve you just as well as a counselor if you have a mature believer that you can get next to you. I tell the people that I'm around, be a spiritual Machiavellian. Machiavelli was a Frenchman who counseled other people that wanted to climb the ladder of power to find people of influence and attach themselves to them. So be a spiritual Machiavellian. Find people that you respect whose walk in Jesus you want to model and put yourself next to them, attach to them, follow them, learn from them. That would be my advice.

SPEAKER_02 32:36

That's fantastic. Would you like to close us with prayer? Yeah.

Closing Prayer

SPEAKER_02 32:39

Let's do it.

SPEAKER_01 32:41

Lord, I'm grateful that you are gracious and patient and long-suffering, that you will take us as we inch forward towards you. Pray that you would meet each listener individual in the place that they are, that you would touch their lives, that you would reveal yourself to them. A little more clearly today.

SPEAKER_00 33:07

Amen.

Outro And How To Reach Us

SPEAKER_00 33:09

Thanks for listening to Wrestling with the Internet with David Stavage. We believe the winners of this ring courageously follow God's work, loves and protects God's women, excels at God's work, and betters God's world with his children. For information, reach out to David at David at thesavagepath.com. That's David at the Stavagepath.com or visit his website, thestavagepath.com. Tune in next time as Wrestling with the Interman tackles more tough topics to train up a generation of better men.