What if reading the Bible was about more than gaining information? What if it was about meeting God?

In this episode, Travis Michael Fleming sits down with David Ripper to discuss his book, Experiencing Scripture as a Disciple of Jesus. Drawing deeply from the teaching and influence of Dallas Willard, David argues that Scripture is far more than a book to master—it is one of God's primary means of meeting with His people. The goal isn't simply to know more about God, but to know God Himself.

Together, they explore why so many Christians have unintentionally reduced Bible reading to a search for facts, principles, or quick application. David challenges that mindset by inviting us into a slower, more attentive way of reading—one that expects God to speak, shape us, and draw us into deeper communion with Him. This kind of reading doesn't just fill our minds; it forms our lives.

The conversation also tackles the realities of our fast-paced culture, where efficiency often wins out over intimacy. David shares practical wisdom for pastors, ministry leaders, and everyday believers who want to cultivate an environment where people don't simply study Scripture but genuinely encounter the living God through it.

If you've ever found your Bible reading feeling dry, rushed, or merely academic, this conversation offers a compelling vision for rediscovering Scripture as a place of relationship, transformation, and apprenticeship to Jesus.

Takeaways:

• The transformative experience of engaging with Scripture stems from recognizing God's presence during reading.
• Dallas Willard's approach to the Bible emphasizes communion with God rather than mere informational reading.
• A disciple of Jesus is characterized by an active, experiential relationship with Him, beyond just belief.
• Spiritual formation requires a patient, unhurried engagement with Scripture to foster deep personal transformation.
• The process of spiritual formation is distinct yet intertwined with healing and emotional awareness in our lives.
• The Immerse method involves immersing oneself in Scripture for communication, communion, and ultimately union with God.

Keep up with updates from Apollos Watered: The Center for Discipleship & Cultural Apologetics.

Get Travis's book Blueprint: Kingdom Living in the Modern World.

Join Travis's Substack, Deep Roots Society.

Help support the ministry of Apollos Watered and transform your world today!

Today's episode is brought to you by the Zimmerman family.

May the Lord our God, bless you and keep you and cause his face to shine upon you.

I'm convinced that experiencing God's presence being deeper in his company, that's what really transforms us.

Dallas really saw the Bible then as communication from God to us that would lead to communion with him, that would lead all the way to greater union with the Lord that we would be is inseparably connected to God as a vine is to a branch.

Welcome back to Ministry Deep Dive.

I'm Travis Michael Fleming, and I'm your host.

We're a podcast where we're exploring ideas, practices, and conversations that help ministry leaders thrive in today's world.

Now, today we have a special guest.

We've got Dave Ripper, who is the author of Experiencing Scripture as a Disciple of Jesus and really reading the Bible.

Like Dallas Willard, Dave is a pastor, he's a scholar, and he is now a guest on Ministry Deep Dive to help us all understand how we can read the Bible in a slightly different way, that we can experience God in an even greater way.

Dave, welcome to Ministry Deep Dive.

It's great to have you.

Hey, thanks so much for having me here, Travis, and appreciate the kind intro.

I would say.

I feel like I'm more of a practitioner than a scholar, just to set everybody's expectations a little bit more realistically here for today, today.

But thank you so much for getting to share this conversation with me.

Well, let's jump right into the book.

What made you want to write this book?

I mean, and why about Dallas Willard?

I feel like we're seeing Dallas Willard all the time right now, but I think he's well deserving.

Wouldn't you say that?

Absolutely.

Yeah.

I got to spend a week with him, and within that week, I made two conclusions.

This is undoubtedly the most brilliant human being I have ever met.

And secondly, this is the most Christlike human being I ever met.

And I wanted to be like Dallas as much as I possibly could.

And he finished our class by saying, what God gets out of your life is the person you become.

And so his key focus on spiritual formation, being at the heart of the gospel, really struck a chord in my soul like nothing else ever really had.

And as I just kept reading Dallas over the years, he had so many brilliant insights, insights into scripture, but because he was approaching a lot of his writing from a more philosophical standpoint, he didn't Always give the steps real clearly about how did he arrive at a biblical interpretation that he did.

And so, as part of my own doctoral work, I got really fascinated to explore how did Dallas come up with what he came up with.

And I think the really unique way that he read the Bible, with the reverence of a Southern Baptist, with the mind of a father, philosopher and the heart of a mystic, enabled him to read Scripture in this experiential, realistic way that I just personally desired to get to meet God the way Dallas did when I would open the pages of the book.

And as that started to really transform my life, I thought, this is a project that more people might be able to benefit from, just like I have.

So Dallas had a really backwards way of publishing as well.

He wouldn't really publish a book unless someone explicitly asked him to do so.

So really, I wish somebody would have asked Dallas to write this book.

Share about how you read the Bible the way you do.

So let's then take this idea of reading again the Bible like Dallas Willard.

How is that different than how many of us read the Bible?

Because so many of us read it informationally.

But I think you're saying Dallas read it transformationally.

Absolutely.

You know, Dallas was a realist when it came to his philosophical approach, and I think that really did shape how he read the Bible.

I would summarize this first off by saying Dallas believed that we lived at the cross section of two landscapes at all times, the physical world and the spiritual world, the visible world and the invisible world.

And when we open the pages of the Bible, Dallas would encourage us to do so, believing the author is really in the room with us, that spiritual reality is present.

He would say the Scriptures are infallible because God never leaves them alone.

And so he would say, approach the Bible like you are going to have a holy encounter with God.

He would begin before reading the Scriptures by saying, lord, beyond the sacred page, I seek you.

So Dallas would absolutely do the hard exegetical work of understanding a text to gain clarity about its meaning and its original context and intent.

But he wouldn't stop there.

I think he would almost go from the words on the page to really notice and pay attention to the presence of the ultimate author.

Who is really there with us so that we might read it like Jesus is right there with us, because he is.

Why do we often so often fail to do that?

I think there's a failure of expectation in a lot of ways.

I mean, I think from teaching this material to my church and others over the years, they have felt like we've been given the Bible back when we realize God is right there.

It's almost like a spiritual practice, like a gateway to eternal living.

I think a lot of us are afraid of some of the sort of mystical way of reading.

And by that I like John Ortberg's definition of a mystic to someone who believes that when we speak to God like God speaks back, it's not a one way sort of thing.

I think there's a sense of control that we really like too.

I mean, if I can just figure out what this text means on my own, then I must understand it.

And it kind of takes some of the mystery out of it and that takes some of the fear, I think out of it as well.

But I think those are a few of the reasons with it.

And I think also in our day and age where our attention spans just continually shrink and shrink, most of us just don't have the capacity to sit with a passage as long as it would really take to allow God to come close to us.

And I think I'd heard Dallas use an illustration about, about how do you see wildlife out in the, in the wilderness.

And typically you don't make a lot of noise, you don't move around a lot.

You position yourself at a post and you just sit and are still.

And if you can be quiet long enough, you'll ultimately get to see the kind of wildlife you would hope to hope to see.

And I think similar to that, when we read the Bible, we're so addicted to making things happen and efficiency and you know, we want immediate results to be clicking in soon so that just to sit and be with the passage, believing God is right there that the Holy Spirit might whisper to you through this passage.

A lot of us just don't have the patience or the attention span to allow something like that to happen.

And I'm convinced that experiencing God's presence being deeper in his company, that's what really transforms us.

And so Dallas really saw the Bible then as communication from God to us that would lead to communion with him, that would lead all the way way to greater union with the Lord, that we would be as inseparably connected to God as a vine is to A branch.

And that threefold movement from communication to communion to union is not something that can be rushed.

It's not a box that we can just easily check.

We have to allow that to kind of unfold slowly.

And that's why Dallas would say, you got to ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life.

And I would say we need to ruthlessly eliminate hurry as we even read our scriptures on a daily basis.

So those are a few thoughts for, I think, why we've lost this a little bit in our day and age.

Have you read Alan Kreider's work, the Ferment of the Early Church?

Yeah, I'm literally looking at it right now.

I'm not finished with it, but I am very attracted to his take on the early church.

Yeah.

Say some more about that.

No, we've talked a lot on here.

Because, of course, the early church grew in four ways according to the extant documents.

Now, patience.

Jesus was never in a hurry, and we won't be either.

Worship and catechesis.

You've got that habitus, and then you've got ferment.

That's just exactly what happens.

But what I've noticed is the idols that we have within the modern church, this efficiency, this idea of the church being a business and synthesizing business practices into the church.

And I try to tell people ad nauseam, the church is an organization.

It's an organism, and it's an organization, but it's not a business in the same way.

And I heard a guy actually say, straight up, he goes, no, the church is a business.

He goes, people show up and we give them religious goods and services and they give us money.

And I was like, that's part of the problem where we're at.

And again, I haven't sat down and had a chance to talk with this guy.

But it's because we're so caught up in the modern world that we don't know how to sit and have that ruthless elimination of hurry.

So when you teach this to your church and you're a pastor of a church in.

Up in New Hampshire.

Yeah.

How do you help your people, which I'm sure are very busy, read the Word in this way.

What do you do?

Yeah.

One of the key things outside of Sundays is where I do begin with this.

And we have a real formational kind of discipleship program we call Monday school.

And it's Monday nights, and.

And it's unhurried.

And we do get to sink down deeply in this passage.

There's lots of silence, there's lots of Time for group reflection.

And I one of the principles I use for teaching that I learned from Trevor Hudson, who was one of Dallas Willard's friends.

Trevor went on this retreat and the retreat director invited him to spend time in John 21, just being with Jesus and that's where Peter's reinstated.

And then get that classic Peter looking over the shoulder to see John eavesdropping, what's going to happen to him?

And Jesus says, what's that to you?

You must follow me.

And so Trevor goes in this retreat center to find a place to, to pray through this text and finds this library there and had all these old commentaries of John's Gospel and he's reading them and like, wow, all these insights into the passage and he starts taking note after note about what he's learning from this text.

And he's kind of thinking, boy, the retreat director is going to be pretty impressed with him when he comes back.

And he, after a few hours comes back to report and Trevor starts going through pages of notes that he took on this text.

And he's realizing the director is not nearly as impressed with him as he would have thought.

Finally, the director says, Trevor, insight is the consolation prize.

Encounter is the grand prize.

And so when I preach and teach, I certainly have my fair share of insights that I include, but I want to create a context with the pace and the structure that the goal would be for people to encounter God more than just walk away with like a practical principle or a one liner.

How can we enable them to experience, you know, God's presence more and more.

And I really find I have to teach from the overflow of what my experiential relationship with God with this passage was like first.

And that is not a very efficient process for sermon planning.

And so I have to just carve out blocks of time, you know, weekly or even monthly, more extended times to just sit with these passages.

And generally the encounters that I have had with the Lord, the questions that God has put on my heart, that's a big part of it.

I think it's leading people to reflect through questions and not just kind of dumping content at them has been really effective in these ways.

But you know, to go back to your mentioning a little bit about not trying to make something happen, that reminds me of Dallas's take on the parable of a lot of the kingdom parables related to seeds.

And Dallas would say it's fascinating that a seed is what's often associated by Jesus for the kingdom of God.

And there's not much we can do to make a seed grow by direct effort.

And he would say the implication then on that for us is, especially for ministers, is we are called to be with God, to teach lovingly, be with people, and trust that the growth will come.

We don't have to make anything happen, which means we can relax.

And that's why Dallas would then say Jesus was the most relaxed human being to ever live.

So I think when preaching and teaching in this way, we really need to do so in a relaxed fashion.

Not believing I have to make something happen that's freeing.

It's.

It's better for me.

It's better for everybody.

And we really trust God to do what he's going to do.

We let the Creator deal with his creatures.

And it's been really beautiful to watch the Lord do that in our context here in New England.

In your book, you talk about much more.

You even highlight near the beginning of being a disciple of Jesus rather than a Christian.

Why is it that disciple carries.

I mean, what is it about disciple that carries a different weight than being a Christian?

And why don't our people in our churches grasp this?

Well,.

Yeah, Dallas would say, is the gospel that we're preaching having the natural tendency of making disciples of Jesus or consumers of religious goods and services.

And I think a lot of the gospel that has been preached doesn't always reflect the gospel that Jesus preached.

You look at Mark 1:15.

Jesus comes announcing the good news.

And the good news of the gospel according to Jesus is repent and believe, for the kingdom of God has come near.

So Dallas would say, the news and the good news of the gospel is the availability of life in the kingdom here and now that goes on forever.

And certainly that's available to us through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.

But I think oftentimes we're just preaching the minimum entry requirements to heaven.

And so as long as I believe the right things, I pray a prayer, then I'm all set.

And Dallas would say, that's essentially vampire Christianity.

That is, we just want enough of Jesus blood to get us to the good place after we die, and not the bad place.

But Jesus came making disciples.

And so, you know, Dallas took the time to count up the number of instances the word disciple is used in the New Testament and the number of times the word Christian is used and the.

The word disciples used 269 times by his count.

And the word Christians used three times.

And I don't think there should be such a dichotomy between disciple and Christian, but that's kind of what's emerged more culturally and in the church.

I think that especially in the kind of church growth movement, you know, I graduated college in 06, and I felt like at that time, you know, if you were going to be a successful pastor, I mean, it was the ABCs that were the big measures.

Attendance, buildings and cash and not discipleship.

And so I think helping people see what a disciple really is was at the heartbeat of Dallas's ministry.

A disciple is an apprentice or student of Jesus, someone who is learning to live every facet of their life the way Jesus would do it if he was you or me.

And so he would then challenge churches.

You should ask yourself, what is our plan for making disciples?

And then secondly, is it working?

And, you know, I think even as I look at Covid and the impact it had on many, many churches, I think the answer to those questions was, we don't have a great plan for making disciples.

As we see how people lost their minds and reacted so unchristlike, even within the church during that time.

And then our plan, whatever it is, it's not working really well.

So we need to rethink that.

And I think those.

Those reasons are why, you know, through John, Mark Comer, and others that are really popularizing Willard.

Well, I think that's why there's such a surge in the need for, you know, the way that he's communicated and taught for our church in these day and ages.

Because we've made Christians, but we certainly haven't made fully devoted followers of Jesus who are living their lives the way Jesus would do it if he was us.

Yeah.

How do you do that at your church?

I mean, you said you have this Monday morning, Monday evening school, right?

Yeah.

But bring us into more of what you do, because as pastors, we're like, okay, I get it.

I'm in.

I want to do spiritual formation.

We've talked about discipleship.

We hear about it all the time now, like spiritual formation as a movement.

And you write about this in your book.

You're caught between being a pastor and being a part of the spiritual formation movement.

But at the same time, being a pastor means that's where it should take place, is at the church.

It shouldn't have to go to different renovare, which, again, good ministry, but we should have this in the church itself.

How do we do this in the church?

Yeah, that's a great question.

And that's one I certainly feel like I am a beggar trying to help other beggars find bread.

And my answer to this, but you know, you have to start with the end in mind of, you know, who is a disciple and then how do you become that kind of disciple?

I'm definitely indebted to a lot of the work around the stages of faith that we see from a critical journey.

And I learned about that through Peter Scazzero's book, Emotionally Healthy Spirituality.

And so if you look at the key six stages of faith, we're trying to design our church's ministry model to help people go through each of those six key stages.

So, you know, apart from Sunday morning, the first stage is really life changing awareness of God and we're really committed to the alpha course.

And we have seen lots of great spiritual fruit of people coming to faith and making that decision to follow Jesus.

Second stage is really about, you know, learning and, you know, what do we believe, how do we behave?

Core parts of Christianity and we've been utilizing the rooted course for that.

Apart, you know, from our Sundays, where we're on Sundays, even when I preach, I'm really trying to think about all these stages of faith as well.

The third stage is really about like the productive life or ministry and, you know, who are we?

How do we take our place, do our part to build God's kingdom?

That's an area over this next year we're going to be developing what we're calling the calling course.

And we want everybody to be able to know, you know, who has God made me to be and how can I best serve him and not just know that, but actually find ways to do that.

And most churches really only do stages one through three.

And like 90% of Christians never really make it to stage four.

And that's because it's the inner journey and that's where we hit this wall.

And that's where there's a lot of looking into our, the text of our lives and not just the text of scripture for discipleship.

You know, Ortberg had said disciples are handcrafted and not mass produced.

A lot of stage four is about creating, you know, more context for conversation and not just content delivery.

And that's what our Monday school environment has really tried to be a catalyst to help people into stage four with other sojourners along the way.

Because it's painful, you know, you have to, you can't go around this wall.

You've kind of got to go through it, and I'm grateful more resources are being devoted to this.

Tish Harrison Warren just wrote a beautiful new book, what Grows in Weary Lands, that I think for people kind of in the mid part of their faith, this will be a great guide to help them through.

Emotionally healthy spirituality is another one of those ones.

And then from stage four, you get to stage five, which is a lot of the outward journey.

And I think this is where you do ministry, like stage three, but with a lot more humility.

You recognize your shortcomings, your pain.

You kind of lead with a limp, you know, to use that Dan Allender term, a little bit more.

And then ultimately, stage six is pervaded with agape love.

And after about four or five years of implementing this process, for the first time, we had had a woman say, I really think I have made it into stage six, where I don't just do loving things, but my inner disposition is that of the love of Christ.

And I never knew this was possible.

So I think if churches arrange their ministry models around the stages of faith, that would really help us take big strides forward.

But it's tough.

I mean, there's no doubt about it.

The headwinds to do that are massive.

And one of the things we've also experienced, as you know, the church I took over was largely a very attractional church.

And so if you're doing attractional things and formation often is painful and difficult and unattractive because we resist the hardest what we need the most.

There's been a lot of pushback to this.

And we've seen our church has nearly doubled in its attendance since doing this.

But that is also, at the same time, a lot of people have kind of walked out the door as well because they.

They would rather just have more of that vampire Christianity, you know, you feel like you're in the upper hand.

I don't have to do a lot of this hard work.

And so there's a lot of pain in that.

And I've been involved doing some consulting with practicing the way to help integrate formation into churches more.

And that's one of the real pieces of pushback that people are finding, that the more we integrate formation, the more there becomes this dichotomy that arises between those who are spiritually healthy and those who are not as spiritually healthy and not willing to be spiritually healthy.

So some conflict and challenge arises.

This is not like an easy journey for people to go into.

If you're a pastor listening and thinking, I want to do this expect some resistance.

I think the enemy hates what is taking place right now.

What is the biggest resistance though?

I mean, we all know that there's resistance to it, especially if you've been in that attractional piece.

And many of us have grown up in that environment where we wanted to be that preacher, that people wanted to come in here, and we wanted that insight, we wanted to give the information.

And we are facing budgets and attendance and all of those things.

But how do we change the gear?

Because for many of us that grew up in that church growth school, our boards or leadership teams were populated with a lot of business people that are looking at the measurables.

And spiritual formation doesn't fall in a measurable category, not in the same way.

So how do we change that criteria for people to be able to do it?

Number one.

And then number two, what do we do when they start resisting it?

And then three, I mean, really, how do we press through that?

Those are fantastic questions.

I think that is one of the leading questions in the spiritual formation movement right now that people are asking is how do we measure formation?

And it's tough to measure spiritual realities.

It's hard to measure character growth.

I think some of the things that are being done are completing some kind of survey up front to identify where are we?

And then offering a similar kind of thing a year or so later to see what has taken place over this duration of time.

What qualitative measures can we.

Can we observe rather than just quantitative ones?

That is a big thing.

You know, Dallas, he once was asked, how do you know if you're growing spiritually?

And Dallas said, I ask myself these two questions.

Am I becoming less and less easily irritated and less and less easily discouraged, less and less easily irritated and less and less easily discouraged.

And so I think if people could identify what area of their life is keeping them from living more fully in the kingdom, what automatic responses in our life are antithetical to the kingdom of God?

And we could identify that.

And then we could help people put into place a plan so they would more easily and routinely do the things Jesus said to do and not do the things that he told us to refrain from.

We could probably gain some more measurable growth out of that.

Going back to the resistance, I think a big part of the spiritual formation process into Christ likeness involves healing.

You know, in the early church, the verse that was often prayed the Most was Psalm 70, verse 1, which says, oh Lord, make haste to help me.

O Lord, make speed to save me.

And that idea for save could Easily be translated heal or healing as much as, like, rescue or deliver.

And it takes a lot of humility to be able to acknowledge there's lots of hurt and pain in my life that I need to be healed from.

And a lot of that comes often from family.

And a lot of us feel like it's wrong of me, or I feel guilty for acknowledging some way that there might be family hurt because it feels disrespectful, full.

And.

And so I think for us to be able to acknowledge ways that we have hurt and wounds that we carry with us, that most of us have just swept under the rug and allow that to come out into the open and then allow God to bring his healing touch and comfort to us, that is a really hard thing for a lot of people.

Shame and guilt just keeps us from.

That grips us from allowing ourselves to find that freedom.

I think that is a huge part of the.

Of the resistance, because it's just.

For most people, it's kind of like, you know, Pandora's box.

If you're doing a home project.

Well, if I don't go there, then it's.

It's not going to be a problem.

But if I decide to, you know, redo my shower, I might find some awful things behind this wall.

There might be asbestos or who knows what?

So this might create bigger problems for me.

I think intuitively, that's what a lot of people are afraid of.

And I think the number one reason people change churches so readily like they do is because they start to get to that inner journey point, and what was working for them doesn't work for them any longer.

And they think, if I just go to another place, that will be better for me.

And oftentimes it is on the short run.

You know, those first three stages of faith, they might communicate that a little bit differently somewhere else, and it feels new and fresh.

But 18 months, 24 months in, you're right back at that same place.

And, you know, with Facebook these days, it's kind of easy to track where people are going.

You see, wow, okay, they left our place.

They went to someplace else, and they touted it as, like, so great and so much better than our place.

And then, you know, less than two years later, they're already on to the next place.

I think people are resisting the hardest, what they need the most.

I know that there's a lot of trauma that people are going through.

I know there's different kinds of trauma.

I know that there is so much.

Healing that's gone on.

I'm Old enough to be around where I remember those Archie Bunker days where you had those guys that were just didn't talk about their feelings.

Right.

That thing.

But it seems like we've gone now this other way where it's like always trauma, always therapy.

Pastors aren't mental health counselors, but churches are hiring now or starting counseling ministries.

And many pastors aren't able to deal with spiritual formation because they're too busy dealing with operations and the day to day and Sunday's coming and all of that.

What do we need to do?

Is it a wrong perspective?

Have we just gone too far where now we're just.

It's everything Is spiritual formation and therapy and trauma.

I mean, is there a balance here or are we just really catching up to where we need to be?

Yeah, those are great questions.

Well, certainly I see spiritual formation as distinct, you know, from therapy or therapeutic methods.

They're.

They're distinct, but there's a inseparability, you know, to them as well.

I think of healing is a big part of the spiritual journey that we've overlooked.

But not all of it is that I definitely think we overuse a lot of the words, you know, with.

With hurt and trauma.

And I think sometimes we do a disservice to people who have really experienced severe amounts of these things.

When, you know, somebody saying something that mildly offends us and we categorize that as trauma, I think that is disrespectful, frankly, to people that have really undergone a lot of other things.

So I think we overuse that word.

I think every generation is a little bit different, and different technologies really are the major reasons generations are so distinct from one another.

And I'm on the older side of the millennial generation and can remember days without the Internet.

And certainly I made it through high school without social media.

But for the folks that are growing up in it, I mean, it's just so much different.

I think Jonathan Hates is really wise and his anxious generation.

Look at the way technology has shaped the next generation.

I mean, there's just an emotional softness that's different than what I had.

I was a kid that still I was able to develop a lot of resilience.

It was come home when the streetlights come on and you're pretty much free to roam and play.

And man, we got in conflict and pushing and shoving nearly every day, but we learned how to work all that stuff out and to shake those things off.

And now people just don't have those opportunities.

I think like my generation and Older kind of have.

So I don't think we need to be coddling people whatsoever either, but I think there's a level of compassion that's needed that I think formation has appealed to.

But, you know, as I look at this next ministry year for us, 1 Timothy 4:16, I believe is the reference where, you know, Paul says, watch your life and your doctrine closely, is one that just to me, resonates for our moment where, you know, right thinking often leads to right living.

It doesn't guarantee it, but I think there's a mind of the formation of our thinking, and our mind is a big next step for a lot of the younger generations of Christians that we need to focus on and not lose.

I plan through our Monday school in the year to come to go through kind of a whole survey of systematic theology, because I think a lot of people now are just basing their theological grounding on just like a YouTube clip here or a little Instagram reel there, maybe one or two books, and it's just not coherent.

And so I think we need that broader framework, and I think that is formation, even though it might sound like information.

So I think we need all of it.

And, yes, I do think we have maybe swung the pendulum a little bit too far, appealing a little bit too much to a therapeutic culture.

But I think this is one of those pieces where, yeah, we were so shut down emotionally that we need to catch up to where the church maybe should have been a long time ago.

I remember hearing sermons where it would talk about, like, the emotions was like the caboose on a train, and it should always be following Will.

You know, that was just a simple illustration when I was a kid.

And now, though, you're finding.

Wait a minute.

Emotions play a whole lot bigger role than we ever think.

It shouldn't be kicked to the curb.

We have to be able to deal with them, and they reveal something about who we are.

Now.

We can't trust them all the time, but there are things that we need to do with it.

So there is that kind of healthy balance.

I do find and wonder, though, I'm like, how much?

Because once you go down that road, like you said before, you start finding a whole lot of other things.

How do you then keep in?

I don't know if balance is the right word, but having healing, and not everything then becomes trauma.

I mean, and you.

You did refer to that, where you're like, I think we have gone a little too far.

And I do think we need spiritual formation.

That's been clear to all of us.

And it's not a program, it is a pursuit.

And it's an understanding of how the brain works and how our culture is discipling us and catechizing us and how church in the last 50 years had, in a desire to reach people, really shrunk the gospel down into the event and forsaking the process involved in that.

How do we help them keep that intention and help our.

These pastors who are already so weary going, okay, what.

What do you want me to do with this?

I agree.

What am I supposed to do?

Am I doing a sermon series?

Am I doing a program?

And it is.

It.

It's a different, again, perspective, but again, what are we saying for these guys to do that are out there?

How can they go about doing and putting this into their lives in their ministries?

Yeah, those are good questions.

There's a few paths at the trailhead.

I'm trying to.

Yeah, there's a lot to take here.

But what's immediately gravitating to my attention is Boy, just the power of the psalms to.

To anchor our formational process in scripture.

You know, as Calvin said, the psalms are a full anatomy of the human soul where they include the.

The range of human emotion.

And one of the most important practices in my life, the last, I think it's been like nearly 19 years as I just pray through a psalm to start every single day.

Just.

Just a psalm.

And I just keep going through it.

And it's amazing how much that enables me to look introspectively at my emotional state, but then not to stay there, but to keep all of that anchored and grounded in scripture.

And I think a lot of, A lot of hopes I have in writing this book is to make sure whatever the next stages of the spiritual formation take, that they are doing so through scripture and not through any other means.

So I would encourage Boy, the teaching and the praying of the psalms to be an anchoring spiritual practice first in a pastor or leader's life.

And I think from the overflow of that, we can integrate that into our culture a lot more.

What's fascinating for me, my wife's actually a mental health therapist, so I get psychoanalyzed all the time.

Like, if I let out a little sigh at home or like, you know, I hold my breath too long and exhale too loudly, it's like, what's going on?

You know, what's happening?

And.

And I'll say it's a nice thing.

Occasionally, like, my wife uses the five finger check in, which is what's making you mad, glad, sad, afraid or ashamed.

And when you don't know that emotional state, that is when your emotions can negatively kind of rule over you.

And you know, Willard said our emotions are good servants but disastrous masters.

So I think the Psalms actually can help us name what emotional place we are in so that it can serve us to make sure our emotions don't master us.

And I think that is the tension that we need to hold in balance.

And I believe the Scriptures and the Psalms in particular can help us do that.

So, Dave, I'm going to take issue because now you've just.

First of all, I think my wife now is going to call your wife because she's going to want to learn this stuff.

And I know she is like, oh, that's great.

The five finger check in.

She's just going to go all over that.

So thanks a lot for that.

You're welcome.

She already does psychoanalyze and my wife doesn't have that degree because she's checking in every time I sigh.

Anything else?

Because she cares.

But going back for a second, you mentioned the Psalms and you talk about how to.

Or you quoted Calvin, the full anatomy of the soul.

Yeah.

And you mentioned your book, this immerse method.

Are you talking about really doing the immerse method with the Psalms?

Because I want to know what you mean by that.

You said, okay, we read the Psalms, right.

But what do you mean when you're talking about letting them form us and how do we go about doing that?

Yeah, that's a great question.

Well, the Immerse method is an acronym that I was, you know, Dallas said.

Said Scripture is communication that leads to communion all the way to union.

And so I was trying to look at how could we actually go from communication to communion to union as we would read an individual text.

So to kind of flesh that out more, I think there's three key steps to communication, which is immersion in the text.

That's the I and immerse meditation on a passage and then memorization of portions of that particular text.

Dallas would say the single most important spiritual discipline of his life was memorizing scripture.

Michael Wilkins, who was at Talbot for a lot of years, I believe, said Dallas had the most intuitive grasp of the Bible of any person he ever met because of how much he had memorized Scripture.

So when we study it, you know, do all of use the commentaries, all the inductive methods that we learn?

Well, that's immersion.

Meditate on it, memorize it.

We kind of really sense what's God's communication to us.

Then we go to the next stages of communion, which would be encounter.

We want to meet God in these passages.

I think the Gospels are a good place to start in that.

Maybe more than the Psalms, but I'll talk about the Psalms in just a moment.

There's an encounter, then there's a response.

What is the Lord inviting us to do in light of how we're meeting him in this passage?

And then the S is supplication.

We ask that what we found to be true in this passage would be true in our lives.

I think for a lot of us in like my Christian tradition, we have a tough time asking God for the things that we need.

You know, we want to be self sufficient.

We don't want to be too needy sounding.

But I think we really impoverish our faith because we don't ask God enough.

Asking does not give God any new information that he doesn't have.

But asking does give God greater access to our hearts and souls where he can meet with us.

And then the last letter in that is experience, the E. And from that whole process now we kind of have a shared experience with God through this particular passage.

I believe the Gospels are the best place to start with that.

Dallas wanted to really insist upon the fact that when we think about who God is, we need to have Christ in mind to kind of heal our operating image of God.

So.

So, you know, he once was asked, what books would you recommend?

I read after a talk and he told it was Trevor Hudson who asked that question.

He told Trevor, I recommend Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

You know, and Trevor's like, those are great.

Any other books you'd recommend?

And Dallas was insistent.

Spend the next 20 years of your life experiencing and living the Gospels be in these stories.

Like what is taking place in these passages is happening to you.

So as I kind of learned that boy, praying through a psalm a day and then spending unhurried time with a section of the Gospels each and every day has been integral for me and be with God in those passages.

But I think the Psalms, just to go back to that, like today I was just praying through Psalm 15 and you know, I did a study on it and this is where you know, who may ascend, you know who may stand in God's holy place, you know, those whose walks are blameless.

And I pulled Derek Kidner's great commentary on the Psalms off the shelf and you see, you know, okay, a better, better word or maybe translation of blameless could be whole or wholehearted or sound.

It's more positive in connotation than, you know, blameless kind of has a little bit of a negative connotation there.

And.

And what do these words mean?

And then at the end, you know, the person who, who has this kind of righteous life, this blameless walk, will never be moved.

And I reflected back on, Boy, how the formation of my character by God's grace has enabled me in the midst of a lot of ministry circumstances that would be uprooting or cause me to feel threatened.

God preserved and protected my life through that.

I wasn't moved.

And so I've got to just enjoy seeing how Psalm 15 has really proven to be true in my life.

And I could just extend so much gratitude to God for how he met me through these words, how those promises proved to be true.

And I think the experiential way of reading scripture more than anything else deepens our trust in God because we are able to reflect and see how God does what he says he will do.

And that has proven to be true in my life more times than I am aware of.

And that just not only deepens my trust, but just fosters my love and gratitude for the relationship that I can share with God, which is the greatest part of my life.

Dave, we have talked about a lot today, and really about formation and your book, experiencing scripture that disciples.

Jesus, Jesus, for any of those ministry leaders or pastors out there, and they're looking say to.

They say, I believe this.

I want to do it.

I'm ordering the book.

They're probably ordering the book right now, and they're going on Amazon and they want to get the book.

But as they're seeking to implement this, what advice would you give them?

Yeah, that's great.

I would consider to not hurry through this, to not rush through this.

I remember Bernardo Clairvaux famously used these images that you can be a canal or you can be a reservoir.

And I think in our day and age, a lot of us are canal people.

There's so much great content out there, and we might listen to this podcast or read this book, and then it kind of flows into us and flows right, right through us.

And we speak about it.

But I think he would encourage folks to be more like that reservoir where we allow this work to shape us deeply before we start to hurry into putting into practice.

And, you know, my fears about the spiritual formation movement right now is that it would become a little faddish.

You know, we'd be all talking about it, and then a couple years later, there's a next Wave, wave of things that we're talking about.

But I think this needs to take just a deep, slow work in our lives first.

So I would just encourage you to.

To go slow and let this form and shape you first, that it's enabling you to love God more intensely and, and follow him more closely.

And then from the overflow of that, speak and teach and lead, lead and guide.

And the last chapter of the book is all about kind of how to preach and teach in these ways and certainly some practical application points that we can implement.

But I would encourage you yet reduce the sense of necessity of doing this too quickly from your heart and your life and your church.

Play the long game here on this and let God form you first.

That's a good word.

Dave, I want to thank you for coming on the show for those pastors and ministry leaders out there.

We know that you're busy, but this is well worth your time.

Make sure that you order this online.

Go to Amazon, of course, wherever you get your books.

It's not a huge read, but you should take your time reading through it.

And I know if you're like me, you're busy, you've got a lot of stuff going on and you can only do a little bit at a time.

But I think we need to be able to help form our people spiritually.

If we want to see transformation, we don't want to just see numbers.

We don't want to see just activity.

We want to see transformation.

And I think this help leads us.

In that way because we want to.

Connect people with God.

Also, we want to thank you for listening to Ministry Deep Dive.

Be sure to check us out online.

Go to apollos water.org because ministry deep dive is a part of Apollo's water.

This is center for Discipleship and Cultural Apologetics, where you can find resources to help you and your church so that you might be able to fulfill the mission of Christ for all of life.

Again, Dave, thank you for coming on the show.

This is Travis Michael Fleming signing off for ministry Deep Dive.

Stay watered, everybody.