Dr. Christopher J.H. Wright joins Travis to discuss the release of the second edition of his magisterial, "The Mission of God." They explore the evolving understanding of God's mission as articulated through Scripture, emphasising that it extends far beyond the confines of traditional evangelism to encompass a holistic vision for justice, mercy, and redemption within the world.

Dr. Wright articulates a comprehensive understanding of the Great Commission, showing that it calls believers to a life of obedience that encompasses all dimensions of existence—spiritual, social, and ethical. This missioholistic approach to discipleship is emphasized throughout the conversation, where Dr. Wright challenges the notion that mission is solely about conversion, insisting that it also involves the transformation of life and society in accordance with Kingdom values.

Dr. Wright's addresses previous critiques and expands upon the missional hermeneutics that have emerged since the book's first publication. Dr. Wright's insights reveal the necessity of understanding the continuity of God's redemptive plan, which includes both Israel and the Church in a dynamic relationship rather than a replacement theology. This profound realization invites listeners to reconsider their own engagement in mission, urging them to reflect on how their lives can align with God's overarching narrative of redemption and restoration in a broken world.

Takeaways:

• In the realm of discipleship, it is imperative to align our actions with our beliefs, as articulated by both Jesus and the Apostle Paul.
• The gospel, while freely given by God's grace, demands a life of obedience and submission to Jesus as Lord over every aspect of life.
• The mission of God encompasses the entire narrative of Scripture, revealing a purpose that extends beyond mere evangelism to the reconciliation of all creation.
• Understanding the mission of God requires a holistic approach, integrating both faith and works, as seen in the teachings of Jesus and the writings of Paul.
• The second edition of 'The Mission of God' addresses critiques from the first edition, clarifying the role of Israel and emphasizing the inclusive nature of God's redemptive plan.
• Holistic mission reflects the character of God, where our actions demonstrate the truth of the gospel, leading others to inquire about the God we serve.

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We're so proud to be partners with you in the mission of God.

There's no saying and being without doing.

We have to match what we say with what we do.

I mean, the New Testament, it seems Jesus and the Apostle Paul make this very clear that the gospel is not just something you believe or that you preach.

It's also something you obey.

Paul talks about the obedience of the faiths and he talks about obedience to the gospel.

The gospel makes demands.

It is, of course, it's free.

It's a gift.

It's by grace.

Let's get that very clear.

We are saved by God's grace.

But having been saved by God's grace, we are then called into a relationship of allegiance, of submission to Jesus as Lord of obedience to him in the whole of life.

Discipleship is not just a head thing.

It is a life thing.

It's whole life discipleship in which we are called to obedience.

And that, of course, also is part of our mission.

It's to show what redeemed life is like, to be part of that new humanity.

Welcome to Apollos Watered.

In the Ministry Deep Dive podcast, we tackle the big questions few are willing to ask about ministry, culture, and the challenges you face every day.

Ministry is hard.

The road ahead isn't always clear.

But with God, nothing is impossible.

We come alongside pastors and ministry leaders like you, exploring obstacles, uncovering opportunities, and sharing practical ways to thrive.

Our vision is simple to see thriving ministry leaders and churches noticeably transforming their world.

So let's dive deep together.

Refresh your soul, renew your vision, and get ready because it's watering time.

Time.

Welcome back to Ministry Deep Dive, where we explore the thinkers, movements and ideas shaping the mission of God in our world today.

I'm your host, Travis Michael Fleming.

And today is a joy because we have someone with us whose work has shaped missional theology across the globe.

A voice whose biblical depth has influenced pastors, missionaries and scholars for decades.

And I am proud to introduce as a guest back to the show Dr. Christopher J.H.

wright.

And if you've been around the world of mission theology at all, you know his landmark work, the Mission of God.

Now, when this book came out, it reframed the conversation.

He didn't simply talk about missions, he argued from scripture that the Bible itself is a missional book.

And I love that.

Telling a missional story, revealing a missional God.

And now it has been re released with the second edition and it's bigger and better, expanded, updated and Even more timely for today's global church.

Whether you're a pastor, missiologist, or someone just trying to understand the grand narrative of scripture, this book gives you a framework to see the entire Bible through the lens of God's redemptive mission.

And today we're diving into what's new in this edition, why the mission of God is more relevant now than ever, and and how the church can faithfully join God's work in a rapidly changing world.

Dr. Wright, we are honored to have you back to ministry.

Deep dive.

Thank you so much, Travis.

It's great to be here, and I hope my voice is clear enough.

I can certainly hear you.

Well.

So anyway, glad to be back.

Thank you.

All right, well, we have the Fast 5, which is our way to get to know you.

Aren't you ready for these fast five questions?

I will try.

Number one, what's the everyday habit or routine you have that helps you stay grounded, whether spiritually, emotionally, or just practically?

I remind myself every time I have a shower in the morning, I say the Jesus prayer.

Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

It's a way of starting every day in the right frame of mind and also having a good shower.

I like that practice.

Number two, you have lived and traveled in many parts of the world.

What's a simple food or dish from anywhere that you could eat every single week and never get tired of?

I think I'd never get tired of Tom Kha gai, which is Thai soup.

It's a lovely tamarind flavored soup.

I love Thai soup.

Number three, when you're not reading biblical scholarship, what's your guilty pleasure?

Book, TV show, or hobby that might surprise people?

Oh, I don't know.

I like reading novels.

I have a little reading group.

We, we read novels.

At this moment, I'm reading Braiding Sweet Grass by what's her name?

Wall Kimmerer.

She's a.

A scientist and a Native American, and she brings together indigenous perspectives on the.

On the world of botany with a scientific perspective.

And also she writes very beautifully.

Braiding Sweetgrass.

It's.

It's a book I'm reading at the one we love.

I. I love reading secular books and novels.

Number four, every writer has their quirks.

What's your favorite place to write and what absolutely has to be within arm's reach?

Well, I love writing down at the writing retreat cottage that John Stott had.

John Stott, who was my mentor and predecessor in the Langham partnership.

And it's down in the very Far west coast of Wales, overlooking the ocean.

That's where he wrote most of his books, and certainly parts of all of mine have been written there.

And what do I like to have to hand.

Gosh, that is a hard one.

Do you mean apart from a mug of coffee or occasional glass of whiskey or something like that?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Something to just keep the spirits up as we go along.

Okay.

All right, number five, then.

If you weren't a theologian or missiologist, biblical scholar, what completely different profession could you see yourself enjoying?

I would love to be a wood carver.

In fact, I think in the new Creation, I'm going to carve wood for a few hundred years.

I have great admiration for the arts, not just sort of painting and so on, but also for sculpture and for people who can take a chunk of wood and bring out the beauty that is underneath the bark, as it were, and polish and see those lovely contours and the veins and the ribs and everything else, and then create something very beautiful.

Great admiration for that.

I'd love to be able to spend time doing that.

Okay, well, then I have to say you're the first wood carver.

Do you do any wood carving yourself right now?

No, I don't.

That's the point.

You know, I'm really.

You know, I can do a bit of DIY and stuff, but my.

My world is with.

With words.

And, you know, I like to look at my box full of sermon notes and things.

Well, that's my sculpture.

You know, I. Sculpture with words to create something which I hope has got form and shape and coherence and some elegance.

You know, use words in a way which.

Which is beautiful or, you know, powerful.

But I would love to be able to do that with my hands as well, rather than just fingertips on the keyboard.

Well, let's get into the second edition of the Mission of God.

We've got this copy right here by IVP Academic.

It's become a foundational text for so many.

Many of us who are in ministry, who've tried to understand God's mission.

What compelled you to release a second edition now?

Partly because I was asked to, Travis, a long time ago by IVP InterVarsity Press, the originating publisher.

I don't know, it must be a good eight or more years ago when they said, you know, this book is already getting old, but it's still being well used.

We think you could do with a second edition.

That was one thing.

Certainly.

Second thing was that.

I mean, you said that in some ways, it sort of kicked off a missional Missiological discussion.

But in the years since, the whole field of what has now come to be called missional hermeneutics, that is, interpreting and reading the whole Bible from the perspective of God's mission, has become, you know, quite a discipline.

There have been a lot of books written, and so it felt important to take into account all that literature that's been done.

And I tried to.

I mean, it was about three years of work.

Almost felt like a second PhD doing that job to read so much that a whole shelf load of books which I'd got here, and I wasn't able to interact quite so much with the periodic literature because I'm not in an academy or a library, but did my best.

And I suppose the other thing that motivated me was that there were, you know, one or two areas where the reviewers, most of the reviewers, of course, have been very kind of the original book.

But, you know, some criticisms were made and some of them were valid.

And so I felt I needed to take those on board a bit and where possible, either clarify what I really meant to say if it was being misunderstood, or reinforce something if I felt I needed to say it a bit more strongly and pull it out a bit more clearly.

So those are a number of motivations that went into the revision vision.

Let's delve down a little bit, because I know there are people that are hearing this conversation for the first time.

They may not be familiar with your work and they might already assume what they believe the mission of God to be.

Especially in many of our different theological circles and tribes, we have a very kind of narrow sense of what God's mission is.

And I'm going to say it.

It's the Great Commission to go and make disciples of all nations.

But you're saying, no, God's mission is actually bigger than that.

And when we kind of pan out and see the entirety of the grand narrative Scripture, there's a whole mission that's here with different parts of that mission.

Can you elaborate on what then this mission of God is for our audience so that they understand exactly what you're talking about in the book?

Thanks, Travis.

Yes, I'll do my best.

It's a 600 page book, so.

Yeah.

Well, first of all, I would say that the mission of God is bigger than the way you just described the Great Commission itself.

The Great Commission itself doesn't just say, go and make disciples, does it?

I Mean, it says, go and make disciples, baptizing them and teaching them to obey all that I have commanded you.

Which is a lot more than just to go and evangelize.

I mean, it includes all that Jesus commands, even within the Gospels itself.

So the Great Commission includes a great deal more.

Plus the fact that the Great Commission doesn't begin with go and make disciples.

It begins with, all authority in heaven and earth has been given to me.

So all mission that we do flows from the fact that Jesus of Nazareth, crucified, risen and ascended, is the Messiah, the King of the universe, the ruler of the nations.

He is Lord.

And therefore the mission of God flows from.

And in a sense is rooted in the fact that God raised Jesus from the dead and has made him Messiah and Lord.

So that would be my expansion, as it were, of the fairly common interpretation of the Great Commission, which is just go and evangelize the world.

And I want to say, well, that's not just all that Jesus said, and it's not all the Great Commission.

I would add to that another verse from the Apostle Paul, because I think, of course, we all know that the letter to the Ephesians is one of the richest, deepest, most profound of his letters.

And in chapter one, he has this huge long sentence that goes on for about 14 verses.

And right in the middle of it there, verses 9 and 10, Paul says that God has made known to us the mystery of his will.

Well, that's the nearest thing you could get to saying God has told us what the mission of God is.

Because, after all, the will of God means the plan and purpose of God.

The mission of God is His purposefulness.

And Paul says God has revealed that to us.

So what is it?

He says that when the times have reached the fulfillment to bring all things in heaven and on earth into unity in and under Christ.

Now, that's a cosmic agenda.

All things in heaven and earth isn't just souls that get saved and go to heaven.

It means the whole of creation, Paul says, which has been broken by sin and satanic rebellion and all that has gone into the suffering and evil and violence and injustice of our world.

For all of that to be put right and for God to bring about the reconciliation and healing and restoration of his whole creation, which we can then inhabit in our resurrection bodies.

When we move to Romans chapter 8 as well, where Paul builds that in.

So that's, I think, how I would begin to summarize the mission of God.

It's God's purpose to take a creation which has been broken by Sin and evil, and a human race who have been in rebellion against him and therefore stand in danger of his judgment.

And to bring both the creation itself and the human population to a redeemed, restored, reconciled unity through Christ, in Christ, through his blood shed on the cross, as Paul says in Colossians, which is the other place where the will of God is expressed.

You know, that God was pleased to dwell bodily in Jesus and through him to reconcile all things in heaven and on earth through his blood shed on the cross.

So that's the mission of God and what it cost God to accomplish his mission, which was the death of his own Son and then his resurrection and ascension.

So it's gospel centered, it's Christ centered, but it obviously includes both ends of the Bible.

Genesis 1 and 2 to Revelation 21 and 2, the creation to the new creation with the Gospel at the center.

One of the things that I find fascinating about your work is the fact how much you use the Old Testament to really lay the groundwork for the mission of God.

The mission that is really a continuous threat that goes into the New Testament.

But I find that many Christians today, because they are more products of the theological systems that they've been inherited and taught, which in my opinion has a blind spot often within it that enables that to.

Basically enables them to minister to their own tribes.

And it can't withstand the weight of global questions.

But in the framework that you have, which I think is the more biblical framework, it actually can handle that weight.

But I also find it very interesting that while you're an Old Testament scholar, you're interacting with a global church and you're able.

Part of your work is that integration.

It seems to me that with your continued interaction with the global church, you're hearing their questions and then you're just simply looking at the Scripture going, okay, I see this because it was already there.

But it's my interaction with the text, with the global church, that helps those issues more come to the surface.

Would that be an accurate assessment or no?

I think it's a.

It's a fair enough assessment.

It's not something I've really thought about, particularly myself, except to say that, of course, when we talk about the global church, I mean, that's a massive phrase.

I mean, it's the church all over the world in multiple, multiple different cultures and places, some of them very sophisticated, some very ancient civilizations and culture, you know, like China and the Arab cultures in the Middle east and so on, and others that are more indigenous, that are more traditional.

And it's interesting.

I think that in many particularly traditional cultures, let's say in Africa, some parts of Latin America, certainly in Asia, the Old Testament actually resonates very much with cultures which, in which kinship and family are important, in which the land is not seen simply as a commercial commodity to be bought and sold at a price, etc.

It's not just a deal.

The land itself is in a sense, a living part of life.

It's God's creation in whatever way that's articulated within the local indigenous religious culture.

But there's often a recognition of what we now call the Old Testament of a greater degree of God's closeness to us and the human race, greater recognition of the importance of family, of ancestors, of kinship, of that you are who you belong to.

You know, where the acids of Western individualism haven't completely wiped that out.

And so I think, yes, perhaps there are elements of the global church who would recognize or resonate with the way I try to bring the whole Old Testament into the narrative and into the story of God, rather than just starting, as it were, with Jesus.

And of course, if you do quote, just start with Jesus, you're jumping into a story more than 2/3 of the way through the plot.

You know, you haven't really grasped who is this guy and why has he come and what's it all about?

For that you need the Old Testament scriptures because let's remember that, you know, Jesus never called it the Old Testament, neither did Paul.

I mean, for them it was simply the scriptures.

This was what God said, this is what is written, these are the words of God in their scriptures.

Of course, Jesus never read the New Testament either.

I mean, let's get our biblical historical perspective right, that the New Testament itself is in some ways simply the scriptures of the Old Testament now being interpreted and seen through the lens of the fact that the Messiah has come and his name was Jesus of Nazareth and they crucified him and God has raised him from the dead and he's now ascended and he's the, the world's true king.

So it's the New Testament which is taking all that the Old Testament had said and saying, guys, what you longed for for those centuries has now happened.

It's here and it's happened in Christ, and you better get ready for where it's moving to at the end of the story.

So we need the whole Bible is what I'm trying to say.

It seems to me in reading your book and mentioned before, that it's 600 pages and it's long but it seems to me that it's chock full of not only the biblical evidence for the mission of God, your elaboration of it, which I found quite illuminating, seeing scriptures from the Old Testament brought out in ways that I had not previously seen, but I could tell, having kind of lived in this domain now for a little while, it seems that you're answering a lot of objections that have come your way as a response to the first edition.

Could that be accurate?

Am I accurate?

There you are.

Yes.

I think two in particular, where I felt that either I was being misunderstood or that what I was really trying to say was not getting through.

One was coming perhaps from a more conservative position, conservative evangelical position, where people are very committed, and rightfully so, to the necessity of evangelism, that people need to come to the Lord Jesus Christ in repentance and faith, and that without the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ, we as human beings universally stand under the judgment of God, and that the wrath of God has been made known on a sinful human race.

There was a feeling that perhaps I had underplayed that I didn't mention it enough.

Somebody pointed out that the word hell only occurs once in the index.

Not sure whether a person's theology should be determined by the number of references anything gets in the index, but there we are.

That was one of the criticisms.

And so this was, I think, partly because, of course, my emphasis throughout the book is on the wholeness of what God is about in his world.

Here is the Creator God who is engaged with a society, a nation, with politics and economics and land issues and family issues and sexual issues all the way through the scriptures.

This God who is the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

After all, he's not a strange God.

He.

He's our God.

This God, for these hundreds of years, is passionately concerned about how human beings live, how they run their families, how they do judicial, how they treat crime, how they divide up their land, etc.

And it seems to me you can't simply ignore all of that.

That this God suddenly, when you get to the New Testament, says, oh, well, we'll just forget all that.

What I really want you to do now is just go out and preach that people are sinners, they need to repent and be saved, and then they can go to heaven when they die.

In other words, that it's only now about evangelism.

I was really trying to say it's not that I don't believe in evangelism.

Of course I want people to come to know the Lord Jesus Christ and be saved and have their sins forgiven and have eternal life with God.

That's my personal testimony.

It's how I became a Christian when as a child, I invited Jesus into my life.

My own parents were missionaries in Brazil for 20 years among the Amazonian indigenous tribal peoples seeking to bring the gospel to those who'd never heard it.

So I could never, as it were, dismiss or diminish or despise the evangelistic mandate of the church and the central importance of people who come into faith in Christ.

However, having said all that, I felt that because that was criticism that came through in some of the reviews, I felt I need to make that a bit more clear.

And so I took out part of what had been in just sort of buried in one of the chapters, I think it was on the Jubilee, and molded it into a completely separate chapter in the book with the title Gospel Centered, Integral Mission.

And both of those words, gospel centered and integral or holistic, are important because I'm wanting to say that whatever we do in mission, in fact all that we do in mission, all the different marks of mission, every aspect of what we as a church are called to do in the world, it all flows from the centrality of the gospel, which is a phrase that I now prefer to use rather than the more common phrase which emerged among some quarters, the primacy of evangelism.

And I don't, in a sense, I don't despise those who use that phrase.

We might want to discuss it in a minute, Travis, if you like.

But my problem with it is that evangelism is what we do.

I mean, evangelism is a human activity.

It's our job to be good, using to be sharing the good news.

Evangelism is what we do.

But Paul says that it's the gospel that is the power of God to salvation.

And the gospel is what God has done.

It's the gospel of God.

And so it seems to me that we need to move to a more theo centric, God centered understanding of the gospel.

This is the God of creation who has intervened in history through his Son Jesus Christ to save the world and who will ultimately bring it to a new creation.

And evangelism is telling that story and allowing God to do his work.

So it's the centrality, in a sense, the primacy of the gospel understood in its fullest biblical sense, which I want to see at the very heartbeat and center of all our mission.

So gospel centered, but then everything else being integrated and held together around that center.

It's not that the centrality of the gospel then means that everything else we do is peripheral, sort of marginal.

It's the gospel and all these other things.

No, it's the gospel at the center, holding it together, integrating our mission together.

That's the.

The.

The.

That's why I put that whole new chapter into the book, Gospel Centered, Integral Mission.

I'm not sure what number it is in the book, maybe chapter 13 or something like that, but it is, it was a response to that particular criticism.

And, and I've seen that criticism that you talk about where they said, well, the guy.

What's the priority?

What's the priority?

What's the priority?

It.

To me, even as I look at it, and we have a model, it's been heavily influenced by yours with Missio Holism.

We have the, what we call the fast track, which is the Great Commandment, the Great Commission and the great community, which is again, coming out of the gospels at the center of it.

And then it extends, though, to what we call the slow track, which frames it.

And basically it gives it the track that the train of gospel proclamation can come on.

That shows credibility, plausibility, because in a world today that is just saturated with content, it's really hard to be heard, especially if you have such a spiritual gospel that is devoid of living in the world, that heaven, only understanding of things.

And where I thought your work was very good is that you even go back to the Old Testament text to show that it was always about all of life.

And you use Deuteronomy, you talk about, even socioeconomics.

Can you draw on that for a moment for our audience so that they can understand what you mean?

Wait a minute.

How is that Deuteronomy applicable to here we're at today?

And how does it affect this integrated or we would call missionalistic mission that you're talking about?

Yeah, I will.

Travis, let me just step back one moment to what you said earlier, because you use this, this language of priority, and that is a question that I do get asked, and I get so weary of it.

Of course, you know, what.

What is.

What is our priority?

You know, because the assumption seems to be that we should decide what is the most important thing we should be doing for God in our mission.

And so what has priority, in a sense, I sort of understand it because clearly, you know, even Jesus points out that some things are more important than others.

I mean, he says, you know, justice, mercy and faithfulness are more important than tithing your herbs and spices.

The weightier matters of the law.

Yeah.

The greater weightier.

So, yeah, of course, yes, there are important things and some things are more important than others.

I don't want to deny that.

But when people are using this language of priority and what they mean is, surely then evangelism is the priority and everything else is simply secondary, which often means therefore peripheral and marginal.

I want to say it sounds as if Jesus in the Great Commission did not say, go and make disciples, baptizing them and teaching them to obey what you decide has the priority among all the things I commanded you, or go and teach them to obey what you think is the most important thing of all that I commanded.

You know, he simply said, go and teach them to obey all that I commanded you.

Everything I commanded you.

And clearly, even just.

If you only ever read the Gospels, let alone the Old Testament, even though so much of Jesus teaching is rooted in the Scriptures, but if you only read Matthew and Mark, Jesus commanded much more of his disciples than that they should simply preach the good news.

He says so much in his parables about compassion, about generosity, about forgiveness, about the needs of the weak and the poor, etc.

And so to limit even the Great Commission itself to a ministry of preaching or teaching, word based ministry, and neglect all the other things that Jesus said, because we've decided that's what has priority, seems to me to be contradicting what Jesus himself said.

So I wanted to get that off my chest if I could, because it is something that I feel.

And out of that Lausanne Conference, I think John Stott and the others tried to get very clear that, you know, whether we're talking about evangelism or about social engagement, they're all part of the total mission that God entrusts to his church.

And rather than separating dichotomizing and taxonomizing these things into what we decide is the most important, let's just obey Jesus and do it all.

That doesn't mean everybody has to do everything, but it does mean that the church as a whole, collectively should be seeking to engage in all these areas that God himself is concerned about.

Which I suppose takes us back to Deuteronomy.

Now, why?

Why should we be bothered with Deuteronomy?

Well, for a very good reason.

One is because Deuteronomy is a book that was given to the people of God in Old Testament times, the people of Old Testament Israel.

And it was given to them on the basis of what God was calling them to be.

Because God had called them obviously to be his own unique, elected, covenant people.

That's who they were.

Israel is my firstborn son, says God to Pharaoh.

But God has called them also with a purpose and the purpose that God has given to Abraham as to why this people is going to be a great nation who will be greatly blessed.

And covenant relationship with God is so that through you, all nations on earth will be blessed.

Right?

So Israel has this combination of uniqueness as God's people with purposefulness for the rest of the nations.

This God has this singularity of vision for Israel along with plurality of vision for the nations.

That's the kind of singular and the universal at the same time.

Now when Deuteronomy comes along, God is saying to them, look, you guys, this is how I want you to live.

If you're going to be my witnesses among the nations, which is Isaiah language.

But in Deuteronomy, God says, you will show the nations what a wise and understanding people you are.

That's in Deuteronomy 4.

Then you've got to live this way.

So the life of Israel that you get then in a sense constituted within the book of Deuteronomy, it's a bit like a constitution.

It's sort of, here is the way to be what I want you to be.

Here are the laws that will govern your use of the land, your economics, your judicial system, your military system, your family life, your debt and credit life, your economics.

These are the ways in which you will show what a redeemed people can be like living on God's creation in that culture.

Of course, in that time, in that historical period, God says, this is what you should be now then, when you then come to the New Testament.

Paul says all of these scriptures, explicitly says it in 2nd Timothy 3.

All scripture is given by inspiration of God and is useful, is profitable for us, profitable for training and righteousness, for enabling us to be people of good works, to be equipped for the way in which we live.

But then why do we have to be a people who are living in that way, in good works?

Well, again, because God has called us to let your light so shine among men that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven.

There is both in the Old Testament and in the New Testament, there is a visibility about the people of God, a visibility on the world's platform that we are to be seen to be different.

And God has given us a pattern for the way we should live.

And within that pattern, I think he's also given US paradigms and values and standards for what God expects also of society in general.

What kind of government do we expect?

What kind of rulers should we have?

Well, those are questions that take us into the area of justice and integrity and honesty and truthfulness and the lack of corruption and all of those things that are very much there in Old Testament stories, narratives, prophecies, and so on.

That's where it gets very tricky, especially within our culture today, because people wanted to instrumentalize the gospel to bring about a Christian government.

Or they want to use the structures, make the structures fit, then they use force or compelling manipulation in order to do so.

So the end justifies the means.

But what we're noticing is that, no, you can't separate the message from the messengers, and the character has to make sure that it fits just to get the end result.

Though you might have the outward piece, you won't have the inner heart and the effect of it.

And I think of an instance just to use it as an example.

I had a Muslim man come to me and he said, how do you get your wife to obey?

And I said to him, I said, well, first of all, he goes, what does the Bible say?

I said, the first of all, the Bible never says that.

It doesn't talk in that language.

I said, he goes, well, in the Quran, he said, I, I.

How did he put it?

He said, I don't talk to her.

That's the first step.

Secondly, I refuse to have intimate relations with her.

And then I said, number three, then I can hit her.

And he goes, what does the Bible say?

And I said, well, the Bible doesn't give that example, but it does give more of a mindset and a frame of reference.

And I said, let me just look at yours, these three from my lens.

I said, number one, you cannot talk to her.

But most men I know don't have a problem not talking anyway, and they need to communicate more.

So I don't think that's going to be the issue.

Number two, you know, very few men that I know are actually going to do that to restrain themselves sexually, to punish their wives.

Some might, but I just don't find we shouldn't.

You're right, you shouldn't.

And then number three, I said, you can hit her and forcefully get her to obey externally, but you will never get her heart.

Matter of fact, you will turn it away.

Yeah, absolutely.

And so I think what we're seeing is something similar in the culture.

You can get the, you can get the outward conformity with inward rebellion, and you can't instrumentalize the Christian faith without it becoming synthesized with some other agenda and it lose what it actually is.

So this is where we have to understand ourselves as a holy nation, is that right?

I mean, not the country, but the church.

The church is the holy nation.

There is no such thing now as a Christian government.

I mean, there may be Christians in government, right?

And there could be Christian politicians and there should be.

And we should thank God for those who have the courage and the integrity to serve in the political realm and to remain Christians.

But we are not Old Testament Israel.

There is no covenant nation on earth that is the same as Israel was under the Old Covenant before Christ and in Christ we have a multinational community of believers which spans the globe.

When you come to what Christians should be seeking to do in politics, the idea that we can instrumentalize God and the gospel in order to achieve political ends through power was effectively the sin of Jeroboam, the son of Nebat, who made Israel to sin, going right back to the Old Testament itself.

Because there you have the man who appeared to have been a Moses figure.

He had taken the 10 tribes out from under the tyranny of the son of Solomon, Rehoboam, who was behaving like a pharaoh.

He was inflicting oppression on the people.

And not just by accident, like maybe Solomon had done, just to sort of, you know, but Rehoboam chose the path of oppression.

And Jeroboam says, okay, we are out of here.

And he.

And he.

And he actually quotes the language of the Exodus, you know, here are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt.

Then what does he do in order to establish establishes power of his state.

And this is state power.

He establishes shrines at the south and the north of his kingdom.

And he says to the people, you don't need to go to Jerusalem anymore.

You don't need to go to the temple anymore.

You can worship Yahweh, our God here in the king's shrine, the king's temple, which of course is what the high priest in Bethel says to Amos.

This is, you know, don't prophesy here.

This is the king sanctuary.

So effectively, Jeroboam has instrumentalized Yahweh.

The holy one of Israel has now become basically, God bless Israel, God bless my kingdom.

This is the God whom I'm setting up.

And he establishes a priesthood.

He establishes it's all of his own doing.

And that state idolatry, the state use of the living God didn't stop with Jeroboam.

In fact, it has been repeated throughout history in many, many ways in many different countries and cultures, including right up to today on, I would say, if I may say, both sides of the Atlantic, it's not just in the U.S. but you see it also in Russia where the power of the state and the power of the church are aligned.

And it has produced that diabolical violence that has been inflicted on the Ukraine in the name of so called traditional Christian values.

Here is quotes the Christian state doing these things.

So whenever Christians begin to imagine that the best way to save the world is to run the world themselves and to enforce themselves on the world, it always ends in tears.

It ends because it is fundamentally idolatry.

And idolatry leads to violence and bloodshed because the idols, the false gods, demand blood.

So it is a serious issue which is often not seen by many Christians because it sounds so plausible.

We need to get our man in the place of power.

We need to have our people running things and then it will all be okay.

But then we forget that Christians are just as much sinners as anybody else.

We are susceptible to the corruption of power and of wealth and of all these things.

And sadly we see it even where evangelical Christians end up in political power, they so often sadly go astray and betray the gospel.

So that all sounds a bit political, but I think it is a deep political idolatry going right back to Jeroboam.

And you see it too in the way God through the prophets critiques some of the great empires that surrounded Israel.

You know what he says about the Pharaoh of Egypt and what he says about Babylon, the arrogance of these states that exalted themselves into a place of almost blasphemous power.

And God says, you know, your time will come because there's only one king of the universe and it's not us.

I find that Michael Ware, who was a guest on our show, he's involved in politics and he said, you know, the problem that we have is we treat our politics religiously and our religion politically.

That's a good way of putting it.

I think it's very true.

And it's not that we're not saying we don't get involved in politics.

It's just you can't expect the political sphere to do what the church does.

Now, James Davison Hunter had mentioned that one of the reasons that Christians are so treating their religion politically is because they've been excluded from every other square.

And this is the only place where they can exhibit any change.

And they're almost willing to do Anything to do that.

But what they're doing, they might win battles, but they're going to ultimately lose.

We will ultimately lose war because we're losing cultural credibility.

Just like I mentioned with the Muslim man.

I can outwardly compel but inwardly rebel.

And we have to keep that.

This is where we have to develop a much more and listen to the global church, to have much more of an understanding of suffering and cruciform suffering, to move forward and understanding our role and the separation.

This is where our hermeneutics become vitally important.

As you've talked about our understanding of the Old Testament and the understanding of the New Testament, it's a continuous narrative.

But we as a nation, in our country, and I know you're in the uk, we are not a Christian nation in the same semblance.

We might have Christians in politics and some people say, hey, we might be a Christian nation.

Okay, yeah.

Let me just say this, being an American, we may have Judeo Christian foundations, but it's always been a hybrid enlightenment.

Go back to listening to our episode with James Davison Hunter.

And now we are in a pluralistic culture and you can't again, use force, even though the political sphere or the government's the only one that has the lawful use of force to compel.

But there's all these caveats and nuances.

We have to be careful in our hermeneutics as we go about this.

Isn't that correct?

I mean, we have to have our hermeneutics in order to get this.

Yeah, I think we do need to recognize, yes, that the state and government is there by God's decide.

God wants there to be government, which doesn't mean he wants this government necessarily.

It doesn't mean that he approves of every government.

It means that government as such is under God's authority and God's appointment.

And as Paul says, ministers of the state are diakonoi.

The they are ministers of God.

They are doing something that God wants to be done when they pursue justice, when they punish wrongdoers and don't pardon, you know, the guilty.

So there is an element in which, yes, we should have a political theology and we should have Christians who are willing to enter into the political sphere and thank God.

Here in the UK we have many evangelical Christians and Roman Catholics and others who are in all three of our main parties, in fact, well, several of the minor ones as well.

It's not quite as polarized as you, sadly, are there in the States.

So, yeah, Christians in politics.

I'm all for it.

I admire them, I admire their courage, I pray for them.

But to imagine that somehow we as Christians should exercise that power of religion ourselves is a form of idolatry, which I think runs, nearly always runs into trouble.

So yeah, and I think we do need to recognize we are not Old Testament Israel.

You mentioned Judeo Christian values that can be so instrumentalized and so badly used.

I mean it's used here in the uk.

There are those who want to say we need to preserve our Judeo Christian values.

And what that means is hating foreigners basically and hating asylum seekers and you know, taking on a very draconian policy of excluding them.

Why?

Well, because they're Muslims or they're foreigners or they're murderers or whatever.

And all it takes of course is for one demented asylum seeker or, you know, foreigner to go berserk and, you know, kill a few people or whatever they do and then everybody is blamed.

So it's all, it all gets so mixed up and so tragic.

But then people use that phrase, we need to defend our Judeo Christian values.

And I say, well, what do you mean by that?

It often means we need to go back to being a fairly monolithic white Western culture when we thought we were all Christians, which of course we never were.

I mean Britain never was in that sense a majority Christian culture.

If we mean by Christian, those who are actually followers of the Lord Jesus Christ and his disciples.

Even though I would completely agree that Western culture in general in Europe and in Britain and in the United States and Australia, New Zealand and so on, Western culture has been deeply impacted by the Christian faith.

Of course it has.

So much of our so called secular liberal values are the fruit of the Gospel.

You know, the fact that we believe in things like freedom and individual rights and human dignity and all of these things, they all come from a worldview which was basically biblical, weren't part of the Roman Empire.

That's where a historian, you know, like Tom Holland in his book Dominion, has made such a clear case that so much of what we value in so called Western traditional values are themselves the fruit of the Gospel.

But that doesn't mean therefore that we as Christians have the right to compel, enforce and be violent against those who are in a pluralistic society worshiping in other ways or following other traditions.

I find that playing in this, swimming in this water after a while you do recognize the delineations between cultural pieces and understanding how Judeo Christianity or Christianity has shaped the Western society.

As you've mentioned, there are definite pieces of it and we've talked about that a lot on this show, but I think of the work of like a. Harmutirosa, the German sociologist who's written about how democracy needs religion.

And I'm not going to disagree.

In America they said that of course our democracy depend upon a moral citizenry.

The issue though is that that has to be done by the church in helping people become that, as you said, Christians, not a Christian government, but Christians within government in order to do that.

So again, it's where you put the car before the horse.

But if you deem the church to be irrelevant to modern life, and I think in some of the theological systems that we have inherited, which we've reduced it to a justification event only, and then with neoliberal capitalism coming in and squashing formation, turning it into a instapot, rather than allowing it to be the crock pot that it is in sanctification, we then find that our gospel is not heavy enough to handle the weight of the modern world.

So people just then move it into that.

They privatize it or look to the escapist theology.

And we're saying, no, you can't do that.

You have to have a biblical view here.

And when we use biblical, and sometimes I hate it when people use the term biblical because it becomes the means of justifying whatever they're about to say.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But it is looking at the whole narrative.

The whole narrative.

And I think you do that and you call it the integrated, you know, you said gospel centered and then integrated mission.

And we call it mission framed because it holds the whole piece together.

So we're talking about a lot of the same things and we've been hugely inspired by, by, by your work there.

One of the, one of the questions I have about your book, and you added a chapter that I thought was very interesting.

We're going to shift gears here for a little bit, but it's on supersessionism.

Fun word, big word.

That'll be the word.

For those of you who are out there, I want you to introduce that at the dinner table with your spouse and your kids.

Supersessionism.

That'd be a fun word.

But can you define that term?

Because once I think you define it, people are gonna go, oh, I know what that is.

Cause some people here right now, and they're like, I don't even know what that term is.

You're gonna learn the term.

Cause you already have an idea about it, I guarantee it.

And then we need to understand it and why you put it in this book.

But Define that term for us.

Okay.

The term basically means that the church, the Christian church, has superseded the Jewish people in God's plans and purposes.

Supersession, the superseding of the Jews by the church.

A more popular phrase that sometimes used is replacement theology.

That is that putting it crudely, God chose the Jews, hoping that they would be a wonderful people, that he would use them to save the world, but they so sinned and failed and rebelled, etc.

Etc.

All through the Old Testament, that in the end God gives up on the Jews, says, I had enough for you, sends his own Son to be the Messiah and to die on the cross and to rise again to save us.

And from then on, those who follow Jesus, which of course very quickly became majority Gentiles throughout the world, that the church, the Christian church in Christ has succeeded and replaced the Jews of the Old Testament.

So the Jews get replaced by the church.

That's popular level replacement theology.

Now, first of all, very quickly to say, I don't believe that.

That's not my position at all, or even close to it.

However, in the first edition of my book, I was very keen to point out that when God called Abraham and thereby created the people of Abraham in him, the people who come from Abraham, he explicitly says to Abraham that I called and chose you, so that through you all nations on earth will be blessed.

In fact, it's not only there in Genesis 12:3, through you or in you, all nations on earth will be blessed, all families of the earth.

It's also repeated four times in Genesis, including in chapter 18, where God says, I have chosen him, that is Abraham, so that he will teach his children after him to walk in the ways of justice and righteousness, so that I can bring about for him what I promised him, blessing to all nations.

So I wanted, in the book, I wanted to stress the fact that that God's election of Israel was purposeful.

It was for the sake of the nations.

The trouble was that in one or two places I used the word instrumental.

And one of the criticisms that came from a friend called Kendall Sulen in his book Irrevocable was that if you instrumentalize people, you're effectively dehumanizing.

You're saying, you know, they've got no further reason to exist because they were merely instruments.

They were just like tools to get a job done.

And once the job's done, they can be thrown away.

And so therefore, the idea of an instrumental election leads to supersessionism.

And that was the accusation that was coming.

Is that the illustration that you gave with the rocket and the boosters.

And then some people say that Israel was just to get it going.

Then they detached and fell to the earth.

And you're saying, no, no, no, that's a poor illustration.

Yeah, it is.

It's very similar.

That's an illustration I used in another one of my books.

And I try to point out that Paul's metaphor obviously was not a spaceship.

Paul's metaphor is a tree, the olive tree.

That when you have the branches and the fruit, you still have to have the trunk.

There is only one olive tree, as Paul's view.

It's not that, you know, the old olive tree gets replaced by a new one or something.

No, no.

It's an organic, continuous relationship.

So the point I would want to make is it's not that the church replaces the Jews, but rather the way I think the Bible puts it is that Israel, God's Israel, expands to include the Gentiles.

And that's an Old Testament perspective.

That's exactly the way the Old Testament expresses it, not only in Genesis, but in the Psalms, in the prophets, again and again.

The point God is saying, this people of Israel, they will expand.

Others will come in, the nations will join Israel.

It will still be Israel, but it will be Israel joined by nations who will come in through God's judgment and through God's salvation.

And so Israel itself becomes, in the Old Testament, becomes a multinational community of those who have become worshippers and followers of the God of Israel, the Lord God of Israel.

The nations will come to worship him.

Isaiah puts it repeatedly, they will come up to worship him and become his people.

So it's not supercession, it's not replacing, it's fulfillment of the expansion.

So what I tried to do then in the second edition was to take on board that criticism.

I recognized that my language in the first edition of using words like instrumental were easily misunderstood in that direction.

And to say that I was not trying to make the Jews unimportant, to say God's now finished with them.

Because the Apostle Paul says in Romans 11 that God's election is irrevocable.

God is not finished with his people.

But the point is that whatever God's purposes for the Jewish people as well as the Gentiles, whoever and people of any nation, God's purposes now are in and through Christ, in and through the Messiah.

There's not a separate.

We haven't got two tracks going on here.

All God's purposes are fulfilled in the Messiah.

And that is where God's fulfillment will ultimately come and what God's ultimate purpose for Jewish people may be, in my view, I want to leave with God, say God, that's your decision, but irrevocable.

So I'm denying that I'm a SuperSessionist.

It's chapter eight in the book.

It's called Election and Supersessionism.

And this is the issue that I try to take up there and to tease it out more carefully, to explain more carefully what I meant to answer the critique and to make the point that I make.

So yeah, that's in there.

And your response.

So whatever they read about Israel in the Old Testament, they want to apply to the modern, modern state of Israel today.

And I think a huge amount of hermeneutical confusion and moral and ethical confusion arises because of that conflation, which I personally would not wish to make.

But it ends up being that anybody who expresses the least critical comment about the actions or the policies of the Israeli government is immediately accused of being anti Semitic and being anti God and all the other stuff that comes with that.

And I feel that's very unfortunate because if to be critical of Israel was to be anti Semitic, then that would apply to Moses and Jeremiah and Jesus and Paul.

They all had critical things to say about their own people and the government and the rulers and the authorities of their people and the kings and so on.

They all had critical things to say about Israel, but they were not anti Semitic.

They loved their own people.

They wept over them.

And it's.

So it's possible therefore to have to be critical of a political policies and actions without therefore being someone who is either, you know, anti Semitic or hates Jews or whatever it is.

That's simply not the case.

And it's certainly not the case for me.

And I would encourage people to read that chapter in the book.

It's very illuminating.

I was very grateful for that addition to the book.

One of the other things that you talk about in it is we call this the continuum of missioholism, where you have being and doing.

And you mentioned this ethic that we have.

The people cannot be separated from who they are.

Really.

I mean, what we're doing out in the world is really exhibited by our behavior, the ethics that we employ.

Why is it so important to write about that today?

Well, to me there, I think you've said this in one of your other things.

There's no, there's no saying and being without doing.

We, we, we, we, we have.

What.

We say with what we do.

I mean, the New Testament, it seems Jesus and the Apostle Paul make this very clear that the gospel is not just something you believe or that you preach.

It's also something you obey.

Paul talks about the obedience of the faith and he talks about obedience to the gospel.

The gospel makes demands, of course, it's free, it's a gift, it's by grace.

Let's get that very clear.

We are saved by God's grace.

But, but having been saved by God's grace, we are then called into a relationship of allegiance, of submission to Jesus as Lord of obedience to him in the whole of life.

Discipleship is not just a head thing, it is a life thing.

It's whole life discipleship in which we are called to obedience.

And that of course also is part of our mission.

It's to show what redeemed life is like, to be part of that new humanity, to put on the new way of being human, as Paul puts it, the new man, the new humanity.

He says, you don't live the way you used to live.

There has to be a new way of life which then demonstrates not just the truth of the gospel, but also that the gospel actually works, that there is a transformation that the gospel accomplishes which is then both visible and attractive and raises questions.

Maybe I could give one example of this at All Souls Church, my home church here, All Souls Church, Langham Place in London.

One of the ministries of the church is called Tamar, after two biblical women actually.

But it's a ministry among women who are prostitutes or who are in self, who are sex trafficked.

Women of whom of course, there are scores, hundreds in London especially, it's very much notorious for that.

And so there's a ministry, some very courageous women of the church do, going to these places, to the brothels.

They befriend these women, they seek to help them, they try to advocate for them.

They in some cases help to teach English, give English lessons or to fill in forms or to help their asylum claims or whatever it might be.

And a number of these women who have been helped and befriended through this Tamar ministry have come to faith, have come to the Lord Jesus and been saved.

And the most recent one that I heard about someone who was baptized at All Souls quite recently.

Her testimony was that for seven years these women, these Tamar women, had kept coming, trying to help her, loving her, befriending her, taking her side, and so on.

And she said, I kept asking myself, what God do these Tamar women worship that they care about somebody like me?

Very powerful question.

What God do they worship these Tamar women that they care about somebody like me, a prostitute in this place?

And she couldn't get away from that question until eventually she said, I want to know this God, too.

And she came through to faith.

Now, that's what I mean by this visibility of the Christian faith.

And surely it's what Jesus said.

Let your light so shine among people that they may see your good works and come to glorify your Father who is in heaven.

We shouldn't be surprised if when Christians do good stuff, that sometimes the world notices and approves, sometimes they persecute and hate.

Because when we seek justice and we seek to do good for those people who are being exploited, then we'll run up against the powers of evil.

That, to me, is why it's.

It is, you said, it's not only about what we believe, but it's who we become.

And in some respects, the great commandment overflows, and it's exhibited, obviously, in the great community, but it also overflows into the world because we're showing how to love God and love one another.

And then when we do that, we display the new, new creation and all of its beauty and all of its splendor.

Watching world takes notice for good and for ill. Yeah, and that's.

You know, John Stott had a lovely, lovely illustration of this in his book the Contemporary Christian when he's talking about a holistic mission.

There's a whole chapter in the book on holistic mission.

He illustrates this from the two, two of the parables of Jesus, the parable of the Prodigal Son and the parable of the Good Samaritan.

And he makes some wonderful comparisons between them.

But he ends up pointing out that we all start out as prodigal sons because we all need to come back to the love and the grace of God.

But he also says we all are called to be the Good Samaritans who, having shown mercy, show mercy to the one who was suffering.

I can't get the whole of what he says, but it's a lovely comparison between those two parables of being both the Prodigal Son and needing repentance and salvation.

And Restoration and the Good Samaritan who shows mercy to the one who is in need.

And Jesus says, go and do likewise.

That's what it means to love your neighbor, to be the neighbor, and to love others.

And of course, that.

I mean, when Jesus says, love your neighbor, and even when he says love your enemies, he's quoting the Scriptures.

Okay, this is not something that Jesus invented.

Loving God is of course from Deuteronomy.

Love your neighbor as yourself is from Leviticus.

But the same chapter in Leviticus, Leviticus 19 that says, Love your neighbor as yourself also says, love the foreigner as yourself.

There it is, Leviticus, chapter 19.

Towards the end, I think it's verse 33, love him as you love yourself.

Well, you know, it's about time some Christians started loving not just their neighbors, but some of the foreigners as well.

In a sense, we've so lost touch with the ethic of Jesus, the ethic of the Scriptures that he himself knew and then taught in parables like the Good Samaritan, that it's hard to recognize what some people mean when they talk about Judeo, Christian values and, you know, Christian society and all that stuff.

So easy to talk that kind of language by behaving in ways which are radically unchristlike.

And we in our country are seeing a lot of that with ice.

Obviously, we're seeing that play out.

And having worked with immigrants, I've seen a lot of people post, I saw one conservative woman on substack basically say, you're here illegally, you need to repent.

You've broken the law.

And she laid that out.

And I went, you know, there's an example in Scripture, I'm not against upholding of laws.

I'm not saying that at all.

And it's difficult to have mercy if law hasn't been done.

But at the same time, I think of the woman caught in the act of adultery, and here's a woman who clearly broke the law, and Jesus still has mercy.

Yeah.

And so that's the part that I think we have to really give into, is to see, okay, what does it mean to be merciful?

What does it mean to put yourself in the place of the other?

To understand there but for the grace of God go I that they're seeking a better life, that they're trying to seek oppression.

And here's the.

Here's the other part of it.

We've been seeing a lot of the stats coming out of the UK and in France, seeing that there's a growth of evangelicalism as.

As reports of younger people Coming to Saving faith.

And some churches are growing.

And I look at those churches, when I dig down, I see some of the photos, I hear some of the stories.

Most of them are coming in are immigrants.

That's right.

And it's like we're removing the very people that actually could be used to help grow the church.

It's like you think you're actually purifying and actually you're actually harming.

Yeah, there is that.

That's very true.

Yeah.

Yeah.

A lot of the growth of the church in, in Western countries has been through immigration from, in some cases, from countries where there are large Christian majorities, such as some parts of Africa, Francophone Africa, etc.

Of course, other immigrants are coming from more Muslim countries, from Afghanistan, from Syria, from Iraq and so on.

It's a very complex problem and I don't have easy solutions.

And of course, it's one thing to say we should love the foreigner in your midst when it is a small number, but when it is a large number, of course, I can understand those who feel, well, you know, our country is being, quote, swamped by immigrants.

Well, you know, we aren't, you know, compared to some like, say, Uganda, which I think is the largest number of refugees, and Lebanon, where a quarter of the population, you know, a whole million, were Syrian refugees.

And they've coped with.

With them in a country which is about the size of Devon and Cornwall put together.

I mean, you know, we aren't swamped, but I can understand.

The problem is, of course, that we've had political decisions and systems for the last, you know, really half century where whole communities have felt so left behind and so impoverished in the west because of the decline of industrial industries and heavy industry.

And so whole communities have become themselves impoverished and, and declined with hopelessness.

And then it's very easy for them to be made to blame the wrong people, to blame the foreigners, to blame the immigrants.

I mean, it's as old as the book of Exodus, you know, Exodus 1 all over again.

Blame the foreigners, blame the asylum seekers, which of course is what the Hebrews were initially in Egypt.

And the sad thing then of course becomes that in certainly the UK and the us, many of these who have come into the country are doing all the kind of work that the indigenous population don't want to do, you know, in the construction and fields, in manual labor and so on.

And so we want to turf them all out.

But then we wonder, well, who's going to do that work?

It seems somehow very, Well, I don't know it smacks of quite a bit of hypocrisy, especially when it is dressed up in Christian or biblical language.

But I do want to recognize that it is a very complex problem with deep economic and social roots, some of which go back a long way in terms of the decline of Western economies.

And certainly in our country, the impoverishment of some of the cities and towns of the north especially.

There are so many different structures and roots underneath it.

As you said, the socioeconomics piece, the social piece, the political piece, the pressure of it, the loss in some respect of Western nations of people that are ethnic groups, such as the majority, feel like they've been left behind in a world.

And all of those play a role where they even feel.

And I can say in our country, when it started to happen here, the thing that really started to hit people was the LGBTQ and the transgender issue, specifically the transgender issue.

And that's when people went, wait a minute.

What's going on?

And they're.

That's why they're trying to grasp, to say, I'm trying to find a foothold.

And unfortunately, everything gets thrown out at that moment in time.

And this is where we have to have nuance and we have to have good hermeneutics and we have to preach and we have to love and we have to listen.

I mean, it's a complex time in which we're in.

But as you said, it's the mission of God.

You quote Michael Gorman and one of the things that we have within Missio, holism, God is concerned not only with the tasks being accomplished, but who you're becoming in the process.

Are you becoming more like him?

And you talk about that in your book.

As we're going about this, we have to be aware of who we are becoming.

Why is that so important to understand, even as we're loving people, and why God allows this to occur?

It's not to make us comfortable, but to make us more like him.

Exactly.

I mean, that is.

I mean, John Stott was very insistent on that.

His last sermon at Keswick was, what is God's ultimate desire for us?

It is that we should become more like Christ.

Christ likeness.

As the goal of Christian discipleship is to become like the one we worship, which we do anyway, we all become like what we worship.

So the more we know Christ, the more we will be like him.

Which, of course, is one of the reasons why I find it so distressing that so much that Christian rhetoric that happens, so called, you know, in those who support some pretty hard line Policies is both in tone and in content.

So unlike Jesus, certainly unlike the Sermon in the Mount.

And that is distressing because you say, well, you know, Jesus did say.

He did warn us about that, didn't he?

He said, many will come in my name and they will say, lord, Lord, we did this, we did that.

And Jesus said, I never knew you.

It is possible to have all sorts of Christian credentials and Christian achievements, etc.

This is Matthew, chapter seven, the ending of the Sermon in the Mount.

And yet to be disowned by Jesus on the last day, which is a pretty fearful sort of prospect that he says, get away from me, you evildoers.

People who are speaking and healing and doing all sorts of stuff in Jesus name.

And he said you were doing evil.

So I think idolatry is so subtle and so deceptive that that's why the Bible gives so much time and attention to the idols which we scarcely recognize because we live in the midst of them.

And we worship the gods of the people around us and the culture around.

Us, which is always so hard to tell because they're disguised as blessing.

What's one just concluding thought for the people today?

Well, I think my concluding thought on what my book is really trying to do is to help people to get back to the whole Bible as the story of God.

I feel that, you know, there's so much biblical ignorance in our societies.

I mean, even among Christian people, if the Bible is treated just as a sort of a book full of nice promises, you know, a blessed thought for every day.

And of course, it's also a marketing opportunity.

There's so many Bibles around for this and that and the other, that the Bible becomes simply a kind of almost a merchandising thing to help you get through your day.

And I just want people to get back to see this whole story that we are in.

We live in God's creation, which is radically broken.

God made a promise and created a people through whom he sent the Messiah, Jesus, his son, who died for us, rose again and calls us to follow him in costly, obedient discipleship and to look more like him.

And he's coming back as king and judge, and he will separate the sheep from the goats.

But then when he has put all things right, he will make all things new and we shall have a new creation, a new heavens and a new earth.

It's not that we go off somewhere else.

We're not going up to heaven.

That's not how the Bible ends.

The Bible ends with God coming here to put things right and to dwell with us.

So let's get hold of that big Bible story and then live within it and live it out and inhabit it and say, this is our story, not the world's story.

This is God's story.

And that will then drive and shape our mission.

I think that's the way I'd want people to finish.

Well, I hope and pray that people get the book the Mission of God, second Edition.

I want to thank you for coming on the show.

It's been a delight for having you on Ministry Deep Dive.

Again.

Thank you, Travis, and thanks for the chat.

It's been good.

And that's where we'll wrap up today's episode.

A huge thank you to Dr. Christopher J.H.

wright for joining us and for the gift of this newly updated second edition of the Mission of God.

His work continues to help the global church recover the depth, beauty and scope of God's redemptive mission.

If today's conversation has sparked something in you, and I hope and pray that it has maybe a fresh way of reading scripture, a renewed sense of calling, or simply a desire to think more deeply about the mission of God, we'd love for you to keep exploring with us.

Head over to ApolloSwatered.org where we write about all of these themes all the time.

You'll find articles, resources, and reflections that help you navigate the intersection of gospel, kingdom, church and culture all through a missiolistic lens.

Thank you for listening, for thinking deeply, and for caring about what God is doing in the world.

Until next time, stay faithful, stay curious, and keep diving deep.

Thanks for joining us on today's episode of the Ministry Deep Dive, a podcast of Apollo's Water, the Center for Discipleship and Cultural Apologetics.

We hope it helps you thrive in your ministry and in today's culture.

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Connect with others in the battle.

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And remember, keep diving deep and as always, stay watered.

Everybody.