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Joshua Spatha's link: His book "Mere Spirituality" releases August 5th

https://www.mperspective.org/

Summary (This is a 2 part episode)

In this episode of Kingdom Crossroads, host T.S. Wright interviews Joshua Spatha, an experienced missionary and author of 'Mere Spirituality.' They discuss Joshua's journey into missions, the importance of understanding different worldviews, and the need for a balanced approach to spirituality that integrates both emotional and rational elements. The conversation also addresses the decline of Western civilization, the role of morality in societal success, and the hope for revival and reformation in contemporary culture. Joshua emphasizes the importance of purity and spiritual disciplines in aligning with God's will and fulfilling the Great Commission.

Takeaways

Joshua Spatha has a diverse background in anthropology and Old Testament studies.

Understanding worldviews is crucial for effective worship and engagement with God.

A balanced approach to spirituality integrates both emotional and rational elements.

Western culture tends to prioritize rationality over spirituality, leading to a disconnect.

Fasting is a spiritual discipline that aligns our will with God's.

The decline of Western civilization is evidenced by various cultural and moral shifts.

Revival and reformation are necessary to avert societal collapse.

The church has the resources to complete the Great Commission in this generation.

Purity is essential for a strong spiritual walk with Christ.

Cultural narratives shape our understanding of spirituality and morality.

Sound Bites

"Revival and reformation are our only chances."

"To whom much is given, much is required."

"Purity is crucial in your walk with Christ."

Welcome to the show that combines biblical truth with the purpose of sparking revival.

Committed to spreading the gospel.

This is your Kingdom Crossroads podcast.

And now your host, T.S.

wright.

Welcome everyone to the Kingdom Crossroads.

I'm your host, T.S.

wright and I'm so glad you could join us today.

Before we dive into today's episode, if you haven't already, just take a moment, make sure you follow or subscribe and give us a like.

And we thank you for being a part of the Kingdom Crossroads community and also you may check us out on our website@www.godcenteredconcept.com which is the main sponsor of the Kingdom Crossroads.

Well, here we are and we are going to have a special guest on today.

Joining us is Joshua Spatha.

He has majored in anthropology with a minor in Old Testament studies and before he began serving in full time missions.

Yes, that's right.

He is an ordained minister, a student of history, Joshua has led collegiate, I should say level discipleship and missions and is currently preparing to move long term to Central Asia.

He is married to a lady from Singapore and is the proud father of three multicultural boys.

His book mere a Rare Embrace of the Supernatural in the Crisis of Our Age getting ready to come out.

As a matter of fact, it's coming out August 5th.

I'm going to post the show on August 4th.

So that way you guys.

So this is August 4th and that is when you guys are going to hopefully jump on this and you can buy the book the next day.

So Joshua, with all that said, welcome to the show.

All right.

Thanks for having me.

You bet.

It's great to have you here.

So, Joshua, just to start us off here, I've given a quick bio, but I'm not gonna be able to do it justice like you.

So why don't you tell us about your journey and just give our audience here an understanding of kind of what the path has been for you.

Yeah, very scientific kind of analytical mind as a kid and wanted to kind of go into engineering while I was in high school, but was talked out of that by a family friend, ended up going to university to really because I wanted to kind of put that analytical mind to something a little bit bigger, a little greater studied origin theories, anthropology and historical geology and cosmology kind of to keep my sanity during those, those years.

I also picked up a minor in Old Testament studies from the only religion professor on campus who was a Jewish professor and was planning on going to Dallas Theological Seminary after that and was accepted, had a scholarship, had taken entrance exams.

And then like a month or so before classes started, administration office called me and said that the funding for their scholarship had fallen through.

So kind of a last minute change of plans.

I wasn't able to go.

And at that time another friend of the family sat me down and told me, joshua, I've been praying for years that you wouldn't go to seminary.

And out of that conversation he kind of pulled, pointed me in the direction of missions, specifically YWAM or Youth with a Mission.

And it was kind of one of those moments where I felt the finger of God on me and felt that that was what I was supposed to do.

And very shortly after God enabled me to actually do it.

And so did a different dts, not Dallas Theological Seminary, but discipleship Training school with YWAM out in Denver.

And then did my field phase down in the Amazon and came back race support, went on staff and have been with the organization ever since.

So coming up on 20 years now.

Oh, wow.

So, man, that's, I love listening to that journey.

That's, that is, that's a fascinating journey, to be honest with you.

And now what I want to do is kind of dive into some of your maybe your thinking.

Okay.

And look at your worldview in the spectrum of this book, Mere Spirituality, the one that you're promoting and obviously getting ready to release on August 5th.

Can you explain kind of what a warm worldview is or a cool worldview is?

And why does that matter?

That we need to have that understanding and, and all those pieces and, you know, how do we define that?

I'm just going to let you take that away.

Yeah.

The idea kind of stemmed from the book kind of opens with this passage when Jesus is talking to the woman saying that we have to worship God in both spirit and truth.

And so kind of putting, putting those on a spectrum, if you will, and temperature, I felt kind of illustrated that spectrum well with spirit being on the warm end of that worldview spectrum and truth being on the cool end and how that correlates to us in how we think and process and interact with the world around us.

Truth being the more rational, scientific kind of thinking of the typically associated with the left brain and spirit being more like the experiential, emotional, artistic, right brained individual.

You know, in Christianity we also use, you know, colloquialisms and phrases like head and heart, you know, versus.

Is it just information or knowledge that you have, which is good, that's necessary for a biblical worldview.

But it has to be combined with a spiritual understanding, an emotional involvement, and a full integration, if you will, of head and heart so that we can worship God properly.

He designed both.

Obviously one is not necessarily right or wrong or better than the other.

But if you know anything about psychology or personality tests, however much, you know weight you want to give those, but you definitely understand that people are wired different and they're going to have a natural bias kind of to one of those poles or the other.

Yes, as well as.

Then on top of the personal kind of hardwiring or personality type, then you're also going to have cultural influences.

And different cultures being obviously just an amalgamation of different people and their own personalities forms a kind of a cultural narrative which then kind of reinforces and usually prioritizes one end of that spectrum or the other.

So in a Western culture, we very much are rational, scientifically minded, at least we claim to be.

That's the view we like to have of ourselves.

We definitely come from kind of a heritage of Greek philosophy and Greek thinking, which ironically also very much incorporated spirituality.

But we have leaned very heavily into the rational, materialistic side of that.

And therefore spirituality in our modern culture is at times looked down upon or just kind of disintegrated from our everyday lives.

And so I really wanted to reintegrate those things and, and show the merit of both sides of that spectrum so that we stop lobbing hand grenades at one another and realize the sanctity of both sides.

And also to encourage us, whichever side of that spectrum we may find ourselves on.

I don't think we can necessarily change to some degree.

But I'm not here advocating if you're a, on a personality spectrum, if you're a very hyper rationalistic or data driven individual, I don't think you're going to be able to shift over to become this hyper emotionally driven individual.

But what we can do is grow our perspective to where we're a more holistic and balanced individual.

And so that was one of the elements of kind of understanding that spectrum, to understand ourselves where we might lie and therefore where some of our weaknesses, our biases and prejudices almost against those who are on the other side and learn to overcome that.

So interestingly enough for you listeners, I teach at a high school, as well as doing all this ministry stuff, I teach sociology, psychology and civics.

So the things he's describing, you need to really listen to these things because they play a huge role.

If you're sitting in our discipleship series, our second lesson in the very first book is hitting exactly what Josh was talking about, about culture and how our culture is derived from.

From a traditional culture.

It's basically Hellenistic point of view, from the Greek side.

And what's happened is, over time, Rome was most likely founded by an exiled Greek, and they carried that philosophy, and that just became more sophisticated in the Roman Empire and all the way through this history in Europe.

It's basically just grown in sophistication, both as technology has become more sophisticated, but also sociologically.

What's happened is that sophistication has just manifested into what we have now is what we call Western society.

Joshua is hitting this point.

I'm telling you guys, you need to read this book, because the things he's talking about, he is spot on.

He is absolutely spot on.

It fits right into our discipleship series that we're doing and the things he's talking about.

And I really hope that you guys will take the time to go and purchase his book on this.

And so, Joshua, I have another question for you.

And as you and I are exploring this subject, talk a little bit about the.

Just from our Western cultural point of view worldview.

I should say, talk about maybe some of the practical things that we need to do to really implement biblical principles in a way that Jesus meant for them to be done, not the way that Western society interprets, but the way that they should be, and how we kind of cross that cultural dividend.

Because I teach some of this in the discipleship, I want to hear you explain it, because I think our listeners need to hear this.

Yeah, I mean, the book starts off unapologetic, kind of getting people over the hurdle that they might have of even accepting a spiritual reality and shows actually the logic and the rationale behind it, but then shifts gears to, once that is established, then, okay, then how do we actually engage with that spiritual reality?

Because obviously, there's a lot of different viewpoints on that out there, a lot of different religions and cultural traditions which man has developed in order to try to reconnect with the spiritual realm.

And so I kind of then go into what we would often just call spiritual disciplines and how we can reengage in that connection and relationship with God.

But I'll pick on one of those just to give an example of how there's kind of a very different understanding in the Eastern Jewish mentality versus how it's kind of been translated or interpreted over the years with our more Greek thinking minds and heritage, and that would be the subject and discipline of fasting.

So of all the spiritual disciplines, fasting is probably the one that I've encountered with students that they understand the least or they practice the least.

And so I've found just kind of unpacking it and helping them understand what it is and why we actually practice it is very beneficial.

Oftentimes, and this isn't true of just college age students, this is true of adults, churchgoers, et cetera.

Oftentimes, our understanding of fasting is kind of like a way that we can impress God, a way that we can kind of twist his arm to get him to do the thing that we're praying for him to do.

You know, we kind of view it as a hunger strike.

And it's like, God, I'm not moving until you do this.

But that is the exact opposite of what fasting is supposed to accomplish.

It is not a tactic in which we get God to align with our will.

It is a spiritual discipline that helps us to align with his.

And the background understanding of what fasting is from a Jewish perspective, again, vastly different from how your average Christian understands it today in the Western world, because we have associated the spirit, the spirit being in different ways than Greeks have, or, sorry, in different ways than Jews or Hebrews did.

And so this is classic head and heart, you know, misalignment.

Oh, yeah.

In that and even beyond that.

Because if you were to ask the average person today, like, where does your soul reside?

Or where does your spirit reside?

In English, a lot of times those two words are interchangeable, even though obviously in Scripture they are not.

But if you were to just say that where does your soul and spirit reside?

Most Americans or Westerners today would kind of scratch their head and not really know how to answer that.

If you were to kind of break it down and ask more specifically, like, where do you think the mind resides?

Most Westerners would point to their head.

But if you go back to Greek philosophy and Greek culture, where they would point is to their heart.

And so we get some of that language translated into our English Bibles, because even though we think the mind resides in the head, there is this symbolic, at the very least, or linguistic connection that we have to the heart because of our Greek heritage.

But the Greeks literally believed that the seat of all intellectual and emotional activity occurred in your chest.

And so when you're in Sunday school and you talk about, I asked Jesus into my heart, that's what we're talking about.

We're talking about your soul, your Spirit man, even though we might not necessarily actually believe today that the geographic region, if you will, of that is actually in your chest.

But then to compound this even further, the Hebrew understanding was even more different than the Greek, where we would point to our head and the Greeks would point to the heart, the Hebrew would point to their gut.

That was the location of the soul and spirit.

And this is where the entire concept of clean and unclean foods came from.

Of course, ultimately derived from Genesis and the Fall.

How did sin enter the world by Adam and Eve?

Eating something Even curiously, if you look at the consequences or the punishments that God specifically laid out for each individual involved in that.

He cursed Adam to have to toil, to work the fields in order to feed his belly.

He cursed the woman to endure pain in her belly during childbirth, and he cursed the serpent to crawl on his belly.

So there's this very strong correlation between soul, spirit and belly.

And this is all throughout the Old Testament, although in English translations it is translated or interpreted often to refer to soul, spirit, inner man, heart, sometimes, rather than what the actual Hebrew says, which is lab and labab, which is literally center or innermost being, but specifically the gut.

Jesus translates this in real time into Greek at one point.

And he is very clear about this in that he quotes an Old Testament passage about the inner man and rivers of life springing forth from that inner man.

And the Greek word that he uses there for inner man, or heart, as we often translate it, is not kardia, which is the Greek word for heart, but he translates it as coelia, which is the Greek word for abdomen.

And so this understanding of fasting comes from that Hebrew or Jewish understanding of where your soul and spirit reside.

And so it's not a tactic, a hunger strike to get God to do what you want him to do.

It's literally saying, God, I need less of my soul, less of me, to give room for more of you.

Amen in that place.

So that I have the will to choose to do what your will is rather than what mine is.

And so it's an activity or a discipline that strengthens our will actually to align with the spirit of God, not to try to get him to do what we want him to do or what we want us to do.

So I'm going to jump in with fasting here because just so you guys know, I have done a couple of 40 day fasts and it's not, and he is spot on, it is not about twisting God's arm to get what you want.

What it is, it's about getting your will in alignment with his, and then what he'll do.

And what's always happened to me when I've done a long term fast, is God has taken that and transitioned me into some kind of a movement according to his will.

And in one of those cases, he actually changed the trajectory of my life to get rid of things that I did not need that were getting in the way of what he wanted me to do.

That is what fasting is about.

It is about getting you in alignment with him, not the other way around.

We don't change God's will.

God changes ours to align with Him.

Fasting is a very powerful way of doing this.

So I think that you guys need to understand that when you do a fast, that it is about him aligning you to Him.

And I think that's so important.