Love in our western culture is often talked about in terms of okay, I have to love myself first before I can love others. I think that's absolutely wrong. I think it's absolutely backwards. Love in the other direction is the biblical form of love, in which no matter how much pain I endure, the love is doing something for the benefit, for the advancement, for the growth of others.
As Christians, our mission is to spread the gospel around the world to all the nations. But our mission also includes transforming the nations to increasingly reflect the truth, goodness and beauty of God's kingdom. Tragically, the church has largely neglected the second part of permission and today, Christians have little influence on their surrounding cultures. Joining us on this podcast is to rediscover what it means for each of us to disciple the nations and to create Christ honoring cultures that reflect the character of the living God.
Hello, and welcome again to another episode of Ideas Have Consequences. This is the podcast of the Disciple Nations Alliance. And my name is Scott Allen. I'm the president of the DNA and I'm here today with Darrow Miller, Dwight Vogt, Luke Allen, and our guest today is a longtime friend and brother in Christ and partner in ministry, Bob Moffitt. Bob, great to have you with us today.
Thank you. It's good to be here.
It's great to have you, Bob. And for those who don't know, well, Darrow and Bob have a friendship that goes back decades. I don't know—
50 years now, Bob?
Yeah, 1967, I think it was.
They were hippies in—you want to tell a little bit about that story? Do you want to share? Maybe that'd be good.
Darrow do you want to tell the story or have me tell the story
You tell the story, Bob. About your prayer.
Okay. All right. It's a good place to start. I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Malawi, Africa, teaching science in a secondary school. And I was there in the Peace Corps rather than as a missionary, which my folks wanted me to be because I wanted to see missions from an outside perspective. And so I intentionally joined the Peace Corps and was fortunately selected. And while there, I read a book by Émile Cailliet. And that was, I think, the first book that was written about Young Life. And I grew up in a fundamentalist Baptist Church. And, you know, the priority of the church at that time was evangelism. And for many churches still today, our priority is to see people meet Jesus Christ. And that's a very good priority, but I've learned since then that's not the priority that Jesus gave his disciples. Anyway, in this book, I read about a style of evangelism, which was relationally based. And I love that. It wasn't what I grew up with, as a sort of grab the collar of the person that you find next, and share the gospel with him. It was a much longer process of earning the right to be heard. And I prayed at that time, Lord, when I get back to the States, I would really like to meet these people called Young Life. Well, when I got back to the States, and was accepted to seminary, one of the first persons I met at seminary was Darrow. And he was connected with Young Life.
And this was Denver seminary. Is that right?
This is Denver seminary. And I thought, wow, the Lord has answered my prayer. And so Darrow and I became really good friends.
It was the first or second day we were on campus, I think.
Yeah, it was. Yeah. And because you were involved with Young Life, you were working in an all black high school at that time. And Denver was really at the point of exploding racially. And we had an opportunity to build relationships with some of those radical kids. Was it East High, I think Darrow?
Manual High School.
Manual High School. Okay. And anyway, that began our relationship. And as continued throughout the years, where Darrow's influenced me and some of the things that I've done, and I think maybe I have him. And so, here we are today. Old hippies.
Wait, where did the hippies come into the story? I missed that part.
Well, we grew up in that era.
It was the 60s.
Yeah. And we would take our dates, you know, to the hippie dives with electric lights and candles dripping on the table.
And were you in California too, Bob? I can't remember.
I was.
So both of you guys were kind of there at the beginning of the Jesus movement, then.
Yes.
Well we were in Colorado, where we met. And that's where he met Judy.
We had the background.
We both grew up in Southern California.
Yeah, yeah. Okay. Yeah.
And we were both traveler kinds, you know, moving around, sort of anti disestablishment. Or no, not anti, we were disestablishment kinds of guys that were not very happy with with some of the things we saw in our society, the time and we're willing to speak out against them.
And we were eventually released from seminary. We were asking troubling questions in seminary.
For example?
Well, we were both social activists and involved in it's black, all black high school. And we were asking questions, social questions about the role of the church and society, and the role of the church in dealing with poverty and hunger and broken societies.
And the finding the church of the denomination of the seminary really quite unresponsive to the social needs that we were experiencing in the inner city of Denver.
And the seminary was, what, a half a mile from the Center of Denver, a mile maybe, downtown? Five Points?
Yeah. And one of the things that Darrow got me involved with was working with these kids. And then one of them was in trouble with a law. And then police records and one thing led to another and the juvenile court asked us if we could work with some of these kids, and formed a group called Young Life probation outreach. And, and the President of the seminary was really excited about what we had in mind. And wrote letters to the key pastors of the denomination and said have them come and talk to our people about getting involved. And the involvement was to be involved as Big Brothers and Big Sisters to these kids, who mostly came from single parent families, poverty situations, a lot of drugs, robbery, that kind of thing. And so we would go to churches and invite the people to give their lives sacrificially in just a couple of—a half a day a week with his kids,
To love on kids.
Yeah. And you know what? After speaking dozens of churches, the only people I remember that came out of those churches that were willing to work with these kids were the sort of delinquent kids of some of the pastors. There was nobody, no adult, no pastor. After pouring our hearts out and saying we will provide counseling, guidance, recreational opportunities for you to be involved with these kids, the middle class Baptist churches that were the foundation of the seminary were frankly too afraid.
They often would say to us, thank you, this is very interesting, we'll pray for you. And that was the response.
Yeah. And finally, I really lost my—I mean, I came to seminary loving the church. I had a passion for the church, I grew up in a church that was alive, and loving, and reaching out into the community. And I found the churches of my own denomination in Denver not like that at all. And little by little, my heart grew very cold towards the church. To the point I didn't want to have anything to do with the church. And, you know, we were part of a little break off from our denominational church, which was an inner city church and a very good one. But I wanted to have nothing to do with the church that I grown up with. I really don't like to use the word but it's true—I detested it. And about five years into this period of alienation, the Lord said to me, "Bob, that church that you detest, is my bride. And until you love her with my love, I can't use you." That was a shock. I mean, I thought I was doing the Lord's work. You know, working with inner city kids, and the Holy Spirit said, "Until you love my bride, I can't use you." And I had to come to a place of confession and say "Father, I can't. But you can. Change my heart." And he did.
And it really gave rise to your ministry, Bob.
Aboslutely. And I have a love for the church today that began in the early 1980s. And that's in spite of her problems and difficulties and struggles. I love the church. And my passion is to see her become the church that Christ has called her to be.
Hi, friends. Thanks for joining us today. And I hope you're enjoying this interview with Bob Moffitt. As always, to take a deeper dive into each week's topic, go to the episode landing page, where we have included all of the resources that we mentioned in each episode, as well as other material that can help you study each topic further, such as the entire podcast and a transcript form, which is neatly broken up into chapters. Also key quotes and social media posts that you can easily share with a friend. If you enjoy this podcast and you want to help us share it, that is the best way that you can do that, by taking your favorite episode, and sharing it with a friend, either the entire episode or sharing any of our social media posts, which are on Facebook, Instagram, and again on the landing page. To find the landing page, just go ahead and click the link down in the show notes below. Thanks again for listening.
And, Bob, our topic today—you mentioned the word love. And that's really what we wanted to talk with you about. So I'm glad you brought that up. You know, you mentioned how God spoke to you and said unless you love the church with the love that I have for her, you know. And that was really a turning point for you and your life. You had to get rid of that bitterness and figure out in God's strength and in wisdom, a way of loving the church. What did that look like? What did God wants you to do? How did that kind of resolve itself in terms of a ministry, Bob, that really I think you've been faithful with your entire life since that point. You've been really faithful at this ministry. How would you describe that ministry?
What it looked like evolved over time. In general, I felt like, okay, in order for the church to be the church that Jesus called her to be, she needed to learn to sacrificially love others.
Which is what you didn't see, when you were in Denver there.
Which is what I did not see. And so, I don't know why, maybe it was because of my Peace Corps international experience, the first churches I thought about were helping churches of the developing world be able to reach out to their communities and demonstrate God's love. And so we started a program, which tried to find churches that were willing to do that, and then to partner them with churches in the US, that could help to fund that process, and to be partners with churches abroad. And we did that for maybe, five, seven years. And so our job was to link Christians in the US with Christians overseas. And that began when I was on staff with Food for the Hungry. And one of the opportunities we had was a high school, a Christian High School, in Mansfield, Ohio, that was looking for an opportunity and we had Food for the Hungry partnered them with a church in the Dominican Republic, to try to help build a community center for them. And that was really the genesis of Harvest at that point in time. I had the sense that we, as an organization of Food for the Hungry, should play the role of like a marriage broker, partnering those communities, those churches overseas, you know, with a church in the States, and then equip them in how to develop that relationship and walk by themselves. And that was really the genesis of the vision of Harvest. And so we did that and had a number of partnerships, in Central America, then Dominican Republic, Haiti, where we partnered churches there who were very poor...
With churches in United States.
With churches in the US, they could partner with them, send kids on mission trips, and help financially on those projects. But after a while, Scott, I began to realize that the help from the churches in the US was actually impeding the ability of the local church to sacrificially reach out and love its own community. In other words, they became dependent on those resources from the outside, instead of saying, what do we already have, even though it may not be enough for us? What do we have that we can give as an expression of our love for our community and its needs? And so at Harvest, we began to transition to a completely different model, where our job was to empower theologically and practically ways for that church to begin to see itself as a giver, as a lover. And love is so clearly defined when we sacrificially give what can hardly afford to give to somebody else for their benefit. So we began a program which is all over the world now. And 1000s of churches have been empowered, theologically and practically. And we have dozens of trainers, national trainers, who are now in the business of training local churches, to do just that.
So it's really, if I can express in my own words, Bob, you stopped doing partnerships between churches in the developing world and the United States and you really focused on churches in the developing world and said, how can we help and equip them to show the love of Christ to those in their own community, with their own resources, and that's really been a theme that's run all the way through.
That's the key theme of Harvest.
I just want to underscore something you said too, Bob. God's really used you too. In fact,there's a verse in Hebrews, Hebrews 10:24, that I always think about when I think of you, Bob, it says, "And let us consider how we may spur one another on towards love and good deeds." And to me that's just a verse that expresses so much the ministry that God has given you. And he's used you to spur brothers and sisters and churches on, towards love and good deeds all over the world. I mean, 1000s of people have been spurred on to express love and good deeds. And so, truly, Bob, it's been an honor for me to know you and to be touched by your ministry, the ministry, of the Disciple Nations Alliance really was born out of a partnership between Harvest, the ministry that you're just describing, and the ministry that God really has given you, Darrow, you know, the power of ideas and biblical truth to bring a transformation. So those two ideas, coupled with a focus on local churches in developing countries, for the purpose of seeing the church rise to its full potential, to really be this agent of change in communities through a practice of love and truth. That was really the seed of the Disciple Nations Alliance.
Well, the truth part is so crucial, Scott. We know that sacrificially loving others is the truth. I mean, that is the key truth of Scripture from my perspective. And unless we can see that as an absolute truth, then when the times get tough, and we feel like I can't give anymore. I need this for myself. I need this for my family. We find it very difficult, I think, to move beyond the selfish gene, to the sacrificial gene, of saying, "This is what I should do. This is God's command for me, this is God's will for me, to be a person who not only is able to sacrificially give, but to be an example, and to challenge others to do the same."
Yeah, I'd like to talk about love, Bob, because, you know, you've mentioned it more than once. It's right at the heart of your ministry. And as our listeners know, we've been going through a series of words that are deeply biblical, very foundationally biblical, and there's probably no more foundational word than the word "love." In fact, it's it's one of these words we use so often, we just kind of take it for granted. You know, I think we all kind of assumed that we know what that word means. And we use it without thinking a lot about it. And so we're trying to help Christians in our podcast and in a book project that we're working on to understand, what are these words actually mean? How does God define those words? How are they defined in the Scriptures? And then how have they been hijacked? Or how have they been redefined in our culture? And you've mentioned more than once now, Bob, for you, this idea that love is something that requires sacrifice. Would you mind elaborating on that and then just kind of, when you think of that word, "love," Bob, that's central to your ministry? How do you define that? How do you describe that?
Well, in the big picture, it's seems to be pretty simple to me. And here is how I would try to understand it. Love in our western culture is often talked about in terms of okay, I have to love myself first before I can love others. Unless my love myself and I think a lot of psychotherapy is geared toward that. You learn to love yourself, too. Because if you hate yourself, you can't love others. Theoretically. I think that's absolutely wrong. I think it's absolutely backwards. Love in the other direction is the biblical form of love, in which no matter how much pain I endure, love is doing something for the benefit, for the advancement, for the growth of others. That's the first thing. Not the second thing. I don't have to love myself before I can love others.
One of the stories that I love to tell about this—this idea comes from my work, before Harvest. And it came out of that ministry that Darrow and I started in Denver, which eventually became called Partners. But we were working with delinquent kids. And we had a school for several dozen kids that couldn't make it in the public school system. And these kids were really broken. They came to school dirty and washed, with their heads hanging down. Very low self image. And we kept brainstorming, how can we help these kids? How can we help them to get out of this funk that they were in?
And one of our teachers had a great idea. It didn't sound like a great idea, but it turned out to be. He said, you know, we have here in Denver, an institution for mentally and physically handicapped people. What if we ask this institution if we can bring our kids, these unmotivated kids with real low self image, to this state institution for the mentally and physically handicapped, kids as volunteers. To wipe the saliva off of the inmates, to push them in their wheelchairs, to just talk to them, even though they couldn't respond. And the people at the institution said, "We'd never thought of that. Maybe. Let's give it a try." So we announced to the kids on a Friday afternoon, that on Monday morning when they came to school, we were gonna bus them to this institution. And we're gonna have a name tag, with their name on it, and the word volunteer. On Monday morning, a miracle had taken place. Those kids came to school, bathed, in clean clothes, with their hair combed and brushed, standing tall because they were going to be able to go someplace and help other people.
And it was amazing the transformation that just that idea for these broken kids, that they were now going to be in a position where they can help other people who are more broken than they are. And that was an incredible insight for me. Even though we're broken, one of the fastest ways to be healed from our brokenness is to think that we might be in a position to help other people. We can be significant in the lives of the other human beings. These kids didn't feel significant in the life of anybody, let alone to themselves. Now all of a sudden they were going to be in a position where they could help somebody else. That's the core of biblical love. And I think we see that exemplified in God Himself. At what great cost to himself, did Jesus come and serve us? So, I think one of the cores of the concept of love is this sort of dichotomized way of seeing it. One is understanding love as doing something for me. And the other is, no matter how much it hurts me, doing something to help somebody else grow and to be healed. And today I talk about that as moving toward God's intentions.
So I'm hearing sacrificial service is so key to this, Bob. And, you know, yeah, obviously, we see that in Christ. And, you know, I'm also mindful of the parable of the Good Samaritan, you know, what does it mean, the lawyer asked Jesus, to love my neighbor? Who is my neighbor? But Jesus tells the story of the Good Samaritan, both to answer the question, "Who's my neighbor?" but also, what does it mean to love?
I think it was even more than that, Scott. It wasn't, "This is how you become saved." But it's the evidence of our right relationship with God. Because you'll notice, at the very end of the story of the Good Samaritan, Jesus answered the very first question, the Bible scholar, the lawyer, asked Jesus, how can I be saved? And Jesus answer was something that shocked most of us evangelicals. He says...
Go do likewise.
Go do it. Go love.
In that same way.
Wait a minute, you know, we're not saved by works. We're saving by grace. Jesus wasn't saying we're saved by works. Here we're saying the evidence of our right relationship with God is that we love in the way that Jesus taught us to love.
There's something hidden in this story that Bob is just pointing to. The lawyer asked one question, what is love?
Who is my neighbor?
Yes, yeah. Who's my neighbor? But then Jesus said, What does the Bible say? And the lawyer got the right answer.
Yeah. Love God with all your heart and love your neighbor as yourself.
Yeah. And you've answered right. The word "love" there was a noun. And when Jesus asked the question at the end, who was it that loved, who proved to be the lover.
The neighbor.
The one who has acted neighborly.
It wasn't even the one that had the right beliefs. In our nomenclature, it was a Jehovah's Witness that was a lover.
Yeah. Because they were neighborly. They were functioning as a neighbor.
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it was demonstrated by what they did. Yeah.
Not who is my neighbor? But who acted neighborly? So the word was changed. And Christ changed the word. And that's the very nature of "agape" love. It is self sacrificial love where you are neighborly to the person who is in need.
Bob, would you say that this is, you know, you were talking about the priority of the church and how when you were growing up, and even to today, you know, many people will say the priority is to proclaim, is to preach the gospel. Would you say this is the priority of the church, to demonstrate love? How would you put those two things together?
In a way. But I would say it a little differently. I would say that I think the priority that Jesus gave is disciples, was to disciple. And I think what it means to disciple is to teach people to be like Jesus. We have so messed up our understanding in the evangelical church what discipleship means. We've got three manuals that we go through and when you go through these three courses and you go through these disciplines, you've ended up discipled. But you may not look any more like Jesus than you did before he started to take the discipleship course. What is being a disciple of Jesus? It's learning to look like him, and behave like him. That's what discipleship is for me.
And the content is secondary, it's important. But it's secondary. And if we don't have a picture of what discipleship means, we're never gonna accomplish it. No matter how many classes we have, if we don't understand that the purpose of that class is to help the people in the class look more like Jesus, then we're gonna miss the picture. There are a lot of people who look more like Jesus, than those who know a lot more about Scripture than they do. But they're more disciples of Christ than those who know a lot and got an A+ on their catechism class, or their discipleship class. So discipleship is equipping people to love. And if we understood in our churches—that's the picture. That's what we're aiming for, when we disciples them, is to help them move from where they are increasingly, in a lifelong journey, of looking more like Jesus. Even Paul, at the end of his life said, I have not yet arrived. He understood discipleship as a lifelong process. Not a series of classes or manuals that you go through.
And so, the priority? I think, when we say evangelism is a priority our hearts are right. We want to see people come to know Jesus. That's why Jesus came. He came to see us saved. But there were many of the disciples, maybe all of them, who Jesus began discipleship before they even knew who he was. How many of the disciples were saved when they started following Jesus? Maybe none. But he said to them, follow me. He started disciple in them as soon as he met them. And what is disciple mean? It means helping them to know and to be like Jesus. And I think that probably one of the most effective means of evangelism is meeting people who look like Jesus. When you meet Jesus, you're changed. And if you meet people who are like him, that has an impact on your life, and those of us who God uses to direct other people to Himself may never see the result. We never may see them come to Christ, but we've been a part of that journey. Because hopefully, they saw Jesus in us. And you can't see Jesus without being transformed. And that transformation may not result in what we as evangelicals think of salvation for a long time. When is that transition point, that fulcrum point? We don't know that. But our job isn't to know that. Our job is discipleship. And if we don't look like Jesus herself, it's pretty hard to disciple.
I'd like to dig into this Bob, you said discipleship is teaching people how to love. In a while back, you said there's a dichotomized view of love. And one way of looking at it is self sacrificial service. And then another way is a selfish view of it. You know, "Love yourself, fill yourself, love is love." That kind of thing. Those are completely different definitions of love. And yet one, because it's focused on selfishness and the other one's selflessness, one of them looks a lot better to a person, especially an unbeliever. How do you disciple someone who sees this definition of love, that just sounds great. It's fulfilling. It'll make you feel good and happy and emotionally rich. How do you disciple someone to leave that definition of love? Teach them how to love in a self sacrificial way that selfless, and really doesn't sound too good? You know, I'm a marketer, you always want the customer to feel like a superhero. But how do you do that when the thing you're marketing to a selfish person just doesn't sound as attractive?
Okay, great question. Great question, Luke. And I didn't set you up for this. I want the listeners to know that. I think there are two things. The first is truth. We need to understand that to love this way, self sacrificially, is the mark of a disciple. When we encourage Christians, we shouldn't do it because this is a nice thing to do. Sounds good. Looks good. Markets well. We need to be convinced theologically that this is the truth. This idea has consequences. The idea that love isn't a good idea that comes from the human perspective, it is the very nature of God. And it is who He has called us to be. This is a non-negotiable truth. And unless we know that and we believe it, it's easy to fall into the trap of, let's do it, because it's a nice thing to do. We need to not be attracted to loving, because it's a nice thing to do. We need to be motivated to do that, because that is God's command. That is who he is. And that is who he has mandated us to be. He has mandated us to be like his son. And that's number one.
Number two, is how do I do that? Well, we're always working on a graduate degree and spending wee hours of the night and the morning writing papers about this subject. And a little prompting of the Holy Spirit has said, "You know Bob, all this reading you're doing is a good thing. But how are you living this out in your own way?" Oops. Didn't have time for that, I was writing. I was working on a degree. I was doing the quote unquote "loving thing" by taking the opportunity God had given me to write and to study. And Holy Spirit's says "That's good. But it's not the real thing." And so I began to ask, "What is the real thing?"
And I believe it was the Holy Spirit that led me to develop something we call the discipline of love. Some people call it acts of love. But basically, it's one of the key programs ore methods that we teach at Harvest. It's a matrix which looks at first the areas in which we need to grow to be like Jesus. And the little paradigm that we've chosen to use is from Luke 2:52, the four areas of Jesus' growth—wisdom, physical, spiritual, social. So if we're gonna grow to be like Jesus, we need to grow in all of those areas.
And then on the other side of that matrix is the communities that we all inhabit. One is family and other is church, others are the multiple communities that we're a part of. And so if you take those three categories of communities, and you take those four categories of areas in which you need to grow, you find 12 categories, in which we need to grow to be like Christ. And so, in the discipline of love, we teach people how to grow in those 12 areas. And each of them has an exercise, not a prescribed exercise, but an exercise which the individual themselves comes up with. And exercises that growth process and journals it and reflects on it, and then shares it with other people that they're doing this in community with.
But the key thing is that you don't do these exercises to help yourself grow. You do them to help others grow in those areas, in those 12 areas. And as you help others to grow in these, you grow. So you don't do it out of self interest, you do it out of interest in helping others become who God wants them to be in these 12 categories. That sounds mechanistic, but it works. This morning... was it this morning? No, it was yesterday morning, in one of my mentorship calls. I've been in a mentorship relationship with this young pastor in Mongolia for maybe 15 years. And he said something to me yesterday morning, that really struck me. He's teaching pastors how to do the discipline of love. And then how to teach their people to do the discipline of love. And I asked him, I said, what about you? He said, you know, Bob, he said, I don't even think about that anymore. It's just so natural. It's become a lifestyle. And he does, I mean, his whole life is the lifestyle of giving. Pastors, senior pastors call him just to talk to him. Because he listens, and he loves. Out of his meager resources, he helps other people, sacrificially, at the expense of his family. And I know that because we've been walking together for 15 years now. But he began with the discipline of love. It's sort of like a spiritual discipline that you practice, to the point that it becomes a habit. And it becomes a lifestyle.
Yeah, and I want to point listeners to where they can access that method, that tool or resource, Bob, well, maybe you can explain that. Because we want people to check this out and to use this.
Yeah. Come to the harvest website and type in discipline of love. It's one of the resources that you'll find. Yeah, harvestfoundation.org
Harvestfoundation.org. And I encourage our listeners to do this. It's a really powerful tool for discipleship. And, you know, one of the things that I love about it, Bob so much is that it seems to me like in our church, when we want to do outreach into the community—and this is good, but it's collective, you know, what can we collectively do to reach out into the community, maybe to love our schools or to do something with the inner city poor. But what disciplines of love does is it makes it individual. What can you do as an individual person with the people that God has put into your midst, to your family, or your neighbors or whatever it is, you know, what are you going to do as an individual?
Yeah, that's a real paradigm shift that's needed in the church. When we think of service, we think primarily of group service. And so we go on a missions trip. Or we go to the rescue mission, or we do that. At most, that's a weekly thing. The mission trip, maybe once a year, maybe once every couple of years for each individual and church. Those are great things. But I think the major discipline that we need to be teaching our people in the church is the lifestyle. In our families, and the church in the community, the local communities that we all have.
Yeah, we do put a lot of emphasis, getting back to discipleship, Bob, on knowledge. And it's important that we grow in knowledge of what the Bible teaches. But it seems to me the emphasis that we don't put as much emphasis on his practice of love the sacrificial service. And that God really has put that on your heart to kind of fill in that gap, if you will, or to help churches to do this as a practice. Just that's part of your daily life.
I wouldn't mind guys, I'd love to hear other people that haven't been talking, I wouldn't mind shifting to a few, I think misconceptions maybe that people have about love Bob. And just honestly, I'd love to get your thoughts on on this one. We have a mutual friend, I won't mention his name. But he said to me more than once, and it's kind of struck me and I've heard this from people besides him. He said, You know, I don't have to like you. But I am commanded to love you. You know, as Christians, we don't have to like the people that we're to love, we just have to love them. And I kind of knew what he was saying, that love is as we're describing it here. It's, I need to find some way to come alongside and to serve you sacrificially. But that doesn't mean I have to like you. But I struggle with that, frankly, because I do think there's an aspect of love that includes affection. That I want to see this person thriving and doing well because I care about them. I have affection for them. And you know, I don't think Jesus would say that. I don't have to like you, but I do have to love you. I think he actually had affection for us lost people and wanted to be our friends. And anyways, talk to me a little bit about that this whole role of heart and affection in love, do you think that's important or not?
I don't think Jesus likes Pharisees and the Sadducees. Those he called hypocrites. Those he called a brood of vipers. I don't think he liked him.
To push back on that though, Bob, he had lots of friends who were, in Nicodemus and many others. So I wouldn't say that as a class, he didn't like them as a class of people. He had affection for many of them. But it was it was, when he's calling them a brood of vipers, he's getting at something that they're doing and they're believing thats really destructive. That's kind of my second point I wanted to get to but go ahead with...
I don't think Jesus liked all the Pharisees. But some he did. But he loved them. And when we define love, it's acting in the best interest of the other. I can see how those two things came together. When Jesus was talking to the Pharisees and shocking them with his statements about who they were, it didn't mean he didn't love them. But I don't think he liked them. I think that it's very possible. There are some people we don't like. I mean, there are people politically in our culture today that I don't like at all. But Jesus commands me to love them. And so that means that when I talk about them, I don't use disparaging demeaning terms. And if I had an opportunity to do something directly in relationship to them, I would hope that I would do something that would be in their best interest. So loving isn't liking, I don't think. I think the two can go together. Because there's some people we just really don't like. But I think that we can love them.
Go ahead Darrow... or Darrow and Luke, go ahead. Yeah.
Just real quick. I agree with you, Bob. But I do also think there is an element of affection that can grow from sacrificial service, especially through the softening of the Holy Spirit. Yeah, like, you don't have to like everything someone does. I think of it more as actions. Like I don't like everything my wife does, but I love her always. You know, that's a really soft example. You can also go with harsher examples, but through the Holy Spirit, someone that I really don't like, their actions, you know, "Hate the sin, love the sinner" kind of thing, I can still love them and pray for them. And through that process, I think the Holy Spirit can work and that affection can come as a consequence.
Agree. Agree. 100%. It's really interesting when there's someone we don't like that we begin to pray for, and we really pray for. How our attitude and feelings toward that person changes. I've experienced that in my own life. So yeah, I would really concur with that.
Darrow, go ahead with your thought there.
Yeah, um, you know, when you're talking about like and love. I think part of what we get mixed up in is today's understanding of love.
The hijacked.
The hijacked concept of love, and there'd probably be many ways to express it. But I think two that are the most prevalent today is the word love is understood as sex. And if you look at all the the media, it's all about sex. Sex is the highest value, as it were. But when people talk about sex, what word do they use? Love. So in our culture's mind, that's part of what is in the back of the mind. Love and sex are synonymous. Well, what we're talking about here is not that.
But the other thing is like, and we have reduced love to sentiment, a sentimentality, a feeling. And that's not love. It's a feeling. And we use the word "love" today to mean sentiment. I feel well towards a person, I love them. And if they're rotten, and I don't feel good about them, I don't love them. So I think it's important, and we could probably spend a lot of time unpacking the counterfeit. But we have to, when we're having a discussion of love, we have to look at what is the hijacked concept because that's what we're dealing with in culture today. So that's one thing.
The other thing is, I think of C.S. Lewis's book "The Four Loves," because I think one of you said earlier, we need to go back what does the Bible say? But we're using the word love and it can mean sex, it can mean sentiment, it could be self sacrifice in which is what Bob is describing here. But there are four words and Lewis points this out in his book, "The Four Loves," there are four words in the Bible that are translated "love." They're each translated "love," but they're four different Greek words. And so they have four different concepts. And I would argue the biblical concept of love is much broader than what we've talked about today. And I wish I could remember the fourth one, is the one of, Bob I love your gray hair. It is... stylish isn't the word. It's a mature. It's shows wisdom. I love your gray hair. You know, it's the loving of detail in life, right?
Yeah, I love pizza.
I love pizza. Yeah. And that's one of the Greek words for love, but it's not what we've been talking about. But if you parse the word love in the New Testament, there are these four words. The second one is phileo, which we all know as the love of friendship, and we've talked about that today. That's phileo. And we have friends that we love. And when we use that word, "love" in relationship to a friendship, we're speaking of this concept of phileo.
And then there's eros. And that's not simply sex. We have reduced eros, just like we've reduced the word love to sex. Eros is an intimacy that is a comprehensive intimacy between God and man, man and woman. In the Old Testament, it's the Hebrew word "yada." To know intimately. And the concept of sex today has lost that. It's a one night stand. But eros is sexual love born out of intimacy, out of the whole knowledge of another person.
And then you have agape, and this is what Bob has been primarily talking about. It is self sacrificing love for for the good of another. And this is the very nature of God's love. And as Bob has described it, it's taking us back to the core of who God is. Jesus died because God loved us. He was willing to sacrifice his only Son, and the Son was willing to give up his life. This is self sacrificing love, and it doesn't matter how you feel, as it were. It is an act of self sacrificing love. And that's what Bob has been describing today. How do we understand that? How do we begin to practice that? But I think it's having a biblical, a more biblical comprehension of what the word love means, so we can contrast that with the cultures understanding, which is totally reduced love to sentiment or to sex.
Yeah, Darrow. That's really good. Let me just pick up on that. The thought of God's love and the idea of knowledge. In Philippians, we have the hymn that describes Jesus as a servant. And he served humbly, he served sacrificially. But there's something that is revealed in Hebrews 12:2, that says even though the cross was not happy, he was joyful. Christ was joyful. Because he knew long term what his sacrifice would mean for us. But for the joy of the cross...
For the joy set before him, the running of the race in Hebrews 12.
Imagine in the physical pain of the cross, having joy. And that, I think relates to the concept that you talked about, the knowledge. The knowledge of what his sacrifice would produce for and in us, he can be joyful.
And there's something in this, Bob, that there's the recognition that the universe is bigger than we understand it. There's a realm there that we haven't even begun to understand. And you're touching on that here. Was he happy? No. Was he joyful? Yes. That's mind blowing. How do I live in that realm? And when I live in that realm, the self sacrifice is not a sacrifice. It's not seen as a sacrifice. It's what I have been meant to do.
Yeah, that knowledge, that encompassing knowledge, intimacy, I think is really tied up in that concept to joy. And even though you're suffering physically, painfully suffering, you can have joy, knowing what will produce.
Well I think of my wife being there, and those of us that have been at the birth of our children, you think of the immense pain, the immense suffering of a woman giving birth, they say, there's no more painful thing in the world, and I know what pain has been in my life but I can't imagine that. But in the midst of that pain, something is being birthed that brings overwhelming joy. And I think that's what you're talking about here.
Yes, it is.
There's something else that relates to this, to the going deeper that we're talking about here. In Genesis chapter two, it says that God is going to make a suitable helper for Adam. And when we see that, and we think of the word helper in whatever, it's Spanish or English, or whatever, we think of subservient, someone who is lower. But the word helper is the Hebrew word, easer. And 16 times where that word is used 16 of the 18 times, it's used for God. God is our easer. He is our helper. And now here, it's used for a woman. But we forget, who owns that word? Who manifests that word? It'ss God Himself.
And we live in a world where the word serving and submit are evil words, because we are so ego centered. We want to stay away from serving and from submitting. And yet, this is the very nature of God. And I think, Bob, you help me understand this when you were teaching one time on serving, and you said, when did serving begin? And you're thinking, well, when did serving begin? And then you say it never began! It's from eternity. It's the very nature of God to serve his character. It's his character. So there's this realm of reality out there that we on this little planet, that's a materialistic planets, narcissistic culture. There's this whole realm that we are totally missing.
I like what you're saying Darrow a lot about love. Iin the Bible, it's a much larger concept. All of these things we're seeing are important, but you can't really be reduced to any of them and has to be seen in a broader way. I do want to touch on before our time runs out today because this is a big topic. We'll come back to it again. But I feel like one of the biggest misunderstandings of love today that we are facing is the separation between love and truth. So, we live in a time, right now culturally, where there are lot of lies. We know that behind those lies, Satan, father of lies, uses lies, to steal, to kill, to destroy. So we have a lot of lies. And as Christians, you know, we are to speak the truth, you know. And I think that truth is, is motivated by love because, you know, truth is what causes things to grow and to flourish and to thrive. But when we speak the truth against these cultural lies, you know, we're accused of being unloving, and you can think of any—there's just numerous examples. If you don't use that pronoun, you're unloving. And so that, it seems to me is something we're facing a lot. And I think there's a lot of confusion even in the church on this, Darrow, I remember you came back from teaching in California not too long ago, and the people were uncomfortable, these young people were uncomfortable with what you were saying. And they, at the end of the day said, you're not being loving Darrow.
I was teaching a group of university students in San Jose area. And they'd asked me to teach on the postmodern shift that was coming. And so I was talking about conceptually post modernism and its application in terms of critical race theory and gender, the whole trans movement and gender identity. So as putting feet as it were to the concept, and at the end, the student pastor stood up and he said, Darrow, what you said wasn't helpful and it was not loving. And I was simply sharing the truth of what is going on in our culture today. But to share the truth is not loving.
So loving there means affirming what other people believe, whether it's true or not. Is that the way you would describe that Darrow?
Absolutely, yes.
And I think that's a real confusion today, even in the church, you know. To be loving towards our same sex attracted brothers and sisters is to affirm that. To challenge that or to question that because this isn't God's design, is not loving. I think that the way that I've described it to some people is that this separation between speaking truthful things and loving is unbiblical. They go together, you know, they're two sides of the same coin. I'm speaking these things truthfully, because I love. Because I want the best for you. What are your thoughts on on this area of confusion here? Because it seems to me this is a huge one in the culture today.
Well, yeah, I mean, you cannot separate truth and love, because truth is the format for which God made us to live in. Its reality. And then when we're living inside of God's truth, we're living the way that He created us to live. And it works. So when you push against that reality or truth, you're going to be pushing against the way that we were created to live, which is harmful. It's harmful spiritually and it's harmful in our physical daily lives. You know, when you start looking up the statistics of people that push against this reality for which God made us to live. It's saddening. So the most loving thing you can do is push someone towards living in this framework.
The other week, we were talking about homosexuality on the podcast, or no, the transgender movement. And we were saying how it's harmful for people to live inside, you know, that lifestyle. So the most loving thing to do there is to push them towards God's way of living, towards truth. When you start looking at the statistics, I mean, it's really sad. People that live in the homosexual lifestyle have a 50% higher likelihood of depression and substance abuse. Transgender people have a 200% increase of likelihood of suicide. And a lot of people say that's because people aren't loving towards them.
They're not affirming me.
And yet, and yet that 200% is in the US, where it's just recently becoming more of a norm. Versus when you look at countries like Sweden, where it's been legal in the most affirming nation in the world, towards that type of lifestyle. It's been legal since the 40s. And their likelihood of suicide isn't 200%, it's 300%. So there's clearly something here where when you push against God's framework truth of reality, you're harming yourself. And therefore the loving thing...
I love this quote from somebody I'd heard somewhere, "You don't break God's laws, you break yourself against them." Go ahead, Luke. Sorry, I didn't mean to cut you off, though.
No, no, no, I was pretty much wrapping it up. But it hurts us spiritually. And it does hurt us physically in this life as well. So it's there's such hard difficult conversations, though. Bob, have you encountered that, where you're just revolving from a different worldview in the way that you define love? And have you had someone that has accused you of being not loving? Even when your entire desire is to love them?
Yeah, my kids.
That's a good point.
Yeah. And we all know, if you're a parent, you know what that's about, you know, your kid doesn't think its loving when you discipline them. Could be true that you're not. But in most cases, we discipline our kids because we love them. And they don't experience it as love at the time. But it is loving. And so the core to love is truth, is understanding what is. And I think with my kids and my grandkids, one of the things that I really try to help them to understand is truth is what is, not what is not. And so truth is trying to understand what reality is, not what you want it to be. Not, what you think it is. Not what you perceive it to be, but what really is. And so it's so important to seek truth. And that's one of the things that I've really tried to do with my grandsons is to help them understand the importance in their lives of seeking to know truth. Seeking to know what really is because any decision that you make that is not based on what really is, is going to create pain.
The Bible talks a lot about speaking the truth and love. And to me that says that our motivation for helping people understand what's true, especially if they believe in lies, our motivation should be rooted in love for them. That we really want what's best for you, we want you to be all that God intends for you to be. We want you to know the joy of living in reality, and not in a illusion or delusion. And not to win an argument, not to prevail, not to win a debate. That's not the point. We speak the truth because we love people. And I think that is the biblical balance.
And you do want to win in the sense of helping others and yourself to see what really is, not what you want it to be. Not what you think it is, but that's really important to win there.
I just think we live in postmodern times, which deny that there is an objective truth. Truth is subjective. It's relative to whatever you believe and so love, then it has to be redefined within that framework to be affirming of whatever you believe. And I just think that confusion has crept into the church. And, you know, we kind of come to accept that idea that to love other people is to affirm what they believe. Whether it's true or not, we don't ask the question if it's true. We've become postmodern.
So well, Bob, we probably need to wrap this up. This has been I would say the first of other conversations we'd like to have with you on this talk. But any final thoughts that you'd like to leave us with, Bob, on this topic, and the way that God's put this on your heart?
No, I think other than the critical importance of definitions, which I know you're working on. If we differ in our understandings of a word, then let's acknowledge that or let's begin a discussion on an issue like love. It's so important to find what we're talking about.
Oh yeah, for sure.
And not just make assumptions that other people are understanding that idea, that concept, that word, the same as we are. In discussion with one of my grandson's yesterday, and sociopathic, psychopathic, and we're having all kinds of discussions in coda. Let's define those terms before we talk about them. Because if we don't have a common understanding of the definition of what we're talking about, we're not going to go anywhere in our discussion.
Now, it's so true, especially with this word, love, and we all need to understand, what does it mean? And God is the source of this concept of love. It's his very character. So he has the privilege of defining it for us, we don't get to define it for ourselves. So contrary to what post modernism says, you know, so it's important understand it biblically.
And thank you, Bob, for your life, for Harvest, for your emphasis on doing and applying and demonstrating in everyday life, what it means to love. You have led us in our little group, you have manifest that and been the one that we have sought to honor and follow. Thank you very much.
Yeah, Bob, I just agree, your tools and the exercises that God has given you, the disciplines of love, seed projects have helped me. I mean, they've really become a big part of who I am. So I just want to encourage everyone that's listening. If you're not familiar with Harvest, Bob's ministry, I encourage you to go visit the website, harvestfoundation.org. And take a look at the resources that God has available to you to put love into practice right now in your own home, and neighborhood and wherever you find yourself, place of work. These are outstanding tools, and I really recommend them to you. Thanks, Bob. Thanks for being with us today. Thanks, everyone for listening. Take care.
Thank you for joining us on this episode of Ideas Have Consequences brought to you by the Disciple Nations Alliance. As my dad just said, you can find out more about Bob and his ministry at harvestfoundation.org. And the website for that as well as the other resources that we mentioned this episode are all included in this episode's landing page, which is linked down in the description below. If you enjoy my dad's most recent book, "Why Social Justice is Not Biblical Justice." And the way it clearly defined the biblical understanding of justice and contrasted that with our culture's confused definition. Then you're going to love his next book, which we've informally titled, "The Ten Words" book, because it highlights 10 words that are currently under attack and actively being redefined by our culture around us. And one of those words is love. So I'll make sure to give you guys information about that book as the date for publishing approaches.
Speaking of social justice, our next guest is the author of the excellent book, "Christianity and Wokeness, How the Social Justice Movement is Hijacking the Gospel and the Way to Stop it." And yes, that is the one and only Owen Strachan, who is a social critic, a bold true speaker and a professor of theology at Grace Bible seminary. I know many of you recognize his name, so make sure to tune in for that interview when it comes out next Tuesday, here on Ideas Have Consequences.