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Resist the World: Pursue Full Discipleship to Jesus | Jonathan Storment · Real Life Theology Podcast

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  Hello, everyone, and welcome back to another episode on the Real Life Theology podcast.
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  Today's episode is going to feature Jonathan Storment, who's going to share with us how
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  to resist cultural formation by pursuing full discipleship to Jesus.
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  I hope you guys enjoy this episode.
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  Let's gather back together.
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  So I want to build on what Brother Bobby said, and by the way, I'm so honored to get to be
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  here and get to meet you and hopefully tribe up with some of y'all.
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  Last week, I had a ton of friends send me that Atlantic article that Brother Bobby was
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  just quoting from.
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  The Atlantic article is responding to the January 6th riot on the Capitol, and these
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  people holding up the sign of Jesus, and it's them trying to make sense of what is
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  happening in Christianity in America.
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  And there's this one line in that article that's haunting.
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  It's where Dr. Jacob says, honestly, American Christianity is less about Christology and
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  more about sociology.
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  That's big, fancy words to say, basically, there's nothing here.
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  We vote the same as our secular, unbelieving neighbors.
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  We sleep around the same.
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  We view porn the same.
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  We beat our spouses the same.
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  We're as racist.
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  It's hollow is what they're saying.
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  So I grew up very conservative Church of Christ.
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  I was in the Taliban version of Church of Christ.
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  And then I went and got a Bible major, and I went and worked at some great churches.
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  But I would say I went from being overly conservative, and it was because I cared so much about my
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  friends that were walking away from faith, that I became enamored with all things progressive.
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  I was trying to be relevant, and looking back on it, there were two things that were happening.
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  One, if I'm really honest, and this is painfully honest, because this is still true about me,
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  I want to look sophisticated.
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  But the second thing I realized is that I was lower, unintentionally, I was lowering
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  the bar of discipleship in my own life and in the lives of the people I was trying to
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  reach.
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  So for the last 10 years, I have kept this picture on my desktop and my computer.
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  His name is August Vissemer, and he is in, this is in 1936.
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  Is that picture up?
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  Okay.
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  In 1936, this is a Nazi rally that Hitler is at.
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  This is not just any Nazi rally.
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  Hitler is here, and people are falling all over themselves to honor Hitler.
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  Except that one guy.
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  And this picture haunts me because I think, wouldn't he just raise your hand and kind
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  of insincerely participate?
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  I mean, he's going to die for this, but he doesn't.
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  And that picture haunts me because I think, what would I do in that moment?
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  Karl Barth, one of my favorite Christians from the last 100 years, was one of the few
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  people who stood up to Hitler during the 1930s, 1920s, and 30s because Nazism had taken
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  over.
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  And here's the thing, Brett McCracken in his book, Hipster Christianity, he talks about
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  the thing, he studied Nazi culture, and he said, it wasn't just politics they took over.
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  It was all the soft forms of power.
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  So they took over the elementary schools.
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  They took over pop music.
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  They took over all the Boy Scouts.
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  Nazism wasn't just evil.
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  Here's the point you need to realize.
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  It was cool.
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  In that moment, in that cultural moment, it was cool.
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  And only one person really, only a few people stood up to him, Karl Barth being one of them.
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  And Karl Barth used to open up his seminary classes, not with the Bible, but with this
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  brilliant atheist named Furelbrock.
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  I can't even say his name.
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  The guy went on to invent a popcorn.
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  Furelbrock was this brilliant atheist from the 17th century, and he said that all the
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  world religions are basically human wish projecting onto this big thing they call God.
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  So we want sex, we have a sex God.
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  We want race wars, we have a tribal God.
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  All these things.
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  Karl Barth said, this is true.
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  He's right.
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  This is the beginning of wisdom, and the departure for all Christian thought must start right
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  there.
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  Because if you want a God, who would make up a God like Jesus?
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  Who would make up a God who says, if you want to know how well you love me, love your enemies?
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  Who would make up a God that would put the book of Jonah in the Bible?
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  It's just a book, honestly, about loving your enemies and against racism.
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  I mean, who would make up this God?
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  And Barth said, that's right.
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  That is true about world religions, but that is not true about the God revealed in Jesus
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  Christ.
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  And Hitler, as he took over all these different places through soft power, the place he took
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  over last was the church.
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  And here's what he said to people like you and me.
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  He said, now listen, you can keep running things as normal.
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  Just do these couple of things.
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  One, you can't preach from the Old Testament.
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  And two, you can't mention that Jesus was a Jew.
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  And Karl Barth stood up the next Sunday and preached a sermon called, creatively, Jesus
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  was a Jew, and he mailed it to Hitler.
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  Then he fled to Switzerland.
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  Now listen, Hitler was fine with Jesus, as long as it was Hitler's Jesus.
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  Your politicians love to quote Jesus, as long as it's their kind of Jesus.
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  Hollywood has no problem with Jesus, as long as it's their kind of Jesus.
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  There's a part in 2 Corinthians 11 where Paul, the apostle Paul, actually says, if someone
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  comes to you and preaches a different Jesus.
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  So here's what this means for us.
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  We may not all mean the same thing when we say the name Jesus.
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  There are different Jesuses.
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  Which Jesus do you want to be discipled by?
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  There's progressive Jesus that has nothing to say about your sexuality.
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  There's American Jesus that supported every war.
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  There's Southern Jesus that supported racist Jim Crow laws in the past.
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  There's religious Jesus that sounds more like the Pharisees of the Gospels than the
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  Jesus of the New Testament.
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  Which Jesus?
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  Do you know, for the first hundred years of Christianity, the most popular gospel was
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  the Gospel of Matthew, because there was more FaceTime with Jesus in there, more red letters.
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  It was seen as a manual of discipleship.
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  People used that to learn what it means to follow Jesus, because at the end of the Gospel
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  of Matthew, he says, teach them to obey what?
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  Everything.
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  Not how to do church on Sunday morning.
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  Not how to be religious.
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  How to live like a new creation.
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  That's what he's teaching us.
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  To be a disciple of Jesus Christ means how to be nonviolent, how to be generous with
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  your money, how to treat women, how to use or not use your sexuality, how to love people
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  of other races that you don't naturally love, how to do business like God is watching, how
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  to be married, how to stay married, how to stay single, basically how to lay down your
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  life for the watching world.
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  God wants all of it.
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  So there's a time right in the middle of the Gospel of Matthew where Jesus takes his disciple
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  Peter, his most caffeinated disciple, and he asked him, who do people say that I am?
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  And Peter says, you're the Messiah.
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  And then Jesus says, you're right, and I'm going to die naked on a cross.
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  And Peter says, nope, no you're not.
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  And Jesus says to Peter, get behind me, because the proper place for a disciple is behind
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  him.
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  In other words, we don't get to make this crap up.
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  We have a tradition that we have received, not one that we get to invent.
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  That's what Jesus is telling us.
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  We don't get to make this stuff up.
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  He's saying to Peter, Peter, you get to decide if you want to be a part of the kingdom of
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  God, but you do not get to decide what the kingdom of God is.
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  So do you know why Christianity grew the first few hundred years?
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  There's this great historian, Larry Hurtado, who said there are five distinctions about
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  Christianity that were incredibly different in the ancient world, and they're incredibly
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  different today.
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  The church was multiracial and multiethnic.
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  It had a high value for inclusion, diversity, and equity.
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  The church cared for the poor.
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  It had a lot to say about how you used your money to serve people that had less than you.
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  The church was staunch in its resistance to abortion and infanticide.
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  The church was resolute in its mission.
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  Its vision for sexuality was only between a man and a woman in a lifelong covenant relationship,
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  and it was nonviolent in every way.
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  Now here's my question.
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  What political party represents that, right?
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  This is a different way of being human.
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  I mean, there are people on the left like two of those, people on the right like two
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  of those, and that last one, nonviolent, nobody likes.
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  So which Jesus?
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  Because we don't get to make this stuff up.
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  This is why I like Renew, because they're trying to help churches be disciples of this
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  guy, and my politics are the least important thing about me.
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  I hope that's true about you, because if Jesus asked me to change my mind, I'd have to.
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  Otherwise, it's not Jesus I'm following, that's a version of Jesus I'm using.
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  So the reason I push back often these days on progressive Christianity is not because
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  I don't believe in progress, but because I do.
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  I just don't think there's been another, a better vision of the future that's come along
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  in the last couple thousand years than the apostles and prophets of the past.
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  This new heaven and new earth, this restored humanity filled with people from every tribe
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  and every tongue who bend their knee to King Jesus.
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  So back to the 1930s, when that happened, there was most people, and by the way, this
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  is in the world's most sophisticated theological system they had ever known.
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  Nazi Germany grew.
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  The Tübingen School, these people were brilliant.
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  If you've ever seen the TDNT, the Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, that guy
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  was a resolute Nazi.
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  But there was a small group of people, the confessing church, that probably could have
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  fit in this room today.
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  And one of those most famous disciples was Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
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  He came to America.
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  He was not impressed with the discipleship that was happening here then.
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  But he knew that when Jesus calls a man, he bids him come and die.
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  And so he went back to his home country, and he started these seminaries he called Schools
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  of Death, because that's what you're doing as a disciple maker.
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  And word got out that he was kind of taking this pretty aggressively.
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  He was the Bobby Harrington of Nazi Germany.
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  And so some friends came to Dietrich and said, hey, man, you're really emphasizing,
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  you're being too spiritual.
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  And so one day, as recounted in his book, Beautiful Resistance, John Tyson says, one
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  day, he takes out one of his friends on a boat ride, and he shows them what's happening
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  next door to his seminary, his School of Death, is a Nazi soldier boot camp.
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  And they're seeing the soldiers run and do calisthenics.
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  And they're seeing the soldiers, you know, push-ups and learning how to fly planes and
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  all those things.
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  And they're training very severely.
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  And Bonhoeffer says to his friend, what we do here must be stronger than what they're
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  doing there.
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  In other words, spiritual training must be stronger than cultural formation.
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  Leadership must be stronger.
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  What we do in our homes, in our churches, must be stronger than the cultural formation
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  that we're living in, because the times call for a beautiful resistance.
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  And that brings me back to this guy.
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  You know, he has no idea the way history is going to play out, right?
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  I mean, think about the pressure.
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  It's not just that it's, you know, everybody's doing it.
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  It's that it's cool.
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  He has no idea the way history is going to play out.
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  He doesn't know that for decades, the Nazi gesture is going to be an obscene gesture.
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  All he knows is what he's experiencing right now.
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  But you know why he does this?
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  Because he had married Irma, a Jewish woman.
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  And he knew he had seen the face of what they were calling the enemy.
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  And he knew he couldn't hate her.
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  There are many, there are good reasons to be willing to be uncool.
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  But the greatest is love.
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  And I don't know about you, but I think the place to start as we try to resist the cultural
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  formation of our day is falling deeply in love with Jesus.
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  Do you know what Jesus is?
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  Jesus is the new Adam.
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  He's the new creation.
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  He's the first fruits of the new creation.
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  He did for us what we could not do for ourselves and in our better moments.
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  Even our good stuff is tainted because we can't do it for ourselves.
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  Jesus is the shining that your shame cannot extinguish.
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  He is the door where you thought there was only wall.
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  He is what comes after deserving.
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  We may be tempted to worship kings.
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  Trust me, church, he may be like a king, but kings are not like him.
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  Praise be to Jesus.
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  May we fall deeply in love with him and resist anything less than full discipleship to that.
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  Thank you guys for tuning into this episode on The Real Life Theology Podcast.
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  Here at Renew, our main mission is to renew the teachings of Jesus to fuel disciple-making.
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  We want to equip everyone to be disciples and to help them make disciples.
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  I hope this content has been encouraging and helpful to you.
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  Please stay tuned with us down the road for more great content on disciple-making and
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  theology.
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  I hope to see you guys on the next episode.