Ep. 217: Missing the Point of Christianity

Kourtney Cromwell:
Welcome to the indoubt Podcast where we explore the challenging topics that young adults often face. Each week we talk with guests who help answer questions of faith, life, and culture, connecting them to our daily experiences and God’s Word. For more info on indoubt, visit indoubt.ca or indoubt.com.

Kourtney Cromwell:
Hey everyone, it’s Kourtney. I hope you’re having a good day, wherever you’re at! On this week’s episode, we’ve got Andy Steiger, Director of Apologetics Canada, and if you were able to listen to our last episode, then you know that he was with us then, too. Last week the focus was on the future of Christianity and the Apologetics Canada Conference, which just happened. This week, Andy and Daniel are talking through a wide range of topics like the importance of evangelism, the impact death has on us, and the power of the gospel. We’re going through a lot, so I hope you enjoyed this episode with Daniel and Andy Steiger.

Daniel Markin:
Hey, welcome to indoubt. My name is Daniel Markin. I’m joined here again by Andy Steiger. Andy, good to be with you.

Andy Steiger:
Yeah, good to be back.

Daniel Markin:
Andy, you are the Director of Apologetics Canada and also a co-labourer with me in Christ. We work together at Northview Community Church.

Andy Steiger:
Been a privilege, Daniel.

Daniel Markin:
Andy, I’m sad to say, but that privilege of working with me is slowly ticking away. You are getting more involved here. You’ve been part time with Northview Young Adults as the Young Adults Pastor at Northview and part-time with Apologetics Canada and now you are moving into full-time Apologetics Canada, so our partnership over these years is coming to an end.

Andy Steiger:
We will always be friends, Daniel.

Daniel Markin:
Well.

Andy Steiger:
I like to think we are or will be.

Daniel Markin:
Of course we will. Andy, we have a lot to talk about today. As we begin, one of the things that I want to ask you is about sharing our faith. It occurs to me that a lot of times people either don’t share their faith because they have doubts or they don’t share their faith because they have a lot of shame about being a Christian. Which one do you think is more prominent? Do you think they’re both highly active? How do you see that playing out?

Andy Steiger:
I just say two things that we see in the Bible is that one thing with regards to doubt is some people are afraid to engage their doubt. I’m telling you right now that your faith will never grow until you engage with the doubts that you have. Do not run from your doubts. I would encourage you to wrestle with those and there are great resources to help you to wrestle through the doubts that you might have.
I’ve personally experienced this as I’ve walked through my own questions of doubt or concern. As I have seen over and over again that there are good answers, my faith has been strengthened and strengthened. Again, like I was saying before, you will naturally share about that which you believe is true. As your doubts are addressed and your faith is strengthened, you’ll actually want to tell people about that.
The second thing that I would say though is shame is a huge part of our culture today and our cultural conditioning that, you do you, kind of idea, and so, okay, you’re a Buddhist, for example, I’m going to let you be a Buddhist, and in our culture, it’d just be politically incorrect of me to share my faith with you because you have a faith. Right?
It’s interesting to me, though. I had a conversation with a guy who was formerly a Buddhist monk. I met him on the border of Laos, and he is now a pastor in Laos. Just with tears in his eyes as he shared his story with me of coming to faith in Jesus and going from a worldview of hopelessness. For those who don’t know about Theravada Buddhism, which he was a part of, they believe that Nirvana, the etymology of the word means to snuff or to blow out. You cease to exist. That’s the goal. He said, “Andy, you don’t understand the weight of hopelessness when your whole view of life is that it’s an illusion in that you’re just striving to cease to exist.” He said, ‘When somebody shared Jesus with me,” he said just a weight lifted from him and he saw that the world wasn’t hopeless and that there was meaning and it began to change his life.
One of the things that I’m always encouraged of, I’m reminded of is that the human need for the gospel, that human flourishing comes from the gospel. This is something Jesus talks over and over about, that you and I, and you’ve heard me preach this so many times, that you and I were created to be in relationship with God and relationship with people and you will not flourish as a human being until those things come together. One of the examples that I like to give, and Daniel, you know.

Daniel Markin:
Oh, I know, Andy.

Andy Steiger:
That the older that I’ve gotten, the older I get, I love my gardening.

Daniel Markin:
Yeah.

Andy Steiger:
I’ve talked a number of times. Daniel makes fun of me, by the way, a lot. He’s salty sometimes, this guy.

Daniel Markin:
It goes both ways sometimes.

Andy Steiger:
About my hanging basket love affair. I don’t know what I’m doing gardening, so when I go into a greenhouse, I always look for the little tag that says, okay, what’s going to lead to this plant’s flourishing? I like to think, what would that look like if a human had a tag? What’s going to lead to this human’s flourishing? Is it sunshine, water, the right kind of ground soil, shade? Blah, blah, blah. Jesus says, listen, it’s your relationship with God and it’s your relationship with people. This is what you were created for. This is what’s going to lead to your flourishing. In fact, I wrote a book on this topic and it’s coming out in September.

Daniel Markin:
Okay, tell us about that.

Andy Steiger:
The book’s called “Reclaimed: How Jesus Restores Our Humanity in a De-Humanized World.” That book really talks about what I’ve just shared is that what does it look like to be a human? How does the gospel allow us to fully be human, to fully experience the flourishing that we were created for? When you begin to understand that, then the gospel is more about answers to questions.
I bring it up like this, because sometimes we’ll ask questions like, is there life after death? I like to change that and ask, is there life before death? These are more than these existential questions like, I sure hope that when I die, there’s something more, or whatever. What we find in the gospel is this is about the here and now.

Daniel Markin:
Yeah, give me a reason to live and a reason to go through this world that seems so dark and so much suffering.

Andy Steiger:
That’s what you see in the gospel is reasons to live now that don’t stop, but continue on into the future. That’s that beauty of a changed life is that’s evidence to you that what God’s begun. Paul talks about it like this, he says this in second Timothy chapter one, that what God has done now, that you can be confident that He will bring that to completion.

Daniel Markin:
That’s an interesting thought because one of the things I’ve been reflecting on a lot is that Christianity as an idea is a deeply physical idea that impacts our life here, but that the afterlife or heaven is also very physical. Right? The new creation, we are told that we are going to be on the new heavens and the new earth, everything will be redeemed, and it will be a physical life again, but life as it should have been. Right? All of humanity has been trying to get back to the garden of Eden, trying to get back to the way things were meant to be.

Andy Steiger:
The story ends the same way it began, relationship with God, and in fact-

Daniel Markin:
But in a greater way because we now have Christ.

Andy Steiger:
That’s right. This is an important point to understand because a lot of people misunderstand the idea of eternity. They think Christianity is all about living forever. Christianity is not about living forever. We often conflate life and eternal and eternality as one thing, but these are not. The gospel is about life. Jesus says in John chapter 17; He praises. He says that His prayer is that people might come to know eternal life, to have eternal life, which is knowing You, it’s relationship. You’ve been created for relationship with God. You’ve been created for relationship with one another. That’s life the way you were intended to be, but in Christ that is fulfilled eternally.
Sin separates us from God. Sin separates us from one another. Death is, we see that death spiritually, we that death physically and that’s mended in Christ so that we can then fulfill the purpose that we were created for.

Daniel Markin:
I read an interesting article recently, which is right on this idea of death. It was with Kobe Bryant. Kobe Bryant was killed in a really tragic helicopter crash a couple of weeks ago. On Twitter, automatically someone just went on to Twitter and started saying, “Yeah, he’s dead, but think about all these other bad things he did, don’t you forget about the things that he did in his past,” and they tried to bring this up and kind of smear his reputation. As they did that, people were rising up and defending him. The person writing this article in the New York Times was saying, ‘What is it about death that causes us to want to just speak about the best of the person and speak about all the good things they did? Maybe they weren’t perfect people, but we want to remember them in a good way.”
They asked a further question. They said, “Why is it that when you enter a cemetery people go quiet? It’s like really quiet. People talk softer when you’re surrounded by death.” The point that this writer made was that deep down we all know that death is coming and when someone dies, that we feel that death is really close. It seems to me that in our culture in our world today, we still have a real hard time with this idea of death.

Andy Steiger:
It was interesting, I was preaching at a church when that news about Kobe Bryant dying in that helicopter crash, and it’s interesting because that Sunday I was giving the gospel message and it was at this moment, I’m sharing the gospel and giving people an opportunity to respond to it. After the service, a guy comes up to me who had given his life to Christ that Sunday, he came up to me and he said, “Hey, I just wanted you to know that I’m so thankful you gave me an opportunity to respond to the gospel.” He goes, “I was thinking about it and I was leaning towards not,” he says, “My phone vibrated,” and he looked and saw that this helicopter crashing, Kobe Bryant had just died. And he said, “It was this moment where God just kind of woke me to the idea that I’m going to die one day and I don’t know how much time I have and I got to stop with this idea that I’m just going to do whatever I want and I’ve got all the time in the world,” and he’s like, “I don’t, and I do want Christ in my life.”
It was this catalyst for him that morning to given his life to Christ. I think that that’s the interesting thing about when somebody dies, isn’t it? It’s a wakeup call to you to go, “Oh yeah, maybe I should think about the fact that I’m a human being on a blue planet spinning around a giant ball of fire in a dark vacuumous universe.” It gets back to this idea that maybe I should be questioning if there’s life after death.
But again, I would say, and this is what I was talking about actually that Sunday was, is there life before death? And we see that in Jesus and we can embrace that reality now. You don’t wait until you die to embrace that reality, in the same way, you don’t have to wait until you die to experience the brokenness of this world. You can get a taste of hell on earth just fine right here and now, but you can also get a taste of heaven on earth as you begin to live for that purpose you were created for in relationship with God, in relationship with one another.

Daniel Markin:
In Christianity, that relationship with God and the relationship with one another, that doesn’t end when we pass on to heaven, that doesn’t end. I was just reflecting on this, too, because maybe the Kobe Bryant thing brought up death, but the idea, I think it was because we were studying communion in one of my classes, and when we take communion, we are, we are coming to the Lord’s table and it reminds us that for 2000 years people have come to the Lord’s table and taken in that meal together and we remember the past of what God’s done in His story. We remember this present moment what God has done through Christ in our own lives, making our life meaningful and living heaven on earth right now.
Then, we look forward to the future when He makes all things new. Part of that future is recognizing that when we’re all in heaven, when Christ comes again, we will all be at the great banquet feast. Right? Then we’ll be physically eating. We’ll be doing that thing and celebrating. It dawned on me that as we walk our days on this earth, the closer that we walk to towards death as our time is ticking, we’re sad about leaving the ones behind. It occurred to me that as a Christian, in Christianity, in Christ, we actually can look forward to the continuing of these other relationships that were on pause. Right? Our family members, our friends who have passed away, we get to see them in only a matter of time and re-begin, press play on those relationships while we press pause on the ones that were here on earth. That’s a deeply hopeful thing that I think again, just elevates Christianity above all other religions, as far as what it offers.

Andy Steiger:
That’s right. Hope now and hope to come. One of the things that has influenced me, and you see this in the apostle Paul, again, going back to second Timothy chapter one, he starts by telling Timothy, “Look, you got this inheritance of faith. You received it from your grandmother and from your mother, your grandmother Lois, and your mother Eunice,” and he’s like, “Now, that faith lives in you.”
It was interesting for me though, Daniel, because I had the opposite experience. In my life, I saw that everything was hopeless. I grew up in a very broken family. My grandmother did not know Jesus, cheated on her husband, had multiple marriages. My grandfather died of alcoholism. My mom grew up in that brokenness. That’s her inheritance. Then, my dad left my mom, left us four kids, and I grew up poor, again in that vacuum, that brokenness. That was my inheritance.

Daniel Markin:
Were you scared that that was going to be your inheritance as well? That you were going to do that exact same thing?

Andy Steiger:
Absolutely.

Daniel Markin:
Like there was a curse on you.

Andy Steiger:
Yes. A, that was a curse on me. At the same time, I was having these thoughts as a kid, they started at 12 years of age, that one day I’m going to die, I’m going to cease to exist forever. Just the thought of meaningless just swept over me. I thought, okay, we’ve got a broken, messed up world and here I am, in all this brokenness and it’s all meaningless.
Then I witnessed something happen. I had the privilege of seeing my grandmother come to faith in Jesus and seeing her life transformed by the power of the gospel. God did an incredible work in her. I got to say, by the way, a lot of people don’t realize the miracle involved there. When you see somebody that was just a train wreck of a human being come to Jesus and restored, that is a powerful miracle of the work of God and people’s lives. I saw it not only my grandmother, I saw it in my mother as she came to faith in Jesus. It began to change my view of the world.
Then, I began to think, okay, again, it’s this idea, not only is there life after death may be there’s something right now that I can experience the joy and the meaning of life right now. I will never forget this, Daniel. When I put my faith in Jesus, I asked this question, I just said, “God, if you can make my future better than my past, I will put my trust in you. I will follow you to the day I die. But I know that given my circumstances, given my inclinations, I will make a train wreck of my life given to my own devices. God, would you help me?”
I guess really what you could say is the power of the gospel I wanted to see, I wanted to see the miracle of a changed life now. I experienced that in the gospel. I’m still experiencing that in the gospel. For me, I have just so much hope as I look towards the future, going, I can’t wait to see what God’s begun in me, completed when I meet him face-to-face.
This, then became for me a real turning point in my life because long story short, when my mom got remarried, my dad contacted my mom about having my stepdad adopt us and for child support reasons and blah, blah blah. My given name wasn’t Steiger and I’d never really liked that name. My name reminded me of my broken past, so much so that when I got married to my wife, Nancy, I seriously considered taking on her last name. But then again, there was this moment of the restorative power of the gospel where I was saying, wait a minute here, as her and I prayed and thought about this, maybe this is an opportunity for us to redeem this broken past and hand off to our children an inheritance of faith that I didn’t have.
This then becomes the power of the gospel as it works through you, as I seek to love God and I seek to love people. For me, my desire is to love my children, is to love my wife, is to love those people around me. Part of loving people, just to come back to the idea of evangelism, people aren’t projects. I think we’ve got to be so careful about that. Jesus didn’t call you to go make a project of a person. Jesus told you to go love people. That’s what you were created for, relationship. Go have relationships with people, care for people, love your children, love your wife, love those people God puts into your life. Part of loving them is sharing the truth with them. Letting them know that they were created. They’re not a random collection of particles that’s going to cease to exist forever, but they were created for a purpose and that they have incredible value and meaning that is fulfilled in Jesus as they seek to know God and to know one another, to live in relationship.

Daniel Markin:
Yeah. What you’re saying is, because you could hear someone say, well, I didn’t want to see my life go like this, so I chose to believe in Christianity, but that can sound an awful lot like, I looked around my life and realize I want to add on Christianity so I would have a better life. But what you’re saying is, no, I wanted this relationship with God. If he’s offering this type of relationship, if I can know God and He can know me in the most deep way, I want that.

Andy Steiger:
This is the difference between a religion and people often will want to make a religion out of Christianity and they’ll think, okay, I did this at first where, okay, Christianity is about these rules. I got to follow, and I can’t be that person I once was. Then I do these rules and that’ll make God happy or whatever.

Daniel Markin:
That’s a temptation, too, for most Christians to fall back into.

Andy Steiger:
Absolutely. Oh, absolutely, it is because we’re much more comfortable with this idea of a religion. We’re much more comfortable with this idea of earning God’s love and grace and mercy and forgiveness, but that’s not what it is. Right? That Christianity is about a relationship. It’s about a God who created humanity to be in relationship with Him and one another. It’s a story about how sin, evil has broken that relationship, but a God who didn’t give up on humanity and sent His Son to redeem that relationship, to restore that relationship so that we could fulfill the purpose we were originally intended for, relationship.
That’s not this idea of a religion, right? That’s the idea of a relationship. It’s not something that you have done as though God is somebody that you could reach. I often find that hilarious, by the way, when people are asking, do all religions lead to God? Christianity’s answer is no religion leads to God. I mean, how low is your view of God to think that you could reach God? The beauty of the gospel is that God reached you, that God loves you, didn’t give up on you, and although you can’t reach Him, He can and did reach you. I guess that’s the nature of the severity of our broken relationship with God and people that we just don’t appreciate.
But it’s funny, isn’t it? If you think about it, Daniel, that we come into the world as human beings being experts at breaking relationship. No one had to teach me how to break relationship. I’m very good at it. I was born into that brokenness and I saw that brokenness in my own family. We’re very good at that. That’s where when I came to Jesus, was like, listen God, I get it. I’m broken. My whole family’s broken and I’m great at breaking things. I need You though to help me to know how do You restore; how do You reconcile? Because I am not good at that. Humans are not good at that. Right? In our brokenness, in our sin, in our evil, that’s what we’re incapable of. But yet again, through the power of the gospel, God at work in and through you, what is impossible is possible, and that’s an incredible miracle.

Daniel Markin:
It is. And it’s a continued miracle because God doesn’t just, we don’t just get saved and then He leaves us to figure it out. He sends us His Holy Spirit who helps guide us through that. But then more than that, we have a community of faith that we’re to gather. That’s why it’s so important to gather and get involved in a church is we can forget and we can fall back in this way of thinking that we have to earn our way to God, and it’s by being with the people of God that you’re reminded over and over again that there’s no way you could actually earn this, but that as you gather, everyone here is on the same page. Everyone knows that they don’t deserve this, but they’re here to worship that God together.

Andy Steiger:
Let me just say one last thing here that I think is important that a lot of Christians get wrong on this, what you’re just talking about there, Daniel. A lot of Christians have been taught this idea that you have a personal relationship with God. You need to come into this personal relationship with Him. That’s fine and everything, but it doesn’t have the full scope of what God’s intending.

Daniel Markin:
It’s only part of it.

Andy Steiger:
It’s only part of it. Yes, you have a personal relationship, but it’s so much more than that. You also have a corporate relationship with God. A lot of people don’t understand the church thing because again, they fall back into the rules. Oh, you become a Christian, oh you have to go to church. No, no, no. You’ve totally missed it. No, you become a Christian and you get to go to church. You have been invited into a community. You’ve been invited into a community with God. You’ve also been invited into community with one another.
This is an important idea then, especially in our individualistic culture of consumerism where it’s all about me. Right? But church is, yes, it’s about you, but it’s also about everyone around you. You need church, but so do those people around you, and that means that sometimes you need to go to church because the people around you need you and to be in community with them. There’s times that you need them as you’re in community with them. I always get concerned when I hear people ask whether or not Christians need to go to church. I was like, brother, you clearly-

Daniel Markin:
You’re missing it.

Andy Steiger:
Yeah. You’re clearly missing the point of Christianity.

Daniel Markin:
Yeah. It’s not about you and it’s never been about you. It’s always been about God.

Andy Steiger:
Yeah. In this idea of relationship. You could say then, yeah, it’s about you, but it’s also about everybody else. You know what I mean?

Daniel Markin:
Yeah.

Andy Steiger:
It’s this both idea. When you start seeing your relationship with God in this way and your relationship with one another this way, it changes the way that you view church. It changes the way that you view Christianity, and it changes the way that you’re living your life. For me, it’s so valuable and so important that my relationships, my relationship with God, my relationship with people, those are commitments to me because I know that it’s good for me and it’s good for them.

Daniel Markin:
Well, as we come in for a landing here, Andy, how would you encourage people who maybe are not plugged into a church, what kinds of things should they be looking for in a church? And how do we know what church is a good church to be at?

Andy Steiger:
We live in such a lonely culture, Daniel, as you know, and there’s a lot of people out there that are dying for community and relationship, but they’re terrified of community and relationship. I’m sure there are listeners listening to this right now that you know exactly what I’m talking about.
I had a young adult come up to me just recently when I shared that I’d be transitioning out of the young adult ministry back to Apologetics Canada. This young adult, tears in his eyes said, “Andy, I am so thankful for what I found in this ministry. You kept preaching about the importance of community,” and he says, “I came to church because I knew something was wrong in my life and I had these suicidal thoughts. I was thinking about taking my own life, and I thought, Hey, might as well try this church thing. Here you keep talking about community,” and eventually he built up the courage to get into a community group. With tears in his eyes, he says, “Andy, it’s changed my life.”
I guess what I’d love to just say to listeners is you need the courage to step out into relationship, relationship with God and in relationship with people. That means that you’ll need to get off your couch and you’ll need to go to church and begin to get connected, and not just on a Sunday morning, but I would say specifically into a community group.

Daniel Markin:
Yeah, and knowing that it’s not going to be always hugs and muffins, that the nature of being a human is going to get messy sometimes.

Andy Steiger:
Last night in my community group, we had a person share with us that they might have cancer and that’s a reality that you’re going to deal with, that you’re going to deal with people when their best times and their worst of times, but it’s also the same with you. You’re going to have moments where you’re going to need that community and there’s times where that community needs you. There is just such a beauty to that relationship that transforms you.
Let me just say this, by the way. I think this is so interesting. I’ve heard from so many counselors who have said, “Andy, the West does not need this many counselors. We have lost the idea of what it means to be a friend. We have lost the idea of the need for community.” I’ve heard from so many of my friends that are counselors would just say, if we just had people getting into community groups and caring for one another, this counseling crisis would be over.

Daniel Markin:
That feels like a whole nother. That’s a whole nother show, because you’re right, there’s such a hunger and a need for community. There is such a desperate need to be known.

Andy Steiger:
That might mean, by the way, that you need not only to attend a community group, God might be calling you to lead a community group.

Daniel Markin:
Yeah. To help facilitate that. You might not be a person who feels like you have all this Bible knowledge that you can actually teach and built to coordinate it. The Lord is going to lead, and you trust in the Lord and He will give you what is necessary by the power of the Holy Spirit. Right? I think just especially with some of the things that we encourage our committee groups with, and one of the things I always often talk about is we are rallying around the Bible when we come and we want to study the Word together.
I think first and foremost as a leader, you’re facilitating community. You want to get people there. Yes, we’re going to do our best to study the Word as best as we can because that’s what unifies us and we can rally around that.

Andy Steiger:
In praying.

Daniel Markin:
In prayer, yeah, but bringing people in, facilitating community. Part of facilitating community is praying for one another and hearing each other, and sharing and carrying each other’s burdens.

Andy Steiger:
It was interesting, last night when the wife of the husband who might have cancer, when she was praying, she said in her prayer, “I am so thankful that I have a group that can walk with me through this,” in her prayer. I just thought, that’s right. That’s right. That’s part of what it means to be Christian. We’re going to walk with you through the good and the bad.

Daniel Markin:
Well, Andy, thank you again for being with us and sharing your heart and sharing your love for the church, and we look forward to seeing how the Lord will be using you at Apologetics Canada full-time and looking how we can partner in the future as well.

Andy Steiger:
Yeah, so am I. It’s great to be on the show. Love this ministry, appreciate the ministry of indoubt and yeah, looking forward to partnering in the future.

Kourtney Cromwell:
Well, that wraps up our time with Andy Steiger for now. We’re so thankful that he was able to come and talk to us about Apologetics, the future of Christianity, and the smaller discussions from today’s episode. If you’d like to find out more information about Apologetics Canada, check out their website at Apologeticscanada.com and you can find them on Instagram, too. Like always, if you’re interested in anything that Daniel and Andy talked about, we’ll have the links on our website for this episode.
I’ve mentioned it before, and I’d like to take a second to ask for your support. There’s a lot of ways that you can help a ministry like indoubt, like listening to the programs, following on social media, sending in your questions or suggestions, or giving financially. We definitely don’t want to take away from what you give to your church, but if there’s anything that you can spare and are willing to partner with indoubt to see it grow in the future, you can head online to indoubt.ca and either give as a monthly partner or make a onetime donation. Basically, the amount of a Starbucks coffee could help us in the long run.
Anyways, I hope that you join us next week for another episode of indoubt.

Kourtney Cromwell:
Thanks so much for listening. If you want to hear more, subscribe on iTunes and Spotify or visit us online at indoubt.ca or indoubt.com. We’re also on social media, so make sure to follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.