001. How God Gets Our Attention and the Pace of Formation ft. Tyler Staton

What does it mean to know God, not as a doctrine held, but as a presence inhabited? Tyler Staton joins John for the first conversation in Formation's history: an unhurried exploration of how the Holy Spirit forms us, why prayer is less about technique than attention, and what it looks like to discover God not only in the sanctuary but in the chaos of a basketball sideline, a marriage, and a cancer diagnosis. This is a conversation about the ancient and the empirical, and how sometimes we may look for formation in all the wrong places.

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About Tyler Staton:

Tyler Staton is the lead pastor of Bridgetown Church in Portland, Oregon, and the national director of 24-7 Prayer USA. He is the author of two books — Praying Like Monks, Living Like Fools and The Familiar Stranger — both of which take seriously the gap between what Christians say they believe about God and what they actually experience in daily life. Tyler studied at Southeastern University and has spent much of his ministry in New York and Portland, two cities that have sharpened his theology as much as any classroom. 

What this conversation explores:

• Why the Holy Spirit is the most neglected and most contested person of the Trinity and what a more integrated pneumatology might actually look like in ordinary life
• Dallas Willard's "golden triangle" of spiritual formation: practices, movements of the Spirit, and suffering, and why removing any one of the three is detrimental 
• The difference between discernment and miracle-seeking, and why Tyler believes the deeper invitation of the Spirit is often hidden inside what we're most eager to escape
• What it means to "find yourself in the story" — Tyler's practice of praying through Scripture in seasons of doubt, loss, and confusion
• How family life and marriage in particular function as formation's most honest classroom

Resources mentioned:

• Praying Like Monks, Living Like Fools — Tyler Staton
• The Familiar Stranger — Tyler Staton
• Renovation of the Heart — Dallas Willard
• Fresh Air: The Holy Spirit for an Inspired and Empowered Life — Jack Levison
• Miracles — C.S. Lewis
• Ministry and the Miraculous — Lewis Smedes
• The Protestant Spiritual Formation Movement — Todd Keesler
• The Examen

Connect with Tyler Staton:

Website: bridgetown.church
Instagram: @tylerstaton
Praying Like Monks, Living Like Fools, available wherever books are sold
The Familiar Stranger, available wherever books are sold

About Formation:

Formation is a podcast produced by Become New that explores the science and soul of spiritual formation. Each episode brings together the ancient wisdom of the contemplative tradition and the best of modern research. New episodes every other week, wherever you listen to podcasts.

Connect with Formation:
Website: [www.formationpodcast.com]
Newsletter: [www.formationpodcast.com/subscribe]
Socials: [@formationjohn]

The conversation doesn't have to stop here. Formation is produced by Become New, a community dedicated to helping you grow spiritually... one day at a time. Subscribe for daily teaching from John Ortberg at becomenew.com/subscribe.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Well, there is nothing more important in the world than talking about God. There was no like greater mischief I could get myself into than whatever Jesus invited me to do. And I wanted that.

SPEAKER_00 0:12

I don't even know how to put this in the right words exactly. I don't think I've ever asked it before.

SPEAKER_01 0:16

I've thought a lot about this.

SPEAKER_00 0:18

Being a pastor, there's always the temptation to sound like I'm more certain than I really am.

SPEAKER_01 0:22

It's so easy to make jokes about marriage and like, oh, we are you sometimes. It's harder than I thought. Because of me.

SPEAKER_00 0:32

That word is a really interesting word to me. It's kind of a litmus test.

SPEAKER_01 0:37

I have a terminal condition of deception that's in my bloodstream.

SPEAKER_00 0:41

It's as central to our formation as engaging in practices. This will scare some people, but I'm just being honest. There can be all kinds of questions that as a pastor, you're kind of not supposed to have. This is something that is just beyond the capacity of words.

SPEAKER_01 1:01

I got cancer. I never once prayed that God would take it away.

SPEAKER_00 1:06

No kidding. There'll be folks that think, man, I'd like to know God like that, but I just don't. What word would you speak to give them hope for coming to know the Spirit of God in that way? Well, there is nothing more important in the world than talking about God. Thinking about how God is present right here. We get to live with him. And I'm so glad to get to do that together with Tyler. So uh Tyler Staten, uh you may well know, is uh lead pastor at Bridgetown Church in Portland. I think the first conversation we had was several years ago. We had lunch at a little outside restaurant on a sidewalk in Portland. Yes. And uh you bring to conversation in life uh an earnestness uh about God and the role of God in human life. It's a very striking thing. Um and and I was struck by that in our first conversation. And you know, you're super fun. I would watch you as you were up there speaking, and I can't figure out how you get your t-shirt. It's like a toga where it's like coming in and out of just all the right places, and um, so there's a joyful factor, your wife Kirsten, and then you have uh two boys, three. Oh, you have three? Three little boys, yeah. Okay, Hank Simon and Amos. And Amos. Yeah, yeah. And they're what ages? Nine, seven, and three. Okay. Uh, and you had formerly been at Oak Church?

SPEAKER_01 2:46

Yes, Oaks Church, Brooklyn.

SPEAKER_00 2:48

In Brooklyn. Mm-hmm. And uh uh you tell in your book, uh, The Familiar Stranger, we'll get to that a little bit later on, about your involvement in 24-7 prayer and uh how that might be one of the ways that you would know God was up to something if you would be able to go to Bridgetown and continue that. And uh, and and in fact it was. Um, Tyler, if you don't know him, is a remarkable communicator and writer and thinker. And uh your book, Praying Like Monks, Living Like Fools, has just struck a lot of chords, and now more recently, uh The Familiar Stranger. So uh I'm so glad we can do this. We we had a wonderful moment of prayer and we're ready for this real deep conversation, and then a garbage truck came by and started beeping in reverse gear, and somehow that feels about right and about appropriate. Um, this is the first kind of conversation that I've had that with my little team. So you're kind of a guinea pig. Have no idea what to expect, but my hope is you will feel completely free, and this could be a very wide open conversation. Um, but I know it's also an incredibly busy moment for you. You're coming from a Holy Spirit conference. That's right.

SPEAKER_01 4:04

And it's kind of our big event of the year at Bridgetown.

SPEAKER_00 4:07

And then going to speak at another event here in Santa Monica.

SPEAKER_01 4:10

Yeah, practicing the way.

SPEAKER_00 4:12

Yeah. So uh I'm very grateful that you would wedge this into all that. Oh, thank you. Yeah, thank you for being here.

SPEAKER_01 4:20

Yeah, absolutely. I'm delighted to sit down with you.

SPEAKER_00 4:23

So I I'd love to start by just talking a bit about your life and and being able to kind of learn how you ended up on the track that you're on, how you came to think about and live with God in the way that you do. Um, so uh I just want to start there. When you think about growing up, um the the home in which you grew up, what was the climate like there? What was the emotional climate? What was the spiritual climate like? What did you learn? What were the assets? What were the deficits? Tell us, tell us something about that.

SPEAKER_01 4:55

Yeah, I so I'm the middle child of three boys. I'm a middle child of three kids. Really? Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 5:02

So it's a very hard thing to be a middle child. You just get lost all the time. Neither my sister nor my brother recognizes that, but we know.

SPEAKER_01 5:09

Yeah. This might be why both of us chose vocations where we stand on stages and everyone has to listen to us uninterrupted. You know.

SPEAKER_00 5:18

Because it wasn't gonna happen at home.

SPEAKER_01 5:20

Yeah, I'm like, was that the call of God or a reaction of my family of origin, or is God always in all of it? You know? Yeah. Um, but I uh my mom came from a family of really faithful followers of Jesus. Uh her parents were early influences in my life. We we lived in the same town as my mom's parents, uh, and she's one of two, and her sister lived also in the Nashville area where I grew up, and did not, she was not married and didn't have children. And so we were very much the center of my mom's family of origin. My dad's the youngest of six from a tobacco farm in Kentucky, the only one to leave that area, and um his family would be more disparate when it comes to faith. Um and I would say my dad, I watched my dad's faith become increasingly a part of him, and that was a significant positive input in my life as a young person. My dad got sober shortly before I was born, and that was very necessary for him, and my upbringing would have been quite different had he not made that decision. But it was it was not actually through a 12-step community, which has been a huge part of my personal spiritual uh formation, and it has been yours as well. But my dad had a very powerful encounter with God alone in a little country church from a guest speaker in rural Kentucky. Uh married no kids yet, and just knew he needed to follow Jesus and give up drinking. And so that happened that day, and he's never looked back on either one. But my dad uh went to he went on a short-term mission trip uh to Central Asia when I was in elementary school, and he ended up going to this nation called Kyriston ten times, and the first time he went, he came back and he was different. And I remember that. I remember noticing that as a child, noticing a gentleness and a joy and a sincerity come alive in him that I hadn't seen before. Um, my grandfather was the most present man that I've ever known. Wow. He was just with you and content to be with you. And I've gained language for the experience of seeing my dad's transformation and knowing the warmth of my grandfather's presence um as I've grown into adulthood, but the felt experience was shaping me in my own becoming. Uh and and I would say, you know, every family of origin has their shadows as well. And I would say whether it was the environment my parents created or my own personality quirks or both, I associated achievement with love at a young age, and I've and I fight that battle to this day.

SPEAKER_00 9:13

And I have Which what's your Enneagram? Three. Yeah, me too.

SPEAKER_01 9:18

Yeah, and I I think it's because I largely I had some success in sports, and my parents were both athletes, especially my mom, and as a middle child, that's where I got their undivided attention. Yeah. And again, language came for that much later, but even as a high school kid, I think I felt special and I felt loved uh through achievement and through my family was very much no drama, no complaining, nothing like that. And there's a lot of good that I took from that. Yep. Um, no negativity, but I've also really struggled with associating love with never burdening anyone else. Yeah. Um, and that's made its way into my marriage.

SPEAKER_00 10:13

I was gonna say, I'll bet you you and Kirsten had some interesting conversations.

SPEAKER_01 10:16

Yeah, continue to be something that I've unearthed, um, and I'm sure we'll go on unearthing until Jesus returns and makes my formation complete.

SPEAKER_00 10:30

Now, um, how about conflict? Was there much of that in the home? How did that uh how did your family stay out there shape you?

SPEAKER_01 10:35

Oh, that's a a good question. My family was very much a like nothing gets bottled up, you say everything you think right when you feel like a family. Yeah. Um and so I feel like I feel like conflict was handled pretty healthy, but the way that's shaped me as an adult is I'm often too direct with others in a way that I don't intend to be uh bristly or abrasive, but can be perceived that way. And so I often have to coach myself toward gentleness um because there just wasn't a lot of that in my home.

SPEAKER_00 11:18

It's so interesting because again, we don't know each other super well. You have a kind of you have a very gentle demeanor. I mean, your your person, your presence with uh somebody with me feels uh very safe and and even therapeutic. So I would not have guessed that uh an overly directive style would have been part of your part of your part of your uh method.

SPEAKER_01 11:41

Yeah, I mean I I would say it doesn't often manifest in sharp language or tone necessarily, but just saying something to someone exactly as I think it, and then realizing later, oh, I should have thought more about that before I just I I need to be more quick to listen and slow to speak. There's not a lot, there's a lot of quick to speak uh in the home that I grew up in.

SPEAKER_00 12:12

Yeah. Uh so then you end up deciding to become a pastor. Um, what was that journey like? There's some traditions where you kind of have to have a certain experience to do that. Uh some people get to just choose like being a weatherman or something. What what was the journey like for you? How did you end up going down that road?

SPEAKER_01 12:32

Yeah, I'm more on the weatherman side of that equation. I I was so fascinated by Jesus, so captivated by Jesus as a middle and high schooler. I just knew that I felt most like myself when I was talking with Jesus, and I knew that Jesus is the most compelling person who has ever lived, and there's not a close second. And so I became interested in the scriptures because Jesus seemed interested in the scriptures, and when I thought about I'm gonna study something, I wanted to study the person of Jesus. Um, I never thought I would become a preacher, I didn't ever relish the idea of writing or delivering sermons or things I saw a pastor doing in a traditional Western church context. I thought I'd like to study Jesus and then go live in an impoverished village in a third world country and help dig a well or something like that.

SPEAKER_00 13:44

And you're how old when you're thinking these thoughts?

SPEAKER_01 13:47

In high school. Yeah, that's amazing. And and I was drawn to the radical. You know, I'd I'd read the stories of those who had followed Jesus in radical ways, and I wanted that kind of story. Um not for any, not for the sake of heroism, but I think I think maybe a unique thing that happened for me in middle and high school is I became utterly convinced that following Jesus wasn't only the most meaningful life, but it was the most adventurous and fun. That there was no there was no like greater mischief I could get myself into than whatever Jesus invited me to do. Um and I wanted that. And so I I then got a little bit freaked out because I was like, wait a minute, people are always describing like a second conversion experience you're supposed to have to go into formal vocational ministry. Yep. So if I want to go to Bible college, do I need to like, does the Lord need to speak to me like Abraham in the middle of the night or something? You know? Yeah. And um, I asked the pastor of the local church my family attended at the time, which was just this little Baptist church in Clearwater, Florida, where I lived during my high school years. And he said, I said, How do you know if you're called to ministry? And he said, if you can't imagine doing anything else. And that was such a helpful response for me at the time, at least, and and a relief. So I I went to Bible college having no idea what I was gonna do, yeah, but just wanting to study the person of Jesus, and one thing led to another, and I'm doing the very thing that I never thought I would do, and that's preach sermons and and lead a Western church.

SPEAKER_00 15:39

Yeah, that's so cool. I I had folks say the same thing to me. I also grew up in a Baptist church. My problem was I could imagine doing lots of other stuff. There were so many things that sounded like fun. So uh that made it a really difficult thing. Did you ever second guess that decision once you decided to do it? Was it just always clear-cut?

SPEAKER_01 15:58

I didn't second guess the decision. I did I I remember my freshman year at Bible college being really bewildered, um, not disillusioned, just not knowing what to think, because I didn't come from a family where anyone was in pastoral ministry uh in my family history.

SPEAKER_00 16:28

And were your folks okay with it, supportive of it, opposed to it? Totally supportive. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 16:34

But I remember realizing that there was a variety of theological interpretations of the Bible, and I didn't know that. That was news to you. There were things I was entirely unaware of, and then I would be sitting in a you know an intro class, freshman year of Bible college, and and hearing things that for me were mind-boggling.

SPEAKER_00 16:57

And if you're gonna end up in places like New York or Portland, it's good to know that.

SPEAKER_01 17:01

Yes, yeah, yeah. So I I do remember laying awake many nights thinking, what is this book really about? What is it trying to tell me and how can people see it so many different ways and wrestling over that? And I I would say that the wrestle is intriguing to me, not off-putting, and the mystery of God, yeah, I find myself drawn to, not repelled by. So I'm I'm much more comfortable than I I've discovered than most people that I interact with, at least in not knowing.

SPEAKER_00 17:51

No, and that's that word is a really interesting word to me, mystery. It's kind of a litmus test. There are some people who do what we do and they don't really like that word at all. Right. Everything needs to be very, very black and white and clear-cut, and then other people who find it quite compelling. So talk a little bit about when you hear that word. I mean, I can see in your face it kind of lights you up. What what does that? What is it about that word that draws you?

SPEAKER_01 18:19

I think I think there are aspects of Christian spirituality that have been neglected in the Western church context that I find so important and compelling. Like seeing God in nature and creation, just to offer a really simple example, everyone can relate to. And we all experience what we term transcendence uh in nature. But I would say this here's here's an experience everyone can relate to. There are moments when you behold the beauty of creation, and the internal experience is one of surrender and contentment at the same time. Like when you can be on a backpacking trip, utterly exhausted, thinking about nothing but dinner, just getting to where you're going, taking your shoes off because your feet are aching, and eating a meal, and then you you turn a corner and you see a black bear, and you just stop. And it's like all the senses that were within you plotting your future, just everything ceases, and no one seeing a black bear in the middle of the trail is thinking about themselves, their want, their and no one tries to hold the moment and keep it forever. You just surrender and you behold for however long you get to behold, and then the bear wanders off, and you feel hungry again, you keep going, you know. But what is that? Yeah, what is it that I experienced there? The best term we have is transcendence, but that experience is a lot like the scripture describes life with God.

SPEAKER_00 20:35

Yeah, you know, there's that line, I think it's in 1 Peter where he says uh about Jesus, although you haven't seen him, you know him, and you experience inexpressible joy.

SPEAKER_01 20:45

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 20:45

And that's such an interesting, he's using words, but he's saying, actually, words cannot, this is something that is just beyond the capacity of words to communicate. You have a wonderful story in your book. By the way, I often hate it when people will say that to me because I can't remember by the time I've written a book what was in it or what wasn't. Yeah. But this you probably will. It's most likely an apocryphal story about Augustine and a little kid that sees him and the overwhelming uh nature of Trinitarian thought.

SPEAKER_01 21:15

Mm-hmm. Yeah, so uh uh there's a story about Augustine, probably just a legend, but who knows, uh that he would always walk along the sea uh on Sundays between preaching sermons. And this one day he's walking along the sea, and he sees this little boy who's dug a hole in the sand, and he's running with a bucket and filling it up with water and coming and dumping it in the hole. And Augustine watches him do this over and over and then says, What are you doing? And the little boy says, I'm gonna take that big, great big ocean and put it in this hole. And Augustine says, You can never fit. The big ocean in that hole, and he says, easier for me to fit the ocean in this hole than for you to fit that great big Trinitarian God in that little mind of yours. And I I think, look, if there's a God, I'm which there is, I'm barely scratching the surface, and I'm gonna swim in his being forever and never reach the end of him. So to try to, and this will scare some people, but I'm just being honest, to try to condense that God into like a math equation that I can fully understand and comprehend every last bit of is obviously to minimize the majesty of who God is to some degree.

SPEAKER_00 22:51

I'll ask you this. I don't even know how to put this in the right words exactly. I don't think I've ever quite asked it before. But being a pastor, there's always the temptation to sound like I'm more certain than I really am, or that I know more than I really know. And then when we're just sitting around talking like this, there can be all kinds of stuff, all kinds of questions that I have as a human being, that as a pastor, you're kind of not supposed to have. Yeah. Do you find talking openly about having a sense of mystery, does it help you be more honest with that when you're on a platform in front of a group of people? Do you wrestle at all with that? Uh here's what I'm supposed to know or supposed to believe. And when it's three o'clock in the morning and I'm all by myself in bed at night and something scary is going on in my life. How do you navigate that?

SPEAKER_01 23:42

I I would say for me personally, and this would be different for different folks, but I I don't doubt what I would term as the essentials. You know, I've I've been through some hard things in my life. I'll be through I'll go through more hard things in my life. None of them have caused me to doubt the Jesus being the way, the truth, and the life, the the only way to the Father. None of them have caused me to doubt the love and justice of God. Um there are questions I sometimes have about how all these pieces fit together. Yeah. But I think the essential nature of the message of the gospel is something I feel settled in, and that I'm not looking over my shoulder about. And so I think when I talk about mystery, and the reason it intrigues me is just to say there's there's joy and wonder to who God is. I'm still going on to discover what it means to follow him. And essentially, I would say the spiritual journey is so much going from seeing God sometimes in places I expect to find him to seeing God everywhere, especially in the places I wasn't taught to look for him. Yeah. And that is fun. And it's really intriguing and it's really beautiful. And so the the primary arena of my spiritual becoming right now isn't through the sermons that I craft or the small group that meets in my home. It's not in the places it's supposed to be. Those are environments that are shaping me spiritually, and they are essential agents to my formation. But if you were to ask me, where's the primary place God is meeting you right now? I would say it is attuning to the joy of who God has uniquely made each of my children. Yeah. And the way that that actually allows me to make greater peace with my own imperfection and ongoing shaping, because it teaches me about my safety before God in all my little idiosyncrasy. And it's learning to love the woman that I've made a covenant with because it's it's harder than I thought because of me, you know, and I mean I'm just being honest, like it's so easy to make jokes about marriage and like, oh, we are you sometimes. Sure. But what I'm talking about is I can be really pleasant to everyone I interact with all day, and immediately irritable when I'm alone with her. What is that? Yeah, that is um my ongoing formation into the image of Jesus and the gap between who I am and who I want to be. And so I would say kind of the barometer by which I'm taking my spiritual temperature is how effortlessly or how consistently, it's probably the better term. How consistently am I loving the people who know me best and interact with me most frequently? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 27:39

No, I think marriage reveals sin like an MRI reveals, whatever it is an MRI reveals. Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 27:47

Can I one example of this, and then we can move on because you probably I've probably over talked this already. This is great. I got no agenda.

SPEAKER_00 27:56

I got a whole bunch of questions we could get into, but mostly it's just getting to the core of life and heart and God.

SPEAKER_01 28:01

Yeah. So so here's an example of this. I just we just had the Holy Spirit conference at Bridgetown. It was amazing. It was so powerful, so beautiful. Thousands of people in Portland's largest auditorium outside of the Moda Center where the Blazers play. And it wasn't hype, it was deep, beautiful work and formation. And in between a couple of the sessions, I had to come late to one because it's my seven-year-old Simon. It's uh I'm his basketball coach, it was the first game of the season. And I was like, you know, I've got a great team. They can lead the conference. I'm gonna go coach. And I've been praying that God would give me opportunities for secure attachment with Simon in particular just because it's a little uh he's more emotionally mysterious than the others. I've got like two golden retrievers and then and then a cat, you know, and I'm like, I don't know what this guy's thinking. Yeah, he's scaring me. Um and then as I prayed the exam, laying in my bed Saturday night, utterly exhausted from the conference, and I went back through and I said, when God didn't know your presence most clearly today, I just saw myself on the sideline of the game with Simon and I knew Jesus was saying to me, like, this was the best part. And that that's what I'm talking about is learning to discover, oh my word. God's not just in the auditorium, maybe even more so. He's at the basketball court with the seven-year-olds who are, you know.

SPEAKER_00 30:00

And it requires a constant letting go. I remember with our firstborn, say deep feeler. So, like, I get that, I understand that. Going in to say goodnight. Uh I love you so much. If I could have any little girl in the world to be my daughter, I love being your daddy. It's and you know, she just gets big tears in her eyes. And so I'm thinking, oh, I'm really good at this. And I walked into our next child and started going through the whole same spiel. She looked at me as a true story and said, Daddy, you got something in your nose. Yeah. It's like, oh, I I this is not a formula after all. And um, so to allow that first experience to be that first experience, and I'll find God there however, wherever I find him. But then allow the second experience to be the second experience. Yeah. And not to put the pressure on that child to say, oh no, no, in this moment now, you're supposed to make me feel like a wonderful dad by getting all emotional because I'm saying these beautiful words to you, to to let the lab be a lab and let the cat be a cat. And that's just a I'm I'm always constantly learning that.

SPEAKER_01 31:07

Yes. And and the discovery of God in my everything isn't, it's not that now God is forming me in my family and before he was forming me in other environments. It's oh my word, God has been using this all along. Yep. But now I'm I'm becoming aware of it, and that opens up a more conversation between me and him. No, I'm not sure. It's like more awareness.

SPEAKER_00 31:43

I think that's a good question last week uh about this topic and spiritual formation. Get into that language a little bit too. Where did you first hear about that? And so uh uh one of the gifts from people like Dallas Willard and Richard Foster over the last several decades has been kind of a rediscovery of wisdom around how does spiritual growth take place. And when I was when I was a kid growing up, churches had Christian education departments, but we did not use that language of formation. And uh one of the gifts of that has been a discovery or a rediscovery of all kinds of practices like silence or solitude or Sabbath or fasting or so, that are not barometers of how spiritually mature I am, but a means to an end of freedom and receiving power. But it's interesting, I think, as we think about the spiritual formation movement. Genim Keys Keisler has written a book, it's gonna be out in March uh on the history of the Protestant spiritual formation movement. Oh, fascinating. Yeah, you'll you you you will love it. He was he was just at an event this last week. But uh one of the dynamics in it can be because of the rediscovery of practices, we can almost reduce all of the Christian life to practices. Right. And Dallas used to talk about he called it the golden triangle of spiritual formation, where one of the corners of the triangle was practices, uh disciplines, another one was uh movements of the Holy Spirit. So that was a third from one moment to the next, you know, the practice of the presence of God. God, where do I find you here? What's happening right now? I'm I'm here with Tyler, and what do you have to say? What should what should I be listening to? Okay, I I I don't have anything further, so I'll just keep going. But that continual, I don't have to worry about how it's going. I can just, God, you're right there. So those learning, how do I enter into the experience of the spirit from Mama? And then the third uh is suffering.

SPEAKER_01 33:50

Yeah, I knew it would be.

SPEAKER_00 33:52

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Bummer. Um, and family life brings both. Yes. Uh it it it brings the potential for the experience of the spirit all the time. Uh, and suffering, not the big ones, and you've been through some pretty big ones, and and those are important, but I often think if we wait till the big ones come, we kind of won't be ready for it. It's really just the uh, you know, the trial of this moment. Do I go coach the basketball team or do I go to the conference? I'm not sure what the right thing to do is. I don't know if I made and then the next moment, and then the next moment, and then uh getting into LA for this conference, and you got to run to this uh podcast, and it it those trials from one moment to the next, learning how to go through those with God um is as central to our formation as engaging in practices. But I think a lot of people miss that.

SPEAKER_01 34:49

Yes. Yeah, I think uh I use the term submission a lot in place of suffering because people tend to think of suffering as the big diagnosis, right, the the loss that I'm grieving. That is suffering. Uh so it but suffering includes the limits and constraints of my life, the people that I've let in, and what that you know, all of that stuff. And so to submit to the present moment, to submit to Jesus as Lord over the present moment, all of that is charged with formative power. And I think the fact that suffering's in that triangle is revealing of the goodness of God.

SPEAKER_00 35:44

That's interesting. Say more about why. Because I think a lot of people would think the opposite. Like, if God was good, then suffering would not be in the triangle.

SPEAKER_01 35:50

No, it's my suffering is too consequential to God for him to leave it as meaningless happenstance. He is so good that sometimes he removes suffering through the miraculous power of the spirit, and other times he redeems suffering by repurposing it for the formation of my soul. Yeah. And yet God is also gentle, and so rarely does he insist that my suffering be redemptive in me. He allows it to be if I participate with him. And that's the way a lot of this stuff works, you know. You can do the practices and become a Pharisee, like the practices themselves. And that's probably one of the, like at this moment in church history in America, probably the great uh, I would say maybe a way that the enemy would like to partner with spiritual formation for the destruction of the church would be to make it seem like a life hack. Because we currently are very into basically anything that might improve my daily experience, you know.

SPEAKER_00 37:14

Um I I told my wife, I don't even know why this is. I'm just coming to hate the word hack. I don't know why it was like everything is it's a hack for everything. It's like, can it just can we just not use the word hack for another year?

SPEAKER_01 37:27

Sure. Here's how to get a good night's sleep. Yep, here's how to control your anxious thoughts, here's how to, you know, and a lot of it, there's a lot of truth. I think there's the truth that we're coming out of probably minimizing the person to just the brain on a stick too much and realizing, oh, I'm a holistic person, I'm formed by my emotions, my body. But the truth is I can't just have a vision of my becoming and effortlessly become it if my vision is Jesus, because I have a terminal condition of deception that's in my bloodstream.

SPEAKER_00 38:08

So let's pause there for a second. One of the gifts that my wife brings to our relationship is just the spiritual gift of eye rolling and throwing up in her mouth a little bit anytime I sound too abstract or try to sound more spiritual or smarter than I actually am, which happens quite a lot. So if Kirsten was here right now and she heard you talking, uh where would her eyes be tempted to roll? Where would she say, uh, this is still a big growth area for Tyler?

SPEAKER_01 38:36

Oh, for me?

SPEAKER_00 38:37

Yeah. Yeah, sorry.

SPEAKER_01 38:42

Yeah, I would say you know, one of the something that probably ails most preachers is we're so much better at talking about this stuff than living it. So I think she would say Tyler is very aware that living in surrender is the best way to live, and that it's the most relational way to live. It allows you to be present to other people. And Tyler's pretty compelling at expressing those ideas in large room formats. And Tyler's pretty controlling over his time and pretty irritable when his plane goes awry, even in small ways. And and I'm trying to learn to greet interruptions as invitations from the spirit, but man, it's slow going. Cause I really, really like planning my experience and executing my plan. Yep. I really like looking forward to the gratification of my preferred pleasure. I really like the discipline of an ordered day, you know, all that kind of thing.

SPEAKER_00 40:12

Um I remember earlier on in ministry, I hadn't really been exposed to this much growing up, but uh early on learning, there's people who love God, love Jesus, love the Bible, and believe deeply in an egalitarian model of ministry and community that the spirit is served best when people serve on the basis of giftedness, dot gender. Like I I love that. I remember listening a few years ago to a talk that you did on that at Bridgetown that was just tremendous. I don't know if we're gonna have show notes or anything like that, but if we could have that available for people to listen to because gall, it was passionate, it was learned, it was accessible, it was terrific. So I could, you know, I I could sing that song, but then when I went home and we had three kids under the age of four, and it was time to feed and bathe, and I was a whole different uh uh that was a whole different thing to actually serve in a deeply partnering way with my wife, or to be willing to listen and receive feedback from her without getting defensive or prickly. Uh that was a journey that was uh exponentially harder for me than trying to find ways of talking about it.

SPEAKER_01 41:24

Yes. Yeah, I I've I find that, and this might be common to um a more Enneagram type three personality or something, but if I look at the fruit of the spirit, there are proactive expressions of the spirit and there are reactive expressions of the spirit. Like say more about that. Like patience or gentleness.

SPEAKER_00 41:50

More reactive? Yes.

SPEAKER_01 41:52

So I can't I I've asked myself that question a lot. Like, how do I grow in patience? I can't plan it into my schedule and practice it each day. Yeah, I'm very good at that. If you ask me how do you grow in silence and solitude, I could tell you about the rhythms by which I live that I've planned and executed. But what is all of that supposed to do to me? It's supposed to make me someone who is slower, quieter, more attentive, and all the time that I'm not practicing silence and solitude. And that is a much slower process for me.

SPEAKER_00 42:46

I think of um step seven and the 12 steps, humbly asked him to remove our shortcomings. Yes. And uh the word humbly, folks will say, is in there to remind me I'm not in charge of the process and I'm not in charge of the timing. And it might take quite a while. And generally, um, it will involve things like if I have a problem with impatience, then God will send people and circumstances in my life who help me. Who helped me discover the limits of my patience and the need for them more? So uh it's a process where it's not it doesn't just get zapped out of me. Um, but I'm not in charge of the timing of it or the method of it, and and and that's a real good thing, but it's a difficult thing.

SPEAKER_03 43:40

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 43:41

Yeah. So that kind of gets us into the whole person of the Holy Spirit, the work of the Holy Spirit, uh, how do we interact with the Holy Spirit? And there's a lot of mystery there. So let me just start with that. Uh uh What drew you to the Holy Spirit? What is it about being having the chance to study about, think about the Holy Spirit that drew you and said, this is a topic I'd really like to explore and and write about?

SPEAKER_01 44:13

I would say the the really unhelpful polarity that the Western Church tends to live in when it comes to the third person of the Trinity. You know, I think it it seems it seemed to me that there was a gap that someone needed to thoughtfully bridge between theology and model. Yeah. So a really helpful, at least I think it's helpful, John Wimberism was if you want to pick anything up off the pages of scripture and see it come to life in a community, you need a theology model and a practice. I mean, you gotta have a theology, you have to understand what scripture teaches, then you have to have a model. How do we live that here and now in this community? And then you have to have practice, you have to have space to practice where the stakes are lowered, risk is implied and shared, and failure is okay. It's kind of like, and and you could apply this to any spiritual gift. Like if someone came to you in a local church and said, I think I have the spiritual gift of teaching, you wouldn't say, fantastic, you should preach from the pulpit next Sunday. That's right. You know, they would have space where the stakes are lowered. Why don't you teach a Sunday school class for the kids? And it's assumed like they're probably not gonna hit a grand slam the first time. But when it comes to the more mysterious gifts of the same spirit, according to Paul, like prophecy or a word of knowledge, it's like we only have someone standing on a stage with a microphone declaring something. And and so I think I just talked to so many pastors and leaders, and just sincere followers of Jesus, that believed these two things. Do you believe the whole Bible is livable? Yes. Have you ever prayed for someone and seen them healed? No. When was the last time you tried? I can't really remember because I was that's just never it's always felt disingenuous in the midst of a hospital room, or I grew up in a toxic, charismatic environment where those sorts of things were practiced, but in a way that felt drummed up and hyped and ultimately shallow in the end. Um, almost like experiencing the miracle was the whole purpose that we were after, instead of the miracle worker himself being the one that we're after. Um, and so I just thought we have to thoughtfully bridge the gap between the whole Bible is livable, and how do we live some of these parts, particularly the parts that are related directly to the gift of the Holy Spirit uh in Acts chapter two and the pages that follow? And how do we think about them? How do we live them personally? How do we teach them to communities of people so that people can begin to walk in the power of the spirit? And I think I would just summarize all of that to say if you were like, what does the Holy Spirit do? I would say this the Holy Spirit does the work of spiritual formation that I'm ignorant to, so the spirit's working in me deeper than I can explain to you right now, and that I cannot do so. There's times when I'm not being formed slowly by practice or suffering, but the spirit of the living God fast forwards like a 10-year formation journey in me and gets it done in an instant. And we see Jesus doing that on the pages of scripture, standing up the paralytic and then saying, Go, your sins are forgiven. It's like, wait, how'd you get from there to there? And it's just like he's fast-forwarding the journey of this person's formation. And I think when we experience the miraculous work of the spirit, that's usually what's going on. Or sometimes we experience the miraculous work of the spirit so God can get at the deeper thing in us that he really wants to get to. Um, like when he heals the blind man in John 9, and then that man's healing gives him it uncovers his family of origin trauma. It uncovers the uh toxicity of the religious institution that he's a part of at the time. It uncovers the story that's been written about him that he's been complicit in in his community, and so Jesus goes and finds him a second time and introduces himself to him now that he can actually see him and has a subsequent conversation. And it's all it's an interesting story because in John 9, the healing isn't the climactic moment, it's just it's like the prelude to the work that Jesus wants to do in this person's life. So sometimes God uses the Holy Spirit to be like, hey, you've got this bodily issue, and I'm gonna take care of that because I really want to talk to you about what lives beneath it. Um so anyway, that would be my brief take.

SPEAKER_00 49:52

Say a little bit about because some folks listening will be familiar with this, others not. Um, one whole wing of the church said certain gifts of the spirit, like prophecy or exorcism, are not for today. It's sometimes called cessationism. You write about that a little bit, the idea that they ceased. So say a little bit about kind of that movement, how you've grappled with that, and how you would address somebody who finds themselves there.

SPEAKER_01 50:19

Yeah, I I think I would just say there's a lot of evidence to the contrary in early church history. There's very, very little evidence biblically that would lead one to that theological conclusion. And I think to be entirely honest, having done the scholarly work, having grown up in a cessationist tradition myself, having attended a cessationist Bible college, I would say that that theology is one constructed from lack of experience and fear of experience rather than what is actually on the pages of scripture and what has been passed down through church history. And I think that it can be threatening when we feel like we follow Jesus for a long time. But there's aspects to life with God we haven't experienced yet. And that's why humility for every last one of us has to be the soil in which the spiritual life grows. Because when I posture myself as an expert or having arrived in any way, then I become threatened and defensive against what might actually be further invitation to full life through the Holy Spirit. So we could have a whole conversation about cessationism, but that would be a brief take.

SPEAKER_00 52:15

When I was a kid growing up, there was a much bigger divide then between charismatic or Pentecostal churches and then quote unquote evangelical churches. And about every decade that gap is narrowed, narrowed, narrowed. Um Fuller Seminary, where I went in the late 60s, had a big decision to make. There was a charismatic seminary, Melody Land, that closed down. And so scores and scores and scores of seminary students that wanted to go to seminary. And uh Fuller was the one place that would be orthodox and um evangelical in its theology, so there would be theological compatibility there. But as opposed to a number of other kind of similar seminaries, would say, Nope, you come here, be a part of this community. So Dave Hubbard was the president at that time and made that decision fairly controversial. But then the Fuller community was much enhanced, it became a much richer place, but much messier. Sure. So then in the uh must have been late 80s, not long after I left there, John Wimber was a good buddy with a guy named Pete Wagner, who was in the School of World Missions at that time, and they started to teach a class on signs and wonders. Right. And it exploded, but it became part of the messiness was uh that people could come and ask for healings. It's an academic context where to be able to ask questions, critique, poke holes, is part of the academic process, but somewhat at odds with you got to have faith in order to. So it created a big, very interesting conversation. Um eventually a committee, as often happens at academic settings, was appointed to explore the whole thing. Lou Smeads, who was on the faculty at that time, was the guy who drafted a little book, a little booklet called Ministering in the Miraculous. And um very interesting. Lou is a very thoughtful guy, uh real significant mentor for me, very different than Dallas. Dallas would talk very readily about God speaking to him. I have no doubt that God spoke to Lou as much as God spoke to Dallas, but I never heard Lou use that kind of language.

SPEAKER_03 54:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 54:34

He was from a like a Dutch reformed, and I I jotted down uh here was one of the comments that Lou made uh as he was reflecting on that class and trying to help create this balanced community that is open to all the gifts of the spirit and seeking to how do we understand them in right perspective. So I'll read this. It's a little provocative, and then I just love to get your response to it, however. Um he's talking about kind of the question of how central are miracles to the vindication of the gospel. And Lewid leaned more to the side of not terribly. He said, the gospel does not clearly vindicate itself to the world when ministers proclaim the occasional release of affluent individuals from bearable aches and pains, while thousands of starving children are calling in vain to be fed.

SPEAKER_01 55:40

I don't know if this is gonna be a direct response, but I've thought a lot about this. Yeah, and I would say the miracles on the pages of scripture and that I've seen in my life, first of all, are the exception not the rule. And secondly, we have to understand and keep all of these in the context of the the miracles of the spirit are signs of the kingdom.

SPEAKER_00 56:16

Yes. Yep, that's so good. Say a bit more about what does that mean. Because what that means then is they're not actually primarily about the relieving of suffering universally.

SPEAKER_01 56:27

Right. Every person who is miraculously healed, whether they are a starving child in a third world tragic, impoverished situation, or an affluent individual with a torn meniscus, everyone who's healed is gonna have their body increasingly decay, wear out, and ultimately fail them altogether and die. Every last one of us. And the process of my body slowly wearing out, decaying, and dying, the process that I will go through as a human being of I was born as a child, I'm gonna grow up, increase in strength and capacity until it feels like I'm nearly limitless, and then I'm gonna experience limit upon limit upon limit, ailment upon ailment upon ailment. I will have all of my capability stripped away from me, and ultimately I will die. And I will that process I just described is a greater invitation to Christ likeness than the healing of the torn meniscus or the the miraculous healing, you know, of someone's terminal diagnosis. I I would just say, why does Jesus go around working miracles? It's not to prove that his message is legit. Yeah. It's not to prove that he's the Son of God. All sorts of people work miracles on the pages of Scripture, not just Jesus, Old Testament and New Testament. It's all over the map. The reason is because healing, just use that one, is a sign of the kingdom. And that means in heaven there will be no more mourning, death, crying, or pain. And so whenever morning, death, crying, or pain is removed, this side of heaven fully to come, it's pointing ahead to the kingdom we're awaiting. It's prophecy. It's it's what 1 Corinthians uh is talking about when it says that prophecy will one day cease when we see him face to face. Because prophecy is about revealing Jesus in the personal circumstances where someone can receive the revelation of his love in the context of their ordinary life. But one day I won't need that to happen because I'll be looking Jesus face to face. So I won't need him to be mysteriously coming to me through the words of someone else that could never have known this unless God had put a thought into their mind. And so what it's doing is just pointing ahead to that intimacy, I will know then. That's what all the gifts are about. And if you keep in mind that all the gifts of the Spirit are signs of the in-breaking kingdom of God, then we can hold them in proper context. The trouble is that they've been put out of that context in different ways by different traditions, leading to dysfunctions. Um, so even for the person going to seek healing, whether it's in an academic setting at Fuller Seminary or in the church that I lead in Portland, Oregon, their ultimate hope cannot be in the healing of their body. Because whether God answers this prayer or not, that thing's gonna wear out. And if they submit to that increasing limitation, they can one day give the gift and receive the gift of saying, like Jesus, no one takes my life from me, I lay it down. And that's what I'm living for and trying to be formed into. And if on the way I am, I receive or am the vessel through which miraculous healing comes to another, fantastic! It's it's a preview of the promised future we're all awaiting, a sign of the kingdom.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:25

Yeah, it's interesting. C.S. Lewis, he's got a little book, Miracles. And he actually actually has a line in there where he says, miracles are uh part of sacred history, and they're just kind of at the nodes of critical moments. So he says, probably none of us will ever see a miracle. But when his wife Joy is dying of cancer, he's praying for God to heal her.

SPEAKER_03 1:00:50

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:50

Which would be a miraculous thing. And there's just a kind of tension there if we live in the real world, and it leads to another part of the spirit I want to ask you about of uh the spirits. I'll back up. There's a there's a guy who's a professor of Old Testament at um Southern Methodist, Jack Levison. Okay, and he's put out all this stuff on the Holy Spirit. Eugene Peterson said he was his favorite theologian of the Holy Spirit. Okay. And part of what he writes about, you write about in your book how ruach in Hebrew and the pneuma in Greek is both wind, this cosmic mysterious force, and breath, so terribly intimate and spirit. Um so that Jack says that that uh ambiguity or multifaceted nature of the word is actually an asset, not a deficit. So the fact that we have one word for breath and another word for spirit, he said, actually reinforces our separation of the physical and the spiritual. And so he'll actually use the hyphenated phrase spirit breath. And so he says, in some way, then, in some literal way, the spirit of God is present and at work in every human being on the planet. Every time they breathe. And we tend not to think about that, but he says that's because we really have a false view of, oh, my body is just me, and that can be explained naturally without resort to miracle. But he says, from an ancient or a biblical worldview, no, it's not that way. You live in Portland, which is a relatively secular city. How do you think about the spirit of God involved in people's lives? Um, again, with Jack, uh uh part of what he says is that often we as Christians think we have a franchise on the spirit. We kind of have embottled, but that biblically, if you really pay attention to it, the the spirit was very involved in the Old Testament. I love how you use those five categories of creation and then root, where the spirit is at work in the Old Testament and then Jesus in the early church and now. Um, so how do you think of the spirit at work uh in Portland in the lives of people who never go to church?

SPEAKER_01 1:03:20

I think the spirit is willing every soul all the time. And I think the spirit is crying out through natural creation, through God's people, through the circumstances of every life, through the through the transcendent inner workings of every personality. I just I think God is trying to speak to everyone through every door, hoping that they'll hear notice him knocking at one because I just want to pause for a moment at that phrase because I love that.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:19

I think God is speaking to everyone at every door.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:23

Yeah. I mean, I think God is fundamentally love. And I think sin is fundamentally a misconception about love. It's the the serpent chipped away at Eve's trust in God. The point wasn't the fruit. You know, the serpent never says, like, look how good that apple looks. It looks better than all the other apples. God's holding out on you. The serpent just did God really say it just chips away at her trust in God until reaching for the fruit was the natural expression of a broken trust structure within. What she's reaching for is the love she's already been freely given, but she's been convinced she can earn. And that's that's what's wrong with all of us. That's what's wrong with me. Is I'm trying to earn the most untakable thing I've got, which is the love of God. And so I think I think God is trying to convince everyone in the world, every way he can. What do you say?

SPEAKER_00 1:05:34

What do you say, Tyler, to people who say, man, when you talk about God or you talk about the Spirit, it sounds so compelling, it sounds so wonderful. I just never experienced anything like that. I don't hear God speak to me, I don't get answers to my prayers, I don't uh uh when folks will report that kind of experience to you, if they do, um, how do you respond? What do you say?

SPEAKER_01 1:06:00

I would ask a lot of questions. You know, I think again, I think that is almost always because people have narrowed what it means for God to speak to them. And I'm still discovering different ways God is speaking to me. I'm beginning to learn to pay attention to the ways that God is speaking to me through my body. Um you know, things like that. And and I don't that sounds way more mystical than it is, but all I mean is things as simple as I had a pretty strong moment of awakening where I got shingles a few years ago, which is almost exclusively caused by carrying high degrees of stress. And at the time that I got shingles, if you had said, Tyler, do you feel particularly stressed right now? I would have been like, no, I think I'm doing generally great. And so all of a sudden I was like, oh, my body is literally sounding an alarm of something I'm unaware of. So it's all I mean to just I think a lot of times people just have narrowed, it feels like this for God to speak to you. It looks like this for God to answer my prayers. And this is why, you know, if you ask me, all right, I want to grow more in walking in the life of the spirit, what should I be trying to cultivate? I would say discernment. Not, I wouldn't say go after miracles. I I believe fully in the supernatural. Yep. I'm like a full-blown charismatic, just to like polarize some people, in the sense that I think everything on the pages of the New Testament is livable, and and I think the Bible is a book of invitation. Yeah, it's an invitation to life, it's showing us not what God's all-star team could look like, but what life with Jesus is inviting me to know and experience. So I got cancer. I never once prayed that God would take it away.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:26

No kidding.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:27

And I told other people, you can pray for me whatever you want if you want to pray for my miraculous healing. I'm totally open to it.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:34

But as a I'm thinking I'm thinking of a couple that are very, very good friends. She has cancer. Uh it would be hard for her to hear that.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:44

Well, yeah, and and that was just How was that for Kirsten? That was just for me personally.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:48

Yes. Well, as I did she want you to pray take it away?

SPEAKER_01 1:08:54

No, she didn't. But you know, some of that is our personalities. I think we were united and and we're we got a lot of things wrong with us. But both of us are are very calm, non-anxious people internally. And so we walked out of the doctor's office finding that I had cancer at the most advanced stage and was about to go through the most toxic chemo treatment of anyone in the practice at that time. And I just in the days that followed sat before the Lord, and I felt like God gave me a few psalms to pray, to hold to as anchors, two different psalms. And through those psalms, what I felt the Lord speaking to me was uh that I would know my children's children and that he would lengthen my days.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:48

So I felt like, oh, this is not ending in, I I don't believe so you took that as an indication that you were going to live. So it wasn't that it would have been wrong to ask to be healed. It was actually that as far as you could tell, that was going to happen.

SPEAKER_01 1:10:06

Yeah, I felt as God was speaking to me. I don't know if I'm gonna be limited by this for the rest of my life. Right. But I don't think I'm going to die a young man from this. And I don't have a perfect read on the voice of God. None of us do. Sure. I could have been wrong.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:22

I'm just saying how I personally that's why I said Well, I think some people are confused and they think if you're not infallible, then you can never hear God speaking. And those are really two different things.

SPEAKER_01 1:10:32

Totally. And that's why I said, like, hey, if anyone wants to pray for me to be miraculously healed, I'm down. You know, I'm not saying don't pray, God has spoken. I'm saying my own discernment is that I'm being invited to attune myself to how God might want to shape me through a profound experience of weakness and limitation as a young man, rather than ask God to get me out of that experience as quickly as possible. And so I just tried to say yes to him because I believe that he leads me to life. And I believe that his rod and staff are my comfort, and that means I'm gonna live a life of walking through some valleys of the shadow of death and a lot of green pastures and next to still waters. I will go through consolation and desolation, but he will shape me and lead me to life, to a spacious place if I allow him. And so I was just trying to allow God to do that. So that's what I mean. I think Jesus only did what he saw the Father doing. Jesus didn't try to heal everybody. Jesus didn't try to work the most miraculous work everywhere he showed up. He was constantly practicing discernment.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:50

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:50

No, and you have a and so that's why I'm trying, that's why I say it this is all about discerning what is God's invitation to me right now. And it might be to share a prophetic word with that person at the grocery store, or it might be to be really kind and wait in line at the grocery store. I don't know, you know.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:14

Yeah. You have a uh wonderful section on the practice of examen as a real uh actionable way of trying to pursue discernment. And we don't have time to get into that, unfortunately. But for anybody who's interested in that, the familiar stranger, uh the the whole book, but that section on how do you practice that could be a real big help. I'd like to do this, Tyler. I'd like to end on a note of hope. And I think there's something uh uh uh something deep in your spirit that will long to address deep calls to deep, that which is deep in somebody else's spirit. And there will be somebody, some people who are listening with a deep need for God, a deep pain. Uh somebody with lots of doubts. I I as you were talking about your clarity and certainty, I thought I'm somebody who doubts quite a lot. And uh I would like to have that same kind of certainty. I have a different kind, I have a kind that uh is real clear. Nobody's made an offer comparable to Jesus, so there's no other road to go. Yeah. Um, but there'll be folks that are listening and they struggle with doubt, or they're going through a big loss, or they hear you talk and they think, Man, I I'd like to know God like that, but I just don't. Um what word would you speak to folks to give them hope for coming to know the Spirit of God in that way?

SPEAKER_01 1:14:06

You know what's coming to my mind as you ask the question is just to offer one of the most frequent prayers that I pray. And it's probably not helpful to everyone, but it's really helpful to me, and it might it might be helpful to some listening. I will ask in different chapters of my life because a season of doubt, a season of hopelessness, a season of suffering, those that's not like uh, oh, today I'm hopeless, but tomorrow I might be full of hope. That's a different thing. It's it's a chapter that we walk through, you know, it's a prolonged experience. So in every prolonged season, I ask the Lord, God, would you find me in the story again? And what I mean by that is, would you take me to a moment in Scripture that I can live in and inhabit and know as my own right now? So one example would be because then I know what my invitation to life is. I went through a season a number of years ago in my final year in New York that was profoundly difficult. And it's like this moment created so much chaos in my life, and I began to pray, God, would you find me in the story? And I felt like the not in my mind in that moment. It's it's more a prayer that I hold before God, and you know, days, weeks could go by, and then one morning I'm just reading scripture, and it's like, bam, something just lights up off the page. And that happened with the the story of Jesus asleep in the bow of the boat in the storm in the middle of the night. And then when he wakes up, he calms the storm, says, Why did you doubt? You have little faith. And I just asked myself, like, so what would have faith meant in that moment? Like, what was he looking for? And I just thought, I guess it would have been to let the storm rage and go down in the boat and lie down on the cot next to Jesus and just say, if he's resting, I guess I'll try to get some rest too. And so I was able to go through that season very imperfectly, but daily returning to that picture and saying, every morning, God, I'm still in the midst of the storm, and I'm not gonna try to save myself. I'm gonna try to rest and find some peace, knowing that you're laying down right here, and so we will be okay. And every evening I would pray Psalm 131 that I would become like a weaned child, content in the arms of the Father, not clamoring for his provision, and I found imperfect but very real solace through that season and intimacy with God in the midst of circumstances I would never choose and don't want to live again. And so if you're in the midst of a difficult season, I would just say, ask God, will you find me in the story? And then just faithfully crack the scripture every day and assume that he's gonna answer that prayer at his pace, and when he does, it will be like an anchor for you to hold on to.

SPEAKER_00 1:18:15

Yeah. There's a beautiful one. Find me in the story, and then watch. Tyler, thank you. It's been a real gift.

SPEAKER_01 1:18:25

Yeah, thank you, John.

SPEAKER_00 1:18:26

Yeah, but