Four People You Meet on Your Spiritual Journey | Influence Magazine

The older I get, the more I appreciate how important people are to my spiritual journey, and yours, too. Americans tend to think of spirituality as something we do by ourselves, but for Christians, the spiritual life is something we do with others. Only together do we form the body of Christ (Romans 12:5).

When Paul talked about Christ’s body, he emphasized both unity and diversity: “In Christ we, though many, form one body, and each member belongs to all the others. We have different gifts, according to the grace given to each of us” (Romans 12:5–6).

It’s not just that we play different roles, however. At different times in our lives, we have different relationships with people in the body of Christ. This is evident in Romans 16. As I read the list of people Paul asked the church to greet, I see four relationships in particular: patrons, peers, protégés and pains.

Patrons
Patrons are people who make our spiritual journeys possible. They open doors for us and provide for our needs. In Romans 16, Paul mentioned three such people in particular.

The first and most prominent is Phoebe (Romans 16:1–2). Paul wrote Romans from Corinth. Phoebe was a deacon at the church of Cenchreae, one of Corinth’s two port cities. It is likely that Paul mentioned her first because she carried the letter to Rome, read it to the Christians there, and answered their questions about it. If so, she was history’s first commentator on Romans.

In Greek, Paul described Phoebe as his prostatis, which translates as “benefactor” or “patron.” The ancient world contained what we call patron-client relationships. Wealthy, well-connected people (patrons) provided material help and protection to those beneath them in the social hierarchy (clients) in exchange for allegiance and service. Evidently, Phoebe served as a kind of patron for many in the church at Cenchreae, including Paul himself. This probably entailed funding her church’s benevolence programs, as well as Paul’s missionary journeys.

Paul also mentioned two other patrons: Rufus’ mother, “who has been a mother to me, too” (verse 13), and Gaius, “whose hospitality I and the whole church here enjoy” (verse 23).

Each of these relationships provided Paul something he needed: financial support (Phoebe); emotional warmth (Rufus’ mother); and a place to meet and eat (Gaius).

In one way or another, patrons make our spiritual journey possible. What we owe such people is gratitude.

Peers
Peers are people with whom we share the burdens of the spiritual journey. Paul name-checked nearly 40 individuals in Romans 16. He didn’t give much information about most of them, besides their names, but he used three terms that indicate his relationships with them were on an equal footing.

The first term is synergos, “co-worker,” which Paul used to describe Priscilla and Aquila (verse 3), Urbanus (verse 9), and Timothy (verse 21). He also named several individuals who worked hard for the churches in their spheres of influence: Mary (verse 6), Tryphena, Tryphosa, and Persis (verse 12). The work here is the ministry of the gospel in some form, though we shouldn’t necessarily infer all of these people held formal church offices.

What we owe such workers is a commitment to do things right and get things done. Work teams can only succeed to the extent that everyone puts in equal labor. In the local church, there’s plenty of work to spread around, and we all should work hard alongside one another.

The second and third terms have less to do with work than with the quality of our relationships. The first is agapetos, “dear friend” or “beloved,” which Paul used to describe Epenetus (verse 5), Ampliatus (verse 8), Stachys (verse 9), and Persis (verse 12). The second is adelphos, “brother” or “sister,” which Paul used to describe Asyncritus, Phlegon, Hermes, Patrobas, and Hermas, among many others (verse 14).

Take a moment to notice something interesting about the names Paul mentioned, not only under the heading of peers, but throughout the Romans 16 list. Both Jews and Greeks made the list. Paul described both men and women as co-workers, friends, and siblings. And scholars indicate that some of the people on the list had names commonly given to slaves.

In the Church, our status “in Christ Jesus” (verse 3) makes us equal to one another — equal in hard work, friendship, and familial love — regardless of one’s sex, ethnic group, religious background, or socioeconomic status. As Paul puts it elsewhere, “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28).

Protégés
Protégés are people we help along the way. Paul named two in particular: Epenetus, “my dear friend” and “the first convert to Christ in the province of Asia” (verse 5), and Timothy, whom Paul described as his “co-worker” (21), but whom we know Paul elsewhere called “my son whom I love” (1 Corinthians 4:17).

We owe our protégés grace. In Paul’s writings, charis, which is the Greek word for grace, has two basic senses. The first is unmerited favor. This is the sense of charis in Romans 3:23–24: “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.” The second is spiritual power. This is the sense of charis in Romans 12:6: “We have different gifts, according to the grace given to each of us.”

Good patrons know their protégés will mess up on the spiritual journey. At those moments, the patrons will model God’s unmerited favor. They also know their protégés need to grow stronger in spiritual power. At times, protégés can benefit from a pep talk or constructive criticism spoken in love. Whatever the case, we owe our protégés grace in both senses of the term.

Pains
Finally, pains. These are people who make our journeys hard.

Some spiritual journeys are hard because non-Christians cause us pain. Paul hinted at this when he mentioned that Andronicus and Junia had been “in prison” with him (verse 7), and when he said Apelles “stood the test” (verse 10). These are the pains of persecution, and throughout the world, many of our brothers and sisters in Christ are experiencing them.

But the pains Paul mentioned in Romans 16:17–18 came from inside the church. I like to think of these people as church trolls. Like internet trolls, they use clever words and specious arguments to gain followers, divide churches, and exasperate cool-headed, warm-hearted Christians. As with internet trolls, the best thing you can do is ignore them.

This requires discernment, because sometimes our protégés act like trolls. (And sometimes we act like trolls!) We need the Spirit’s wisdom to know when to give grace and when to stop throwing pearls to pigs (Matthew 7:6).

___

I close with an observation and some questions.

The observation is that our relationships are not static. Everyone begins the spiritual journey as a protégé, but as we mature, we become peers and patrons. Unfortunately, sometimes we even become pains.

The question is this: Where are you in your relationships today? Who are your patrons, peers, protégés and pains? What are you giving each to enhance their spiritual journey?

May God bring the right people into your life this year so that you make good progress on your spiritual journey! And may you be the right person for someone else’s journey!

P.S. This article was written for InfluenceMagazine.com and appears here by permission.

January 15, 2021 0

How to Settle Your Soul After an Unsettling Year | Influence Podcast

This past year was an unsettling one. I like to think of it as the Year of Three Ps: pandemic, protests, and politics. Each one fomented conflict, but taken together, they were a conflict force multiplier. And that doesn’t even taken into account the normal stressors we face every year.

How can followers of Jesus Christ experience settled souls in the midst of unsettling times? That’s the question I’m talking about with Dr. Jodi Detrick in this episode of the Influence Podcast. I’m George P. Wood, executive editor of Influence magazine and your host.

Dr. Detrick is a personal coach, public speaker, and most recently author of The Settled Soul: Tenaciously Abiding with a Tender God, published by Gospel Publishing House. An ordained Assemblies of God minister, she loves to talk to people at the heart level about things that matter most.

P.S. This podcast is cross-posted from InfluenceMagazine.com with permission.

January 12, 2021 0

How Do We Know? | Book Review

How Do We Know? By James K. Dew Jr. and Mark W. Foreman is an introduction to epistemology, the theory of knowledge. It is also the inaugural volume in IVP Academic’s new series, Questions in Christian Philosophy. The next volume, How Do We Reason? by Forrest E. Baird, is an introduction to logic and comes out in April 2021.

Here is the table of contents:

What Is Epistemology?
What Is Knowledge?
Where Does Knowledge Come From?
What Is Truth, and How Do We Find It?
What Are Inferences, and How Do They Work?
What Do We Perceive?
Do We Need Justification?
Can We Be Objective in Our View of the World?
What Is Virtue Epistemology?
Do We Have Revelation?
How Certain Can We Be?

As can be seen from this table, the book asks the basic questions of epistemology. Dew and Foreman outline the most common answers to each question, noting their strengths and weaknesses. They write clearly and use everyday illustrations to make their points.

The authors note that the book is for “those with no background in philosophy,” and it brings a “Christian perspective” to bear on the topic. This perspective is most evident in the book’s discussions about the possibility of divine revelation and of Reformed epistemology.

Given that How Do We Know? is published by the academic imprint of an evangelical publisher, I assume that its primary readers will be college students, especially at Christian colleges and universities. However, readers who aren’t college students—or even Christians—can profit from the book’s discussion of the issues, which largely tracks with the content of other primers on epistemology.

One final note: This is the book’s second edition. Its major difference from the first edition is the addition of chapter 8, “Can We Be Objective in Our View of the World?”

Book Reviewed
James K. Dew Jr. and Mark W. Foreman, How Do We Know? An Introduction to Epistemology (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2020).

P.S. If you liked my review, please click “Helpful” on my Amazon review page.

January 11, 2021 0

The Trinity: An Introduction | Book Review

The Trinity: An Introduction by Scott R. Swain is the second book in Crossway’s Short Studies in Systematic Theology series. The first was Graham A. Cole’s Faithful Theology: an Introduction. According to series editors, Cole himself and Oren R. Martin, “each volume (1) introduces the doctrine, (2) sets it in context, (3) develops it from Scripture, (4) draws the various threads together, and (5) brings it to bear on the Christian life.”

Unfortunately, The Trinity does not accomplish the first two items in the editors’ list. In my opinion, one cannot understand Trinitarianism, the Christian doctrine of God, without understanding its historical development and creedal/confessional definition. Swain justifies this in terms of space limitations: “The book’s limitations in space and focus mean that it will not give extensive attention to the doctrine’s historical development, polemical uses, or more sophisticated dogmatic elaborations.” Given that this text is explicitly introductory, Swain’s choice to skip those topics—not to mention his editors’ decision to allow it—is difficult to understand.

Fortunately, what The Trinity focuses on is very helpful. Swain focuses on “the basic grammar of scriptural Trinitarianism.” He writes: “If Scripture provides the primary discourse of Trinitarian doctrine, theology is that discipline concerned with understanding and communicating Scripture’s basic grammar so that Christians may become fluent, well-formed readers and speakers of scriptural teaching.” This approach is helpful because the doctrinal definition of Trinitarianism employs terms that are not found in Scripture, terms that clarify what Scripture means and demonstrate is internal coherence. One must understand the interplay of these texts—along with the worship patterns of the early church—in order to understand why Christian theologians employed philosophical terms to define the doctrine. Only by doing so could they show the meaning and coherence of those biblical texts.

Here is the book’s table of contents:

The Bible and the Trinity: The Basic Grammar
The Bible and the Trinity: Three Types of Texts
The Simplicity of God
God the Father
God the Son
God the Holy Spirit
The Shape of God’s Triune Work
The End of God’s Triune Work

Although The Trinity describes itself as an introduction, readers need to have at least a passing familiarity with the doctrine and its basic terms before they read the book, or they might feel a bit lost in it. My guess is that the Short Studies in Systematic Theology is directed at Bible college students and seminarians, who are the most likely to consume introductory books on systematic theology. I believe pastors and theologically proficient church leaders and members can also benefit from the book. It will enrich their understanding of why sound biblical theology results in Trinitarianism, and it will help them connect what sometimes seems like an abstract doctrine to the Bible’s core concern, namely, God’s salvation of lost humanity.

Book Reviewed
Scott R. Swain, The Trinity: An Introduction (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2020).

P.S. If you liked my review, please click “Helpful” on my Amazon review page.

January 8, 2021 0

How to Fight Racism | Book Review

“Something is different this time.”

Jemar Tisby tweeted those words in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd, a black man who died while in police custody. The videotape of a white police officer kneeling on Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes resulted in widespread outrage, organized protests, and criminal indictments of the officers involved. While similar incidents had provoked such responses before, the reaction to Floyd’s death seemed different, as if American society had come to a turning point on racism.

Turns don’t make themselves, however. They have to be made. In Tisby’s words, “racial progress does not occur apart from the sustained efforts of people who dedicate themselves to fighting racism in all its forms.” How to Fight Racism is Tisby’s contribution to those sustained efforts. It outlines a model of practical action he calls “the ARC of Racial Justice,” with ARC as an acronym for awareness, relationships, and commitment.

How to Fight Racism is the companion to Tisby’s 2019 book, The Color of Compromise. That book outlined American Christianity’s tragic complicity in slavery, segregation and racism from the colonial period to the present day. (I interviewed Tisby about it here.) If that book described “complicit Christianity,” How to Fight Racism describes “courageous Christianity,” a faith that “dares to love through action and to risk everything for the sake of justice.”

The book’s ARC model begins with awareness. According to Tisby, the concept of race is “a socially constructed category that offers certain privileges and advantages to one group, which in the US context is white people, to the detriment of all those who are excluded from that group — that is, ‘nonwhite’ people, or people of color.”

So defined, race contradicts biblical theology, according to which all people are “the image of God,” and therefore “a racially and ethnically diverse church” represents God’s redemptive goal. Because race is socially constructed, we need to be aware of how it has shaped and misshaped our racial identity as individuals, as well as our history as a community.

After awareness come relationships. The goal here is racial reconciliation. This “does not mean returning to a bygone historical era of harmony but rather revising our relationships to more closely match God’s foundational pattern for human interaction,” Tisby writes. As Christians, we must pursue this reconciliation both personally and community-wide.

Personally, we need to make friends across dividing lines of race and ethnicity. According to Tisby, this is important because it is “difficult to pursue effective structural remedies to racism if you have little understanding of the personal experiences of marginalized people. Relationships make reconciliation real and motivate us to act.” Churches are a good place to do this, especially since biblical theology demonstrates that God’s redemptive goal is a racially and ethnically diverse church.

But reconciliation efforts need to move outside the church walls too. Corporately, we need to take action to build communities characterized by “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” Tisby defines those terms this way: “If diversity focuses on who is present, equity says who has access to a community’s resources and on what terms, and inclusion speaks to the sense of welcome and belonging extended to each person or group.”

Finally, there is commitment. Here, the key terms are racial justice and systemic racism. The former names the end we should seek, what Martin Luther King Jr. called “the beloved community,” while the latter names the obstacle to that goal.

“It is one matter to acknowledge that all people are made equal and have inherent dignity in their very being,” Tisby writes. “It is another matter to identify the ways the image of God is defaced in groups of people through systems and policies and to work against those injustices.”

As a middle-aged minister, I have witnessed several racial reconciliation movements sweep through the church. They start well, as people experience the good feeling of beginning friendships across racial and ethnic dividing lines. But so far, those movements have petered out because once participants got past the good feelings, they found themselves disagreeing strongly, often sharply, about the nature, causes, and fixes for the persistent disparities between white and black Americans.

I worry that our post-George Floyd moment will suffer the same fate. Tisby takes pain to root his advice in sound biblical theology, but I know that many white readers especially will disagree with his advice. At certain points in the book, I did. Nevertheless, I encourage you to read How to Fight Racism in tandem with The Color of Compromise. Even better, read them with others in your church.

The beloved community — the place of racial reconciliation and justice — only comes about if we commit ourselves to God’s will and to one another and lean into the hard conversations these books raise. If we do these things, perhaps something will be different this time indeed.

Book Reviewed
Jemar Tisby, How to Fight Racism: Courageous Christianity and the Journey toward Racial Justice (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2021).

P.S. If you liked my review, please click “Helpful” on my Amazon review page.

P.P.S. This review first appeared at InfluenceMagazine.com and is cross-posted here with permission.

P.P.P.S. I interviewed Jemar Tisby about his previous book, The Color of Compromise. Take a listen to the podcast:

January 7, 2021 0

The End Times and the Church’s Mission | Influence Podcast

According to Stephen Covey, one of the seven habits of highly effective people is beginning with the end in mind. I doubt Covey was thinking about the Book of Revelation when he identified that habit, but I can’t think of a better way to begin the New Year than by talking about the end times. So that’s what I’ll be doing with Dr. Chris Carter in this episode of the Influence Podcast, the first podcast of the 2021 season.

I’m George P. Wood, executive editor of Influence magazine and your host. Dr. Chris Carter is an ordained Assemblies of God minister, missionary to Japan, and author of Revelation: The End Times and the Never Reached, published in December 2020 by Assemblies of God World Missions. He holds a Ph.D. in New Testament Studies from the University of Aberdeen in Scotland.

P.S. This podcast is cross-posted from InfluenceMagazine.com with permission.

P.P.S. You can read my review of Carter’s Revelation here.

January 5, 2021 0

“Your Crown the Year with Your Bounty”

The year 2020 will not be forgotten soon, but it also will not be missed. Although it has been a frustrating time, its frustrations have fostered greater faith in God, who loves and cares for His people. That increased faith is what will and should be remembered.

Reflecting on 2020 and preparing for 2021, I have focused on Psalm 65:11, which says, “You crown the year with your bounty.” Psalm 65 comes as a relief after the 14 laments that immediately precede it. “Have mercy on me, O God” (51:1) gives way to “Praise awaits you, our God, in Zion” (65:1). Repeated requests for God to “hear” or “listen” to prayer (54:2; 55:1; 61:1; 64:1) result in a confident, “You who answer prayer” (65:2).

David identifies three reasons to praise the prayer-answering God in this psalm:

First, forgiveness. “When we were overwhelmed by sins, you forgave us our transgressions” (verse 3). This verse captures the great truth of the gospel that though we are a sinful people, God is a forgiving God. He always answers the cry of genuine repentance.

Second, creation. David turns from the personal to the global when he speaks of God “who formed the mountains by your power” and “who stilled the roaring of the seas” (verses 5–7). These actions remind us that God created the world with stability and order. If we rest in God’s “awesome and righteous deeds” (verse 5), we can remain calm amidst “the turmoil of the nations” (verse 7).

Third, providence. “The streams of God are filled with water to provide the people with grain, for so you have ordained it” (verse 9). In the dry Judean hills from which David reigned, water was a miracle, its presence or absence the difference between life and death. These verses remind us God is life’s source. Because of Him, “The meadows are covered with flocks and the valleys are mantled with grain.” His provision is yet another reason to “shout for joy and sing” (verse 13).

Because of Psalm 65, my prayer for life and ministry in 2021, both yours and mine, is this: Almighty God of love, maywe grow in the grace of Your forgiveness, focus on Your steadiness in the midst of our chaos, and trust in ever-greater measure that You will provide for our needs. Amen!

In this way, we will end 2021 not with 2020’s exhausted, “We survived,” but with Psalm 65:11’s joyful, “You crown the year with your bounty.”

P.S. This is my editorial in the January-March 2021 issue of Influence magazine, an HTML version of which is available here. It is cross-posted from InfluenceMagazine.com with persmission.

January 1, 2021 0

Secularism | Book Review

There are many ways to understand secularism. In Secularism, Andrew Copson notes that secularism can be understood as a catchall term for “non-religious philosophies, morals, and personal world views” and is thus akin to atheism or humanism (1). It can also be understood as a “political settlement” (xvii) or “approach to the ordering of communities, nations, and states” (1). Though Copson himself is a secularist in the first sense, his book is about secularism in the second sense.

In chapter 1, Copson derives a working definition of secularism from the French scholar Jean Baubérot, who identifies three components:

separation of religious institutions from the institutions of the state and no domination of the political sphere by religious institutions;
freedom of thought, conscience, and religion for all, with everyone free to change their beliefs and manifest their beliefs within the limits of public order and the rights or others;
no state discrimination against anyone on grounds of their religion or non-religious world view, with everyone receiving equal treatment on these grounds (2).

Chapters 2 and 3 provide a thumbnail sketch of the history of secularism in Western and non-Western societies (Turkey and India), respectively.

Chapters 4 and 5 outline the cases for and against secularism, respectively. The case for focuses on secularism as “the best religion-state arrangement to provide freedom, equality, peace, and democracy in a modern society” (47).

The case against notes Christian, Islamist, Hindu, and Communist pushback against the secularist political settlement. If the first three are examples of theocracy, loosely defined, the latter is perhaps an example of a-theocracy. The common types of argument advanced against secularism are (1) “romantic conservatism,” whereby “each person is rooted in a particular society and tradition and is bound to their fellow members of that society by culture” (70); (2) “the myth of neutrality,” which points out that secularism “explicitly favors non-religious ways of reasoning, living, and thinking over religious ones” (73); and (3) “a community of communities,” according to which “it is the group rather than the individual member of society that needs to be treated impartially by the state” (76).

Chapter 6 goes beyond Baubérot’s working definition to limn the conceptual boundaries of secularism by contrasting, among other things, “two types of Western secularism”: (1) “laicism,” which is inherently anticlerical and exemplified by France; and (2) “Judeo-Christian secularism,” which draws on both Christianity and the Enlightenment and is exemplified by the United States (80–81).

And chapter 7 identifies “hard questions” and “conflicts”: the relationship between secularism and democracy, education, blasphemy laws, religious expression (in terms of religious garb and symbols, as well as of conscience), religious diversity, and the challenge of political religion (e.g., Islamism and Hindutva, among others).

An Afterword looks at the future of secularism, concluding that it is “the best way of organizing our common life in a way that is fair to all in the context of diversity” (125).

As a Christian in America, which has no living memory of an established church, I resonated with Copson’s working definition of secularism. What he later calls “Judeo-Christian secularism” is simply the way we have done things for over two centuries. By the same token, I can understand the criticisms of secularism he outlines in chapter 5, insofar as many secularists—including Copson?—seem to argue that secularism as a political settlement ultimately depends on secularism as an ideology. I disagree with that argument because I think it’s false, because I doubt it’s neutral, and because in effect it tends to accord more and more power to the state to the detriment of other forms of power in society.

Regardless, however, Copson’s Secularism is a brief and helpful overview of the subject and well worth reading by the nonreligious and religious alike.

Book Reviewed
Andrew Copson, Secularism: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019).

P.S. If you like my review, please click “Helpful” on my Amazon review page.

December 30, 2020 0

Win the Day | Book Review

My friend Mark Batterson has a new book out today. It’s called Win the Day: 7 Daily Habits to Help You Stress Less and Accomplish More. I interviewed Mark about the book on the Influence Podcast a few weeks back. Take a listen!

I also recommended the book in the forthcoming issue of Influence magazine. Here’s what I wrote:

“Almost anybody can accomplish anything if they work at it long enough, hard enough, and smart enough,” writes Mark Batterson. In Win the Day, he identifies seven “daily habits” that will help readers “stress less and accomplish more.” Written with Batterson’s trademark combination of biblical insight, historical and scientific anecdotes, and practical application, this book will get your 2021 off to a good start. Today is the best time to start planning and working for a new year better than the old one.

As always, if you like my recommendation, please click “Helpful” on my Amazon review page.

December 29, 2020 0

My Year in Podcasting | 2020

I host the weekly Influence Podcast. Below are the 35 conversations I hosted with a variety of Christian leaders this past year. For all episodes, visit InfluenceMagazine.com/Podcast.

And if you’re looking for past years’ podcasts, here are the links: 2019 Podcasts | 2018 Podcasts | 2017 Podcasts | 2016 Podcasts | 2015 Podcasts.

Episode 238. Diane Langberg, “Christ Used His Power Redemptively, and So Should We!”