What Does a Protestant Vision of Spiritual Formation Look Like?

This transcript has been lightly edited from an automated transcription for clarity and readability. While we've worked to preserve each speaker's words faithfully, errors may remain.

1. 0:00

   KYLE STROBEL This is when folks turn to moralism, where they think, I just need to be better. That if I finally do the right thing, God will give me consolation back, right? He'll like me again.

2. 0:11

   KYLE STROBEL I'll get back on track, right? And so whether this is just straight morality, whether this is volunteering for the junior high ministry, right? That's a bad sin. It's, you know, high school's one thing, but junior high, it's like, okay, I've really messed up. I gotta go straight junior high. Or if it's, you know, I gotta fix my marriage, right? We very quickly turn to morality. And it's this false idea that somehow God is tethered to us and our behaviors.

3. 0:38

   KYLE STROBEL It was in our sin that he died for us, but now, no, he's tethered to me in a certain way that I could kind of control him if I do what is right. And I'm actually suggesting that God leads you in the desert to show you that whole enterprise is a Tower of Babel. That whole enterprise is false.

4. 0:55

   MICHAEL HORTON I'm really looking forward to this conversation with my friend Kyle Strobel. Kyle is the director of the Institute of Spiritual Formation and a professor of spiritual theology and formation at Talbot Seminary, part of Biola University. And today we're going to talk to him about spiritual formation, a topic that is very important and also very relevant to discussions today. And we're going to do this consulting his new book, When God Seems Distant: Surprising Ways God Deepens Our Faith and Draws Us Near. Kyle, it's great to have you.

5. 1:58

   MICHAEL HORTON Yeah. First of all, can you— spiritual formation, just the phrase kind of separates a room, you know?

6. 2:10

   MICHAEL HORTON This group loves it. This group is suspicious of it. How do you— tell us a little bit about what spiritual formation is from your perspective.

7. 2:21

   KYLE STROBEL Yeah, well, spiritual formation, I think, Quite simply is the Spirit's work to form us ever increasingly into the likeness of Jesus. And so spiritual formation is not a view. And this is very important to understand. And I think folks who are critical, and honestly folks who aren't critical, who have bought in, often confuse that point. Just like any doctrine, take the doctrine of the atonement, for instance, you're going to have a set of views, some within bounds and some totally outside of bounds of Christian orthodoxy.

8. 2:51

   KYLE STROBEL And so you're going to have Catholic versions, Roman Catholic versions of spiritual formation. You're going to have Eastern Orthodox versions, and you're going to have Protestant versions precisely because the gospel is going to be the governing feature to what this is. And so unfortunately, I think a lot of folks come to think this is a view of something and that there is something called a spiritual formation movement. That actually isn't accurate on the ground. There's been a conversation, there's been some instincts, there's been a lot of questions about Well, what does it mean to actually live out our faith? And there's been some authors who have spoken to that, but what has actually happened are a bunch of different views based on ecclesiology, based on theology, based on traditions. And so we always have to specify what actually are we talking about. And so in one sense, every Christian by necessity believes in spiritual formation. The question is, What is a biblically grounded, and I would certainly hope a Protestant vision of spiritual formation look like?

9. 3:57

   MICHAEL HORTON Along those lines, a lot of people in our audience, not everybody, but a lot of people come from confessional Reformed, Lutheran, Anglican traditions and are sort of wary of this thing called spiritual formation. What would you say to them to try to even challenge them to think of it differently? Because part of it is, well, spiritual formation is mainly going to church.

10. 4:32

    MICHAEL HORTON The public ministry of the means of grace, word and sacrament. And it seems like people who advocate spiritual formation are more individualistic, Pietistic, this is what you do one-on-one with God and just follow these steps and you'll be right with God. So there's that kind of concern.

11. 4:57

    KYLE STROBEL That's a great question. I think in many ways that really is an important question because what has happened, if you look back, so in 1978, Richard Foster published his book, Celebration of Discipline. And most people would put this current iteration of this conversation, they would start it with that book. And what Foster was doing was he was collecting a group of, you know, a kind of a book of disciplines that he said, we stopped talking about these. Now, it's important that we remember that. He wasn't saying these are the spiritual disciplines of the Christian life. He wasn't saying this is Christianity 101. He wasn't saying these can grow you.

12. In fact, one of the most universally agreed upon affirmations in this conversation is that spiritual disciplines cannot grow you precisely because they are means of grace. They don't work ex opere operato. You just don't do them and they enact their doing. That's not how they work. And these are simply ways of offering our life, to use the language of Paul from Romans 12, of presenting our bodies as living sacrifices. And so unfortunately, I think what has tended to happen is that Richard did not include some things. Because I would say, for instance, like, what is one of the most fundamental spiritual practices of the Christian life? It's listening to a sermon. Like, that is fundamental.

13. Like, that is so much more fundamental than silence and solitude. And yet what we don't want to do though, is say that because that is more fundamental, that silence and solitude is irrelevant. And I think what's often happened on both sides of this debate is, and I've heard, Mike, over the years, you've done a great job, I think, of speaking into these things, that we don't have to accept false dichotomies. You know, the Christian life is first and foremost going to be public, but that doesn't undermine that it is also private. It is going to be objective, but that doesn't erode the fact that we have to speak meaningfully about our subjectivity.

14. 6:57

    KYLE STROBEL It is communal, but that doesn't undermine the fact that we individually stand before God and that he died for me, as Paul says in Galatians 2:20. And so it's actually holding those together But I think what's tended to happen on the confessional side, because of the subjectivity, because of the focus on individuality, there's been a tendency to just kind of react to the one direction. And you have the same reaction on the other side, I think. And I would say on the spiritual formation side of things, most people who have been a part of this conversation, they come out of a context where they haven't actually heard the Protestant gospel. They've heard a reduction of it. And so what they have heard, now what was said and what they heard, right? We want to be careful there. Maybe there's differences. But I think in many cases, in both, what they've heard is you've been forgiven and now it's time to get your act together. And it's been debilitating, but it's also been unmoored From, well, what, get my act together? What does that mean? What does that look like? And so for someone like Dallas Willard, as a great example, and Willard, one of the things I would say about Willard is he's often quoted but rarely followed. Willard would actually tell you, he told me directly, he'd say, if you want to be faithful, go back to the Protestant tradition, go back to the founders of this and rediscover their spirituality. And don't just react to what your pastor told you.

15. 8:29

    KYLE STROBEL And I think Willard, when you listen to him, one of the things that comes clear over and over and over again is he grew up in the South in a Baptist church, whereas he looked around, the people thought, oh, I come here on Sunday. That's what it means to be a Christian. And then I live the rest of my life as if that had nothing to do with this.

16. 8:52

    KYLE STROBEL And so Willard was always saying things like, Look, going to church isn't enough. And so for the confessional crowd, I'd say, don't hear that as, that's not fundamental. What he means by that is that a Christian lives by faith, not just on Sunday mornings, but for all of life. And the gospel isn't just justification, but sanctification also. And so we have to give an account that actually makes sense of what does it mean to actually walk with Jesus?

17. 9:24

    KYLE STROBEL What does the Christian life actually look like? So that's been the driving emphasis of it. I think on the kind of— a lot of the publishing industry has then taken that and on a more popularizing level has published things that are much more reactive, reactionary, and probably not as grounded than that, unfortunately. Yeah.

18. 9:44

    MICHAEL HORTON I think of John Mark Comer, just very popular writer, and others who seem to be sympathetic with Tom Wright and Scott McKnight and others who have challenged pretty straightforwardly the doctrine of justification.

19. 10:05

    MICHAEL HORTON And so, kind of collapsing, as we would put it, the gospel into law. What would you say to that group?

20. 10:15

    KYLE STROBEL Yeah. Well, I mean, at the end of the day, that's death. I mean, this is what Paul warns about in Colossians 2 when he critiques philosophy. Right. It's interesting. Colossians 2, in my mind, is the longest passage in the New Testament where you get a vision of false spirituality.

21. 10:36

    KYLE STROBEL And there he names it philosophy, which of course the ancient philosophical world is about contemplating eternal things. It's what he calls an asceticism of the body or spiritual practices that are very commonsensical. He says they have the appearance of wisdom. And so on the surface, it's like, oh yeah, do these practices. Discipline your body and you will grow. And God has given you a kind of path to walk and now go do it. The first, I would say that isn't Willard. And so it is this weird amalgam of things if you're applying that to this conversation. And again, I see folks doing that. I think you're right about that. But that isn't at the center of what this conversation has been about. But ultimately, I think Paul's response is clear, is that This has no ability to deal with the flesh. You have to set your mind on things above where Christ is seated at the right hand of God precisely because your life is hidden with Christ in God. And so I think this crowd needs to kind of hear the depths of the gospel and recognize the temptation, particularly in modern biblical studies, to have a very narrow vision that looks at the primary context of Scripture as the ancient world rather than God's action in history.

22. 11:54

    KYLE STROBEL And I think what the Reformers give us, and you just don't get more beautiful than Calvin and Luther on this, is that salvation has a name and it's Jesus. And that singular salvation has a twofold benefit of justification and sanctification, precisely because God has given himself to you in Christ Jesus.

23. 12:17

    KYLE STROBEL Sanctification is a gift.

24. 12:19

    MICHAEL HORTON We shouldn't run away from it. As a topic because it's not as if justification is by grace and then sanctification is by work. So we're not going to talk about sanctification.

25. 12:30

    KYLE STROBEL That's right. And unfortunately, I think both sides, I mean, this is where, you know, when I hear folks in the spiritual formation conversation, more often than not, they say things like, I was told I was forgiven. And then I was told I had to get my act together. I was told the gospel was justification and sanctification was up for me. It was up to me. It was just something I had to do. And if you sit with, I think, you look at Calvin and the Institutes, even the commentaries, how often 1 Corinthians 1:30 shows up, that Christ is your righteousness, that Christ is your sanctification. And of course, the reality of the double grace that holds these together as gift.

26. And I think unfortunately, so many folks haven't been given the kind of objective reality of who they are in Christ by faith, that now they're desperate for a path to figure it out. But on the other side, I would say on the more confessional side, there is an equal temptation, I think, to focus so much on the objective, to focus so much on the corporate and the public that you miss the reality of our humanity in the subjective, in the individual, in the private, that we don't have to pick and choose between these things. Because actually in Christ, they're held together.

27. 13:48

    KYLE STROBEL And it's that, that for me, folks like Luther and Calvin so profoundly embody. But then, you know, I spend much of my time in the Puritan theological tradition and the spirituality that seeks to hold these together, not always perfectly, right? Like, we need to be honest about the Puritan tradition. There's often overreaches here and there. Naturalism shows up. Sometimes you get this overly rigorous piety that stems from a kind of scrupulosity. You get a lot of, a lot of our own Reformed figures struggled with melancholia.

28. 14:25

    KYLE STROBEL Jonathan Edwards being a great example, where there is this kind of desperation because of fear that should turn them to set their eyes on Christ and his accomplished work, that instead too often send them inward to navigate their subjectivity. We need to remember that, but we shouldn't overreact and lose our subjectivity.

29. 14:48

    MICHAEL HORTON And there were plenty of Puritans, as you point out, who didn't do that.

30. 14:54

    MICHAEL HORTON That's precisely when you need to look outside of yourself to Christ. But they were also, you know, interested in what we would today call spiritual disciplines.

31. 15:05

    KYLE STROBEL That's right. Yeah. And, you know, by and large, you know, one of the harder things I think we have to wrestle with, particularly for the folks who are coming from a more confessional This is an area in the tradition where we don't land on language. So, I mean, even thinking of what we call at Talbot spiritual theology, the Dutch would call Christian ethics or practical divinity. Some Puritans would talk about experiential or experimental divinity. Sometimes you get spirituality language show up, sometimes it's just piety. And so you have a highly amorphous language.

32. 15:43

    KYLE STROBEL And then you also have a sense where there are a whole group of people who are very, I'm thinking of the crowd you and I live in, Mike, right? We're academics, we live in the academy. It's a whole group of people that have done a really good job of understanding doctrine, but that haven't necessarily heard the call to navigate the kind of experiential depths of that doctrine.

33. 16:05

    KYLE STROBEL And unfortunately, I mean, there's plenty of circles that I'm in as a theologian, that they just don't think it's their job to do those things any longer.

34. 16:14

    MICHAEL HORTON I'm concerned about that too. I feel like there's this whole mystical tradition in Reformed and Lutheran circles that draws heavily, drinks deeply from the well of patristic spirituality and the best of the medieval scholastics, as Calvin put it.

35. 16:37

    MICHAEL HORTON Bernard of Clairvaux, his Christ mysticism shows up 26 times. Calvin quotes him 26 times in his treatment of union with Christ in the 3rd book of the Institutes. So, I mean, we have this tradition, but it seems to me that in modernity, we've gone off into rationalism on one side and experiential pietism on the other.

36. 17:03

    KYLE STROBEL That's right.

37. 17:04

    MICHAEL HORTON And have lost a lot in the bargain.

38. 17:07

    KYLE STROBEL Yeah. Yeah. One of the most profound things I think Jonathan Edwards said, so Edwards, for those who don't know Edwards very well, he's kind of an early evangelical Reformed Congregationalist, but he's helping launch the Great Awakening. And the Great Awakening, it's hard for us as moderns to understand how crazy the Great Awakening was. Everyone had to go to church. This is not an unchurched culture, right? You couldn't run for office unless you were a member of a church in this day. And 30,000 people are showing up in a field to hear Whitefield preach. Edwards is preaching a sermon, and his sermons are 2.5 inches by 2.5 inches, and he's reading them.

39. 17:44

    KYLE STROBEL I've held them at Yale as well. I've, you know, read them. And he's reading these academic treatises and people are shouting and falling on the ground. What must I do to be saved? Like, this was a chaotic time. And in the midst of it, right? Like in every movement, you have 2 sides emerge. You have people who are naively, everything's great. You have people who are naively, everything's bad. And Edwards' response, I think, is so interesting. This shows up in the introduction to the Religious Affections. And he says, what is a true work of God? Like, that's what we have to wrestle with. He says, look, whenever God's at work, what you will always find is excess, enthusiasm, and heresy. Because wherever God's at work, Satan is going to be there to mimic that work. And I think

40. 18:26

    MICHAEL HORTON He's an imitator.

41. 18:27

    KYLE STROBEL He is an imitator, and he's trying to kind of create these false images of these things precisely so we'll react away from them. And so after Schleiermacher, it's just easy to do away with our subjectivity. Or, you know, in response to rationalism, it's easy to just spin off into subjectivism rather than much more soberly sitting with our tradition and saying, what would it look like to recover this biblically rich, doctrinally informed spirituality? And unfortunately, so much of this conversation has been doctrinally uninformed because it is coming out of evangelical churches that just have given into a very pragmatic approach to both church as well as the Christian life, sadly.

42. 19:18

    MICHAEL HORTON Let's dip into your book, When God Seems Distant. You have a category here of consolation and Desolation. Can you first of all explain why that is so important in the Christian life, those categories, and why, as you argue, the Holy Spirit is present in both?

43. 19:42

    KYLE STROBEL Yeah, yeah. Yeah, well, one of the things that my co-author and I, Jon Coe, wanted to pay attention to is both, you know, we're sitting with the Protestant tradition and we're sitting with scripture. And I'll just use Exodus as an example. If you think of how God delivers his people, the Exodus Biblically is the kind of archetype, right? He has delivered us out of the land of slavery and death into his— the kingdom of his Son. He's led us out of slavery into freedom, right? You have all these images. Well, the way God delivered his people was very visibly powerful. It was very clear that God is with us. And then he kind of marches them into the desert without food or water, right? It's a very confusing thing.

44. Like, you kind of think God, like, he's going to deliver us and then he's going to establish his kingdom, right?

45. 20:31

    KYLE STROBEL That's right. And of course, that's exactly what they— are you— were there not enough graves in Egypt? Like, why are we out here? And in Deuteronomy 8, it's interesting because we're told that the Lord led them in the desert to show them what is in their hearts. And of course, in Stephen's martyrdom speech, he tells them, he tells the Pharisees that, and the Sanhedrin, that in their hearts they turned back to Egypt. And the Lord wanted to show them that. And so part of what I think is being modeled there, of course, those were real events, but part of what is being modeled there, part of what we see in the lives of the disciples with Jesus is that early on in the Christian life, it is flooded with what the tradition would call consolation, which is akin to kind of pleasure, or what I would actually argue in 1 Corinthians 3, Paul associates with milk, right? You were infants, and so I gave you milk. In our infancy, you know, every infant is a narcissist, right? They just are. Like, we don't call them that because that sounds mean, but that's what an infant is supposed to be. And so we give them— they're sponges that soak up love and presence and milk, and there's lots of milk, right? They're soaking drinking all of that up.

46. But he tells the Corinthian church, but you're actually beyond that now. You're kind of in your adolescence. You shouldn't be on milk any longer. And he calls them fleshly, which is actually a term Paul usually reserves for unbelievers. But he's saying like, an infant is fleshly. It's just not bad. But you should have matured beyond that. And one of the things that our own tradition has noticed is that the Lord often floods young believers with consolation early in their Christian life.

47. And the longer you're a Christian, you often struggle, either struggle or absolutely glory in these dear folks. Like sometimes you look at these young believers and you're like, this is so beautiful. This is so rich. There's other seasons where you're kind of rolling your eyes at them a little bit. Is that the greatest sermon of all time?

48. 22:24

    KYLE STROBEL I don't know. Is that the— like, they're just overjoyed. And part of what we argue is going on is God treats spiritual infants as infants. And he does that by flooding them with consolation. It's very young, but he's teaching them that these are beautiful things. These are the goods of the kingdom. The temptation though into that is to think that God has healed your soul like he heals blindness in Scripture.

49. 22:55

    KYLE STROBEL And so then what happens, and you see these patterns all the time, is that the Lord leads us into the desert, Consolation totally dries up. And suddenly what comes to the surface is, oh, that anger I thought I left behind is still here. Oh, I'm bored. That sermon not only wasn't the best sermon I ever heard, I'm now criticizing it the whole way home to my wife. What's happening in this? And the danger is that people think consolation is the goal. And that is, I think, precisely what the Lord constantly teaches his people, is you actually don't want me quite. You want consolation. I've given myself to you.

50. 23:38

    MICHAEL HORTON Will you be here? I am your consolation.

51. 23:40

    KYLE STROBEL I am your consolation. And I am your consolation in the desert. I am your consolation in Gethsemane. I am your consolation when you too cry out, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? All of these things are gifts. They're never something to fix because ultimately what grounds you isn't your present experience, but Christ, the risen and ascended Lord, who is your righteousness and who is your sanctification? And so the goal isn't to try to certainly use God to get consolation back, even though I think young believers will actually think that feels more faithful. Because young believers often associate consolation with God's presence. And notice the problem is they're still thinking like infants. They're trying to live by sight, not by faith.

52. 24:31

    KYLE STROBEL And the Lord's training is always a training by faith. But what's, I think, so profound about this is that the Lord treats us developmentally.

53. 24:40

    KYLE STROBEL He relates to us as infants. He relates to us, to use the 1 John paradigm, as children, young men, and as fathers, right? Like, he relates to us according to our maturation because he's trying to train us in faith. What ends up happening is our flesh arises and says no. We need to go back and recover consolation. And so this is where I think a lot of folks go looking for all sorts of things. So in the book, we actually name several temptations. This is when folks turn to moralism, where they think, I just need to be better, that if I finally do the right thing, God will give me consolation back, right? He'll like me again.

54. 25:21

    MICHAEL HORTON I'll get back on track.

55. 25:49

    KYLE STROBEL It was in our sin that he died for us, but now, no, he's tethered to me in a certain way. That I could kind of control him if I do what is right. And I'm actually suggesting that God leads you in the desert to show you that whole enterprise is a Tower of Babel. That whole enterprise is false. One of the other key temptations, I think, particularly today, maybe more than in the tradition, is I think people begin to think that what I need is to pump passion into my will. And one of the things we do in the book is, and this is something I learned from Edwards, but certainly is in the tradition well beyond Edwards, is a distinction between affections and passions. Affections are part of your rational personhood. So if you want to know what you're affectionate about, it's very simple. You don't turn to your feelings, you turn to your decisions. Where do you spend your money? How do you spend your time? What do you give yourself to? Your affections govern and guide your life because they're a part of your intellectual vision of what the good life is. Your passions are things that begin in your body and often kind of work against you. And so passions lead you to disintegration. They unintegrate you as a person. This is why you often feel undone by them. I mean, think of being overtaken with like road rage or something like that. This is not a rational person any longer. They've actually become animalistic, we might say.

56. 27:18

    MICHAEL HORTON Which is why passions comes from Latin passio, suffer.

57. 27:20

    KYLE STROBEL That's right. Yeah, because it's done against you, right? Whereas affections integrate your life and often will awaken your passions. Because it's going to turn out actually, when an affection awakens passions, that's going to help you enable difficulty and navigate difficulty.

58. 27:36

    KYLE STROBEL Unfortunately, in the modern era, if Thomas Dixon is right, and I think he is, that the language of emotion was designed to de-Christianize psychology. We have lost our Christian understanding of psychology, and we've put it under the banner of emotion. Turns out, by the way, no one knows what emotions are. I've interviewed psychologists about this, and every psychologist I talked to had a totally different view. No one knows what emotions are. And that's by design. They were designed to be very opaque precisely because they wanted to kind of de-Christianize psychology.

59. 28:12

    KYLE STROBEL So we think of emotions as, again, these, this kind of things that happen to us. And then we think, well, of course, God's not against our emotions. And what ends up happening is, again, going back to our baby, our infancy in Christ, where we probably were very passionate because we were very fleshly, that we come to believe what'll fuel the Christian life is passion. And what we fail to see is the passion I'm using in worship and to fuel the Christian life is the same passion that's driving my lust and my sin. And that is the same fountain in the soul.

60. 28:48

    KYLE STROBEL And passions are the kind of things that burn very hot. They burn very quick, and they do not light a life on fire. They feel

61. 28:56

    MICHAEL HORTON They burn people out.

62. 28:57

    KYLE STROBEL And they burn people out. If you give yourself to passion, you'll feel consumed. And I think one of the things we see right now is so many people just feel consumed because at some point they go to pump passion into their soul and it doesn't work any longer. Because that's not what passions are for. And so instead of having an affection that guides a life, they end up with these hot and fast— I remember I used to work at a camp and—

63. 29:29

    KYLE STROBEL Yeah.. And one of my jobs was to get up at 5 in the morning and light a fire under a cauldron of water because you'd fill half the bucket of hot water, then you'd pump the rest of the bucket with cold water, and then you'd walk in a room and hang that bucket up, and there was a little shower head underneath it. And I came to realize that there were these dried-up pine needles. Man, you could light these with a match and they would take off, but they burn so hot and so quick, they actually wouldn't even light the kindling on fire. That's what passions are. And so we have people who think, I just need to get more passionate because it'll— it feels so meaningful. It feels like this will drive my life.

64. 30:08

    MICHAEL HORTON Or what's your passion? Everybody asks. What's your passion?

65. 30:10

    KYLE STROBEL What are you passionate about? And that's somehow defining who you are. And I think what our own tradition would tell us is that that's the way to be tossed by the waves of this world, that you need an integrated affection that is governed by a will where you are coming to will the things of God precisely because he's the Lord who both wills and works in you, as Paul says in Philippians 2:12-13.

66. 30:36

    MICHAEL HORTON So this is not against desire. This is not against Not at all. Affections, but passions are the disturbances of the soul.

67. 30:46

    KYLE STROBEL That's right. And this is why the tradition would say God is affectionate, but not passionate.

68. 30:51

    KYLE STROBEL Right? Because God isn't overtaken. Right? God doesn't fly off the handle.

69. 30:56

    KYLE STROBEL God, in his infinite simplicity, only moves out of the depths of his blessedness, of his belovedness. And even though on our side of things, it might not feel that way all the time, That doesn't define who God is. God is internally stable in himself, as it were. And the call for us is to have integrated rational lives. So we actually are moving in a way that is in self-control.

70. 31:23

    MICHAEL HORTON And this is Paul teaches this, right? We need to the passions of the flesh need to be submitted to the Word of God and not to That's right. Their own, you know, eating our own innards.

71. 31:37

    KYLE STROBEL That's right. Yeah. And you know, why do you murder? Is it not the passions that are at war within you? You know, and James is going to give you— so the passions are these things. This is ancient psychology. We kind of recognize this distinction. And so I think by losing that, so many of our people, it just feels true to them. And I think this is where it's so important to enter into and pastor in people's subjectivity. We can never underestimate that what feels true to people has a kind of intellectual power.

72. And so while it is true that you shouldn't follow your feelings, that shouldn't lead you to ignore them. We have to learn how to navigate them in light of the gospel.

73. 32:21

    MICHAEL HORTON Especially today, Kyle, as you know better than anybody, in terms of apologetics and understanding where even our own young people are in church these days, If we don't address the subjective side, you know, that's where we're losing a lot of people.

74. 32:40

    MICHAEL HORTON It's not; there are a lot of people who would, you know, check the right doctrines, but do they want God?

75. 32:51

    KYLE STROBEL Yeah. And this is where, again, I think part of what has been missing is teaching that integrates all of these things. And one of the axioms that I think is just true about human institutions in general is that human institutions just have a way to always gravitate towards incoherence and chaos. And I think we're always having to bring them back to order. And I think one of the things that can happen in the church is that people can hear good and true teaching, But they miss that teaching, how it actually shapes and governs a life. And the assumption on the pastoral side is it'll just figure itself out. On the other side, increasingly, the laity are beginning to think that they can't speak into this. And so they're turning elsewhere and they're outsourcing navigating the inner world of their personhood.

76. 33:48

    KYLE STROBEL When our tradition speaks to this profoundly. I mean, Calvin has this wonderful turn in the commentary on the Psalms where he talks about how growth in holiness doesn't feel like growth in holiness. This is actually a common refrain in the Protestant tradition where, and you see this in Edwards. Edwards actually says at the end of his life that he thinks he was a better Christian for the first 2 or 3 years he was a Christian than he is today. And notice he's looking at consolation there. He's thinking like, man, I was excited back then.

77. 34:17

    KYLE STROBEL And he looks at his state, he's like, you know, I'm a little more ambivalent. Like, I kind of think I should be more passionate than I am. Like, he's thinking all those things. And he knows that's not true, but he also can feel how persuasive that is.

78. 34:30

    KYLE STROBEL But he says, but I know I depend on God more than I ever did. And one of the things he knows, because this is what holiness does, holiness will always lead you to see how deep your sin goes. You shouldn't despair in that because hope isn't found in you. It's found in Christ. Christ. But the problem is when you, if you look at that, you can begin to wonder. And if you look for assurance there, you can then begin to kind of spin. And it's not enough to just tell that kind of at people.

79. We actually have to shepherd people into the truth of these things and show how the objective dynamics of the gospel actually should give shape and guidance to their inner life. And I think unfortunately that hasn't happened. And I think people are feeling that.

80. 35:14

    MICHAEL HORTON Yeah, even And in the Heidelberg Catechism, I love it when you hit very difficult doctrines summarized in such a beautiful way and a simple way for anyone to understand, followed up by the question, how does this comfort you? So what, basically?

81. 35:34

    KYLE STROBEL Yeah, that's right.

82. 35:35

    MICHAEL HORTON And I think we need to do that more. How does this make you feel?

83. 35:44

    MICHAEL HORTON That's really what that question is. How does this comfort you? Well, also, how does this disturb you? How does this confront you? How does this—

84. 35:53

    KYLE STROBEL Yeah, no, that's exactly right. And I think one of the things that that will teach us is that we actually have to draw near in reality and not in fantasy. That because of the Protestant gospel, because Christ is our salvation, because he has secured in his person, I don't have to be afraid of what I find in myself. And one of the common refrains in the Reformed spiritual tradition is you actually have to bring the truth. God knows the truth of your life. He's not afraid of it. He's not tossed by the waves of your anger. But if you actually in practice feel anger, clean it up, then only pray about it in the past tense, You are, it's a kind of practical rejection of the gospel because you haven't believed it all the way down.

85. To believe it all the way down is to come in the truth and trust that Christ will meet you there. Not irreverently, not bombastically, but to offer your, to present yourself, Romans 6, or present your body, Romans 12, as a living sacrifice to God.

86. 37:00

    MICHAEL HORTON Today, not just—

87. 37:03

    MICHAEL HORTON Back when I That's right.

88. 37:06

    MICHAEL HORTON You write that conflating the Spirit's work of consolation with our spiritual practices is one of the main mistakes of our spiritual childhood. I think to a lot of people, that is spiritual disciplines. Can you unpack that?

89. 37:23

    KYLE STROBEL Yeah. Yeah. Well, again, this is trying to say a lot of people, when they turn to spiritual disciplines here— now, again, when I think the spiritual formation conversation, this is a synonym of means of grace. I've critiqued the language of spiritual disciplines because it sounds a little too much like the gym to me. Like, I know what the— I know what— I might not go, but I know what the discipline— I know what that looks like. I can imagine, right? I know what physical discipline looks like. I prefer the traditional language of means of grace because it locates it doctrinally, but that's what we're talking about, right? And unfortunately, a lot of folks, when they talk about spiritual disciplines, they are divorcing it from the corporate means of grace. And I was saying, no, no, there's one sort of thing.

90. There's public means of grace, and those are going to order and govern and guide the private means of grace. But the focus on the public should never take our attention off of the private, but that should govern and guide it. And unfortunately, when people do kind of maybe focus more on their private devotional lives, we might say now, Whether that's, you know, probably I'll take this morning. I am a kind of get up early and do your devotions evangelical. So every morning I'm up, I use Jonathan Gibson's Be Thou My Vision. I was meditating through the Heidelberg this morning and the 400th anniversary edition. So you have all those passages built in there, which is wonderful. And that's a part of private devotion. I don't do that because I think it's going to awaken consolation in me. The danger, particularly when the Lord leads us in the desert, everything feels dry, we're bored, we're tempted to look for a fix. When again, what does the Lord tell us? I led you in the desert to show you what is in your heart. I actually need to see, wow, Lord, I'm doing this not because I want you, not to present myself to you. I'm doing this because I just want you to give me what I want.

91. 39:20

    KYLE STROBEL I just want to feel better about my life. It doesn't help to just ignore that, but I have to then lay that down. And I've got to discern, like, what is my calling as a Christian? To offer myself to the Lord. It's not to generate consolation. That's the fleshliness of our infancy that makes its way into our spiritual lives. By faith, I'm offering myself to the Lord saying, Lord, I am yours.

92. 39:47

    KYLE STROBEL I'll offer myself to you wherever you lead me, whether that is Gethsemane, or whether that's the mountaintop, or wherever it is. And I think unfortunately, because in our youth, things were so exciting, things were so passionate, things felt so meaningful, we think that that's the place and only place God works.

93. 40:08

    KYLE STROBEL And we don't end up praying to a God like Paul who might give us a thorn of the flesh, a messenger of Satan to harass us. To keep us humble, to know that his grace is sufficient for us.

94. 40:20

    MICHAEL HORTON Sounds like you're also— this is— there's a parallel here in Luther's emphasis on the theology of the cross versus theology of glory.

95. 40:28

    KYLE STROBEL That's right.

96. 40:29

    MICHAEL HORTON And hiddenness, revealedness, where we think God is most absent, there he is most present.

97. 40:40

    MICHAEL HORTON With the cross being a perfect example. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? And yet right at that very moment, when everyone around him, the disciples had fled, it looked like God had abandoned his Son. At that very moment, God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself.

98. 40:57

    KYLE STROBEL That's exactly right. Yeah. And this is where in the Puritan tradition, the language that— it doesn't get quite codified, but the language that gets used is God often leads his people in what they would call spiritual desertion, where it's not the dryness of the desert, which just feels dry. It now actually feels like God has abandoned you. And this is where with Paul, we say, therefore I'll boast all the more gladly. Or with Jesus, we accept the cup offered to us. We don't judge God's presence in our feelings and in our experiences. We rest on faith. And it's there that we come to offer ourselves to the Lord, whatever he offers us. And I think, yeah, Luther's been a profound guide me. One of my favorite Luther quotes is, if you look at yourself apart from Christ, you're done for. And that's exactly right. But that shouldn't be heard as then stop looking at yourself. No, look at yourself with Christ. Because what you see in yourself doesn't define you, Christ does, which is why you can now see the truth and offer the truth to him.

99. 42:03

    MICHAEL HORTON Sin isn't afraid of religion, you say? Can you comment on that?

100. 42:09

     KYLE STROBEL Yeah, you know, this is my evangelicalism coming out, probably. This is my, you know, one of the things that comes clearly, I think, of C.S. Lewis really hit hard on this theme, particularly in The Screwtape Letters, is that religion and what I would call a kind of religiosity, as it were, is oftentimes one of our greatest temptations to hide the This is why I think in Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, there's a pathway to hell from the gate of the celestial city, right? That there's this temptation to look by sight at my religion, precisely to not set my mind on things above where Christ is seated at the right hand of God. And again, I would And what I was getting at there was similar to what Paul was getting at in Colossians 2 or Galatians 3, where there's a temptation in Galatians 3 to begin in the Spirit, but try to perfect ourselves in the flesh. That the moralistic temptation is actually a temptation of self-made religion, right? It's a temptation to take good things God has given, but use them as my own agenda of ascension. And this is Israel's great temptation. This is why they have to prophetically hear, do not say this is the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord. This is why you have the kind of Jeremiah polemic against the very things God's given them, feasts and festivals and sacrifices.

101. But we hear the call for a broken and a contrite heart. And so the danger of anything external, which again, I don't want to lose the external because it's— the Lord has given us those for a reason, is going to be to actually turn to the external as a place to fix our gaze rather then walking by faith. Instead of it being a means, it becomes the thing itself. And this is, you know, most dangerously, I would say, what is going on in Matthew 7, where before the judgment seat, one gives their ministry resume to Jesus, which as an aside, if you find yourself before Jesus giving your ministry resume, it's probably the wrong move. But

102. 44:22

     KYLE STROBEL Judgment Day. I'm not sure that's what you want. But they kind of slide that, take a look at this, you know, I've done miracles. I've done Wonderful works. And the response they hear isn't a rejection of that truth, interestingly enough, but it's the claim is, I don't know you, which I take to be, you didn't give yourself to be known. And I think this is where we have to remember the external signs are precisely means, and they're means of self-gift, precisely because God has given himself to us in Christ Jesus.

103. 44:51

     MICHAEL HORTON And it seems like, as you're talking, antinomianism drinks from the same well. So you're— when you were defining legalism and moralism, returning, you know, to the gifts rather than to the giver, God gave all these good gifts, but we're turning them into the ultimate object of our— that sounds a lot like what the antinomian does too.

104. 45:18

     MICHAEL HORTON Taking God's good gifts, not to lift their hearts to the giver, but for us to just indulge the flesh.

105. 45:27

     KYLE STROBEL That's right. Yeah. And it's, you know, again, I would say for the confessional crowd listening, you know, this is— antinomianism is such a temptation precisely. And again, why does Paul say things like, shall we then sin that grace may abound? Like, there's a recognition that if you've heard the gospel, it is so profound. There can be an overreaction.

106. 45:45

     MICHAEL HORTON You might ask that question, right?

107. 45:47

     KYLE STROBEL Yeah. And I would say you should ask that question. Like Paul rhetorically in Romans is trying to show you, if you're following me, you're probably saying this now. Or I think of Luther, when Luther attacks the Lutherans. You know, it's really interesting. And he tells them that they, the Lutheran pastors become good Easter preachers and bad Pentecost preachers.

108. 46:09

     MICHAEL HORTON Interesting.

109. 46:09

     KYLE STROBEL And it's precisely because they had stopped talking about the 10 Commandments and the 3rd use of the law and what it actually means to walk in obedience And I think this, yeah, this is the constant temptation is to overreact, to choose one over the other, when actually

110. 46:25

     MICHAEL HORTON We're like a drunk who gets up on one side of the horse and falls off the other side.

111. 46:32

     MICHAEL HORTON And that was in the antinomian controversy. Yeah.

112. 46:34

     KYLE STROBEL That's exactly right. And that's such an apt metaphor. Luther is great for these things, right? Like, that's such a perfect image because that's exactly what we see in church history happening. is we see every generation, people see the problem. And instead of soberly, in light of Scripture and tradition, resting in the teaching we've had offered and walking by faith, we have this overreaction on one side or the other. And then precisely because someone else is reacting differently than we are, reacting to them. And it just does

113. 47:05

     MICHAEL HORTON In a social media world.

114. 47:06

     KYLE STROBEL And in a social media world, it really lacks sobriety. And it's very tempting to just constantly react rather than really drink deeply from the wells we have.

115. 47:18

     MICHAEL HORTON Kyle, you suggest that when we think about these things, we're talking about with our Luther quotes, you quote Luther where he says, the chief article and foundation of the gospel is that before you take Christ as an example, you accept and recognize him as a gift. As a present that God has given to you and that he is your own. This means that when you see or hear of Christ doing or suffering something, you do not doubt that Christ himself, with his deeds and suffering, belongs to you. On this you may depend as surely as if you had done it yourself, indeed, as if you were Christ himself. Why is it that we tend to So easily forget and lose our grip on the gospel when we think of our own spiritual life and growth.

116. 48:08

     KYLE STROBEL Well, I mean, that Luther quote, I mean, it doesn't get any better than that. I mean, Luther does just such a profound job of just constantly and just pastorally grounding us in the proper ordering of the gospel. And again, remember, this is proper ordering. He doesn't say imitation of Christ isn't meaningful or important.

117. 48:29

     MICHAEL HORTON He isn't an example.

118. 48:30

     KYLE STROBEL Exactly. And we, again, have a tendency to pick one or the other. But one of the things that I've learned, and this is, you know, I grew up in kind of a megachurch evangelicalism that was very pragmatic. I was kind of tossed by the waves of my own sin, of my own vices, and I didn't get help with it. So all I knew was to kind of trust and kind of really just hope blindly that maybe God has forgiven me and will continue to forgive me. But then I just kind of thought, I've just got to get my act together. And Luther saved me from a lot. It was this message of Luther where I came to receive, oh my goodness, it really is finished.

119. Christ really has accomplished all. But one of the things that Luther and then the Puritan tradition helped me see was that actually every day my flesh tells me something different. Every day, I mean, for Luther, Satan tells me something different. That I have to actually reframe my experiences. And one of the things I think that's easy to forget, it's not like this, that we're now as Christians, just neutral agents. No, we too, just like institutions, are constantly gravitating towards the disorders of worldliness, of the flesh, of the devil. And we have to recognize, I am inclined on a daily basis to forget that truth.

120. 49:54

     KYLE STROBEL And to trade the gift for something I now have to do on my own. And then I would just say culturally, there is an unfortunate movement, and you referenced it earlier, particularly among New Testament scholars, I think, because the primary goal now is to get behind Scripture into the Greco-Roman and Jewish background behind the text. We actually end up pitting Jesus and Paul against each other. And really, we've tried to take the Gospels and freeze them as a kind of spirituality of themselves. And unfortunately, a lot of people have missed the fact that Christ reigns today at the very right hand of God, and he is enacting his offices in and through his church today. And I don't have to kind of just look backwards for an example. And I think unfortunately, a lot of people, they don't know that. And so they actually just are, you know, I guess Jesus is just a philosopher who just did give me a path.

121. 50:50

     KYLE STROBEL and I just have to enact it, which by the way was definitionally Pelagianism. And I think whether it's of the individual variety or of the more liturgical variety, Pelagianism unfortunately has come back in force. And as much as everyone says, I've never read a book on spiritual disciplines that does not say spiritual disciplines cannot form you. Unfortunately, because we're in a life hack generation and a self-help generation, I think inevitably, people hear that. And so we have to do more than just say it. The very kind of mode of our preaching, of our writing, of our teaching, like all of it actually has to reframe this in the way Luther did. No, Christ is received as gift. And it's only to use Colossians 2:19, it is only as we know the growth that comes from God that we corporately grow into him who is our head.That is how we grow into the likeness of Jesus.