Episode 304 - Alan Kraft, "The Intimate God, Part 1"

Welcome to another episode of Restoring the Soul. Alan Kraft is joining Michael on today's podcast. Alan has served as lead pastor of Christ Community Church since 1990. He is passionate about teaching, writing, and prayer to help people experience Jesus in transformative ways. He holds an MDiv degree from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.

Alan and his wife Raylene live in Greeley, Colorado, and love hanging out with their ever-growing family. He enjoys playing golf, drinking sweet tea, watching British crime dramas with his wife, and doing ministry with the amazing staff at Christ Community. 

In this episode, "The Intimate God," we're exploring the transformative power of experiencing God's love and the practical ways this can reshape our lives and our congregations. We'll tackle some challenging issues facing the body of Christ, such as the gap between knowing God and genuinely experiencing His love. Alan will offer insights from his journey and his newest book, "The Intimate God," which offers a practical guide for encountering the God who delights in us.

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Transcript

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Hey, everybody, and welcome to the Restoring the Soul podcast. I am here live in the studio with my friend Alan Kraft. Hello. Great to be with you, Michael. Alan, we've known each other for about ten years, and we haven't seen each other for, it's been a while, maybe seven or eight pre pandemic. And in this day and age, we don't actually get to do many podcasts sitting with real microphones face to face. Everything now is online thanks to the great technology, but I miss the face to face. So it's really, really nice to be with you. For our listeners that go way back in the earlier podcast when I used to start every podcast saying, from the fourth floor of the Academy park building overlooking Eenie Meenie Sushi, we are, in fact, overlooking Eenie Meenie Sushi. Alan has written a book called the Intimate a practical guide to experiencing the God who delights in you. It's a seven week journey, and we're going to talk about the content in that book, and we're going to talk about the context for why you wrote that book. I think where this is going to go is that in podcast number one, we're going to talk about the background for what was happening in your church and what you've seen in the body of Christ as you've been a pastor for how many years now? 34. 34. 34 years. So you've been around. We're the old guys now, aren't we? But we don't look it. But we are. No, we don't. If people could see how hip we are, they would probably chuckle. I think we're going to have fun, too. As we talk, I went on and on about how much I love this book. And what I love about the book is its simplicity, but its depth. I'm a guy that I tend to think big thoughts, and it's hard for me to get really practical, I think, in the macro. So the book that I just wrote, which will be out in about nine months, it's kind of a lot of big ideas, and I think some of the feedback will be, that's great. It helps me to understand big ideas. But what does it look like in practice? You're all about the practice, but you give five big ideas. Again, the book is the intimate God. It's a seven week journey, but then there's five practices that you give people for how to grow in their experience of God. Yes. As a pastor of 34 years, the Bible is important to you. Scripture is important to you. But what's really important to you, and who I know you to be is a man who has experienced God, and you have a passion for others to experience him as well. So I'll stop talking and tell me about how the book came about and where you saw the need in your own church and in the body of Christ. Yeah, I mean, this book really is out of my own journey, my own story with the Lord. I was a pastor for. I was four years into being a pastor and began to experience a crisis of soul panic attacks. And I didn't know what was happening to me, so I went to a counselor. I thought I was losing my mind. And I remember he asked me this question, Alan, what would happen to you if your church stopped growing? And I knew up at that point, it was like my heart was opened and exposed. And I realized I would be devastated because my whole identity was in performance and what other people thought of me. And the reason I tell that story is because I had been a Christian for decades, for a long time, since I was 13, and yet I didn't experience God's love for me. I taught about it, I sang about it, I preached about it. I knew the Bible verses, but I wasn't experiencing that. And so that four years into ministry, that experience for me became this watershed, kind of the starting moment of a journey where I began to, one, examine my own heart, and then what does it look like to welcome Jesus into that place? So that's the 30 years of that. Was it hard for you to be honest about the fact that you had seminary training, that your pastor already four years, you'd been a Christian since you were 13? Was it hard to acknowledge and admit that you didn't really experience God's love? You know, I don't know if it was hard, because once I started, when I had that experience of panic attack, I was desperate. I knew. I longed for more. I longed for an authenticity in my ministry, and realizing I'm just working myself to death. I'm doing all these things, even spiritual disciplines, and I'm not. I don't really know. In my experience, I don't feel God's love for me. That just felt wrong. Like, those pieces needed to be together. If you look at scripture, they needed to come together, and they weren't in my life, so it wasn't. I don't think it was hard. It was more like, ah, let's, you know, help me, God. You were ready, right? Help me on this journey, because I don't want to do Christianity and ministry the way I had been doing. It. Yeah. So a lot of people that I've talked to who have gotten to that point, and I think we all need to get to that point where we go, this isn't really the living water that's flowing so abundantly. There's a gap, as we say around here, at restoring the soul. But a. A lot of people stop and they fill in the blank and go, this is the problem. I am not experiencing God because blank, I'm not disciplined enough. And you just qualified that. You were disciplined in doing disciplines. There's something fundamentally wrong with me, that God doesn't reveal himself to me. Somehow. I'm the problem. Did you get to that point, or did the counseling experience kind of help you to bypass that? Well, the counseling experience started the journey, and again, it's been a 30 year journey. So we're talking kind of decades of growth in this and different experiences. And there were different parts of this, Michael, that I would get introduced to and experience. And so it really has been very much a journey. And I think that's why this book was kind of this culmination. How can I put these experiences in my own life, 30 years worth, into a practical form for other people to embrace? But I think for me, the, one of the crucial elements for me was realizing, one, this is not working. What I'm doing is not working. And so finding another path of doing more, trying harder, I was already on that path. So here what I needed was an experience. And I come from a background, evangelical background, all this. We tend to be afraid of experiences. We tend to be afraid of even language that would talk about feeling God's love. When I use language like that, I feel like I have to qualify that, but I shouldn't have to qualify that. When you look at the New Testament, what you see is this is normal, to actually experience the father's love. Ephesians three makes no sense. You would know how high and wide and long and deep is the love of Christ. You may know this love that surpasses not. I mean, Paul is gushing. He's going on and on about an experience. But I find going back to the first question, in the body of Christ, much of the body of Christ, we're afraid of even talking about feeling God's presence, experiencing his love. And so I feel like, for me, I had to work through that barrier or whatever that was. And I think a lot of Christ followers have that same barrier. Well, no, it's the fact faith, feeling train. Remember that whole thing, our faith is, in fact, minimizing truth at all. The problem is, the New Testament describes a truth that is very experiential, and yet we have divided that, and then we've christianized it and said, this is what Christianity looks like. It's what, you know, it's how much you understand. And I was at a point where, no, this. There's more. There's more. And that gets a little bit into that first chapter about the left brain, right brain, you know, however you want to think about that. But that was a crucial thing for me in realizing that we're actually going about our christian faith using only part of our brain. The left information, data, seminars, sermons, content, listen to more podcasts. That for a lot of people, including me, that was the sum total of my Christianity. And what we're missing is the right, the experiential side. And when that realization really helped me, I think, understand what was going on, and then being able to enter into practices, even spiritual practices, I'd done before, but entering into them in a different way, that actually awakened that right side of the brain. Yeah. And I love how you talk about neuroscience in the brain without, you know, having to have a whole treatise on the brain. You really distilled it. I think you did a great job of taking this 34 years of experience and your own journey and distilling it. And for me, that's the hardest thing as a writer, is everything I say makes me want to say three other things. And it was. Your book was just very, very focused. I think it's the guys at true face that say something like truth that transforms is truth that is experienced. Yeah, absolutely. Or truth that's not experienced cannot transform. So this is really about out of your own journey and in your pastoral work being a catalyst for people being transformed and changed in their faith. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And it's really rooted in this experience of God's love. I mean, and that's the piece, I think a lot of us are missing. If you don't have that, if we don't experience, experience the depth of his love, not just know about it. I feel like the whole foundation, we miss the foundation. And so then our Christianity naturally turns into a performance oriented, information oriented thing. Right. And there are all sorts of manifestations of that. Right. You also make a point almost as a side note in the book, that one of the places where the church does create experience is in worship, and whether that's singing hymns, because I hear a lot of people say, I love the hymns because they warm my heart. Right. And that's a right brain phrase not they inform my mind. Exactly. Although there is great doctrine in a lot of the hymns compared to a lot of the modern songs, but in a lot of contemporary churches, the only reference point that people have for experiencing God is worship. That's quote unquote awesome. The problem is that then we need another hit of it, and we always have to keep going back to that. And we can't play our music loud enough or have enough smoke machines or flashing lights to have that experience replicated. And you can tell I'm a little bit jaded, perhaps, to some of the performance oriented worship, and I do believe there's a place for that. And there's people that come to Christ and grow in Christ because of that. So in the introduction, you quote a couple different ideas from John Mark Comer, who's written some great books, the ruthless elimination of hurry. We've tried to get him on this podcast, but he's stepped back from a lot of public ministry to write and reflect and to actually live a spiritual life. But you talk about the difference between intentional spiritual formation and unintentional. And I think that in our conversation, two part podcast, unless people understand this contrast between intentional spiritual formation and unintentional, that everything after that may just be another performance. So unpack this idea, and I really want to go into this, in this conversation and then tee up the second conversation. Yeah. John Mark Homer was the first person to, I saw a teaching of his where he described this, and it was like, yes, that totally makes sense. We're all being spiritually formed by what we listen to, by the people we hang out with, by the things that we're doing. And the question becomes, are we going to be intentional about that, or are we just going to kind of let it happen? And so that's where I think leaning into this idea of intentionality without it becoming legalism and to dos. And that's a little bit of the challenge, even in this book. I was trying to navigate that, and that's why the first chapter is so foundational. This is all about our experiencing of God and his delight in us. And when we experience that, the things we do intentionally flow out of that, or they fuel that. And so if we miss that first part, it just becomes another. I'm being intentional, but it's not actually helping the way that I long for it to in my soul. So. And so let's take a minute and unpack the unintentional spiritual formation, because I've heard this idea before. The one conversation I had with Dallas Willard, before he died, we talked about the idea that we're all being spiritually formed. But I think it's so easy to miss if I have high blood pressure and high cholesterol, and I go to my doctor and he says, there's something you can do about this. You can. With your family history and all your other good health, you could live to 90 years old. But it's far less likely unless you get your high blood pressure down and your cholesterol. But here's what you need to do. You need to change your diet. You need to go for walks. There's actual hard statistical data in a book called change or die about how people hear that information, and they go, I'm going to change my diet and go for walks and exercise. And they don't. So they choose to die rather than to change. And I think that there's an aspect of that's related to our brokenness, that's related to our fear, etcetera. But the point is that there's probably not a Christian listening to this podcast and probably not a person in your congregation or who would read your book that if you came to them and said, do you want to be more like Jesus? Nobody would go, ah, I don't think so. I mean, he had a compelling life, but that's not for me. I'd like to watch Netflix all day. Eat slurpees and pork rinds, or drink slurpees and pork rinds. Everyone's going to go, yes. And then you'd say, okay, here's what you need to do. Like the doctor saying that, I know that, but I'm preaching to myself that there actually is a way to be like Jesus. Not just to live a good christian life and not sin as much, or not just to get free from your addiction, or not be angry or to tithe more, but we can become like him, and more importantly, that we can experience him and his love. So that's what you've made this distinction about. We have to be conscious, aware, awake, and responsive to this invitation, that if we're intentional, we can have a very different outcome. Yeah, I mean, I liken it to date night with my wife. I mean, if we miss that, if we're not intentional about scheduling, that in our relationship is impacted. And so I actually want. I want to get closer to her. I want to experience a deep relationship with her. But we still have to schedule that in. And there are times we go weeks without it. Not because we don't want a close relationship, but it's the intentionality piece. And if we can kind of wed those two ideas, it's not about legalism. It's about the kind of relationship I want with Raeleen. Right. Same thing. It's what we want. That's where it begins. I want a deeper experience of intimacy with Jesus. I want to walk more fully in his love. If that's the want, then the realization that's not just going to happen. And so what are some ways, what are some practical things we can do to help us grow in that experience? And I love how in the section on Sabbath, which we'll get to, you said, one Sabbath is probably not going to change you all that much, but a lifetime of sabbaths will save your life. Is that the quote? So one date night with Raeleen or one date with Julianne or ten over the course of several years isn't probably going to change our marriage very much. But if we go to Las Vegas or to Mexico, wow, we might have fun, but it's not going to really transform the marriage. And we might be married 40 or 50 years and go, why? Why didn't we experience more connection? Yeah. And that's. It's. Yeah, yeah. There's. There's something that I want to communicate and that I think you did a great job of in the book, that practice. Right. Practice, practice, practice, practice will take you somewhere instead of performance. Yeah. And I think as long, and just reiterating, as long as the practices are enjoyable may not be the word, but you know what I mean. I mean, they'll be enjoyable, but there's a. As long as the practices are life giving. Right. It's the connection with these date nights that's life giving. And that's where, again, I think the body of Christ, we have struggled. We know what we're supposed to do. We know we're supposed to pray more, read the Bible more, do these things, but there is still a disconnect. And that's where I want to help people lean into. What does it look like to experience these practices in a way that actually is life giving. Right. And it's something that enables us to experience something that we weren't experiencing before. I love how also in a later chapter in the book you talked about, and this was very freeing for you as a pastor, writer, you said mix it up, variety, that the same thing day after day after day. Right. So when we were young believers and when we were discipled, and we both had very strong foundations of discipleship, wasn't your background in the navigators a little bit, yeah. And so that rigid structure, I'm so grateful for that today. But it's also part of what fueled some of the legalism that set me up then, for shame, because I could never sustain it. But this idea of variety, I want to unpack that, but it's so permission giving. A spiritual director once asked me about my prayer life, and I said, terrible prayer life. And she said, it was interesting that it was a female asking this question. She said, tell me about when you feel most connected to God. And I was in a really healthy spot, and I was running on a treadmill five days a week with a health club that's now out of business right up the street. I said, I feel closest to God when I'm on the treadmill. That's easy, but that doesn't count because da da da da. And about five minutes later, she comes back, she goes, why did you say it doesn't count when you're on the treadmill? I said, well, because I'm not really praying. I'm not really interceding, petitioning, but I just feel close. And I discounted that. And if we look at these spiritual practices in a lot of different ways, it allows us to experience the conversational intimacy, but also just this union with God that you talked about as you unpack some of Brother Lawrence's material. Yeah. And I think this is a real tension. Even in writing the book, even as people engage in the book, there's a little bit of a tension, because what I have done in this book is I lay out some exercises at the end of each week, three exercises, and specific things to do that have worked for me. But the balance that you're talking about is so important. I think I use the analogy in the book of a recipe where, hey, I cook something, you love it. I give you the recipe, you make it a few times, and then you're like, this really needs a little more cheese. This really needs a little more garlic. You start adapting it. And so when I did this with our church, I wanted them, I would encourage them try it the way I'm describing it, realize just to try that, to get a feel for what this is, the basics of this, but then this freedom to make it your own. And I did have some people who were like, I can't sit still. This stillness thing. I'm like, take a walk. Do it when you're walking. You know, giving people the freedom. But I really wanted them. The way I wrote the book and the practicality you talked about that was very much this desire. I just wanted to help Christ followers who struggle to feel connected to God. I wanted to help them have a practical guide to what that might look like, and then the freedom to adapt and vary that based on how God's. You made them. Transitioning to chapter one, week one, how does God feel about you? Yeah, that's a dangerous question. Oh, it's such an. But it's the critical question. It's a diagnostic question. It's a question that pulls back the curtain. And so let me have you qualify that, because you say, actually, let me rephrase that. How do you feel God feels about you? Yes. It's a perception thing, not a brain thing, because we can all give the right answer for God so loved the world, God loves me. Everyone can give the right answer. My question is, do you really feel that that's true? When you think about God, what is your intuitive perception of him towards you? And when you ask that question, you get a very different answer. If people were to close their eyes and just envision God, many people, he's far away. He's turned away. There isn't this. He's embracing me. He's right here. That's a huge question. It's not a theological question. It's a perception question. If I perceive God to be distant or distracted or busy with other things, how motivating am I going to be motivated? Am I going to be to hang out with him? And I love the example you use of the school teacher who's an older woman who's very renowned as a successful teacher. She's a really hard teacher, very demanding, and people respect her as a teacher, but nobody feels enjoyed by her or wants to spend time with her or potentially even really knows who she is. Right. And so imagine when you think about God and how people, and this breaks my heart, how so many people, their percept, their heart level perception of God is that he's disappointed in them, he's distant from them. He's really got better things to do than hang out with me. If that's our. Or he's rigid and strict and all those things, if that's our perception, it's going to impact the intentionality, it's going to impact our desire to want to hang out with him, and then it just becomes going through the motions. And that's not very good news, is it? No. No. Play for your first book. Right. Which is. Go ahead and say the title, good news. Good news for those trying harder. Yeah. And the second book is longing for more. It's more. Yep. When a little bit of the spirit is not enough. So that was about the Holy Spirit and how to hear his voice. The first one was really about this spiritual exhaustion kind of thing, which is something you're leaning into in your book as well, your book coming out. This one was kind of a. I don't know if it was a kind of a culmination, a practical culmination of both of those, those general themes to how do we live this out? Tell me what this is looking like in your church, because you've done focus groups and you've preached through this with your congregation. That was really fun. And you have a college congregation. You're in Greeley, Colorado, University of Northern Colorado. So this is not. Yeah, that's a very dynamic population. Yeah. We have a really diverse, age wise, a really diverse congregation, and that has been fun to see varying generations connect with this material. We had our children's ministry adapt this material. So they were practicing stillness. They were practicing these things, which was so energizing and exciting for me because, look, if a child can experience God loving them, experiencing how the father feels about them, if a child can learn how to hear the voice of Jesus, you know, whispering, I love you, that is so foundational and transformative to everything else that they might experience. And so that's why I was so excited about our entire church. And we had older folks, we had younger folks, we had children describing how for some of them, this was. I looked at some of the comments people had. This was the first time I've ever prayed, or this is the first time I've ever known how to, you know, those kinds of comments were so, so energizing and encouraging to me because that's really the whole, the whole point of this was to help people. They want to connect with God. They want to experience his love, just like I did. But a lot of times we just don't know what that path looks like. So the response has been really, really positive. And have you taken this and put it into any kind of group context? There's a study guide in the back of the book, but do you have small groups now doing this or living this out? Yeah. What we did was encourage people to do this material together in a group. So we spent eight weeks going through kind of a seven week journey with a last week of next steps. And so we did that. Many people were doing it in groups. We created a website, allencraft.com, where I redid some of the questions you ever had that one where you've written something. And then you look at the questions you wrote, like, I don't even like these very much. Oh, that happens all the time. Yeah. And so I rewrote some of the questions, small group questions, and put them on that website. But anyway, yes, I feel like what I loved about the experience, too, Michael, was it wasn't just that I was teaching a sermon and then we're going to have a, a small group that's going to talk about what I said. Each week there are three exercises that take 1015 minutes where they're walking through, people are walking through what the content was. So the first chapter is about experiencing God's love. They walk through exercises, reflections, experiences, which help them do that. And then when they go to the group, it's not about, hey, what'd you think about what Pastor Allen said? It's more of how did the practices go? How did the exercises go? That to me is gold. Right? It's when people are actually trying something and then they come to a group and say, I was really, I've struggled with being still or I struggled with this. That to me is so life giving that they were meeting together to talk about how the practices went. So the study guide, that's often was the first question. Talk about how the practices last week went. How was that? Was it frustrating? Was it life giving? And let's process that together. So I loved that aspect of this journey the book provides and that we went on as a church where people were doing the stuff and then we were talking about it. I have been around so many pastors who have said I can't get the people in my church to show up for stuff and that I can't get people to do spiritual practices. Usually they use the word disciplines, and you have a lot of joy and you write with a lot of exclamation points. And I can just imagine. I've been to an event, not at your church, but that you and another pastor at First Prez and Greeley sponsored. But I've never actually been to your church, but I've heard a lot about it from students that I've worked with and known, and it's a dynamic place. But how would you respond to the person who said, you know, people are just so busy, they wouldn't do a group like this, where then they have to do these practices? I mean, that's going to take time away? Way. Yeah, I think the invitation was to an experience with Jesus. If the invitation is, hey, you're going to learn five practices. You know, if the invitation is, let's journey together. This has been a part of my own journey. Let's journey together, because all of us long to experience the father's love more deeply. That resonates with people. And the other thing, I would say Michael, too, in terms of a shout out to Christ community. I love our church and so many great churches in this area and around the world. But the thing, I only know Christ community because I've been there for 34 years. But what we have tried to do in our worship service is incorporate these elements so that the worship service itself is an experience, is a discipling experience. So we will right now, after the message, have everyone stand. We're going to just take some time of stillness. So we are practicing a minute of stillness in the service. What is the Holy Spirit saying to you? So it's not just a book. It's like a culture that we're trying to create. It's okay to ask God a question and then to quiet your heart and listen. And how do you pay attention to that and. What you're teaching in those services and what you're teaching throughout the week and what then people can actually go do? Yeah, I think we miss just for those pastors out there. I just feel like when I stumbled on this, maybe I don't know how many years ago, but this idea that the most part, important part of my sermon is the end of my sermon, the prayer after, where I'm actually creating space and inviting people into a response, I'm not doing all the talking, I'm stopping. And, hey, ask the Lord this question, or what is God speaking to you about? And that is so rich and powerful. We're teaching people how to listen to God, how to experience him, and we're creating space for it in a worship service. And so there are lots of opportunities that we have even in a worship service to disciple our congregation in these kinds of practices. Yeah, you're literally inviting people into life, into life with God, into walking with God. And ultimately, the words that are the refrain in your book is experiencing God. Yes. Versus simply teaching people the Bible, which the caveat is always, that's important, but it's utterly insufficient without experience because as I was told as a young Christian, the devil knows the Bible better than anybody. Yeah. And I think that it's almost a new reading of the Bible because suddenly these verses that we've read, they actually talk about experience. In Romans 815, the spirit testifies with our spirit that we are God's children. I mean, think about that. To testify means to speak. What Paul is saying is that part of the ministry of the Holy Spirit is to continually whisper to your soul and my soul, I love you. You are my son. You are my daughter. That is so life giving. But we read these often. We'll read a passage like that and we just think it's talking about reading the Bible, but it's talking about an experience with God, with the Holy Spirit whispering things to our soul. And so it's like the Bible presents this very experiential walk with God, but somehow after the enlightenment, we tended to box it up into an information based content thing rather than this life giving. Experience with them and therefore left brained and not right brain. Yep. Yeah. Well, Alan, thank you so much for this conversation. This is just the warm up. And we're going to come back for another conversation, part two of the conversation around your newest book, the intimate God, a practical guide to experiencing the God who delights in you. And you mentioned your website, but I want to do a shout out. You are Allancraft, a l a N as opposed to a l l e n? Yes. So your website is alancraft.com, and that's. K k r a f t? Yes. Allencraft.com cccgreelie.org is the church website where they can find teaching and stuff there and then the books on Amazon in various formats. Thanks so much for talking about.