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Transcript

"The Cure For Sickness" with JD Walt · The Weight

• 0:00
  Eddie Rester: I'm Eddie restor.
• 0:01
  Chris McAlilly: I'm Chris McAlilly. Welcome to the Weight.
• 0:03
  Eddie Rester: Today, our guest is J.D. Walt. J.D. Walt is the former dean of the chapel at Asbury Seminary. He's the founder of SeedBed, which is a Christian publishing house, he continues that work. And he's also the host of the Wake Up podcast, so great conversation today. He's recently written a book about Romans, and so he's really done kind of a rethinking of faith and what it means to have faith, and what faith offers to us, and why that's significant.
• 0:33
  Chris McAlilly: J.D. started out in public service and politics in Washington, D.C. It ends up moving into a deeper calling, and ultimately, pursuing ministry as vocation. And he's thinking about the problems of our world, not just as systemic, but as personal. And we do a fairly deep dive in terms of thinking about the questions of what's going wrong in the world around us, but really focused on a personal level. And he has a lot of interesting ideas about, how to reread Romans and how it might be impactful for us today.
• 1:12
  Eddie Rester: I think one of the helpful things that I heard from him, that has been churning in my brain for the last year and a half, probably, is that when we think of our relationship with Christ, it's not just that Christ has come to fix a problem we have or solve something that we can't solve, but it's really about healing us. To return us to who we are created to be, who God desires us to be. To give us the power to live as fully human. And I think how we get there, that deep dive into Romans, he is tracking along with that, really, I think, in some helpful ways. What are a few things that you took away from the conversation today, Chris?
• 1:53
  Chris McAlilly: Just that the gospel is not a self improvement program from good to great, but rather a way of dealing with our, the problem, you know, kind of these base level, what he calls, you know, ontological sickness. The sense that there's something wrong with us at a very deep level before we do anything, just at the level of our being. Something has gone radically wrong. And we need Death and Resurrection ultimately. And so he lays that out. But you know, the other thing, that the other takeaway is just that Romans was written to one hundred people in the city of over a million and the power and the potential of a personal change in an individual or in a hundred people to make change in larger settings and systems. I think that's that's my takeaway.
• 2:46
  Eddie Rester: That really ripples out. I mean, because we continue to read Romans, as you pointed out in the podcast, Romans is at the heart of almost every renewal movement over the last two thousand years, large renewal movements. And so, great conversation today. I'm thankful he took the time to be with us.
• 3:03
  Eddie Rester: J.D., if you don't know him, he's an icon, just from his work at Asbury and the conversations that he's had through the years.
• 3:12
  Eddie Rester: And so I'm thankful for the conversation. I hope you are too. I hope you'll like it and share it. We haven't had a comment in a while. Chris.
• 3:20
  Eddie Rester: People aren't we need a comment or two.
• 3:23
  Chris McAlilly: Yeah, give us a comment.
• 3:27
  Eddie Rester: Enjoy.
• 3:27
  Chris McAlilly: [INTRO] Leadership today demands more than technical expertise. It requires deep wisdom to navigate the complexity of a turbulent world, courage to reimagine broken systems, and unwarranted hope to inspire durable change.
• 3:43
  Eddie Rester: As Christ-centered leaders in churches, nonprofits, the Academy, and the marketplace, we all carry the weight of cultivating communities that reflect God's kingdom in a fragmented world.
• 3:54
  Chris McAlilly: But this weight wasn't meant to be carried alone. The Christian tradition offers us centuries of wisdom, if we have the humility to listen and learn from diverse voices.
• 4:05
  Eddie Rester: That's why The Weight exists: to create space for the conversations that challenge our assumptions, deepen our thinking, and renew our spiritual imagination.
• 4:14
  Chris McAlilly: Faithful leadership in our time requires both conviction and curiosity, rootedness and tradition and responsiveness to a changing world.
• 4:23
  Eddie Rester: So whether you're leading a congregation, raising a family, teaching students, running a nonprofit, or bringing faith into your business, join us as we explore the depth and richness of Christ-centered leadership today. Welcome to The Weight. [END INTRO]
• 4:39
  Chris McAlilly: We're here today with J.D. Walt. J.D., thanks for taking time to be with us on the podcast.
• 4:44
  J.D. Walt: I love it. I'm back on the heat. I call the Weight,"the heat."
• 4:50
  Eddie Rester: We're so grateful for you to spend some time with us. I've been an outsider watching your work at Asbury as dean of the chapel there for years and years. Work with Seedbed, just grateful to get a chance, just to chat for a bit about some history and where you are and what your hopes are right now. So thank you.
• 5:10
  J.D. Walt: Yeah, thanks guys.
• 5:11
  Chris McAlilly: Yeah, I wonder if you, maybe just for folks who don't know your work, or maybe are less familiar, if you would just tell us a little bit about your story and maybe your calling.
• 5:21
  J.D. Walt: Yeah, so, short story, long. I'm from Arkansas.
• 5:30
  J.D. Walt: I'm from a small town in Arkansas, and I grew up in the church. And I never, I love the church, but I never considered the church as a vocational path.
• 5:43
  J.D. Walt: It just didn't seem to have, it just didn't seem... My path that I wanted to go down was public service and politics, and I had prepared myself for that, and got involved in that pretty heavily, and what I saw in...
• 6:07
  J.D. Walt: here's to sum it up.
• 6:13
  J.D. Walt: What I thought I saw in the government was potential, but what I really saw was power. And what I came to realize through my working in government, is that government really did have a lot of power, but it actually didn't have potential. It didn't hold the potential for what the human race most needs. It's a necessary thing. And when I looked at the church, it seemed to me to have power. And I just had this awakening in my life where I came to realize that though it may seem to have no power, it actually has all the potential. And the Lord just begin to direct my path to the potential, and how can I be part of helping to develop some of the potential of the church, because it does hold the answers to the desperate situation of the human race.
• 7:19
  Chris McAlilly: So talk about the desperate situation of the human race. And I mean, I know that we could talk about this in terms of a biblical framework of the fall of humanity, and the condition of sin and brokenness that's there. But I think there's some particular ways in which those have manifested in the American context that maybe you're navigating. If you're certainly, if you're navigating the D.C. context and just looking out at the American landscape over the last fifty years or so. And how do you think about the problem to which the gospel is the answer? How would you have been articulating that as you were coming into your life and your vocation?
• 8:02
  J.D. Walt: Well, I mean, I don't think I wouldn't identify the problem primarily as systemic, and therefore I wouldn't identify the solution as primarily systemic. The problem is primarily personal, and it is systemic. There's no doubt about it. But it's systemic in that it is compounded exponentially by the problem at the personal level, and so you can't solve it at the systemic level. It can only be solved at the personal level. Person by person by person. And so you got to get down to, well, what's the the actual problem. Is it, is it primarily social? And I just, it's interesting, I've been studying writing on Romans, and Romans is just really, I feel like I finally got it, or at least I starting to get it.
• 9:14
  J.D. Walt: Because I think for most of my own journey, I've kind of misunderstood sin. I've understood sin as personal failure instead of ontological sickness. I've understood sin in moral categories, as opposed to understanding it in sickness categories. And Jesus is pretty clear about it, right? He's like, I didn't come for the righteous. I came for the sick.
• 9:46
  J.D. Walt: He didn't say I came for the unrighteous. No, I came for the sick. And I think I grew up understanding that I'm a sinner because I sin. And I just had a flip in recent years to begin to understand that actually I sin because I'm a sinner.
• 10:11
  Eddie Rester: So it's interesting that you you say that because I'm becoming more and more convinced that we've been misreading the word salvation in Scripture "sozo", which one of the meanings of that is healing.
• 10:28
  J.D. Walt: Absolutely save.
• 10:29
  Eddie Rester: Yeah, that we might be healed and not just saved, so we can get an escape hatch to heaven, but that there's a healing that is necessary to make us truly and fully human. And I think that sometimes, when we simply settle for sin as moral categories, bad choices that people make, we miss what Jesus really came to do. Jesus, there's a healing in the work of Jesus that we ignore or we discount when it's simply, well, he's going to fix a problem, you know, surface problem.
• 11:11
  J.D. Walt: It's a transactional ledger move. And that's how Romans gets read.
• 11:18
  J.D. Walt: If you read it on the level of, I've done something wrong, and then Jesus does something for me to get me out of the bad situation I created because of the things that I've done.
• 11:27
  J.D. Walt: That's one way of reading sin, thinking about sin and salvation. You said, moving from personal, thinking of sin as personal failure, to think of it as ontological sickness, this sense of there's something at the being, the level of being, not the level of doing, that's askew. Unpack that a little bit more.
• 11:48
  J.D. Walt: So I like the example of cancer, and I use it because it defrocks it of all the shame dynamics, right? And so I say, every human being since the fall of Adam is born into sin, cancer. We have it. I mean, I don't know. I don't like to talk about human nature. I think human nature is actually good. It's created by God. It's in the beginning. It's original righteousness. And then there is sin. Cancer comes into the picture. The file is corrupted. The genome is inalterably modified. And it's broken, and there is sickness, and so you don't have to do something wrong for that to be the reality. You know, I used to read "all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God" is like, well, yeah, you know, I did steal something back there in the third grade. And I guess that counts. I mean, I haven't been that bad. And I, consequently, I grew up and I think many people in my stage in life, we grow up thinking the Christian faith is a good to great program, and it's not.
• 13:23
  J.D. Walt: We've equated it with self improvement, with a little Jesus sprinkled over it.
• 13:28
  J.D. Walt: It's actually a death to life program, it's a darkness to light program. And if you don't understand that you're born in to darkness and death, you can't really get it. Because what you wind up doing is you'll have sinners to a greater or lesser degree, and you'll say, well, I'm not that bad. And you kind of excuse yourself. And when something bad comes up, you try, this is Pharisaical religion.
• 14:03
  J.D. Walt: You try to hide it, or you wind up treating the symptoms.
• 14:08
  J.D. Walt: Imagine treating the symptoms of cancer and thinking that's going to solve the tumor that is brooding at the core of your being and so we're all born with sin cancer. You could switch this over and talk about debt, right? Like, if you're a citizen United States, you're actually born a debtor. You have debt. If they called in the note, they'd have to divide it up. And so I don't feel that, just like, I don't necessarily feel like I've got sin cancer. It's not like behavioral at the start. It becomes that.
• 14:51
  Chris McAlilly: I think it's helpful to have some of these analogies as a way of, reframing the conversation around sin and salvation. Yeah, go for it.
• 15:03
  J.D. Walt: Because, how do you explain this world? Is it just some bad people out there doing bad things? No, it's every single one of us. We are all sick with sin cancer and the Gospel is that there is a cure.
• 15:23
  J.D. Walt: There is a cure. And it's been revealed to us. The Gospel is, Paul, he says it's that righteousness comes by faith from first to last, so that no one may boast, right or not, by works. It's not something you
• 15:50
  Eddie Rester: It's not a problem you can solve.
• 15:52
  Eddie Rester: can do.
• 15:54
  J.D. Walt: You can't solve it, but you can receive the cure, and it is the person of Jesus.
• 16:05
  Chris McAlilly: One of the people that's been that's helped me think about this, about thinking about the brokenness or the dysfunction, or whatever that you sometimes see in systems, in institutions. But to think about it at the personal level. Was, and is David Foster Wallace, who is a writer who described himself as an atheist.
• 16:31
  Chris McAlilly: He wrote this piece. I go back to it again and again and again.
• 16:35
  Chris McAlilly: It's Kenyon College as a commencement speech, he's talking to college students, and he essentially says, in the day to day trenches of adult life, everybody worships. And you end up, if you worship power, you end up feeling weak and afraid.
• 16:48
  Chris McAlilly: If you end up, if you worship your intellect, you end up feeling, stupid and a fraud. You worship all these different things in this unconscious default level. But if it's not God, you're going to put yourself in a position to not only feel sick, but be sick. And there's a, there's a sense in which...
• 17:10
  J.D. Walt: Is this a speech called "Water"?
• 17:12
  Chris McAlilly: Yeah? This is water. Yeah. It's an incredible speech, to kind of put you in touch from somebody who doesn't profess the Christian faith, but just walking around in American culture and it's a diagnostic piece.
• 17:28
  J.D. Walt: He killed himself.
• 17:28
  J.D. Walt: Tragic.
• 17:30
  Chris McAlilly: It's awful. It's a terrible ending. But I do think he's diagnosing what it feels like to live in this kind of world that is askew or just doesn't add up. It needs an explanation. And it needs an explanation, as you're saying, on a personal level. And so talk a little bit more about how Romans has been a helpful framework for helping you rethink. How is it that, I guess Protestants, American Christians, have misread Paul?
• 18:06
  Chris McAlilly: And how is it that, how are you learning to kind of reread Paul and what are some...
• 18:16
  J.D. Walt: I mean, for starters, I Just like to sort of crush the Jesus versus Paul thing and say no. I say the problem is that we want to read Jesus with Paul glasses on. When we actually should be reading Paul with Jesus glasses on. We need to see Paul through Jesus and then I mean Romans begins to become this robust understanding of how Jesus works, as opposed to this systematic doctrinal treatise.
• 19:02
  Eddie Rester: Recently been having the conversation of how scripture for us gets redefined when we stick the numbers beside the verses, because then we begin to read it in parts and pieces instead of seeing things, when Paul writes in arcing thought categories. And I think in Romans, when you pull the numbers back, you see more clearly, or at least I do, and I don't know how you see this, but you just begin to see more of the rhythm of what Paul's trying to offer to us.
• 19:38
  J.D. Walt: Exactly, Eddie, I mean, we could talk about headings too. We could talk about all the ways that those put glasses on us. I mean, I was writing the other day. I've been writing through all the four Gospels, eighty nine chapters in eighty nine days. And I'm coming up on Luke, and I'm like: Who said the Good Samaritan? What are you trying this is only four hundred years old, but it's completely shaped our reading.
• 20:09
  J.D. Walt: And I'm like, are you saying the rest of them are bad? Is that what's meant? Or the prodigal son? What about sons plural?
• 20:17
  J.D. Walt: What about that older brother? I mean, he's just as prodigal as the one that went away. He won't even come in the house from the backyard. And the father, they shape the way we read. But Romans, okay? It's like, first off, we always say the book of Romans. I'm a master of the obvious insight. I'm like, well, Romans isn't a book. If you're reading a book, your first question is, what's it about?
• 20:45
  Eddie Rester: What's the plot?
• 20:45
  Eddie Rester: Yeah.
• 20:47
  J.D. Walt: But Romans is a letter. And if you're reading a letter, you don't say what's it about? You say, who's it from and who's it to? And that gets you into what you're talking about. The narrative, as Ben Witherington wrote a book years ago called "The Narrative Thought World of Paul", and he's trying to get at some of this.
• 21:04
  J.D. Walt: But Paul, I learned, and I didn't know this, he's writing a letter to a hundred Christians in a city of a million, and it's become the most consequential letter in human history. I think that's a fair statement. Romans.
• 21:30
  J.D. Walt: So he's writing them not to give them a doctrinal treatise on, justification and grace and the Gospel. He's writing them because they can't get along.
• 21:42
  J.D. Walt: There's the two groups, the Jews and the Gentiles. And the Gentiles, the Jews, had been kicked out of Rome by one of the emperors and time passes, and the Gentiles actually come in and set up church, took over church that the early Jewish Christians had started, and the Jews are kicked out, and then they come back, and they're like, who moved my cheese?
• 22:11
  J.D. Walt: Where's the furniture that we bought here? And they're eating different kinds of foods, and they're just messing things up.
• 22:22
  J.D. Walt: And so Paul writes this letter, and he spends like thirteen-forteen chapters before he ever even gets to the problem, because it's not a sociological problem, it's not even a religious problem. It's a human nature problem. It's a sin nature problem. Excuse me, sin nature. And Paul is dealing with the real, personal problem that these early Christians have, just like the rest of every human being that's ever lived.
• 22:56
  J.D. Walt: And he starts in Romans one and he starts with creation. He doesn't start with sin. He starts with creation, and then he moves to talk about sin, and then he moves to talk about grace. And he's essentially trying to say, there's a you've got the sickness, there is a cure. His name is Jesus, and here's how he works.
• 23:24
  Eddie Rester: So talk about you mentioned grace, because oftentimes I think, American Christians get stuck in, you call it sin management. We just get stuck in thinking that sin is just, "it is what it is." But you mentioned grace here. So how, in your understanding of sin as this sickness, how does grace begin to unleash us to become the people we're created to be? How does it begin to offer that healing that we talk about? In your mind? What is this gift that we've been given?
• 24:03
  Eddie Rester: And now I'll stop there. Yes, another question later.
• 24:07
  J.D. Walt: Yeah, that's a great... and y'all ask hard questions.
• 24:12
  Chris McAlilly: This is the heat man, this is the heat.
• 24:14
  J.D. Walt: That's why they call this the heat. I'm seeing the weight over here. So grace, amazing grace. It's interesting how you get up to Romans chapter seven. It's the peak of symptom management. And it's just like, he's totally worn out with it, I do what I don't want to do...
• 24:48
  J.D. Walt: ...can't do. And it's like, who can free me from this
• 24:48
  Eddie Rester: I can't do the things I want to do, yeah.
• 24:53
  Eddie Rester: body of sin and I think for the longest time in my own growing up, it's like Romans seven was pitched as the Christian life, like, oh, that's just normal.
• 25:06
  Eddie Rester: And Paul says, no, that's not the Christian life. That's the conflicted misunderstanding of the life of the Holy Spirit, right? That's because he goes to Romans eight, right? Who can free me? There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, because the life giving law of the Spirit has set you free from the law of sin and death. And he's like, stop treating the symptoms. So there's capital "s" sin, and then there is little "s" sins.
• 25:56
  Eddie Rester: And the little "s" sins are the symptoms of the sickness, but the capital "s" sin is actually the tumor. It's actually the sickness itself. And so Paul is saying, the grace of God is that it's like his blood, blood of Jesus, becomes the chemotherapy of salvation.
• 26:23
  Eddie Rester: I don't understand how that works, but take it over to the debt. I say to my little church here all the time, guys, he paid a debt he did not owe. Because we owed a debt we could not pay.
• 26:42
  Eddie Rester: And everybody gets that. And so it's kind of like, well, I accept, will I receive his payment for my debt? Because if I will, all of a sudden, by nothing I did, I am leveled up into... I'm pardoned, I'm free.
• 26:59
  Eddie Rester: And then, I am now, I'm now dead to sin. That's how Paul talks about it. And I am alive to God in Christ and then Romans eight.
• 27:13
  Eddie Rester: You know the holy, the spirit filled life becomes the it's like the massive software upgrade. Like this computer was so corrupted it couldn't even run the software. But he fixes the computer, he gives us a new hard drive, a new RAM, and then he upgrades the software, and all of a sudden I'm a real human being. I'm alive. I'm not, I don't I'm not destined to sin anymore. I'm destined to win.
• 27:53
  Chris McAlilly: I do think that there's a... Paul uses the language of, I mean, he uses this kind of juridical language.
• 28:01
  Chris McAlilly: He uses this legal language of a debt that's forgiven. I do think, he doesn't use the the technological or kind of computer metaphor that you're talking about, of course, but he does... I find it quite compelling, this framework of sickness and healing as a way of thinking about the work that...
• 28:23
  Chris McAlilly: And I do think it's a specifically or distinctively Wesleyan way of thinking about salvation. I think it is a gift that has come down to us from from this, this insight that comes from John and Charles Wesley and the evangelical kind of revival in England 18th century, that God desires to do, not just something for us that we can't do for ourselves, but there's something in us that is part of the work of salvation that God wants to to do in us.
• 28:55
  Chris McAlilly: And Wesley was so... he preached gonna have to wait, you know, that could about, he taught about, he came back again and again and again to Romans five, where the Holy Spirit is shed abroad in our hearts.
• 30:13
  Chris McAlilly: reoxygenate our bloodstream and take us from death to life. I mean, that is a profound promise. It's so powerful. And it's right there. It's embedded in Paul and then, and it gets, every time the church gets renewed, I mean, it gets renewed again and again. The fourth century, the 15th, 16th century, again in the 18th century. It has to do with this rereading of Romans. It comes alive again in a new way.
• 30:43
  J.D. Walt: Martin Luther is just in a dim cell as a monk, and he's all the other monks are just toasted drunk, and he's reading Romans, and he comes to Romans, one seventeen about salvation by grace, through faith, and it caught on fire, and then it just completely revolutionized the church. And in Wesley, in similar fashion, he's hearing Paul, he's hearing Luther's reading to the preface.
• 31:21
  Eddie Rester: Preface . Not even the... somebody gave me the preface one time, and I've got it in a file.
• 31:26
  J.D. Walt: We published it. We published it in a book.
• 31:28
  Eddie Rester: And it's not exciting stuff. But just in terms of reading today, but the heart of it that drew him to awaken his faith. I mean, it just amazing.
• 31:41
  Chris McAlilly: Sometimes, I think it's not even a content, it's, it's the Spirit's use of something. The spirit can pick up and use whatever, whatever one might encounter a particular moment to kind of, to move an individual, you know. So, I mean, so we started with your calling. You're in D.C. You're thinking about, the potential, or the power that you see in D.C. without the potential, and you move into this sense that you know the church might not have power, but it has potential. So how has that played out in your life? I mean, certainly this vision is powerful, this theological vision of our deep sickness at the level of our being, not even our doing, that causes a whole bunch of bad things to happen in the world. And then that kind of vision that continues to unfold for you, you're seeking ways to offer that to people. And I like what you're saying a hundred people in the city of a million.
• 32:42
  Chris McAlilly: The image that I think you've lifted up, the vision of Seedbed, the sowing tiny seeds for a great awakening.
• 32:52
  J.D. Walt: Imagine what a hundred people could do in a town of five hundred?
• 32:56
  Chris McAlilly: So just talk about why that vision continues to animate you. Just kind of, why is that still such a profound image for you?
• 33:07
  J.D. Walt: Even backing up to what you were just saying, Chris a minute ago, I think, growing up in the church, I think the question was like, who am I?
• 33:14
  J.D. Walt: And, of course, the cliche answer, well, that's not the right question. It's, whose am I? And I'm like, okay, I don't think that's the right question either. You know what? I've just kind of had my own awakening in recent times. The question is, what am I? What are we? And the Bible talks about us like in an ontological way as a phylum below angelic beings, okay.
• 33:43
  J.D. Walt: Crowned with glory and honor. We are created in the very image of God. It's cliche now, right? But it's like, oh, my- this is like talking about reading the Bible and waking up. Like what? He's saying, we carry a divine essence in us, and God puts us here in his stead to run the creation, to steward this creation that he made. And of course, sin... here's my great example I'll use on this. I actually went on amazon.com and I ordered a flux capacitor.
• 34:30
  Eddie Rester: Now you're talking my language.
• 34:34
  J.D. Walt: And the flux capacitor, of course, is the thing that powers the DeLorean in Back to the Future. But the problem is, he's got this thing, but he can't power it. And this is what I like in this, in like Psalm 139, he says, "You created my inmost being. You knit me together in my Mother's womb. I praise you because I'm fearfully and wonderfully made." I've just always been taught to read that through a pro-life lens, and you don't even really get below that to like, what is this thing saying? It's saying you got a flux capacitor at the core of your being. There's an interface there that was made to have direct, abiding union with the God of the universe, and it's been rendered unworkable by sin.
• 35:27
  J.D. Walt: Unfortunately we're born with a broken flux capacitor. And this gives meaning to me, like the whole idea of regeneration, right? The spirit comes in and regenerates the inmost being.
• 35:49
  J.D. Walt: This is the place of interface.
• 35:55
  J.D. Walt: And all of a sudden, we're back.
• 35:55
  J.D. Walt: We're back to the future, right?
• 36:02
  J.D. Walt: We're like...
• 36:04
  Eddie Rester: One of my favorite passages is, is in John one. I mean, the whole of John one is such a beautiful prolog to that gospel. Light and darkness. And it's, John's the crazy uncle that shows up at Thanksgiving and talks about things. But later on in that prolog, he talks about to all who have received Him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become, not just power, but to become children of God, to return to what I believe we were created and crafted to be in the first place. And years ago, someone said to me, and it just changed my entire understanding of what that verse meant and what you're talking about means to me that Jesus didn't come to make Christians. Jesus came to make us fully human. And I think sometimes people reject, and some reject Christianity, and sometimes rightfully so, because of what we present to them, but it's because we're not showing them a better way, a better life, a better way of being in the world. We're showing them something much smaller than that. And what John talks about, what Paul talks about, something dramatically different than what we often talk about and show people in the world.
• 37:28
  J.D. Walt: Well, the Yeah, the Bible is is revealing. They're stretching to capture what they're seeing, and they're trying to get it down into human language, and they're revealing something to us that is massively complex, and yet it's also stunningly simple. And so, I think about you asked, how's this landing on the ground here?
• 37:57
  J.D. Walt: And I'm thinking about my little confirmation class that I taught last year. I had five young women and one young man. And of course, I go in there, and I'm like, I give them all a little moleskin journal. And I just decided, you know, we got to go back way earlier than what confirmation may used to have had to go back to, we're not just going to talk about, like, the traditions of the church.
• 38:34
  J.D. Walt: You're just layering something on top of something they don't understand. And I said right in the front of your book, guys, the very front, I want to write this question. This is our real curriculum, asking for Jesus.
• 38:48
  J.D. Walt: Who do you say that I am? And because, again, I'm trying to help people move from the former way of thinking, which is Christianity equals, believe and behave. And I'm like no. Faith equals, behold and become. And we've got to get our eyes on this person, that God became a human being, and he is the paradigm of the human race. And so how we want to become more than a little bit obsessed with the person of Jesus, and we want to read. He actually, he's our teacher. Here's our textbook and he's going to teach it to us.
• 39:49
  J.D. Walt: He's going to walk us through this book, and he's going to reveal things to us, and we're going to respond to that revelation. And we're going to be transformed, not because we tried harder, but I'm saying guys, we got to break free from the try harder, to do better, to be more. That's not the gospel.
• 40:07
  J.D. Walt: That's that's believe and behave.
• 40:11
  Eddie Rester: Up and to the right is not the gospel.
• 40:14
  J.D. Walt: No, it's down into the right. It's descent and ascent. And that's mind of christ, right? Philippians two.
• 40:24
  Eddie Rester: So say a little bit, because you talked about becoming more like Christ, focusing on Christ. I know that throughout your work and your ministry, you've really focused a lot on discipleship. I used to get your daily devotional in the early days of email back in the day, and you've got a podcast now, The Wake Up Call. So tell us a little bit of just about your hope of how people can keep their focus on the person in the life of Jesus. What would you say to somebody say, I want to do that. How do I do that?
• 41:02
  J.D. Walt: It's not complicated to me. And I just started, can we read the Bible together? How about we just start reading together. Let's read it, I'm not your teacher. I'm not your guide. I'm with you reading.
• 41:22
  J.D. Walt: Jesus is our teacher. And so every day we wake up on the way, I always say that's John Wesley's favorite Bible verse, Ephesians 5:14, wake up, sleeper, rise from the dead. And I'll say to people, you know, guys, the greatest impediment to my own awakening is that I'm pretty sure I'm already awake.
• 41:43
  J.D. Walt: And so there's can we just level down a little bit and take off all the pretense? Can we check our spiritual badges at the door, and let's just not try to out do each other, but let's come as learners. That's what the word disciple means, isn't it? "Mathates", it means learner. And I'll be the chief learner. How about that? And so, we start every day with consecration. I believe the Gospels, it comes in a three fold, almost maybe four fold movement. But it's consecration, and we have a prayer. We say, Jesus, I belong to you. That sounds familiar, doesn't it?
• 42:31
  J.D. Walt: I lift up my heart to you. I set my mind on you. I fix my eyes on you. I offer my body to you as a living sacrifice all right out of the New Testament, Jesus. And I say, Jesus, we belong to you.
• 42:44
  J.D. Walt: Because, as in the early church there, they had this saying, one Christian's no Christian. And it's like, this is a "we" game.
• 42:51
  J.D. Walt: This is a team sport. And then, in the name of the Father, Son, Holy Spirit, amen, we're coming.
• 42:55
  J.D. Walt: And then we read God's word. And then we respond to it. I give some comments, we pray. I call this the transformation.
• 43:06
  J.D. Walt: Consecration is like opening the door into the Cathedral of transformation. And transformation works by revelation and response.
• 43:18
  J.D. Walt: We have to receive something.
• 43:18
  J.D. Walt: It's even flipped my whole notion of how change happens. I used to think, I got to repent first. I got to do something for God to do something. And it just, I just had this awakening one day, I'm like, no, he's already done it. I have to receive something so that then I can release something that's broken, and I started this
• 43:44
  prayer: Jesus, I receive your righteousness and I release my sinfulness. I receive your wholeness. I release my brokenness. Because transformation doesn't work by replacement. That's just self improvement. Transformation works by displacement. I receive your love, I release my self centeredness. And this is a massive shift, and it takes the pressure off, because you don't got to do something first, right? While we were yet sinners, he went first, Christ.
• 44:22
  prayer: Andrew Forrest. Y'all need y'all need to read his book, "Love Goes First", so good. Have him on your show.
• 44:28
  Eddie Rester: Andrew Forrest, I'm writing him down.
• 44:29
  J.D. Walt: He's at Tulsa. He was at Munger Place here in Dallas for a while, but he's got a brilliant book called "Love Goes First", and it's so good, and it's a word into our present day culture, frankly. How do you how do we get past the toxic division that we're living in.
• 44:47
  J.D. Walt: Anyway, transformation, then, okay, and then we say it's time to hit the fields. That's demonstration. The Gospel goes from transformation to demonstration, which is what I have. I give you. I can't give you what I don't have, but what I have, I can give you.
• 45:09
  J.D. Walt: Impartation.
• 45:11
  J.D. Walt: And I hold up the seeds, and I'm like, guys, we're going to the field, and we're going to sow today. We're going to look for places, and that's the great Franciscan prayer, right, where there's hatred, let me sow love, where there's all that. And we're going to become attuned.
• 45:32
  J.D. Walt: We are moving. Jesus is moving with us today. And I created this little thing called the Sower's Creed. And I say things like this, because Jesus is good news, and Jesus is in me, I'm good news. And I'm going to sow the extravagance of the gospel everywhere I go, and into everyone I meet. In my little town, just when I was in Houston, I like, how can I do that? I'm seeing a million people a day. What does that mean? And you know what I started doing, waving at every single person. I just wave at them in the car, and they're like, what? What did he wave at me for? Out there in I-45 traffic, and it's just a nightmare, and everybody's trying to kill you.
• 46:27
  Eddie Rester: We just honk at each other here, not happy honks, but we honk.
• 46:31
  J.D. Walt: Eddie, here's the thing. I thought, you know what I'm out here doing today. I'm trying to help other people get where they're going. And all of a sudden it changed my whole notion of traffic. And I'm like, oh, you need in. No problem.
• 46:45
  J.D. Walt: You're in. I'm like, that's what Jesus would be doing out here.
• 46:49
  J.D. Walt: He'd be helping people get home.
• 46:49
  J.D. Walt: All right, why not me?
• 46:53
  Chris McAlilly: I love this J.D., and I appreciate the reframing in a world that is broken and that is sick. There's a lot of complaining, there's a lot of grievance, there's a lot of frustration with what is happening, whatever that thing might be. And I really appreciate the reframed, it says, nope, what's going on is really at the personal level, and it's something that's happening at the level of our being. But, it's really bad, it's probably even way worse than you've ever imagined.
• 47:26
  J.D. Walt: It's a hell escape out there.
• 47:28
  Chris McAlilly: And also, the cure is far better than you ever thought it was. And what we are and what we can become, is far more than you could ever imagine.
• 47:41
  J.D. Walt: Extraordinary.
• 47:41
  Chris McAlilly: And you have something to offer. Every single individual has something to offer everybody else.
• 47:46
  J.D. Walt: Think about this, Chris, and this is again, this is a discovery of the obvious.
• 47:50
  J.D. Walt: But like, we all think about, like, how do we scale this thing? And I'm like guys, the kingdom won't scale. It won't.
• 48:00
  J.D. Walt: It'll multiply, but it will not scale. What it works, it's like, I'm very limited. And this is the thing about Jesus. When God, becomes a person, he becomes uber limited. He's one person in one place, and in fact, again, I'm just constantly discovering new things that are very old and very obvious, but they're just new to me. And the whole notion that, like Jesus, surrendered his quote, unquote, I don't know how to say this, but his"godness", so that he could show us what it looks like when a real human being is moving in the fullness of the Holy Spirit.
• 48:45
  J.D. Walt: And all of his miracles, they're not like zapping with God zaps.
• 48:51
  J.D. Walt: They're gifts of the Spirit.
• 48:56
  J.D. Walt: He's moving in gifts that are accessible to us. And he's trying to show us what it looks like when a human being is filled with God. And He is God, He's God from God, but he has emptied Himself, as the great hymn says of all but love.
• 49:15
  Chris McAlilly: Well, I think that's a perfect place to set it down. J.D., we could talk to you for a long time. So grateful.
• 49:23
  Chris McAlilly: Thanks for the time. Thank you for the conversation, and we can find you, tell us where folks can find your stuff.
• 49:30
  J.D. Walt: Well, I'd love for you to come on The Wake Up Call, and just y'all every day we sing a hymn on the Wake Up. I want you guys to come. My dad, okay, he's eighty five, he's losing his memory, he sits right beside me in that chair. We pull it up and we sing a hymn every day.
• 49:47
  Eddie Rester: You probably don't want me to sing a hymn, but I appreciate the invitation to do that.
• 49:52
  J.D. Walt: I tell people all the time, guys, we're not singers, we're worshippers. So it's, it's seedbed.com/wakeupcall And you can get to all the places from there. But I'd love it if you come.
• 50:11
  Eddie Rester: We would love to do that. It would be fantastic.
• 50:14
  Eddie Rester: We will do that. We'll put, we just need to set up a time.
• 50:17
  Eddie Rester: J.D., we appreciate you and your work and your ministry that you've offered to so many, in so many places. Thank you, my friend.
• 50:23
  J.D. Walt: Thanks guys.
• 50:24
  Eddie Rester: [OUTRO] Thanks for listening. If you've enjoyed the podcast, the best way to help us is to like, subscribe or leave a review.
• 50:34
  Chris McAlilly: If you would like to support this work financially, or if you have an idea for a future guest, you can go to theweightpodcast.com. [END OUTRO]