Ep. 230: Surrendering Joyfully

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.

Erika:

Hey, this is Erika. Thanks for joining us for another episode of indoubt. Today’s guest is someone who is no stranger to us. It’s pastor and author Scott Sauls. If you’ve been listening to indoubt for a while, you’ll remember when Scott was a guest last year where he talked about how to make your faith stand out. And more recently, he was here talking about outrage culture, what it is and how to combat it. Scott always proves to be an amazing guest and today’s episode will be no different. This time Scott is here with Isaac to talk to us about Irresistible Faith which happens to be the title of one of his books. But more than simply promoting a book, Scott is here to talk to us about what goes into having an irresistible faith. At the very center of having an irresistible faith is the need for us to joyfully surrender ourselves to Christ. But this surrender is a good thing, and we are called to share this good news with our world. But a lot of times the message of Christ gets lost in all of the other messages that are constantly being thrown at us. So what can you do to make your faith stand out? We’re so happy you’re here for this episode and can’t wait for you to hear from Scott and Isaac. Now that you’ve heard enough for me, it’s time to get on with the episode.

Isaac Dagneau:

Hey, welcomed to indoubt. My name is Isaac, one of the hosts at the show. And with me on the show today is pastor and author Scott Sauls. If you have been listening on indoubt for a little while, you’ll know that we had him on the show a little while back and he’s back on with the great pleasure to have him again. So, yeah, thanks again for being here, Scott.

Scott Sauls:

Thank you, Isaac. Good to be with you.

Isaac Dagneau:

I had the great privilege of hearing a little bit about your ministry life, but also your personal life the last time we talked. But for those that maybe didn’t catch the last one, could you just again share a little bit about who you are, how you met Jesus.

Scott Sauls:

Sure. I met Jesus chiefly through a heartache situation in college when a relationship that I thought was going to turn into marriage ended the summer before my senior year in college. And that was the time when several friends of mine in college who were also Christians came around me and supported me through that season. It’s through those relationships and the exposure to Christianity that God used that to bring me into the faith. And ever since then, it was a long time ago, I’ve gotten married, going into ministry after seminary and getting ordained. We planted a couple of churches and then served for a season at Redeemer Presbyterian in New York City, and have been in Nashville as Senior Pastor of Christ Presbyterian Church for the last eight years.

Isaac Dagneau:

Yeah, that’s awesome. I appreciate that. And if you want to go back to our other conversations, our listeners, please do that, called The Gentle Answer based off of Scott Saul’s latest book. But this conversation that we’re going to have is from his book just previous to that called Irresistible Faith. This came out last year, Becoming the Kind of Christian the World Can’t Resist. That’s the subtitle to his book, Irresistible Faith: Becoming the Kind of Christian the World Can’t Resist. Now Scott, as I read that title, it implies that there may be different kinds of Christians because you need to be a certain kind of Christian. So obviously you’ve thought a lot and you’ve wrote about this kind of Christian. So maybe we can just ask, what are you talking about of this kind of Christian?

Scott Sauls:

Yes. I will give a brief caveat first of all and that is that publishers are the ones that tend to make final decisions about titles and subtitles. But that’s not to say I don’t like it, but in any event, I hope I do the publisher justice by answering the question in the way that I do. I think there are three different categories and these are the different categories that the book explores. One is redeemed individuals. What does it mean to become the kind of person that God has designed you to be and to become? What is the best version of yourself under Christ and through the influence of Christ? So that’s the first section. And then the second would be a renewed community. What does community look like when Christ is in the center, creating it, forming it, restoring it, and so on. And then lastly, what does the restored world look like from a Christian perspective? And the goal of a follower of Christ toward the world I argue in the book is to be a life-giving presence for our neighbors, which includes our neighbors who never come around to believing as we do, the people that we live with or alongside, the people that we work with, the people that we play with, the poor or those that Jesus referred to as the least of these. These are all people groups that ought to experience Christians as being among the most life-giving neighbors, friends, colleagues that they’ve ever known. So that’s sort of a summary.

Isaac Dagneau:

Yeah, no, for sure, that’s awesome. And for myself, as I hear you answer that, it makes me think, as you were writing this book, as you were studying the Scriptures and prayer and hearing different people’s stories, what do you see as life-giving? Because I’m sure that we could talk about… What kind of life-giving are we talking about? Is it a mix of eternal life-giving and temporal, or how do you understand to be life-giving to your neighbor?

Scott Sauls:

People use terms like value-add, positive contribution. I think of the phrase in Acts chapter 2 where there’s a section that describes how Christians lived their lives, both together and in their communities. And one of the statements it said was that they enjoyed the favor of all the people. In other words, the people around them, their neighbors, their colleagues, people in the places where they live, work and play, generally speaking, experience them as a positive presence in their lives. They were people that you liked and you wanted to be like them. And there’s just a couple of exceptions. There are two groups of people that didn’t appreciate a Christian presence in the early church and early Rome. One was people in power who felt threatened by the power of this movement, this organic movement called Christianity in the way that it was winning people over with love and with kindness and good deeds. And so as people in power and also religious Pharisees, for lack of a better word, people who were, well… Let’s trade the word Pharisee for moralist because there were some very virtuous Pharisees. And then there were some not so virtuous Pharisees, but the not so virtuous ones were what you could call moralists. Those who, as Luke chapter 18 verse 9 says, “Were confident in their own righteousness or trusting in themselves that they were righteous and looking down on other people with contempt.” So those are the kinds of people that did not appreciate the presence of Christ or Christians, but it seems that every other kind of neighbor did. You wanted to work with a Christian. You wanted Christians to be among the first responders if you were in crisis. You wanted to have a Christian pour into the life of people who matter to you like your children or your relatives because they were life-giving people.

Isaac Dagneau:

Yeah, no, absolutely. And I think, too, that obviously the Scriptures that come to my mind are in Matthew 5, “To be light to the world and salt to the earth,” and that all kind of fits into that. And Paul also says I think in Romans, maybe it’s Romans 12 that we need to live peaceably with all. And I love that. I think there’s just something that rings true with wanting to be wanted because of the fact that we have Christ in us. But I’m sure you thought about this, and it just came to mind, how do we square Scriptures like you just read in Acts with some kind of radical things that Jesus said, and maybe we just read them out of context and you could shed light on that if you want. But he said things like, “If you’re going to follow me, you’re going to be hated by the world.” How do we square that? Or like, “I’ve come with a sword,” and it seems so different.

Scott Sauls:

Well, we’re going to ask the question, what does Jesus mean by the world? And the world was a system of thought that was organized largely around power. Pontius Pilate comes to mind, and the scribes and Pharisees come to mind. And so, here I am back talking about the same people that I did in response to your last question. It’s people in power, whether it’s religious power or cultural power, that are most threatened by a movement that wins people over, not through coercion but through love. And the world’s system is a system of coercion. That’s why so much of the world is obsessed about politics, because politics is all about forcing the society to comply to a certain vision for the world. Whereas the kingdom of God, it’s about persuading people to surrender joyfully to a vision for human flourishing and neighbor love.

Isaac Dagneau:

Yeah, that’s so good. Scott, Jesus is obviously our source of hope and the real means by which we are transformed into the kind of Christian that is irresistible, or the kind of Christians that have faith that is irresistible in this world. So, for myself and for us, those listening, what do we need to know about this Jesus and what he’s done for us to help us draw closer to him and thus, as we draw closer to him, we become more and more like him and his irresistibility. So, what do we need to know about this Jesus?

Scott Sauls:

Well, we need to know that he does not put pressure on us to be irresistible people. He says to us, instead, “Come to me, you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.” He hasn’t called us to be amazing. He hasn’t called us to crush it or to kill it. He hasn’t called us to be awesome. He’s called us to be loved. He’s called us to receive, first and foremost. Long before he ever says, “Go for me,” he says, “Come to me.” It’s interesting just the way even that the week, the seven day week was organized in creation. The Sabbath was the very last day of God’s seven day week. And the Sabbath was also the very first full day of humanity’s week. And so God works toward rest so that human beings can work from rest. One of the ways that we talk about it in our church in Nashville is we say that Christianity is unlike any other religion or worldview because it gives you the well done, good and faithful servant, at the beginning of your journey, instead of at the end of it. At the start line instead of the finish line, because Jesus already finished the work. And so when we talk in our community about how God has taken our judgment day and moved it from the future to the past, and the verdict that he pronounced over us was, “Well done, good and faithful servant. This is my beloved child with whom I’m well pleased,” because we’re united with Christ. And so everything that’s true of Christ in terms of identity, in terms of being a recipient and a son of the Father’s love, is also true of us because we’re in him.

Isaac Dagneau:

Yeah. And that’s so refreshing.

Scott Sauls:

The pressure is off, which gives us an even more compelling reason to love and serve.

Isaac Dagneau:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, because we’re not working for anything. And I think that’s one of the things that makes Christianity so refreshingly different than so many other, whether it’s alternative Christianities we could say, or other religions even. That we’re not trying to work for anything, and that is so refreshing and you’re absolutely right. It opens us up and frees us and equips us to live in such a selfless, loving way, that’s so good. You mentioned before, partly, that you talk a little bit about the church in community, so you’ve thought about this kind of light-giving, hope-giving Christianity in respect to obviously the church. Why is the community of the church a necessity? And I think this is important for lots of us. Someone could argue potentially, “Well, if we all just sacrificed our church services on Sunday mornings, then we could go and feed the poor and we could go and be the church rather than always coming and congregating and doing all this.” So, what is it about the community of the church that is so essential to producing in us this Christ-like light-giving, hope-giving kind of life?

Scott Sauls:

Well, I think first and foremost, if you say that you’ll give up church to go serve the poor, you’re fooling yourself. You won’t. You’ll do something less altruistic than that in all likelihood because the body of Christ is, that’s the community that God has put us in so that the pressure is not all on us as individuals to serve the poor. I mean, what a daunting task to serve the poor, to serve the needy. And anybody who’s ever tried to endeavor to do that by themselves has realized very quickly, “This is way above my head. This is way above my capacity.” But it’s not way above our capacity. We is so much bigger than me, and so much better resource than me. And I think, too, just for anybody who’s a submissive student of the Bible, when you look into the original language of Scripture, and when Scripture speaks to us in the second person, when it uses the you language, it’s almost always speaking to groups of people as opposed to individuals. And as an American, I’m not sure how these things are processed in Canada, but in America, Eugene Peterson talks about the Americanization of Christianity. And what he means by that is we’ve taken something that is decisively communal and corporate, and we’ve turned it into something personal and individual. We’ve talked about a personal relationship with Christ. We’ve talked about personal ethics and personal morality when all the while God has intended us to live all of these things out as individuals who are embedded and embodied in a community of people. It goes all the way back to the garden of Eden where God spoke into paradise and said, “It is not good for the man to be alone.” And I don’t think he was talking about marriage. I think marriage was one of the ways that God answered that tension with Adam. But I think even more than that, being a statement about marriage, because clearly you don’t need marriage to flourish because neither the apostle Paul nor Jesus was married. And yet these are the two premier teachers on marriage in the history of the world, are two men who never married a woman. And so, if you go all the way back to the Garden of Eden in paradise before the fall happened, before sin has entered the world, before the curse, even before the curse, God said, “There’s something wrong with the world. Man does not have companionship. Man does not have community.” And man is created in the image of a God who is both one and three. And so we can’t flourish fully without community. And as Christians, we can’t flourish fully without the body of Christ in particular. And we can try to argue that all day on the basis of our experience, on the basis of, “Well, I’ve had bad experiences with local churches,” or, “The American church is such a mess. What needs to happen… And I’d reengage life in a local church if I could find a New Testament church.” And whenever I hear that phrase, New Testament church as a reason to not be involved in the church, I want to ask the person, “Have you ever read the letter of First Corinthians?” The New Testament church that got more press than any other New Testament church was the Church at Corinth, and it was a complete train wreck of a church. Just so many offensive things happening inside that community and from that community toward the world. Rich neglecting the poor, people having sexual affairs with their stepmothers, just all sorts of… People filing lawsuits against each other left and right. Like all of these messy realities in the church of the New Testament that got more press than any other church. And so, you want to talk about a New Testament church? I mean, there are a lot better versions of the church than the premier of New Testament church that you’re talking about. And yet I also get it that we who are in leadership of local churches, we need to be cultivating communities that have integrity and that are life-giving communities. And so it’s kind of a both and.

Isaac Dagneau:

Yeah, for sure. And as you talk about the Corinth church, just so listeners know, maybe they haven’t read First Corinthians and I’d encourage you to, but just so you know, Paul does not say, “Well, you guys should just stop meeting.” That’s not the answer. He still encourages them to meet and just gives them more Christlike realities and truths that they need to know and put into practice. I think that’s huge. Scott, as we finish up here thinking about this kind of Christianity where you’re living this irresistible kind of faith where you are being a light and you are producing hope to not only your brothers and sisters in Christ, but also to others as well, we’ve talked about the benefit of the church. But I’m wondering at the end here, if you could just provide some other, I don’t know, practical ways or practical things that you could maybe tell us that would help us as Christians really thrive in living in such a way as you are pushing for in this book. What are things that we need to take on? We understand the church community is huge, and we need to be a part of that and commit to that. But what are some other practices or things that we should take on as well?

Scott Sauls:

Well, there are several practices. I like that word. I think it’s the right word. Christian maturity, much like physical health, is formed through certain habits and rhythms and diets. If you want a healthy body you’re going to eat healthy, you’re going to exercise, you’re going to get an adequate amount of rest if you want to have a healthy body. If you want a healthy soul, then your diet and exercise and rest are going to be organized around essentially three things. The first is worship, which for us in our community, it means being fully present with a local church every single Sunday. Not 1.5 times a month, which is the American average, but every single Sunday. To organize your life around your worship rather than to fit your worship into your life. And then to be fully present with Jesus in some way, shape or form every single day. So those are basic practices that lead to flourishing. Second one is community, especially community alongside those who share your desire to grow closer to Christ and to flourish as a human being who’s in Christ. And so life-giving community that’s intentionally centered and organized around walking closely with the Lord together and serving neighbor together. And then finally mission. To have a person or a group of people, and sometimes, oftentimes, this happens chiefly through a person’s vocation, to serve the world and to serve people in ways that bring fresh creativity and fresh repair into the world, because God is both a creator and a redeemer. He brings new life and he also restores broken life. And so mission is about those things. It’s about saving souls, and it’s also about having a healing impact or renewing impact on whatever lanes God has put you in. And so it’s pretty comprehensive, but it’s a rhythm. Worship. Connect. Serve. It’s a rhythm of life that if we center all of our lives around the worship, connect, serve paradigm, and we do it over time, it’s like the person who is 72-years-old and they discover that they’re more healthy than 85% of their peers. It’s because they have consistently, over the course of years, on days they’ve wanted to and on days they have not wanted to so much, they’ve eaten well, they’ve exercised their bodies and they’ve gotten adequate rest. And the same is true for people who over a long haul will lean into the prioritization of worship, connect and serve.

Isaac Dagneau:

Yeah. That’s so good.

Scott Sauls:

That sounds very ordinary, but God works beautifully through the ordinary. I mean, he chose to come in the form of a carpenter and to work with his hands. And look at Jesus now.

Isaac Dagneau:

Yeah. Yeah. I know. Amen. That’s great. And I think just that… Like you said at the very beginning of this answer, you were just saying that our soul is not that much different in terms of our body, in terms of what actually keeps it healthy. And we need to know that. We’d love to find little quick fixes here and there to give us a spiritual jumpstart or whatever, spin around, spit on the ground, do something kind of interesting, but it’s not like that. As you’re saying, it needs to be revolved around these rhythms in our lives that provide help. So I appreciate that, Scott, that’s so good. This brings us to the end. So, again, if you’re listening right now and our conversation has piqued your interest, what Scott has been saying has just grabbed hold of you, maybe you thought of something in a new way. Maybe you thought about what it means to be Christian in an entirely new way. Maybe it looks different than maybe how your parents lived as Christians, or what your current church does as the Christian faith. Maybe it just sounds a little bit different. Well, I’d encourage you to go, check out his book, Irresistible Faith: Becoming the Kind of Christian the World Can’t Resist. You can find that at scottsauls.com and also on Amazon or anywhere else as well. We’ll provide links to it also on our episode podcast page. But, anyway, Scott, once again, thank you so much for chatting with us. It means a lot.

Scott Sauls:

Thank you, Isaac.

Erika:

Thanks so much for joining us today on the indoubt podcast, and thanks to Scott Sauls for joining us for another episode. If you’d like to hear Scott’s previous episodes on indoubt, check out the episode page on our website. We’ll have those linked. Episode 158 is all about how to make your faith stand out in a world that so easily runs over our beliefs. It is possible for Christians to make an impact, and Scott tells us how in that episode. And in episode 228, Scott discusses outrage culture, what it is and how to overcome it. These are both really powerful conversations that you won’t want to miss. If you’d like to learn more about Scott or want to read any of his books, check out scottsauls.com. We’ll also have all of his social links on our website. You may or may not have heard that June is a really important month here at indoubt. This year we need to raise $75,000 to keep indoubt alive. And since we’re a nonprofit, all of this money needs to come from you, our listeners. Without your generous donations, there’s just no way we could keep indoubt outgoing. So this month would you consider helping us keep indoubt alive? To learn more you can check out indoubt.ca in Canada or indoubt.com in the US. Additionally, we absolutely love hearing from you, what you love, what’s impacted your life, or even how we can improve. If you’d like to connect with us, send us a message on social media. We’re on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, or you can send us an email to info@indoubt.ca. Again, thanks for joining us for this episode with Scott Sauls, and don’t forget to join us next week as Isaac is back talking with Pastor Tim Elmore, as they walk through various questions about doubt. What is it, and how does God feel about it. We can’t wait to have you back next week.

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.