Shownotes
Will Spencer hosts a thought-provoking episode of the Renaissance of Men podcast, featuring Dr. Joe Rigney, a theologian and author who dives deep into the nuances of emotional manipulation and leadership within the church and family structures.
Rigney's book, 'Leadership and Emotional Sabotage,' explores how anxiety can disrupt relationships and institutions, emphasizing the critical need for direct and honest communication. Spencer shares his personal journey from liberalism to a more traditional worldview, revealing how this transformation has shaped his understanding of communication dynamics and emotional responsibility. The conversation is rich with insights on how modern societal pressures can silence dissent and create environments where emotional manipulation thrives, particularly within church communities.
Throughout the episode, Rigney discusses the importance of being a sober-minded leader, advocating for clear and masculine communication that fosters healthy dialogue and confronts issues head-on rather than allowing them to fester beneath the surface. He warns against the dangers of unmoored empathy, which can lead to emotional sabotage and undermine genuine leadership. Rigney's arguments resonate with Spencer's reflections on the manipulative power dynamics observed in various social settings, illustrating the necessity for men to reclaim their authority and lead with integrity amidst societal pressures.
Takeaways:
- The ongoing cultural struggle isn't just about politics or economics; it's fundamentally a language war.
- To confront uncomfortable truths, one must recognize personal responsibility and the limits of influence.
- The dynamics of communication have shifted, often leading to indirect speech and emotional manipulation.
- Masculine leadership requires clarity, courage, and the ability to engage in difficult discussions.
- Empathy, while valuable, can be weaponized to stifle honest conversations and manipulate behavior.
- The path to authentic enjoyment of life lies in recognizing and embracing God's gifts.
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Transcripts
My name is Will Spencer and you're listening to the renaissance of Men podcast.
Will Spencer:My guest this week is a fellow of theology at New St.
Will Spencer:Andrews College in Moscow, Idaho, plus the author of Leadership and Emotional Sabotage.
Will Spencer:Resisting the anxiety that will wreck your family, destroy your church, and ruin the world.
Will Spencer:Please welcome Doctor Joe Rigney.
Joe Rigney:You are the renaissance.
Will Spencer: beral, basically until summer: Will Spencer:It was one thing to unwind my belief in the state as a solution to the worlds problems, but it was quite another to dismantle all the socio cultural programming I had absorbed.
Will Spencer:The hardest bit I had to unplug was around communication.
Will Spencer:I noticed quickly my own tendency towards indirect speech, not saying what I meant and dancing around the point.
Will Spencer:If you listen to me now, you might find that hard to believe, but it's true.
Will Spencer:I also noticed how quickly I and others would jump to defuse tense situations by placating people, silencing dissent, and bowing to the loudest and most shrill voices, even if they were being unreasonable.
Will Spencer:But most importantly, I watched the way that families, communities and conversations were being manipulated by the most shrill and demanding voices among us.
Will Spencer:In these scenarios, everyone would rush to diffuse tension.
Will Spencer:This left issues simmering beneath the surface rather than everyone boldly confronting them.
Will Spencer:This would be difficult enough, except I also observed that the experts at this particular game would often wield unearned power in the situation.
Will Spencer:One of the great blessings of COVID for me was that it gave me a chance to sit back and examine where id come from, both overseas and the Bay area, and consider these phenomena from afar.
Will Spencer:I spent time in group chats with men and observed the way wed all talk with each other.
Will Spencer:Then, when I took that communication style out into the world, I'd find that things worked very differently.
Will Spencer:In fact, I experienced the same manipulative power dynamics I described above, being used against me and others who tried to communicate using clear and masculine speech.
Will Spencer:And that's when I realized the war we're all fighting today isn't just a cultural war, an economic war, or even a political war.
Will Spencer:Its a language war with words as the threats and adult forms of temper tantrums as the consequences.
Will Spencer:This works by playing upon everyones inability to stand strong in the face of social tension and conflict.
Will Spencer:It squashes masculine resistance and clear speech and bashes everyone down into speech patterns that constrain expression of certain ideas.
Will Spencer:By constraining expression, you constrain thought.
Will Spencer:And that's how wokeness functions.
Will Spencer:It's awful, anti human and anti male, and it's literally how the liberal world works.
Will Spencer:Having lived in San Francisco for over a decade, I can tell you that that's true.
Will Spencer:And it was the hardest thing to unplug from my own mind because I had to do it one interaction at a time.
Will Spencer:So you can imagine how shocked I was to see these same patterns inside churches and small groups.
Will Spencer:I thought Christianity was the masculine religion, with God the father and his son Jesus Christ, the patriarchs, the disciples and apostles, covenants and headship.
Will Spencer:And amidst all that manipulative speech patterns controlling thought and dialogue, I was shocked.
Will Spencer:I didn't know what to do.
Will Spencer:I can understand constraining unrighteous and ungodly speech, that's fine, but forbidding clear, direct and masculine speech to protect feelings that made no sense to me from within a christian framework.
Will Spencer:And for a long time I thought I was alone.
Will Spencer:I didnt know that anyone else could see it.
Will Spencer:I wondered what to say and how, but thankfully someone else already had it figured out.
Will Spencer:Which brings me to my guest this week.
Will Spencer:His name is doctor Joe Rigney and hes a fellow of theology at New St.
Will Spencer:Andrews College in Moscow, Idaho, plus the author of the outstanding book leadership and emotional sabotage.
Will Spencer:Resisting the anxiety that will wreck your family, destroy your church, and ruin the world.
Will Spencer:Thats a bold claim about the power of emotional sabotage, and its one that I can validate because Doctor Rigney has put his finger on something that ive seen first in the world and that has now infiltrated the church.
Will Spencer:Its a silent power that doesnt wield physical force, rather emotional and verbal force, to get its way, which runs directly counter to the gospel.
Will Spencer:And I think as a nation we were largely unprepared for the arrival of this form of soft power in the 20th century, after millennia of so called hard power.
Will Spencer:So the soft power crept in unnoticed and took over, crippling every institution that it touched, including evangelicalism.
Will Spencer:Stephen Wolffenhe, the author of the Case for Christian Nationalism, might call it the most effective weapon of gynocracy.
Will Spencer:But now, with a resurgent church, husbands, fathers, and pastors are beginning to encounter this nameless force like I did.
Will Spencer:And for them it's not merely an academic question.
Will Spencer:They see it weakening everything around them, including their own households and families.
Will Spencer:Which is why Doctor Rigney has performed an admirable service documenting whats going on in brief, clear language, not overburdening the point, and providing a map for faithful leaders to help guide us out.
Will Spencer:In our conversation, Doctor Rigney and I discussed his journey into empathy, the unmooring of our virtues, the meaning of a mature adult, being responsible for yourself before God, why battles are ugly when women fight, why virtue requires fear, defining respectable and credible the way that God does, and finally, being the image of God to your wife and kids.
Will Spencer:If you enjoy the renaissance of men podcast, thank you.
Will Spencer:Please give us a five star rating on Spotify and a five star rating and review on Apple podcasts.
Will Spencer:If this is your first time here, welcome.
Will Spencer:I release new episodes about the christian counterculture, masculine virtue, and the family every week.
Will Spencer:Just a reminder that many things about this podcast will be changing very soon.
Will Spencer:As you heard me say recently, this podcast will soon become the Will Spencer podcast.
Will Spencer:New brand new topics, new guests, same format you love.
Will Spencer:And I hope you won't mind these regular reminders to make sure we all come along together.
Will Spencer:And please welcome this week's guest on the podcast, the author of leadership and emotional sabotage, resisting the anxiety that will wreck your family, destroy your church, and ruin the world, Doctor Joe Rigney.
Speaker C:Pastor Rigney, thanks so much for joining me on the podcast today.
Joe Rigney:Hey, glad to be here.
Speaker C:I've got your book here, leadership and emotional sabotage, with the important subtitle, resisting the anxiety that will wreck your family, destroy your church, and ruin the world.
Speaker C:Fantastic.
Speaker C:Fantastic.
Speaker C:And I want to say before we get started, I want to thank you for this book, because as my listeners know, I spent a long time in the secular world.
Speaker C:I lived in the bay area for about ten years, and the principles that you articulate in here about anxiety and empathy is how the secular world works.
Speaker C:When I saw that you were producing this book, I was like, oh, he's cracked the code.
Speaker C:So I've been looking forward to speaking with you about it.
Speaker C:So, for a first question, how did you encounter the subject of empathy itself?
Speaker C:Cause I saw your sin of empathy talk with Pastor Wilson.
Speaker C:When did you realize that this was, like, a thing?
Joe Rigney:Yeah.
Joe Rigney:So I can't remember exactly how I got ahold of Friedman's book, and it may have been that Doug gave it to me, or it may have been that I gave it to him.
Joe Rigney:And so I don't remember.
Joe Rigney:But it was about, it was about a decade ago, and I read.
Joe Rigney:So I read failure of nerve, found it really insightful and helpful, and started using it in the leadership class that I was teaching at Bethlehem.
Joe Rigney:And then basically, over the next five or so years, it was like the world conspired to prove Friedman's point.
Joe Rigney:Everything, it was all there.
Joe Rigney:And he was writing long before that and had seen it in sort of seed form, but it was as if the world just can fire to prove the point.
Joe Rigney:And so as a number of the discussions about whether it was race, whether it was about gender, whether it was about abuse, all of these sort of big issues that were substantial issues in the evangelical world and in the wider culture, all seemed to be animated and in some ways hijacked by untethered empathy, by empathy gone amok.
Joe Rigney:And so at some point after I'd been teaching courses on it, I'd been talking to other churches about the way that these dynamics were showing up in their context.
Joe Rigney:We were seeing some of it even in our own.
Joe Rigney:And so when I was invited to do man rampant, and we need to pick a topic, I said, why don't we do the scent of empathy?
Joe Rigney:And then everybody.
Joe Rigney:And then, so we did that, and then when it released, everybody decided to prove our point again.
Joe Rigney:And so it was just like one after another, you say these things, and then people really do.
Joe Rigney:It does become manifest.
Joe Rigney:It is an teaching opportunity for people to actually see it in action.
Speaker C:Absolutely.
Speaker C:Absolutely.
Speaker C:When I heard, I discovered that talk after the fact.
Speaker C:So maybe within the past year or so.
Speaker C:See, it was uploaded maybe three years ago.
Speaker C:So maybe.
Speaker C:Can you describe some of the blowback that you received from that?
Speaker C:Because I've heard about the blowback, but not actually seen it myself.
Joe Rigney:Yeah.
Joe Rigney:So I would say the order of events in terms of that particular conflict.
Joe Rigney: lmed man rampant, probably in: Joe Rigney:But it didn't release for another 18 months.
Joe Rigney:And in the meantime, I'd written a couple of articles at desiring God, kind of in that screw tape letter format where, you know, the first two articles, one of them was focusing on the way that you can kind of have the kind of compassion that doesn't ever actually want to get their hands dirty.
Joe Rigney:So it keeps it at a distance, tries to steer people shut down.
Joe Rigney:Oh, you feel sad.
Joe Rigney:Please stop.
Joe Rigney:It makes me uncomfortable.
Joe Rigney:At least you have your health, that sort of thing.
Joe Rigney:And so I hit that sort of ham fisted compassion first and then transitioned to sin of empathy.
Joe Rigney:And I would say those two articles, and then when the man rampant episode released, basically the first place it landed was in kind of the abuse advocate survivor community, and they were really unhappy with it.
Joe Rigney:And so I spent a good bit of time, and some people I would say there was two sorts of people that were upset.
Joe Rigney:One was people who were confused.
Joe Rigney:They just had never heard the idea that empathy could be a problem.
Joe Rigney:Like that never had occurred to them.
Joe Rigney:And so they were like, are you saying all empathy is bad?
Joe Rigney:Are you saying no?
Joe Rigney:No.
Joe Rigney:Okay.
Joe Rigney:So there was some clarification that I was happy to provide, and then others were clearly using that confusion as a tool of manipulation.
Joe Rigney:So it didn't matter how many times they clarified, they were still going to misrepresent and try to use it as a weapon in order to do their power plays.
Joe Rigney:And so over the next three or four years, basically every so often, I kept writing things on it, responding, taking it new directions.
Joe Rigney:And every few years, so often it would blow up again.
Joe Rigney:Somebody else would discover it, or it would run, somebody else would criticize it.
Joe Rigney:And so through it all, it was usually those two.
Joe Rigney:Some people hear it, and they can't imagine empathy being bad, and so they just need some help.
Joe Rigney:Right?
Joe Rigney:Well, you can think anger could be good or bad, right?
Joe Rigney:Anxiety, fear could be good or bad, right?
Joe Rigney:Like, sometimes fear is warranted.
Joe Rigney:Sometimes it's unreasonable.
Joe Rigney:Sometimes anger's righteous.
Joe Rigney:Sometimes it's unrighteous.
Joe Rigney:So these other passions, right, they can be bad.
Joe Rigney:Why couldn't empathy be the same way?
Joe Rigney:And some people are able to get it, others are determined not to get it, because the play that they're running depends upon people not getting it.
Speaker C:Yes.
Speaker C:Yes.
Speaker C:I've got a book here by the author, Simon Baron Cohen.
Speaker C:This is actually Sasha Baron Cohen's brother.
Speaker C:It's called the essential difference.
Speaker C:It's a book about neurological differences in brain structure between men and women.
Speaker C:So he's an atheist.
Speaker C:So differences in brain structure between men and women is about as close as an atheist will ever get to goddess.
Speaker C:And so in here, he says that the female brain is designed for empathizing, and he defines empathy.
Speaker C:And he says empathy has an imaginative and an affective component.
Speaker C:So the imaginative component is you imagine yourself in the other person's shoes, and then you imagine how you would feel.
Speaker C:This is the affective component if you were in their shoes.
Speaker C:So I'm imagining myself in the quicksand.
Speaker C:How would I feel?
Speaker C:And then we're supposed to feel that and never question it, which sounds like what you touched on.
Joe Rigney:Yeah.
Joe Rigney:And I think in that respect, the important thing, and I stressed this from the beginning, that in and of itself, that's a perfectly.
Joe Rigney:That's a very human, God designed thing, both in general and for women.
Joe Rigney:I think that part of the reason, the strength of women in that respect is that intuitive emotion sharing that allows them to be first responders.
Joe Rigney:When people are hurting, they're just right there and they just kick into gear.
Joe Rigney:And it's a good and grand and glorious thing.
Joe Rigney:The problem comes when you take it out of that context and it becomes unmoored from any other concerns, any other issues.
Joe Rigney:And just the other day, so I preached on this the other day at our church, and I had come across a Cs Lewis quote, or actually it was Chesterton, is the modern virtues have gone mad.
Joe Rigney:The old christian virtues.
Joe Rigney:In the modern world, old christian virtues have gone mad because they've become unmoored from one another.
Joe Rigney:So on the one hand, you have the scientists pursue truth, but their truth is pitiless.
Joe Rigney:And the humanitarian elevates pity, what he called pity.
Joe Rigney:But their pity is untruthful.
Joe Rigney:Their pity is untethered from truth.
Joe Rigney:And so you have there you have pitiless truth or untruthful pity, untruthful empathy.
Joe Rigney:And it's those things.
Joe Rigney:We actually have to keep these things together.
Joe Rigney:We have to keep them tethered to something sturdier than our own feelings.
Speaker C:So as all this is kind of landing on you, you put out these talks, you write these articles, everyone's setting out to prove you right, and they're doing a good job of it.
Speaker C:When did the book begin to kind of come together?
Speaker C:Like, I should probably write a book about this.
Speaker C:But not just a book, but more Like a manual.
Speaker C:Pastor Wilson has a map.
Joe Rigney:Yeah, a map.
Joe Rigney:So part of the WAy the book came together was when I moved out here to moscow.
Joe Rigney:You know, I've had friends who've, you know, gotten into Friedman and read it, but have always had the same thing that I had, which is this is, it's a really great paradigm.
Joe Rigney:You know, his, his paradigm for dealing not just with empathy, but just leadership in general is a really helpful one for navigating family conflict, for navigating workplace stuff, church stuff.
Joe Rigney:But you have to wade ThrOUgh a lot of stuff.
Joe Rigney:It's not the sort of book that you could just give to anybody because some people are going to stumble over some of Friedman's categories, his psychological language, the evolutionary roots that he's grounding everything in.
Joe Rigney:And so when I came out here, they said, hey, you've been doing this for a while.
Joe Rigney:Would you want to put, you know, could you pull that together into some talks or into a book or something?
Joe Rigney:And so I said, sure.
Joe Rigney:And it came together actually relatively quickly, partly because, you know, it was the emerging of a couple of different streams.
Joe Rigney:One was for the last few years, I had been translating Friedman's concept of self differentiated leader as sober minded.
Joe Rigney:So I had been thinking and talking in terms of, when we say, when talking about somebody being a mature adult, what do we mean?
Joe Rigney:And sober mindedness had kind of become this organizing virtue as a way of thinking of someone who is steady, stable, grounded, clear eyed, but also engaged, not checked out.
Joe Rigney:So there's a certain kind of person who can analyze stuff, but they're emotionally totally uninvested, and they're not going to do anything.
Joe Rigney:And then there's another kind who's just going to do, and they're going to get led by the feelings.
Joe Rigney:Well, you need somebody who's grounded, steady, stable, has a stability of soul, but is ready to act in the right way, and is governed by reason, governed by what's true, governed by what's good.
Joe Rigney:And so I'd already been doing that, and that had been sort of my own take on freedmen over the last few years.
Joe Rigney:And then I'd done a lot of thinking about man, actually manhood and womanhood and the way that.
Joe Rigney:What does it mean for a man to be the head of his home?
Joe Rigney:What does it mean for the woman to be the body?
Joe Rigney:This head body idea, what was that?
Joe Rigney:And how do we better articulate both?
Joe Rigney:What's sort of the facts of nature, just the way things are.
Joe Rigney:It doesn't matter whether you want them to be this way or not.
Joe Rigney:This is facts.
Joe Rigney:And then in light of those facts, how should we live?
Joe Rigney:What does it mean to be a faithful head?
Joe Rigney:What does it mean to be a faithful member of the body?
Joe Rigney:And so I'd been working on that separately.
Joe Rigney:And so you kind of had, Friedman, you had my sober mindedness stuff, and you had this manhood, womanhood stuff.
Joe Rigney:And then various experiences I'd been through, I preached through the book of acts.
Joe Rigney:I'd seen enough manipulations and pressures and stresses that it all just kind of, like, came together and was able to be wrapped up into six pretty short chapters.
Joe Rigney:So all in all, there was a timeliness thing that I'm grateful God's been kind to pull it all together.
Speaker C:And you produced a course, which I watched as well, or a series of conversations with Pastor Wilson, and then a course.
Speaker C:Maybe you can talk about those also.
Speaker C:And then we'll walk through some of the content.
Joe Rigney:Yeah.
Joe Rigney:So the first thing was that the canon asked to do, hey, let's do a little course.
Joe Rigney:And so we did six sessions, put those on canon plus.
Joe Rigney:And that was the initial ask.
Joe Rigney:And then I said, you know, I wrote about 17,000 words, getting ready for this course.
Joe Rigney:I could probably add another ten, and it'd be a nice little book.
Joe Rigney:And they said, great.
Joe Rigney:And so that's where.
Joe Rigney:So that was the course was first in the book and then kind of coming out of it, you know, Friedman wrote these fables to kind of illustrate some of his fundamental principles.
Joe Rigney:And we and Cannon had the idea, why don't we have you and Doug talk about these fables?
Joe Rigney:Because they can be a little bit surprising.
Joe Rigney:They're just a little bit.
Joe Rigney:Whoa.
Joe Rigney:That's the way fable, good fables, good myths work.
Joe Rigney:That way they kind of grab your attention.
Joe Rigney:But then they gave us a good base from which to launch to talk about, how does this show up in your Home?
Joe Rigney:Or how does this show up in the Church or in the culture?
Joe Rigney:And so we put together those four little episodes also on canon plus.
Speaker C:Yeah, I'd never heard of FRIEdMaN's fables, but hearing you and DOug work through them, it's like, oh, I've seen this a thousand times in my life.
Speaker C:This is basically how the SeculaR WorLD works, right?
Speaker C:Especially the rope.
Speaker C:Like, maybe talk about the rope and the bridge example quickly, and then we'll just use that to set the stage of what the kind of fable looks like and what they articulate.
Joe Rigney:Yeah.
Joe Rigney:So there's, one of the fables is a guy's going on a journey.
Joe Rigney:He comes to a bridge.
Joe Rigney:Another guy's walking across the bridge, and the hero of the story is trying to get where he's going to go.
Joe Rigney:He's got a vision for his life.
Joe Rigney:And the other guy comes up, hands him a rope, and then jumps over and then basically holds him hostage.
Joe Rigney:So I'm not, you know, the guy's like, I'll help pull you up.
Joe Rigney:And the guy, the hanger is saying, no, you'll just hold on.
Joe Rigney:And these are these moments where you realize you're in a hostage situation where the other person is basically saying, if you don't, you're emotionally responsible for me, and I'm your problem.
Joe Rigney:And it's not that I'm your problem in the way that God expects, you know, so a husband's ahead of his home, he's responsible for his.
Joe Rigney:For his household.
Joe Rigney:It's not that.
Joe Rigney:It's actually, I'm denying, you know, the person who's holding hostage, the hostage taker, is saying, my emotional state is entirely up to you, but it's not really up to you.
Joe Rigney:I'm denying all agency, and I'm going to hold you hostage.
Joe Rigney:And you see that in all sorts of places.
Joe Rigney:You can see it in extended families.
Joe Rigney:The example I used the other day in the sermon was, this is how the trans movement operates.
Joe Rigney:The question would you rather have a dead son or a living daughter?
Joe Rigney:Is a great example of someone saying somebody's, you know, you have a boy, parents, you know, have a son, and he's been groomed into gender ideology and now is convinced he's a girl.
Joe Rigney:And the activists will come and say, look, mom, dad, you need to get on board with this.
Joe Rigney:And if you don't, you're gonna end up with a dead son.
Joe Rigney:And so if you don't want a dead son, you better accept your new living daughter, and you better pay for the surgeries and the hormone blockers and everything else.
Joe Rigney:And it's basically a hostage situation that says, mom and dad, this is, if they do something, if they kill themselves, it's your fault.
Joe Rigney:It's your fault.
Joe Rigney:And what are they doing?
Joe Rigney:They're playing on the parents compassion.
Joe Rigney:Parents are compassionate.
Joe Rigney:God designed them to be.
Joe Rigney:As a father has compassion on his children, so shall the Lord have compassion on you.
Joe Rigney:Shall a mother forget her nursing child?
Joe Rigney:Shall she fail to have compassion on the child of her womb?
Joe Rigney:These are biblical texts that say, fathers and mothers are exhibit a of compassion and empathy and pity and whatever word you want to use.
Joe Rigney:And so that also means there's a danger that they can be manipulated by it, and clever, ungodly agents will figure out how to exploit it.
Speaker C:So let's make this grounded and practical, then.
Speaker C:So not everyone's going to be dealing, although someone listening may be dealing with this exact situation, with the trans son, the dead son, living daughter.
Speaker C:But it seems like everyone has at least one situation, probably in their lives, where someone has thrown the rope around them and says, now you are responsible for me.
Speaker C:And if you don't do what I say, then the hostage gets it, and I happen to be the hostage.
Speaker C:So, like, how can men and women, too, how can they spot these situations when they're coming?
Speaker C:And how can they, in the moment, wield the righteous no?
Speaker C:Or what is the right response in that?
Joe Rigney:So I think a couple of things is, first, getting so recognizing when it's happening is often a matter, first of becoming more aware of your own passions.
Joe Rigney:So, because oftentimes paying attention to your own hesitations, reluctances, aversions, your angers, your anxieties.
Joe Rigney:Because oftentimes we intuitively are aware of the social environment.
Joe Rigney:We know what's expected of us when you go home for Christmas.
Joe Rigney:You know that there's certain people, certain topics.
Joe Rigney:You stay away from certain things.
Joe Rigney:When people get agitated, you just kind of begin to maneuver around.
Joe Rigney:So we all do this sort of intuitively and naturally to avoid relational pain.
Joe Rigney:Basically, we want to avoid the emotional pain, relational pain, and we get very adept at dodging.
Joe Rigney:So the first step is becoming aware of when you're doing that automatically.
Joe Rigney:When are you ducking?
Joe Rigney:When are you avoiding?
Joe Rigney:And you can tell that by your own passions.
Joe Rigney:You know, there's, here's the thing I could say in this moment that would set everybody off.
Joe Rigney:And then you have to ask, okay, am I doing that because of wisdom?
Joe Rigney:Because there's an issue that needs to be addressed, but now's not the right time, but I'm gonna address it later, or am I doing so out of cowardice?
Joe Rigney:I just don't want, I don't want to deal with it.
Joe Rigney:I'm fearing man.
Joe Rigney:And so that's how you diagnose when you're doing it.
Joe Rigney:That's one of the key ways you diagnose.
Joe Rigney:Then it's getting more clear on the nature of responsibility.
Joe Rigney:What does God act?
Joe Rigney:Who are you responsible for and how.
Joe Rigney:How are you responsible for it?
Joe Rigney:So your first and fundamental responsibility is for yourself.
Joe Rigney:You stand before God, and you're responsible to him for you.
Joe Rigney:You're responsible for your emotions, your attitudes.
Joe Rigney:You're responsible for your actions, for your words, for your deeds.
Joe Rigney:You'll give an account for every bit of it to the Lord.
Joe Rigney:He's the one who will.
Joe Rigney:You're responsible to him.
Joe Rigney:Then if you're in leadership, you're also responsible for those under you.
Joe Rigney:But you're not to blame for everything under you.
Joe Rigney:So you're responsible, which means you need to address it.
Joe Rigney:But part of, like, if you're a pastor of a church, you're going to be held account for what happened in your congregation.
Joe Rigney:But what that doesn't mean is every sin in your congregation will be imputed to you.
Joe Rigney:What it means is when you discovered or saw the sin, when you saw that issue, what did you do?
Joe Rigney:Did you lean in?
Joe Rigney:Did you address it?
Joe Rigney:Did you rebuke, correct exhort?
Joe Rigney:Did you use the word, did we bring it to bear?
Joe Rigney:That's what you'll be held responsible for your actions and what you ought to do, and they'll be held responsible for what they did.
Joe Rigney:And so this is like with Adam and eve, right?
Joe Rigney:Eve sinned.
Joe Rigney:But when God, you know, both of them sinned.
Joe Rigney:Eve sinned first.
Joe Rigney:But when God showed up, he wanted to talk to Adam.
Joe Rigney:Why?
Joe Rigney:Because Adam was the head.
Joe Rigney:Adam, where are you?
Joe Rigney:I want to talk to you because you're responsible for the whole thing.
Joe Rigney:I gave you the law of the garden.
Joe Rigney:You were responsible to teach it to your wife and to make sure she knew what the law of the garden was.
Joe Rigney:And then you were responsible to guard and protect this place from evil.
Joe Rigney:Now you're naked.
Joe Rigney:Now you've clothed yourself.
Joe Rigney:Who told you that you were naked?
Joe Rigney:Why are you hiding?
Joe Rigney:So he wants to talk to Adam because Adam's the head.
Joe Rigney:But that doesn't mean that eve can say, well, if Adam's the head, I don't have any responsibility here.
Joe Rigney:No, that's not true.
Joe Rigney:Eve's responsible for herself.
Joe Rigney:So that blame shifting thing that all humans want to do, we want to offload blame.
Joe Rigney:Offload responsibility to others is the thing that you have to lean in with.
Joe Rigney:You have to say, no, I'm responsible for certain things, but not for other things.
Joe Rigney:And so that's what prevents the hostage situation.
Speaker C:Can you speak a word of encouragement into men who are experiencing this currently in their lives?
Speaker C:And they know with their families or their workplaces or their friends, that if they say the thing, everything will blow up and they will get blamed for the explosion because everything was going along just fine, quote unquote, before, and then you had to go and say the thing, and now all of this chaos, now it's all on you.
Speaker C:Obviously, we know in our hearts that's false, but can you speak a word of encouragement to men that are facing situations like that?
Joe Rigney:Yeah, this is where, it's where courage is needed.
Joe Rigney:So you get clear on what's happening.
Joe Rigney:Get clear on it.
Joe Rigney:So that means someone can be the occasion for a blow up and not the cause of the blow up.
Joe Rigney:So when Paul's, you know, in the book, I talk about Paul in the book of acts, and everywhere Paul goes, there's a mob.
Joe Rigney:And so the optical illusion that can result from that is Paul causes mobs.
Joe Rigney:And it's actually, no, Paul is preaching the gospel.
Joe Rigney:What's happening is his opponents are following him around, and everywhere he goes, they lie, they slander, they stir up mobs in order to oppose him.
Joe Rigney:This is an effective means of trying to put a damper on the gospel proclamation.
Joe Rigney:So if you were to say, yeah, Paul causes mobs, you're like, no, you're not seeing it clearly.
Joe Rigney:It's his opponents that are causing the mobs.
Joe Rigney:They're behind the scenes.
Joe Rigney:Pulling.
Joe Rigney:They're puppet masters.
Joe Rigney:They know how to stir people up.
Joe Rigney:They know how to use slander and false accusations in order to steer people, and they're doing it.
Joe Rigney:And so there's the mob and Paul.
Joe Rigney:What Paul's refusing to do is he's refusing to be cowed by the mob.
Joe Rigney:He's not backing down from the mob.
Joe Rigney:He sees the mob as an opportunity to be faithful, to preach the gospel.
Joe Rigney:And so you got to get clear on, if I say this, I may be lighting a match, but you ought to be able to light matches.
Joe Rigney:Okay?
Joe Rigney:The issue is somebody else has been pumping gas into this room, and that's what's going to blow up.
Joe Rigney:But it's the person that's pumping the gas that's responsible for it, not me.
Joe Rigney:So I'm going to own my words, but my words ought to be not, you know, my words are not.
Joe Rigney:You're speaking the truth, then it ought to be uncontroversial.
Joe Rigney:If you in heaven, if you said what you said, would the angels react?
Joe Rigney:That sort of question?
Joe Rigney:Right?
Joe Rigney:Would the saints who have been made righteous, if you said whatever thing that you're going to say in the setting, would they approve it or disapprove it?
Joe Rigney:That's how you should calibrate yourself.
Joe Rigney:What does God think about this?
Joe Rigney:What does the word say?
Joe Rigney:That's the true calibration.
Joe Rigney:Then it's okay.
Joe Rigney:Now, in this context, I'm going to say it and it's going to be uncomfortable, and then you're ready to deal with the blowback.
Joe Rigney:So you know you're going to do it.
Joe Rigney:And that's where you have to steel yourself with.
Joe Rigney:I know what God thinks.
Joe Rigney:I know who I am.
Joe Rigney:Um, I'm seeking his approval.
Joe Rigney:I'm gonna.
Joe Rigney:I'm gonna speak plainly and clearly.
Joe Rigney:Um, I'm gonna be, um, master of myself.
Joe Rigney:God's restored control of me to me.
Joe Rigney:I'm.
Joe Rigney:I'm self controlled and sober minded.
Joe Rigney:Um, I.
Joe Rigney:My passions aren't running amok inside.
Joe Rigney:So I'm gonna take this blowback knowing that it's coming and I'm gonna try to lead through it.
Joe Rigney:That's, that's how, that's what God calls, um, leaders to do.
Speaker C:So.
Speaker C:So I asked first about men, because I think courage and disagreeableness, to use a Jordan Peterson word, is something that's very inherent to men.
Speaker C:We're supposed to be disagreeable.
Speaker C:Combat battle is disagreeable.
Speaker C:But I think one of the things we're also facing today is women having the need to be disagreeable about particularly sins about feminism, for example, that show up within families, and manipulation.
Speaker C:And so I've spoken to a number of women that see many things going wrong within their families, within their friend groups, and they want to speak into it.
Speaker C:But women aren't maybe necessarily character or logically designed, made to be disagreeable in that way.
Speaker C:Can you speak a word of encouragement to women as well in this regard?
Joe Rigney:Yeah, so we definitely see.
Joe Rigney:So while women are not designed by God to be frontline fighters when battles are, Lewis said, battles are ugly when women fight.
Joe Rigney:And then he still gave Susan that bow and arrow in Narnia, Father Christmas tells Susan, battles are ugly when women fight.
Joe Rigney:You're not supposed to be in the front lines, but there are times when everything's coming apart where you're going to need that bow and arrow, you're going to need that dagger.
Joe Rigney:And so there is a place, and all women ought to be women of courage.
Joe Rigney:Sarah in the Bible is a model of courage.
Joe Rigney:So in one Peter, we're told, be like the holy women who hoped in God.
Joe Rigney:Be like Sarah, who submitted to Abraham, calling him lord, who did good and did not fear anything that was frightening, so that fear.
Joe Rigney:So a woman could say, this is going to be awkward in my friend group if I bring up, but this is wrong.
Joe Rigney:God doesn't.
Joe Rigney:This is false.
Joe Rigney:This is not true to the scriptures.
Joe Rigney:Yes, it will be awkward, and there's a hurdle that you have to get over because of the agreeableness, the natural female agreeableness, but faithfulness demands it.
Joe Rigney:It's still, do you care what God thinks, or do you care what man thinks?
Joe Rigney:Are you seeking to be approved by the world by your friends, or are you going to be approved by the Lord?
Joe Rigney:That's the fundamental thing that you've got to get straight and you've got to anchor yourself in this.
Speaker C:Pastoral advice is fantastic.
Speaker C:So to follow on from that, let's say that you're in the room full of people, whether man or woman, room's full of gas, the chronic anxiety, you light the match, the thing blows up, and nothing is ever the same again in any kind of way.
Speaker C:Help counsel people through what to do in that moment of grief, like, I've just lost this thing that was precious to me.
Speaker C:How would you counsel somebody in that situation who's sitting with that?
Joe Rigney:Yeah.
Joe Rigney:So then I think, well, part of what you're doing is maybe this would be even part of the advice before you do it, is you're entrusting it to goddess.
Joe Rigney:Right.
Joe Rigney:So a big part of what you're doing in being willing to say it is, Lord, I'm going to say these words, and I'm all.
Joe Rigney:Everything that happens after that, I'm going to say the truth, or I'm going to resist the lie, whatever it is, I'm going to be faithful, and I'm leaving the results in your hands.
Joe Rigney:And so in the aftermath, if it went sideways.
Joe Rigney:So first, let's start with sometimes we say the thing that we think is going to be a problem, and we're actually shocked that half the people in the room are like, thank you.
Joe Rigney:Like, this actually happens more than you think, where you weren't the only one.
Joe Rigney:Everybody else was uncomfortable with it, too.
Joe Rigney:They just hadn't got there yet.
Joe Rigney:They hadn't gotten to the courage point.
Joe Rigney:And it's you saying, hey, actually, I don't think we need to do this.
Joe Rigney:It's you saying, no, we're not going to cater to that, no, we're not going to coddle that.
Joe Rigney:And a bunch of people come up to you after and say thank you.
Joe Rigney:Or you discover that if it's in a family context, that one of your siblings had also had the same thought about your extended relative who was causing the problem.
Joe Rigney:And now what happens is, in that moment, you actually bind with them in a certain way.
Joe Rigney:You're forming the nucleus of a more healthy system, because it's one that's built on the truth and upon, you know, what God thinks and not what the world thinks.
Joe Rigney:The reason the other one's so unhealthy is because it's shot through with worldliness.
Joe Rigney:Yours, you're trying to build something healthier.
Joe Rigney:So sometimes, just know, you might say it and people actually might, might get on board, but say they don't say that.
Joe Rigney:The herd instinct kicks in and everybody tries to shout you down or get you to apologize.
Joe Rigney:In that moment, you're entrusting the whole thing to the Lord and you're saying, Lord, I don't see how.
Joe Rigney:I don't see the way out.
Joe Rigney:I don't see how this could ever be any better.
Joe Rigney:But I'm going to be faithful and I'm going to leave it in your hands and just keep doing that daily.
Joe Rigney:I think when it comes to one of the little bits in the book that I don't know if people fully appreciate, but I've appreciated it more and more in recent years, is the way that job, at the beginning, part of what job made job a faithful leader and a faithful father was.
Joe Rigney:His kids are having their parties and he's regularly going before the Lord and saying, lord, I'm going to offer these sacrifices to you on behalf of my kids, just in case they'd sinned and cursed you in their hearts.
Joe Rigney:Right?
Joe Rigney:And so what job is doing there is taking responsibility for his kids.
Joe Rigney:He's like, I can't reach in there and turn their sin on and off.
Joe Rigney:I don't have that power.
Joe Rigney:Nobody has that power for another person.
Joe Rigney:You don't even have that for yourself.
Joe Rigney:You need the grace of God to change your own heart.
Joe Rigney:So I don't have that power, but I can, Lord, bring it before you and say, I'm responsible.
Joe Rigney:These are my children, and so I am, as the head, I'm going to take responsibility for them.
Joe Rigney:And so that's what you're going to do both before and after both, when you're, when it's still simmering and when it's finally blown up is say, lord.
Joe Rigney:Yep, okay, I said it.
Joe Rigney:I took a stand.
Joe Rigney:I had some nerve.
Joe Rigney:Um, I I didn't go along the way that we've always gone along in the past.
Joe Rigney:I I stood my ground, and now everybody's mad at me.
Joe Rigney:So, lord, I'm entrusting this to you.
Joe Rigney:You're going to have to bring something out and help me in the meantime to be cheerful, to be joyful, to rejoice, because they're saying all kinds of false things about me.
Joe Rigney:Lord, help me to do, to obey Jesus who said, when they say false things about you, go do a dance, go have a party, you're blessed.
Joe Rigney:Help me to receive that and help me to maintain my humility.
Joe Rigney:I want to think your thoughts.
Joe Rigney:I want to be wise.
Joe Rigney:I want to be gracious.
Joe Rigney:So you're just.
Joe Rigney:And you'll notice that what's happening is you're actually becoming a more dependent person.
Joe Rigney:You're becoming more dependent upon the Lord and therefore independent respect to people.
Joe Rigney:Right.
Joe Rigney:Like, you're actually, like, because you're depending on the Lord, you actually have the ability to stand against the crowd, and that's where you, that's where you want to live.
Joe Rigney:Live there.
Speaker C:You used a word that I think doesn't get used enough these days, but I think is very accurate.
Speaker C:Have some nerve.
Speaker C:Like the word have some nerve, maybe.
Speaker C:Can you unpack that a little bit?
Speaker C:Because that's a concept we've lost in our world today, I think.
Joe Rigney:Yeah.
Joe Rigney:It's a way of talking about courage, fortitude, backbone, any of those sort of terms.
Joe Rigney:It's.
Joe Rigney:Here's a hard thing that, and it could be social pressure.
Joe Rigney:It could be objective danger.
Joe Rigney:Right.
Joe Rigney:It doesn't matter what it is that produces fear in me.
Joe Rigney:And so the question is, is my fear going to run me?
Joe Rigney:Is the fear in charge?
Joe Rigney:Does the fear win?
Joe Rigney:Does the fear lead?
Joe Rigney:So the presence of fear is not a problem.
Joe Rigney:If the fear wasn't there, then you wouldn't have.
Joe Rigney:There would be no possibility of the virtue being there either.
Joe Rigney:Right.
Joe Rigney:So you need the fear because you need then the grace of God acting through your mind and heart to overcome it and to not give way, to not buckle.
Joe Rigney:And so if you're standing firm, then you might.
Joe Rigney:We'd say, oh, he's got fortitude because he's standing firm.
Joe Rigney:If it's you have to move forward, you'd say, he's taking a risk, he's being courageous.
Joe Rigney:But in both cases, yeah, you're planting your feet, you're standing firm in the face of challenge, sabotage, steering, pressure, consequences.
Joe Rigney:I'm going to be faithful to the Lord no matter what.
Speaker C:So we started sort of in the home, the friend, the family structure, and in the book, that's where you start, and then you start building out into the.
Speaker C:And into the world.
Speaker C:So maybe let's start with the church, because I think the world is being confronted in some ways, but these conflicts that crackle, this anxiety exists within so many churches, and I think people are rightfully afraid to light a match, but maybe in some ways they kind of have to.
Speaker C:So maybe we can spend some time talking.
Speaker C:Maybe have to isn't the right word, but maybe it's necessary would be a better way of putting that.
Joe Rigney:Yeah.
Joe Rigney:So I think one of the things I've been writing about more recently, and we'll probably try to pull some things together even in the future, but it's kind of a follow on to the sabotage book is.
Joe Rigney:How does it.
Joe Rigney:What are the mechanics of it?
Joe Rigney:And so I mentioned in the book that often worldliness gets laundered through other Christians, meaning you've got the worldly things happening over there and you don't care what the world says because you've got enough backbone.
Joe Rigney:You know what Jesus said?
Joe Rigney:The world will hate us, it's okay.
Joe Rigney:But there's a Christian who's closer to them, who does care and has compromised, but you don't care what that Christian says because they're a compromised Christian.
Joe Rigney:That denomination's unfaithful, that church is unfaithful.
Joe Rigney:So you don't care about that.
Joe Rigney:But then there's a person closer, one step closer to you who does care what that group thinks.
Joe Rigney:And there's a person.
Joe Rigney:And so it's just this chain.
Joe Rigney:And the hard thing to resist is the one that's close to you, right?
Joe Rigney:And this is what, you know, the illustration of the book is when Peter withdrew from the Gentiles because of certain pressures from the circumcision party, which probably means the unbelieving Jews in Jerusalem.
Joe Rigney:And so it's like, how did that work?
Joe Rigney:Well, those unbelieving Jews were making trouble for the church in Jerusalem.
Joe Rigney:James was, you know, people are getting persecuted.
Joe Rigney:They're getting kicked out of the synagogues, thrown in jail.
Joe Rigney:James is worried about this.
Joe Rigney:He sends.
Joe Rigney:He sends messengers to Peter.
Joe Rigney:So now you've got three steps, three people involved.
Joe Rigney:And those men come to Peter and they say, look, if you keep eating with the Gentiles, it's making it really tough for us.
Joe Rigney:You know, people are not liking it.
Joe Rigney:We have.
Joe Rigney:Our reputation is shot.
Joe Rigney:Could you maybe back off and just for a little bit?
Joe Rigney:Maybe just for a season, you know?
Joe Rigney:And you can.
Joe Rigney:And we're not told the details, but it's not hard to imagine the kinds of appeals that would be made in that kind of setting.
Joe Rigney:And Peter goes, okay, and he withdraws.
Joe Rigney:And then Leeds, Barnabas comes along with Peter, and then the rest of the jews come along with Peter.
Joe Rigney:And so.
Joe Rigney:And then it takes Paul to finally say, but wait a minute.
Joe Rigney:Wait a minute.
Joe Rigney:No, this is wrong.
Joe Rigney:And to actually take the stand to oppose Peter to his face, to light the match, which may be really awkward, and you don't know, is it going to blow up or is it going to make peace?
Joe Rigney:And so that's the sort of thing that.
Joe Rigney:The way that the world launders its influence through other christians.
Joe Rigney:So the way I've come to talk about this, this isn't in the book, but it's coming out of the book, I would say, is that oftentimes christians live under the progressive gaze.
Joe Rigney:Under the progressive eyes.
Joe Rigney:So.
Joe Rigney:Eyes, yeah, eyes, not.
Joe Rigney:Yeah, progressive gaze, not gaysgaze.
Joe Rigney:And I actually get the term.
Speaker C:That's true.
Joe Rigney:Yeah, I guess they're both true.
Joe Rigney:But I actually got the terminal from Toni Morrison, who's a novelist, african american novelist, who kind of popularized this, talking about the white gaze.
Joe Rigney:And what she meant was, there's a way with her as a black author, she always felt like that there was this presumption that her true audience was white people, and so that she needed to speak and act and write in such a way that that was her main audience.
Joe Rigney:She was trying to make sure they were the ones evaluating.
Joe Rigney:White people were the ones evaluating.
Joe Rigney:And so it was something like, she basically felt like there was this little white man sitting on her shoulder saying, you know, sort of furrowed brow, you know, well, that doesn't make sense.
Joe Rigney:And, you know, you know, and so she said, I couldn't just describe my own experience because I was not writing.
Joe Rigney:And so she said, I had to really work to get that guy off my shoulder and write for the audience I wanted to write for.
Joe Rigney:Yeah.
Joe Rigney:And what it is, is it's actually just a really creative way to talk about people pleasing.
Joe Rigney:Right.
Joe Rigney:Like, you know what I mean?
Joe Rigney:Like, at some level, it's like the worldly gaze, the progressive gaze, the white gaze, whatever gaze is just a person on your shoulder who's evaluating everything you do.
Joe Rigney:And Christians, this is the thing.
Joe Rigney:Christians have gotten in a habit of doing this by saying, well, the world is watching.
Joe Rigney:The world is watching.
Joe Rigney:And it's like, and that's true.
Joe Rigney:Jesus says, you know, they'll know you're christians by your love for one another.
Joe Rigney:They're watching.
Joe Rigney:And it's like, yeah, but what, but who else is watching?
Joe Rigney:Is the Lord watching?
Joe Rigney:What does he think about what we just said?
Joe Rigney:What does he think about what we're doing?
Joe Rigney:That's, again, the more fundamental question, but, because when you live underneath, when the church lives underneath the progressive gaze, when it lives under that sense of judgment, it will then seek to cater and accommodate and placate progressive ideologies, progressive sins.
Joe Rigney:It will speak softly about things that progressives want us to speak softly about, and it will drop a big hammer.
Joe Rigney:This is the origin of the phenomenon where we talk about people who will punch left but, or punch right but coddle left right.
Joe Rigney:So things that are associated with the right that are culturally unacceptable, the church will just drop hammers.
Joe Rigney:No nuance.
Joe Rigney:No.
Joe Rigney:Let's try to understand that perspective.
Joe Rigney:Nope, just, boom, drop it.
Joe Rigney:And then on the other hand, to the left, it's, well, we gotta nuance this.
Joe Rigney:We gotta be winsome here.
Joe Rigney:And it's like, what's happening is there's a little progressive sitting on the shoulder that's dictating how and when and why we speak.
Joe Rigney:And so that's how the church and the world.
Joe Rigney:And so, and this is the hard thing for a leader, is it's often the first fight is not with the world, but it's with your elder team.
Joe Rigney:It's your elder team.
Joe Rigney:It's the three guys in that room who have that little progressive on their shoulder.
Joe Rigney:And you're going, but we're just drifting.
Joe Rigney:We're being steered left.
Joe Rigney:We're being moved left.
Joe Rigney:We're being moved in a progressive, liberal, unbiblical direction.
Joe Rigney:And it's, how do I stop it?
Joe Rigney:Well, it's going to take some courage, some nerve to stand up to them, just like Paul had to stand up to Peter.
Speaker C:So there could be someone listening who could be like, that's all well and good, but I'm not Paul.
Speaker C:Right.
Speaker C:And push back on that a little bit.
Joe Rigney:Yeah.
Joe Rigney:I'd say, well, you better be if you're a leader, you are.
Joe Rigney:I mean, like Paul says, you know, if whatever you've heard and seen in me practice these things, do it.
Joe Rigney:He puts himself forward.
Joe Rigney:Imitate me as I imitate Christ, he says.
Joe Rigney:So Paul puts himself forward as a model for other leaders, for Timothy, for churches.
Joe Rigney:We're supposed to look at Paul and go, how did he handle these kind of situations?
Joe Rigney:Because he's trying to follow.
Joe Rigney:He's seeking to follow Christ.
Joe Rigney:So I would say you may not be Paul in that you're not an apostle, but you are the leader in that room.
Joe Rigney:And so the question is, will you be faithful at your post just as he was faithful at his post.
Speaker C:Mm hmm.
Speaker C:So what can christians listening then do to root out the progressive gaze that lives over their shoulder?
Speaker C:Because it seems to me that it's a very powerful force within the church today.
Speaker C:Like, it's just living right there.
Speaker C:The progressive gaze, the science man gaze.
Speaker C:Like all these different gazes are sitting on christian shoulders and it's not the gospel.
Joe Rigney:Yeah, right.
Joe Rigney:So I would say this is what I think this is Toni Morrison.
Joe Rigney:She just said, you just gotta flick that guy off.
Joe Rigney:Just, but the thing is, here's the danger.
Joe Rigney:This is the, to borrow a Jesus image, he says, you cast out one demon and then you leave the house swept clean.
Joe Rigney:Seven more worse than the first come back and reinhabit.
Joe Rigney:So it's like, it's not enough to simply remove, to simply say, I'm not.
Joe Rigney:Oftentimes what we're doing when we're writing for that gaze is we're trying to manage results.
Joe Rigney:We're trying to, like that.
Joe Rigney:We want, we're not simply trying to be faithful.
Joe Rigney:We're trying to manage consequences and results.
Joe Rigney:And so the first step is you're not God.
Joe Rigney:You have no control over consequences and results.
Joe Rigney:You can't predict it.
Joe Rigney:You can't with an absolute way.
Joe Rigney:You can sort of anticipate things, wisdom.
Joe Rigney:You can sort of read, okay, I think I know how this is going to go, but you don't have any control over what happens.
Joe Rigney:You're not goddesse.
Joe Rigney:And so I'm not God.
Joe Rigney:I'm going to step out of that role by trying to manage and be God.
Joe Rigney:You know, I got a friend who talks about, we think of evangelism as being God's pr guy, right?
Joe Rigney:We've got to be his PR spokesman to try to spin everything to, you know, to help appeal to the audience.
Joe Rigney:And it's like, you're not God's pr guy.
Joe Rigney:Your task, you're God's herald.
Joe Rigney:Say what he said, okay?
Joe Rigney:Say what he said.
Joe Rigney:And where the thing does come into play is, you know, which by your own hesitations, which things you say are gonna cause that.
Joe Rigney:And it's often, that's the signal of what faithfulness means there, right?
Joe Rigney:What, it's no good to gather all the, you know what here.
Joe Rigney:I'm gonna gather all these christians in a room and I'm gonna preach about the sins that aren't in the room.
Joe Rigney:I'm gonna gather all the christians and I'm gonna address every, I'm gonna address all kinds of sin and I can thunder and everybody, and I'm gonna get amen.
Joe Rigney:Amen.
Joe Rigney:Amen.
Joe Rigney:And it's all about sins that are in that church across town or in that world over there.
Joe Rigney:We're blasting those now.
Joe Rigney:There's a place for that because these christians are going to go out there and they need to know how to live.
Joe Rigney:So you do want to equip people.
Joe Rigney:But if you're doing, if that's all you're doing, and you never address the sins in the room, you're always right.
Joe Rigney:What sins are in the room?
Joe Rigney:What sins are in the room?
Joe Rigney:That's the sin that's most pressing.
Joe Rigney:And if you're avoiding that one but still thundering against the other one, then you're not being faithful because you're living before the gaze of your audience, right, rather than the gaze of God.
Joe Rigney:But if you live under God's gaze, if you say, all right, I want to be faithful, and I know what faithfulness looks like here, what you'll often find is God blesses it, right?
Joe Rigney:God, God.
Joe Rigney:God will bless it.
Joe Rigney:And the blessing might be persecution.
Joe Rigney:It might be that kind of hard, hard mercy, right?
Joe Rigney:Like sometimes happens in the New Testament and other times thousands of people get saved.
Joe Rigney:Thousands of people go, oh, finally, someone said it somewhat, you know, where are the christians who were just testifying to the way things are?
Joe Rigney:And they go, now?
Joe Rigney:I want to.
Joe Rigney:Let me hear more.
Joe Rigney:We'll hear you more about how many times did Paul have these two reactions in the book of acts?
Joe Rigney:Some people said mocked it.
Joe Rigney:Some people blew up about it.
Joe Rigney:They mocked it.
Joe Rigney:They derided it.
Joe Rigney:They tried to persecute him.
Joe Rigney:And then other people were like, we'd like to hear more about this.
Joe Rigney:Because it was plain, direct, no waffling.
Joe Rigney:He's trying to be winsome.
Joe Rigney:He is attempting to sort of make it comprehensible, but he's not trying to shade it.
Joe Rigney:So one of the dangers is sometimes you'll see pastors who speak in order to be misunderstood.
Joe Rigney:I've got a friend who, he's working on a project along these lines, the pastors who are gonna say something, knowing that one audience will hear it one way and another audience will hear it a different way, and it allows them to sort of have plausible deniability in both.
Joe Rigney:No, no, I didn't say that.
Joe Rigney:But to this group.
Joe Rigney:Oh, I did say that.
Joe Rigney:Right.
Joe Rigney:And you're speaking to muddle things.
Joe Rigney:Not speaking, to be clear.
Joe Rigney:And the number of times where Paul or the apostles, one of my favorite things about the apostles is whenever in the early part of acts, Peter and James and John are preaching to the crowds, and then they get hauled before the authorities.
Joe Rigney:And the authorities are like, you're trying to make us guilty of this man's blood.
Joe Rigney:You're saying that we're guilty of the murder of the Messiah?
Joe Rigney:And they're like, yes, that's what we're saying.
Joe Rigney:I'm glad we are communicating.
Joe Rigney:That is.
Joe Rigney:Yes, you murdered the author of Life, and God raised him from the dead.
Joe Rigney:You've got it.
Joe Rigney:What?
Joe Rigney:And Jesus does the same thing, right?
Joe Rigney:When he condemns, I think he's condemning the pharisees at one point, and the scribes said, rabbi, in condemning that, you condemn us also.
Joe Rigney:And Jesus says, yeah, about the scribes, and just launches into round two.
Joe Rigney:And it's like, like, that's.
Joe Rigney:But because what's he aiming for?
Joe Rigney:He's aiming for clarity, right?
Joe Rigney:You're always like, a fundamental thing for leaders is you're always aiming for clarity.
Joe Rigney:You want to bring clarity.
Speaker C:Please say more about that real quick, because I can see there's a ditch on one side of the road of not saying anything at all.
Speaker C:And then there, especially with social media, there's the ditch on the side of the road of making your entire personality about saying the thing.
Speaker C:So how do people who have the courage to get up out of one ditch avoid navigating straight into the other one or even down the road into the other one.
Joe Rigney:Yeah.
Joe Rigney:So I think especially when it comes to the social media question, it's important that all of your efforts to export via social media are grounded in real life community, that you're not treating that online Persona as a substitute for a life well lived with God's people in a particular place.
Joe Rigney:And so sometimes I think that part of the way it can go wrong is that people have taken.
Joe Rigney:This is a category from a friend of mine named Josh Mitchell, who's written some articles on it.
Joe Rigney:But you take something that's designed to be a supplement and it becomes a substitute.
Joe Rigney:So you can think about the way that vitamins are meant to be a substitute or supplement for meals.
Joe Rigney:But if you replace meals with vitamins and all you're doing is vitamins, it's like something's off.
Joe Rigney:It's a similar thing with kind of social media, if that's designed to breed connection, but it's not designed to replace face to face embodied life.
Joe Rigney:And so I would say that's the first check I would have, is if I was somebody saying, hey, here's what my life looks like.
Joe Rigney:Am I doing too much?
Joe Rigney:Am I too online?
Joe Rigney:And I would say, well, let's talk about it.
Joe Rigney:Let's talk about what is it like with your wife and your kids?
Joe Rigney:How much is your orientation towards out there online?
Joe Rigney:Not because being a man and being outwardly oriented, I gotta go build something is good.
Joe Rigney:God designed us for that.
Joe Rigney:Take Dominion.
Joe Rigney:Right, but is the thing that you're building start in your home and then in your community?
Joe Rigney:Or is it entirely digital?
Joe Rigney:And if it's entirely digital, the danger is it can be so carefully curated and manicured, you can present women do it with their Instagram accounts.
Joe Rigney:Here's the life where it's a fake life, it's a curated life.
Joe Rigney:It shows some true things, but it masks all of reality and therefore creates a false impression.
Joe Rigney:Similar thing can happen with anonymous Twitter accounts or whatever you want to say.
Joe Rigney:I know there's good reasons that some people are anonymous.
Joe Rigney:They could lose their job or whatever, that's fine.
Joe Rigney:But if you lean into that anonymous identity and not into your embodied reality with your family, your church, if you're not in community with real people, then it's a good bet that that's going to take on a life of its own and just become another way that your passions will be steered.
Speaker C:So you mentioned in the book the difference between apostles of the world versus refugees of the world, and speaking to those two.
Speaker C:So one of the questions that I had in response to.
Speaker C:That was, how do we speak to apostles of the world knowing that the refugees are listening?
Speaker C:Right.
Speaker C:Because no one tweet can speak to both people.
Speaker C:So how do we navigate that for those of us who are called to speak truth with clarity?
Joe Rigney:Yeah, good.
Joe Rigney: nts or make criticisms, which: Joe Rigney:i dealing with.
Joe Rigney:And I would, and I would self consciously respond to both publicly, and I would do so in different ways.
Joe Rigney:So in other words, sometimes it was clear and I would try to do a little bit of a, there would be a little bit of sharper, you know, I'd be trying to, this is combat, and I'm trying to do that.
Joe Rigney:And then any other time when I thought, there's a good chance that this person is confused or has been lied to or has been manipulated by these other people, I'm going to just totally try to diffuse all of it.
Joe Rigney:I'm not taking.
Joe Rigney:So it was never personal.
Joe Rigney:And it was always, oh, hey, great question.
Joe Rigney:Let me answer that.
Joe Rigney:And the goal was, this is something I picked up from the apostle Paul, was surprise, the importance of surprising people.
Joe Rigney:So if you remember in the story that I do in the book, in the last chapter where he's before that, that audience, they've been told he's a gentile loving grecophile who hates Moses.
Joe Rigney:And so, and then when he gets beat up, he gets arrested.
Joe Rigney:Then he asks, can I go back out and speak to the people?
Joe Rigney:And the tribune says, sure.
Joe Rigney:And so he goes back out, and they're chanting, it's a mob.
Joe Rigney:And what he does is he immediately begins speaking in flawless Hebrew.
Joe Rigney:And you go, why is it significant?
Joe Rigney:Why does the Bible record that detail?
Joe Rigney:He'd spoken Greek to the tribune, and he comes out and he's speaking Hebrew, and it says that the crowd responded by being hushed into silence.
Joe Rigney:They were like, wait, what?
Joe Rigney:And it was, he surprised them.
Joe Rigney:They didn't think this guy knew Hebrew.
Joe Rigney:They certainly didn't think he knew that kind of Hebrew.
Joe Rigney:And so he surprised them.
Joe Rigney:And so I'm always, when I think about that, I'm going, if someone comes out with a snarky comment, but I think it's because of a confusion or at least, or at least there might be other people watching that I'll often deliberately go, I'm not going to take the bait and hit back in kind.
Joe Rigney:Instead, I'll absorb it and try to just say, oh, let me.
Joe Rigney:Happy to be clear, I don't want there to be confusion.
Joe Rigney:Let me answer that question.
Joe Rigney:And so they were not asking a good faith question, but I will answer it in a good faith because I have my eye on the refugees.
Joe Rigney:I want people to kind of go, well, that's not what I thought he would do.
Joe Rigney:I thought he would be really snarky back.
Joe Rigney:And so you're always, so that's how I would do it is I am aware, especially in online interactions, it is a combat zone, but you do have non combatants or you have confused combatants and going, I'm not trying to necessarily persuade the person I'm talking to because in all likelihood, if they're an apostle, there's not going to be.
Joe Rigney:And because of the nature of the case, they're in a combat situation.
Joe Rigney:They're going to dig in out of, even if they think I'm right, they're going to dig in.
Joe Rigney:Right?
Joe Rigney:Like, in other words, if I were to answer their objection in a way that was compelling, they're going to dig in because they lose face.
Joe Rigney:And so people, online interactions are combat, and so people will dig in on stupid stuff because they don't want to lose face.
Joe Rigney:They can't admit that they were wrong.
Joe Rigney:It's like, that's okay.
Joe Rigney:I'm not worried about winning them, but I am worried about people who are observing and who are trying to understand what's the big deal about all of this?
Joe Rigney:What's the big controversy all about.
Joe Rigney:And that's where, and so that's where I'm wanting to define respectable and credible the way God does, right.
Joe Rigney:Not the way the world does, because the world's going to use respectability.
Joe Rigney:Well, if you don't believe this, you're not respectable and they're going to try to steer you by it.
Joe Rigney:The world is watching.
Joe Rigney:World is watching.
Joe Rigney:And I'm saying, well, there's truth in wanting to be respectable, but I want my respectability insofar as it's determined or shaped by outsiders.
Joe Rigney:Like, I want to have a good reputation with outsiders.
Joe Rigney:I want it to be people who've actually seen me up close and personal have watched me coach baseball with my kids.
Joe Rigney:If unbelievers in those contexts saw me and they said, well, we hate what he thinks, but we got to admit that he's a really good baseball coach and really cared for the kids, well, that's the standard.
Joe Rigney:That's that good reputation with outsiders, not random anonymous person online says, you know, you're evil, and therefore I have a bad reputation.
Joe Rigney:It's like, ha, who cares about that?
Joe Rigney:Instead, I'm going to speak over that to this other group who's just observing.
Speaker C:Make them have to contextualize what they might find as sharp words in the larger picture of a man.
Joe Rigney:Exactly right.
Joe Rigney:That's a great way to put it.
Speaker C:So you mentioned baseball.
Speaker C:So do you mind if we transition, talking about strangely bright real quick?
Joe Rigney:Yeah, for sure.
Speaker C:All right.
Speaker C:I really enjoyed that book, by the way.
Speaker C:Did you intend for strangely bright and emotional sabotage to come out at the same time, or was that just sort of, like, providential?
Joe Rigney:So.
Joe Rigney:Well, so strangely bright actually came out.
Joe Rigney:It was first released, I want to say, a couple years ago.
Joe Rigney: th, which I published back in: Joe Rigney:So the things of Earth was the first version.
Joe Rigney:How do you treasuring God?
Joe Rigney:By enjoying his gifts.
Joe Rigney:And that book was helpful to a lot of people, but it was a big, fat book.
Joe Rigney:And so I then said, I'm gonna rework the content and write a smaller version that you can give to your mom to kind of, you know, like, write a little book that she'll read because she's not gonna read a big, fat one, maybe.
Joe Rigney:And so I wrote strangely bright, and then.
Joe Rigney:And it just so happened that it released at the same time it re released.
Joe Rigney:So this new release that cannon just did was a rerelease of an old book, but that was an attempt to kind of get it into a.
Joe Rigney:Give it new life, get it into.
Speaker C:New new circles, because I noticed that the strangely bright cover is green, the emotional sabotage cover is yellow.
Speaker C:And I think they both deal with some uneasiness that it seems to me that modern evangelical christians have with the world.
Speaker C:First is around the question of the righteous use of power and then the other, and then strangely bright is the righteous enjoyment of pleasure.
Speaker C:I thought that was an interesting and providential juxtaposition.
Joe Rigney:Yeah, no, that's right.
Joe Rigney:So I would say so things of earth came first and was really about, okay, we want to be.
Joe Rigney:We're supremacy of God, people.
Joe Rigney:God is greatest.
Joe Rigney:God is the best.
Joe Rigney:God is the chief good, the ultimate good, highest good.
Joe Rigney:But then there's all the stuff.
Joe Rigney:What do we do?
Joe Rigney:How do we enjoy it rightly?
Joe Rigney:How do we steward it rightly?
Joe Rigney:How do we not abuse it, commit idolatry, but also say thank you?
Joe Rigney:All of those kind of questions.
Joe Rigney:Was the things of earth strangely bright?
Joe Rigney: ,: Joe Rigney:Those years are when I'd been newly married and was trying to navigate that as a christian hedonist.
Joe Rigney:God is most glorified in me when I'm most satisfied in him.
Joe Rigney:But now, what with all the gifts.
Joe Rigney:So that book emerged out of that season.
Joe Rigney:And then I think what's happened is culturally, the conversation has shifted, like you said, to the use of power or the question of culture, the question of politics, the question of social order, which is basically an extension of how do we live in the world?
Joe Rigney:Right?
Joe Rigney:Like the common thing is I've got to live in a world.
Joe Rigney:It's a world of pleasures and it's a world of sin and a world of power.
Joe Rigney:It's how do you live faithfully there if you've made God supreme?
Joe Rigney:Because Jesus is lord.
Joe Rigney:And so you're right to recognize there is a shared approach to that question in both of those books.
Speaker C:So I listened to strangely bright.
Speaker C:Now, normally I read physical books, so I can highlight and make notes, but I listen to strangely bright, so I don't have any notes in front of me.
Speaker C:So let's walk through the argument of strangely bright a little bit while preserving some of the mystery and the enjoyment of people to listen or read it.
Joe Rigney:Sure.
Joe Rigney:Yeah.
Joe Rigney:So the basic idea is, if you believe that whom have I in heaven but you on earth?
Joe Rigney:There's nothing I desire beside you speaking to God.
Joe Rigney:So God, there's nothing I desire then, and that's psalm 73.
Joe Rigney:How should you live?
Joe Rigney:How should you.
Joe Rigney:Okay, Lord, there's not only you, all you.
Joe Rigney:And then you look down the row at church and there's your family.
Joe Rigney:What about them?
Joe Rigney:Do you desire them?
Joe Rigney:Do you love them?
Joe Rigney:Do you enjoy them?
Joe Rigney:That's the tension that the book's trying to address.
Joe Rigney:And the first and fundamental place is that, well, why did God make that world?
Joe Rigney:Why did he make a world in which he's supreme, but which is filled with all kinds of pleasures, all kinds of enjoyments, all kinds of goodness, whether it's your.
Joe Rigney:I talk in the book about sensible pleasures like food and drink and things that are pleasurable to the bodily senses, relational pleasures, which is people, and then vocational pleasures, the things you do that are enjoyable.
Joe Rigney:The world is just shot full with all this stuff.
Joe Rigney:Why?
Joe Rigney:And it's because God wants to communicate himself and he's communicating himself in the things that he's made.
Joe Rigney:This is how the Bible heavens declare the glory of God.
Joe Rigney:His invisible attributes have been clearly perceived in the things that have been made, and so that's why God made them, is that they're meant to be revelations of his own character, his own glory, his own grace, and they're meant to draw us back to him.
Joe Rigney:Well, that means if that's why they're there, well, you can't get.
Joe Rigney:There's no shortcut.
Joe Rigney:You've got to go through the things.
Joe Rigney:He's given the things to lead us to him.
Joe Rigney:So follow the things.
Speaker C:So was this a question for christians prior to now, or was this a.
Speaker C:Is this.
Speaker C:Has this always been present, or is this just a modern manifestation?
Joe Rigney:No, I think it's a universal, as old as dirt problem.
Joe Rigney:The problem has always been, how do you navigate the two fundamental sins?
Joe Rigney:You can say in the book of Romans, Romans one begins with this description of human sin.
Joe Rigney:The bottom line, sins, there are idolatry and ingratitude.
Joe Rigney:They don't honor God as God, nor do they give thanks.
Joe Rigney:Those are the two fundamental sins.
Joe Rigney:And you can see there's the two ditches.
Joe Rigney:On the one, idolatry is saying to God, okay, I put God on one side of my scales, and I put everything else, all the good stuff, on the other side.
Joe Rigney:Which one do I want?
Joe Rigney:And idolatry says, I want the stuff, not God.
Joe Rigney:Right?
Joe Rigney:I want this stuff.
Joe Rigney:On the other hand, ingratitude said, well, I don't want to do that.
Joe Rigney:I want to love God.
Joe Rigney:And so I'm not even going to.
Joe Rigney:I won't accept any gifts, right?
Joe Rigney:No God, I.
Joe Rigney:Only you.
Joe Rigney:God, only you.
Joe Rigney:I don't want any of this stuff.
Joe Rigney:And so that's the ascetic route.
Joe Rigney:That's the, you know, the route of ultimate self denial.
Joe Rigney:I'm not going to receive anything good because I don't want it.
Joe Rigney:It's an idle trap.
Joe Rigney:I don't want it to be an idol.
Joe Rigney:And so those are the two twin dangers that we all human beings have always faced going back to Adam.
Joe Rigney:And so I do think in a wealthy society like ours, it's a particular temptation.
Joe Rigney:And I think that some of the reason that that book has resonated is, you know, John Piper is one of my heroes.
Joe Rigney:I'm so grateful.
Joe Rigney:You know, he changed my life in college, and then I was able to serve alongside him for 18 years or so when we were in Minneapolis.
Joe Rigney:And his message into the myth of this wealthy society was basically, God is supreme, right?
Joe Rigney:The supremacy of God in all things.
Joe Rigney:Find your deepest delight and satisfaction in God.
Joe Rigney:The way that you glorify God is by delighting in him.
Joe Rigney:And this just shook up a bunch of people who had been comfortable.
Joe Rigney:It's all about having a nice, comfortable middle class life.
Joe Rigney:And it shook people up.
Joe Rigney:And so I thought, what a great.
Joe Rigney:That's true.
Joe Rigney:That Bible, is Jesus going to do that?
Joe Rigney:But then, okay, you shook them up.
Joe Rigney:Now come along after and they're going to go, okay, but I still have my wife, I still have my kids, I still have my job.
Joe Rigney:I like my chips and salsa.
Joe Rigney:So what now?
Joe Rigney:How do I navigate the world of fish tacos and Doctor pepper, given that God is supreme?
Joe Rigney:And that's the.
Joe Rigney:So the reason I think that the success or fruitfulness in some ways of men like piper, men like RC Sproul, who elevated the glory and supremacy of God, their fruitfulness and evangelicalism meant that this was going to be the next problem.
Joe Rigney:And I was just, that was, I was raised in that and thought, okay, I see it.
Joe Rigney:I see it in my own life.
Joe Rigney:I see it in other people.
Joe Rigney:I want to help people to treasure God by enjoying his gifts and then avoiding the idolatry, by generosity and by self denial and by sacrifice and by suffering.
Joe Rigney:How do you face those things?
Joe Rigney:That's what proves that God really is supreme.
Speaker C:So maybe to put the books together a little bit, you talk about the crisis of degree in emotional sabotage, leadership and emotional sabotage, and then the importance for the husband, the father, the leader to lead.
Speaker C:Is there a way that a husband father man can lead in terms of rightfully ordering his affections with the things that he enjoys, of the earth for his family and those around him?
Joe Rigney:Absolutely.
Joe Rigney:Because it starts with at one level, it starts with enjoying them.
Joe Rigney:So one of the main applications in strangely bright is, okay, God made the world to communicate his glory, made things, make invisible attributes visible.
Joe Rigney:That's the world is not.
Joe Rigney:Well, guess what?
Joe Rigney:You're a made thing.
Joe Rigney:God made you to do that.
Joe Rigney:And as a husband and a father, you're either going to tell the truth about God or you're going to lie about it.
Joe Rigney:You're either going to tell the truth to your family, you're going to tell the truth to the world around you about what kind of father is he.
Joe Rigney:So when the Bible says God made fathers to image his fatherhood, okay, what are your kids, they're going to grow up in your home, what do they think fatherhood is?
Joe Rigney:What have they internalized about fatherhood?
Joe Rigney:So one of the statements that's come out of this for me has been, be the smile of God to your children.
Joe Rigney:And that really does bring together both books, because I can't remember if I said it in the second one, but be the smile of God to your children, be the smile of God to your wife was a way of saying, look, you're meant to image who God is and this is how you lead.
Joe Rigney:This is how you orient a home, is by first and foremost being satisfied in God.
Joe Rigney:You live under the smile of a happy father.
Joe Rigney:God is happy with you in Christ.
Joe Rigney:This is my beloved son in Christ and I'm well pleased with him.
Joe Rigney:Despite his sin, I'm pleased with him.
Joe Rigney:That's the gospel of justification by faith alone.
Joe Rigney:God's happy with us.
Joe Rigney:Out of that, then I want to communicate that to my family by playing with them.
Joe Rigney:Bye.
Joe Rigney:Raising them in the Lord by delighting in them.
Joe Rigney:And so.
Joe Rigney:And that's both modeling for them strangely bright, as well as leading them in the world.
Speaker C:Praise God, sir.
Speaker C:Well, beautiful synthesis of those two.
Speaker C:Thank you.
Joe Rigney:That was bringing those together.
Joe Rigney:I love it.
Speaker C:That's great.
Speaker C:So just.
Speaker C:Do you have time for one more quick question?
Joe Rigney:Absolutely.
Speaker C:So how much pushback did you get in order to put in the recipe for pumpkin crunch cake?
Joe Rigney:Yeah.
Joe Rigney:So the reason that the pumpkin crunch cake recipe made it into strangely bright is that when I published things of earth, I think in like four or five chapters, I mentioned how much I liked it and I used it as this illustration in things of earth.
Joe Rigney:And so I used it.
Joe Rigney:And so what would happen is I would go speak someplace and I would have people come up to me afterward and they would be like, oh, we loved your book, but where do I get the recipe?
Joe Rigney:But where do I get the recipe?
Joe Rigney:And it was just like, I'm like, it was just a, like the number of.
Joe Rigney:And it wasn't just, you might think, oh, the ladies wanted it.
Joe Rigney:And I was like, the guys were like, hey, I need to tell my wife how to make this deal.
Joe Rigney:What do I do?
Joe Rigney:And I would sit there and go, oh, and my wife did have the recipe online at the time, like on her family blog or something.
Joe Rigney:And so I was always, like, giving out this random URL to a family blog post.
Joe Rigney:Just go search.
Joe Rigney:And so then when Crossway asked number of years ago, hey, would you want to do a small version of it?
Joe Rigney:Yeah, absolutely.
Joe Rigney:And I'm not going to make that mistake again.
Joe Rigney:I'm putting the recipe in.
Joe Rigney:And it's funny because everywhere now, everywhere I go, people go, oh, we tried it.
Joe Rigney:And you are correct, sir.
Joe Rigney:It is in fact that good validation for, yes, my wife makes a mean pumpkin crunch cake.
Speaker C:Amen.
Speaker C:Amen.
Speaker C:Well, thank you.
Speaker C:So much.
Speaker C:I know it's summer vacation for you.
Speaker C:Thank you for taking time out of your summer day baseball and the kids to talk with me today.
Joe Rigney:Yeah, thanks, Will.
Joe Rigney:Appreciate it.
Speaker C:Where would you like to send people to find out more about you and what you do?
Joe Rigney:Yeah.
Joe Rigney:So, simplest play.
Joe Rigney:I mean, only social media I have is Joe Rigney on Twitter, but then lots of stuff on canon plus.
Joe Rigney:So if I was going to say, what's one?
Joe Rigney:Well, I say lots of articles on desiring God.
Joe Rigney:You can go back and find all sorts of stuff.
Joe Rigney:I've gotten dozens, you know, not dozens, half a dozen articles on empathy and various and sundry things at desiring God.
Joe Rigney:But now lots of stuff on canon plus.
Speaker C:Excellent.
Speaker C:Well, thank you so much, sir.
Speaker C:I'll send people there.
Joe Rigney:Thanks for listening to this episode of the renaissance of Men podcast.
Joe Rigney:Visit us on the web at wren of men.com or on your favorite social media platform at Ren of men.
Joe Rigney:This is the renaissance of men.
Speaker C:You are the renaissance.