Between Glory and Ashes 5: Distributed Fire - Episode 161

Carey Griffel: Welcome to Genesis Marks the Spot where we raid the ivory tower of biblical theology without ransacking our faith. My name is Carey Griffel and welcome back to another episode on fire and purity and all of these kinds of things that we've been talking about in the fire series . We've talked about refiners fire in episode 1 56, but I wanna hook that into my episode with Courtney Trotter, episode number 1 58, where we talked about theophanies and Spirit fire and manifestations of God and things like that.

[00:00:47] I want to more carefully hook those things into the church, into discipleship, maybe into ethics in relation to believers and unbelievers, and even understanding community and what that means. Because really we are so embedded in individual ideas of how we should behave and what the point of faith and believing and learning even is.

[00:01:13] So today, the question that I want to tackle. Is the question of what does it mean for God's holy fire and his presence to be distributed through the church and even through the whole entire earth, often in spite of us as part of God's creation purpose from the beginning. It's kind of a really big, wide ranging topic, and I'm just gonna be touching on a few points here.

[00:01:42] There's gonna be two things that are really core to these ideas. Number one, we're talking about the glory of God spreading through the earth. What does that mean? What does it look like? How has the church done that? And we're also gonna be talking a little bit about the refiners fire for believers. That is a necessary aspect, I think, because the glory of God is spread through imperfect means. It's through humans, individuals, even institutions that have had a whole lot of problems in the past. So the glory of God and the spread of the church and the work of discipleship can happen in spite of our individual flaws.

[00:02:29] Now, why is that? Well, personally, I think it's because we aren't just individuals. We actually exist within community, and that community is greater than its individuals, even though individuals make up that community.

[00:02:45] It's really a very integrated thing that we have and that we experience in life. And it matters because we do form and maintain identity within groups, even if we're not aware of that, or even if we fight against it. And today, a lot of times we call that tribalism, usually, although not always, in a derogatory sense. Oh, you're just being tribalistic. And we act like that should be some really bad thing.

[00:03:18] But in fact, it's just the way people are. And look, I say this as an incredible introvert. I know I have a podcast and I do other things that maybe make you think that I'm not an introvert, but I can assure you that I am. I am very much an introvert. And yet I understand that that doesn't mean that I am disconnected from community.

[00:03:44] It doesn't mean that I don't learn within community. It doesn't mean that I don't live my life effectively within the shadow of a community or even multiple communities, honestly. But that identity politics in that modern framework, it's usually this very fuzzy, changeable thing where you just get to decide for yourself what you wanna be. And it's all about the individual deciding to identify this way or that way, or you can change your identity and you can change your groups.

[00:04:19] And I mean, certainly to a large degree you can do that. And I have done that in my life. I've changed my identity in my group and my associations with different things from time to time. Those fundamental things are often very hard to do. It's sometimes maybe even impossible to do if you don't have a new community that you can move over into.

[00:04:44] So maybe we need to understand how our identities are formed via community, why our identities are formed that way, and how that's not always necessarily a bad thing. We do need to distinguish between our main identity in Christ. We are the body of Christ. And our individual expression of that identity within our group and our culture and our society. But those are hard to separate out because we have that identity that is built within a certain tradition, certain types of families, certain cultural practices, and we think that all of those things that are unique to our particular tradition or group, we think that that is part of our wider identity in Christ, when maybe that's just a unique instance or manifestation of it.

[00:05:41] So that is a really hard thing, and I think that's part of why the church can feel so divided for people today. So many people in Protestantism or the evangelical world think, what are we gonna do when we have all of these different churches and I can literally just choose to go to one. I can stop going to the one I'm going to right now and I can choose to go to a new one.

[00:06:07] We get ideas promoted by people who say, well, every Christian just makes up their own Christianity. And it kind of doesn't matter. It's this relativistic idea where, well, you know, there's some sort of truth embedded somewhere, but it doesn't really matter how you build your identity.

[00:06:27] I mean, I just think we can understand that our society and our culture can coincide with and be influenced by our identity in Christ. And so, you know, those things can be all right, but then say, well, I'm going to judge that person over across the street because they're not doing it right. They're not doing it the way I would do it. And so there's that separation.

[00:06:57] I don't have an answer here, but it seems to me like we all want to promote some sort of unity. But the unity that we often promote is very seated within our own tradition and culture and society. I think that we have to be rooted in a more local culture that has some sort of history to it.

[00:07:21] Even a lot of that new age stuff , they want to call back into ancient times, right? Ancient pagan religions and druid stuff and whatever it may be. But in reality, there's a very big gap between those ancient practices and what people are doing today, but they call back to that stuff because we have to have our identities and our societies and our culture rooted in something that we feel is real and is historical. That's just so normal for people.

[00:07:58] And so for the Christian, we tend to choose a tradition that is comfortable to us and that we believe has that root in history. There's some suggestion that what you're doing is getting back to that biblical truth, right? The reason people have wanted to form new churches through time is because they're like, well, we see a problem here. It isn't in alignment with Scripture or truth in some way. So we need to go and form our own new little thing because we're trying to get back to something real.

[00:08:33] I know that I don't have an answer for the unity of the church, except that I think that a lot of people aren't even trying. It's like, we'll just form our community and that community that we form, or the tradition that we inherit, or the tradition that we choose to follow now, we do that because we think that is correct in some way. We think that is the right thing to do.

[00:09:00] You know, it's not always even that we're trying to separate ourselves from other Christians or other believers. Those just might be the places where we feel most comfortable, and we're not trying to deny a greater unity or a greater fellowship within that. But there's definitely a lot of traditions and a lot of approaches where we do choose to have that separation. It's like, well, you're not doing it the right way. Then we're stepping away and we're separating because we can't deal with you over there. It's very difficult.

[00:09:36] Again, I'm not trying to have some sort of amazing answer here. But I do think if we can start separating out the fact that we can legitimately have our own culture, tradition, ideas, practice as a unique instance of the body of Christ on earth, without conflating our culture with Christianity itself, I think that might start helping us.

[00:10:06] Well, I personally think that is one step towards the idea that we can be individual congregations within a wider body of Christ. That's all I'm suggesting here.

[00:10:17] My second idea that I want to suggest in this episode is that maybe our following Christ and everybody pointing towards him, then maybe that can serve as a type of sanctification and refiners fire that can actually produce something greater than ourselves. Because if we allow the refiners fire to reveal the things within us and within our culture and our community that needs to be revealed, then that is kind of one of the first steps we need in order to be able to authentically even engage with anybody else at all.

[00:10:57] This is just normal, but difficult relationship stuff, right? Like we, in order for us to be united and to have relationships with other people, we need to be known ourselves and we're not perfect. We need to admit that we're not perfect. Our community is not just the church. Our church community should and does cross directly over with others in ways that we could acknowledge if we were honest about it.

[00:11:27] Now, talking about the distributed fire of God's glory in the world, Christian society and worldview has, I think, very clearly influenced the world. And people who don't even know Christ at all, even if they don't quite know the full gospel. This is not something that we strategically planned out in some human way, but God knows and God is active even within the unbelieving world, and he's active within the believing world.

[00:11:59] So even in those places where we disagree or we think, oh, you don't have as good a faith as we do over here, or whatever it might be, my suggestion is that that refiners fire is active and it is doing things. So let's look a little bit into Scripture. What does Scripture say about these things?

[00:12:20] First of all, I'm going to say that the Bible doesn't begin in Genesis three. It begins in Genesis one. And so I think that the purposes that God has in creation from the beginning and that show up throughout salvation history in the Bible and in the story of the church, I think those things are intended and they themselves are a unifying whole if we look at it as such.

[00:12:48] I think the church was intended from the beginning, just like the incarnation was intended from the beginning. And so the church is about and for more than just salvation from our personal sin, although that is part of it.

[00:13:03] If we compare Genesis 1 26 through 28 and how people are made in God's image and we are given tasks to be fruitful, to multiply, fill the earth, subdue it, rule over the fish and the birds and the animals, all of that is very rooted in what we see in the prophets, even. Like in Habakkuk chapter two, verse 14, which says, quote, " For the Earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of Yahweh like the waters covering the sea." End quote.

[00:13:40] Like no, we don't have anything in the early chapters of Genesis that say that God created Eden and he created Adam and Eve and put them in the garden, it doesn't say directly that they were supposed to spread Eden out to the world, right? But if the core of the Garden of Eden is God's glory, and if Adam and Eve were priests of God, then that's kind of what is supposed to happen with the glory of Yahweh, right?

[00:14:10] It is supposed to go out and it's supposed to be spread. And if we are the image of God reflecting the glory of God then that is in fact, what happens even after the debacle of Genesis three. They're kicked out of the garden, certainly. They lose access to that main hub of glory that they had before, but it's not gone . And God follows them and proceeds to give it to them over and over, in the story of Exodus and throughout the story of Israel as a whole and into the incarnation and the church, right? All of this is a picture of God working in the world generally in spite of how terrible people can be.

[00:14:55] Okay, so let's call back to that conversation that I had with Courtney about manifestations of the Spirit. Like what we have going on in Pentecost is a really big deal in Acts two, right? It is what many people call the start of the church. I don't know as though we could say that it's not part of parcel of what's going on before Acts two. But what we have in Acts two is a very public Holy Spirit arrival, right? And it looks like Sinai, because it's about covenant presence going public to the people of God and commissioning the people of God.

[00:15:38] I really like in the conversation with Courtney, how she was able to talk about how we have the Angel of the Lord, manifestations of the second person of the Trinity, right? As opposed to manifestations of the Holy Spirit, and she doesn't wanna call Spirit manifestations as theophanies because she's trying to be very careful.

[00:16:00] But apologies if I just conflate those terms because they're both manifestations of God, right? They're both manifestations of God himself in the various persons of the Trinity. The Angel of the Lord is the presence of God. The shekinah glory is the presence of God. What we have going on in Acts two is another one of those things, and the tongues of fire rest on people and this is what we call the indwelling of the Spirit, right?

[00:16:30] So we have individuals who host the Spirit of God, and this is part of our process of sanctification and things like that. But we also have the community as a whole, which acts as the Spirit- containing temple or sacred space. And this is presence that is made active and visible in the world, visible through the tongues of fire on people, but also visible through the acts of the church themselves.

[00:17:01] Now, what's important to me in understanding all of that is that purity and holiness are still part and parcel of what's going on here. The distribution of the glory of God does not mean we have privatization of faith. Not everybody gets their own little temple. Paul's logic is: there is one Spirit, one body, one holy dwelling. Even though it's going to manifest and spread in a multiplicity of ways through real people.

[00:17:34] Yes, we have individuals who are indwelt by the Spirit, but Paul and the other epistle writers are very focused on the community and the corporate temple. The corporate temple that is manifested by the individuals.

[00:17:50] Let's look at first Corinthians three and read a couple of these verses here. I am gonna start in verse 10. We're gonna end on the idea of God's corporate temple, but we're gonna begin in a really interesting point here.

[00:18:04] First Corinthians chapter three, verse 10 says, quote, "According to the grace of God given to me, like a skilled master builder, I laid a foundation and another is building upon it. But each one must direct his attention to how he's building upon it. For no one is able to lay another foundation than the one which is laid, which is Jesus Christ. Now, if anyone builds upon the foundation with gold, silver, precious, stones, wood, grass, straw, the work of each one will become evident, for the Day will reveal it, because it will be revealed with fire. And the fire itself will test the work of each one of what sort it is. If anyone's work that he is built upon it remains, he will receive a reward. If anyone's work is burned up, he will suffer loss, but he himself will be saved, but so as through fire. Do you not know that you are God's temple and the Spirit of God dwells in you? If anyone destroys God's temple, God will destroy this one. For God's temple is holy, which you are." End quote.

[00:19:16] Okay, so we're talking about God's people and being indwelt with the Spirit and having God's presence, but it starts with Paul and others laying a foundation, teaching people about Jesus Christ, right? So our foundation is not Paul, it's not even the teaching. It is Jesus Christ himself. Now, what you build upon that foundation is going to be tested and refined.

[00:19:45] And there is a reason for that. And that reason is because there is a holiness demand that flows from the presence of God. God is here. Therefore this place must be treated as holy.

[00:19:58] Ephesians chapter two, verse 19 says, quote, " Consequently, therefore, you are no longer strangers and foreigners, but you are fellow citizens of the saints and members of the household of God, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone in whom the whole building, joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord, in whom you also are built up together into a dwelling place of God in the Spirit." End quote.

[00:20:32] One Peter two, nine through 10 says, quote, " But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for God's possession, so that you may proclaim the virtues of the one who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light, who once were not a people, but now are the people of God, the ones who were not shown mercy, but now are shown mercy." End quote.

[00:21:00] Okay, so what does all of this mean? Well, we have things that we probably have heard over and over again in church. The fact that the church is global. It's not restricted in geography. It's not restricted in people group and ethnicity.

[00:21:19] Those are pretty easy things to see from these texts and to understand that what Christ is building and using himself as the foundation and people themselves as the building blocks, it is something greater than we've seen before and it is something that I think really does call back to those purposes In Genesis one of God creating humanity as his representatives and the ones who are to shine his glory out to creation and to each other. That is not to say that we don't have individual people and individual bodies, but this is not individualism.

[00:21:59] One Corinthians six, 19 through 20 says, quote, " Or do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God and you are not your own, for you were bought at a price, therefore glorify God with your body." End quote.

[00:22:18] So each person matters because the corporate body is holy, and because we are built on that foundation of Jesus. The Spirit's in dwelling forms people who fit the space. Part of that is that refiners fire. The Spirit forms and constitutes and consecrates a holy people. And once you say, holy people, we have to talk about the refiner.

[00:22:46] So let's go ahead and get into that context. What is being burned up in the refiner's fire? What's being purified there? Is it individuals who are being destroyed or is it something different?

[00:23:01] Okay, so the refining fire is fundamentally about compatibility with holiness. It's not just punishment, although it can look like that as we can see here in a minute, but the punishment isn't just because, oh, you did a thing, therefore you have to be punished. But it's about the whole attitude and person in relation to God.

[00:23:24] Now, fire does two things at one time. First of all, it reveals or exposes what's there. Second of all, it removes or purges things that cannot abide God's presence. This is why fire can be both terrifying as well as hopeful. It hurts, but it's a good kind of hurt because it is something that is going to lead to something better than you had before.

[00:23:52] Let's go ahead and go back to the Old Testament and look at the book of Malachi. Starting in Malachi three verse one. It says, quote, " Look, I am going to send my messenger and he will prepare the way before me. And the Lord whom you are seeking will come suddenly to his temple and the messenger of the covenant in whom you are taking pleasure. Look, he is about to come, says Yahweh of hosts. And who can endure the day of his coming. And who is the one who can stand when he appears for He is like a refiner's fire. He will sit as a refiner and a purifier of silver. He will purify the children of Levi and he will refine them like gold and like silver, and they will present to Yahweh offerings in righteousness. And the offering of Judah and Jerusalem will be pleasing to Yahweh like in the days of old and like in former years. Then I will approach you for judgment and I will be a swift witness against the sorcerers and against the adulterers and against those who swear falsely, and against the oppressors of the hired worker with his wages, the widow and the orphan, and the abusers of the alien, and yet do not fear me, says Yahweh of hosts. For I Yahweh, have not changed. And you, oh, children of Jacob, have not perished. From the days of your ancestors, you have turned aside from my rules and have not kept them. Return to me and I will return to you, says Yahweh of hosts. But you'll say, how shall we return? Will a human dare to rob God? Yet you are robbing me. And you say, how have we robbed you? In the tithes and the contributions. You are being cursed with the curse for you are robbing me, the whole nation of you. Bring the whole tithe to the storehouse so that there will be food in my house and test me, please, in this, says Yahweh of hosts. If I will not open for you the windows of heaven and pour forth for you an overflowing blessing." End quote.

[00:26:05] It kind of sounds a bit like some prosperity gospel, doesn't it? If people will only pay their tithing, then the storehouses of the heavens will be opened and they will be abundantly blessed. Now, does this mean that on an individual basis, if you pay your tithing, then you will be blessed with the storehouses of heaven?

[00:26:28] Well, again, we have to go back to this idea of corporate living and corporate community, and what is the purpose of the tithing here anyway? Well, the purpose as many people will think is to help support the temple services, right? It Is to support the priests and the Levites, but that is not only it. The tithes and the contributions to the tabernacle or to the temple were supposed to be also for the poor.

[00:27:00] So this isn't some personal prosperity gospel. This is a national outrage where the people are not taking care of their poor amongst them, and probably the priest themselves. It's talking about how God will purify the children of Levi. That comes first. So first of all, God starts with the priests. Those people who are closest to sacred space and those who are in charge of things. The closer you are to God's dwelling, the more the refining is going to purge you.

[00:27:31] But not only that, we do have this instance where there is a swift witness against people like sorcerers, adulterers, people who swear falsely, and the oppressors. Now, does that mean those people are killed? Is this kind of like a judgment fire where we do have destruction of actual people? I think it's possible. Now, of course, we go into the New Testament with the picture of the refiner's fire. But importantly, that's not all it is though, because if God just destroyed everybody who is wicked and the whole nation is being wicked as he says here, then the whole nation would just be destroyed.

[00:28:14] So that's obviously not what's happening. We also have the offering of repentance. If you turn back to me, then I will bless you. Right? We have to see this within the logic of how the world was going to be ordered in Israel.

[00:28:32] It starts with the priests because they're the ones who are supposed to teach people of Yahweh. Keep people in alignment with Yahweh by doing the offerings and the atonement and things like that. Not because those are some magical thing, but part of that repentance, right, as I've talked about in previous episodes. When we have atonement language, it's not just about some ritual behavior.

[00:29:00] it is also accompanying things that are going to make things right in the world. Whether that is repentance, whether that is restoring something that you defrauded. Whether that's removal of mold on the walls or somebody who is sick. All of these things are involved in this in ways that we just don't understand because we're not in that world today.

[00:29:24] So this is not a prosperity gospel where you're promised something just because you give a tithe. This is about true justice and really making sure that your community is doing right by itself and by God, and both things are going on. We have individuals and community.

[00:29:45] Now, if we go through all of the places where we see the refiner's fire mentioned. And we see things that are being tested by people and all of this, here's a non exhaustive list of things that are kind of burned up, and this happens because of suffering of people. This happens because of persecution, and this happens simply as a matter of course, because you are in allegiance with God now, and so you become out of allegiance with other things, right?

[00:30:19] We have idolatry, loyalties that compete with God. And those things are fairly broad in the New Testament. It is not just a technical Old Testament definition of idols that are indwelt by deities. Because we have references to the god of your stomach and things like this, right? If you have anything that is a competing loyalty with God, that's obviously incompatible with God's presence.

[00:30:52] We have fleshly patterns that are burned away,. Habits trained by the old self. Envy, boasting, domination, things of that nature. We have factionalism, the community- destroying factions where people say, I follow Paul, or I follow Apollos, or I was baptized by whoever. Right? The context of one Corinthians three.

[00:31:22] We have deception and false tellings of lies that we tell, lies that we live, lies that we defend. This is part of the exposure of who we are. We have exploitation, using people as objects and oppression, whether that's money, power, or sex. We have violence as a default here that people tend to go to when they live in fleshly ways and they are acting as the oppressor, right? The instinct to secure life by crushing others. We have sexual purity. Which, you know, we tend to think of that in certain ways. and we tend to have really hard lines here, and I'm not saying we shouldn't, but it's a kind of oppression that we could have when we misuse our sexuality. We're using others for ourselves. We're using others for our pleasure and so on and so forth. Other things that are burned up are self-justifying self-righteousness.

[00:32:25] I'm sure we could all come up with our own list, either from going through Scripture or considering the things that we have experienced when we have gone through the refiners fire ourselves. And I know that we all have in various ways.

[00:32:42] The metaphor that Paul brings out with the wood and the hay and the straw isn't just abstract. It's about what people are actually building with. What kind of community are they making? What kind of ministry are they providing, what kind of teaching are they giving? And yes, that's going to include bad theology certainly.

[00:33:03] But a lot of that stuff is probably self-righteousness, building themselves up, and things that are really impressive looking, but they can't survive the real heat of the fire. The fire isn't making anything here. It reveals it, and the fire doesn't just expose. It forces a reckoning. Again, we are individuals, but if we are individuals that form our identities in community and our communities are not perfect, then that means that our communities also go through this process.

[00:33:40] Now, do we always see that right in front of us when we want to see it? No, certainly we don't. And that can be the frustrating thing because maybe we see something that needs to be refined and needs to be fixed. And currently it's just sitting there being perpetuated still. And that can be very frustrating to us.

[00:34:02] And while I certainly don't have a really solid response to fix all of that, maybe sometimes what we have to realize is that everybody and everything is under the process of going through these things. How much is going to be left at the end? Sometimes we don't know. Sometimes we don't have a real answer to that.

[00:34:27] Now, in the future, I will be talking a little bit more about the fire as far as the ultimate judgment, the Day of the Lord kind of stuff. And here's where we have and need to hold two truths together without collapsing them. We have a present refining fire where God is purifying his dwelling now in real time through repentance, discipline, suffering, Spirit formation.

[00:34:55] But Scripture also talks about an eschatological fire, a final public evaluative moment that Scripture often calls the Day where what is true is vindicated, and what is false is finally totally undone.

[00:35:15] We have the current refining fire where God is making his people fit for his presence, and that is what is going to promote repentance if we need it for those who need to turn to him.

[00:35:28] The eschatological fire, on the other hand, is God setting the world right at the end. Now I'm gonna say those two things are connected, but they're not identical. The refining is inward and it's communal, and it's forming a holy people. In the eschaton, the fire is seen as a cosmic and judicial and final exposure of what's going on and judging what, at the end, is going to continue to resist God's reign.

[00:36:02] Now, a lot of people today do not see the presence of God. They do not feel the presence of God. And we have to wonder why that is. It's not on our timeline and it's very personal sometimes. But we can have a confidence that in the end there is going to be the glory fire that will be unveiled. And that's not always destructive. You know, God's glory can be destructive to those things that cannot last. But there's going to be decisive, public, unmistakable, unveiling of what God is doing at the end.

[00:36:39] Now, if the Spirit's fire refines the church now, then what happens when that same fire becomes the Day's fire for the whole world? Well, anything that does not align with God is going to be burned. So the same holiness that purifies the people now will one day purify the entire cosmos, which is terrifying if you're on the wrong side, but is meant to be hopeful because that is the thing that is going to remove all oppression. And all wickedness. And all unrighteousness.

[00:37:18] So we have these two things that are in tension here. We have mercy for the ones who are being oppressed, for the victims, for those who need that righteousness revealed. That is hopeful. But there's also a judgment and a punishment and a retribution that is going to come because what cannot last is not gonna last.

[00:37:45] All right. Now, here is a kind of a tough little lane to navigate, and this is something I wasn't sure I was gonna go down the path of in this episode, but it's part of this big question. Is the refining fire only for those inside the church?

[00:38:03] Now again, we have different communities, right? And the community of the Christian church is and should be held to a higher standard because we have more knowledge, we have more experience of God, but that doesn't mean that what God is doing in the world at large doesn't affect those people who are outside the church, who haven't confessed to Jesus as Lord, who are not part of our community and so on.

[00:38:32] Let's look at the metaphor of the milk and the solid food. We see this show up in two different places, and it's really interesting to me to see the contrast here.

[00:38:44] I'm going to read in one Corinthians chapter three, first of all, which says, quote, " And I brothers was not able to speak to you as to spiritual people, but as two fleshly people, as to infants in Christ. I gave you milk to drink, not solid food, for you are not yet able to eat it, but now you are still not able for, you are still fleshly for where there is jealousy and strife among you, are you not fleshly? And do you not live like unregenerate people?" End quote.

[00:39:20] We also have this metaphor in the book of Hebrews. Hebrews chapter five, verse 11 says, quote, " About this, we have much to say and it is hard to explain, since you have become dull of hearing. For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the basic principles of the oracles of God. You need milk, not solid food. For everyone who lives on milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness since he is a child. But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil." End quote.

[00:40:01] This passage in Hebrews five uses the milk and the solid food in the realm of the church and maturity within discipleship. And usually I think when you hear this idea come up within sermons or teaching, this is what people are talking about. And sometimes we complain about our sermons because we get tired of the milk and we want the solid food . If you want to have really advanced knowledge of understanding who God is, you need to understand the basics, first of all.

[00:40:37] Not everybody has the same powers of discernment. That's what we have in this passage of Hebrews five. But in the book of First Corinthians, we have it used in a different way. The milk is being given to the people, not solid food, not just because they haven't quite grasped the basics, but because they're living as fleshly people. They're living as if they don't have the truth of the gospel. They're arguing, they're jealous of each other. And so because of those interpersonal dynamics within the community, they're not able to eat solid food in solid Spiritual teaching.

[00:41:23] So milk is not just immaturity and you need growth and discernment, but it's also connected to fleshliness, world patterns inside the holy dwelling of the people of God. Like, you know, when we hear the whole idea of milk versus solid food, we usually, translate it into an education problem. Oh, they're new, they're not ready.

[00:41:49] And that is part of this metaphor, but that's not all of it, because milk language functions as a diagnosis of formation, not just a stage of learning. The problem isn't that they lack information, it's that they're still being governed by the flesh, which usually means they're operating according to the habits and instincts of the surrounding world rather than the Spirit's influence.

[00:42:16] So all of this is a part of the distributed presence that I'm talking about here and the growth of the church because God's fire doesn't just arrive, but it also forms a people who can host the holy presence and share it with others. And so while the milk narrative can be about newness and immaturity and just need of knowledge and growth but it's also connected to this worldly behavior that persists. What patterns do we have in the community, and what do we have going on with our interactions within it?

[00:42:52] So refining isn't only for scandalous sins, it includes ordinary church worldliness. That can be pretty hard. Like Paul isn't saying you're on milk because you're brand new Christians in first Corinthians. He's saying you're on milk because you're acting like everyone else. People whose operating system is still the old age, the old world, the old flesh. The evidence is communal dysfunction where we have jealousy and strife.

[00:43:24] So going back to my conversation about community and identity, these people are supposed to be a Spirit indwelt temple people, but they're running their lives together on the world's information where we have competition of status, rivalry, building within the community of separate tribes. And that's exactly the kind of material that cannot endure the refining fire.

[00:43:53] Look at this whole picture of holiness and sanctification and the dwelling of the Spirit. If the church is one holy dwelling, then things like jealousy and strife, they're actually defilement of sacred space itself.

[00:44:09] Now, I don't really think that Hebrews is saying anything fundamentally different here, although there's a little bit of a shift. The problem is sluggishness and lack of maturity, but notice what maturity is. It's not just knowing more information, but it's having the senses trained by constant practice to discern good from evil.

[00:44:35] It's a formation claim still. People stay on milk when they haven't developed the habits of perception that come from living inside God's story long enough for it to rewire those instincts and allow it to actually come out in practice.

[00:44:51] And all of that is so important when we come to the topic of discernment. It's a cultivated thing that happens within the community. And the community should be normalizing certain things in order to promote it, but also it, the contrast of within the church itself and outside of it, can look just the same as within the church. That's what I'm saying here. Yet we still tend to think of ourselves as so much higher than those who are non-believers.

[00:45:22] I think this should reframe how we talk about sanctification and even evangelism. The refining fire doesn't just burn up our private sins, but our flesh patterns that get socially transmitted, like the world's reflexes that can colonize inside the church or that we haven't kicked out yet, because those patterns are communal.

[00:45:47] The Spirit's work is communal too. So God is refining a people together. And that is part of what the distributed fire of the church means. If milk can describe people who technically belong to the community, yet they're still running on those old world patterns, then honestly the boundary between inside and outside is a lot messier than we pretend.

[00:46:13] And if formation is social, and that means it's trained by practice and with social constraints and forces that help to actually guide and make those happen, then moral habits can spread beyond the church even when the conversion doesn't.

[00:46:34] So today your common westerner is going to be absolutely colored by Christian practices and Christian ethics and morals without having any real idea that that's what's going on. People just think, oh, this morality that I have is just rooted in common history and common humanity when that's not necessarily the case.

[00:46:59] The church and the world are not two airtight realms with a clean border. They overlap far more than we think they do. And people move between them. Ideas move between them. Habits move between them. And that overlap is actually part of how God's glory is transmitted. God intends his holy people to be a public- facing, culture- touching witness. We are the salt and the light, right? And so there's always going to be that interaction, influence, and even contention sometimes.

[00:47:37] So again, we do have a difference of community inside the church, community outside the church, boundaries between people, but they aren't really sterile as we want them to be. The church exists for the world, but it should not be formed by the world, even though we are absolutely influenced by it.

[00:48:01] And discipleship and mission both assume a proximity without assimilation. But that is really hard, especially when we conflate our individual particular cultures and traditions with what the church is itself. And honestly, I think that if God's goal is for the earth to be filled with his glory, and that is happening sometimes in spite of ourselves, sometimes we think it's happening when maybe it's not happening quite as well as we think because of our internal problems.

[00:48:40] Jesus doesn't describe his followers as a private club with a locked door, and nobody can join it. You have to know the secret code and all of that. But he describes people as salt and light. Salt doesn't do its job by staying in the shaker or by being trod upon and losing its flavor. Light doesn't do its job by hiding under a bushel, and so the early church lives in the same assumption where God has arranged times and places for people to seek him like we have in Acts 17. God tells his exiles to seek the welfare of a city that does not share their identity, like in Jeremiah 29. And all of that implies genuine cultural interaction with people.

[00:49:30] If the church is a holy temple- people with distributed presence, then God's holiness becomes a fuzzier boundary marker. And it's supposed to be a radiating reality that really has and does change the world. God's presence creates the witness that we have. Our witness creates the influence we have. And the influence we have creates a moral imagination that impregnates everyone around us, even if they don't realize it.

[00:50:02] So to that point, once the culture itself has been inundated with the actual ethics and morality of Christianity, then suddenly that becomes a different world and we can interact with people in ways that we probably really couldn't before because there was too much boundary lines and too much confusion as to, wow, we have no idea what those Christians over there are even doing. They're so mysterious. We actually have early descriptions that say things like that.

[00:50:35] it's important to understand how vital our communities and our identities attached to those communities are. This is just how people learn. It's how kids learn. It's also how adults learn through imitation and through modeled behavior. People copy what they think is admirable or what they think is stable.

[00:50:58] Even though the church is not an institution, it still has influence and is involved in institutions. We have laws, schools, hospitals, charities, the normal way that people are supposed to be cared for and interacted with, those are influenced by our Christian values. And then we have categories that really did not exist before, like dignity, personal rights, equality, the idea of abuse and how that's a bad thing and you shouldn't abuse people. The idea of personhood. And all of those are also going out into our habits and cultural norms with marriage. How we're supposed to care for the weak and the ones who are disadvantaged. We expect honesty from each other, and we have a high level of understanding that forgiveness is a good thing.

[00:51:56] Like these are not normative things throughout all of human interaction and history. And they happen through shared life in our neighborhoods, in our workplaces, in our friendships, in our families. And those are not always clear bounded by church and outside the church.

[00:52:14] And so even when people don't share our personal confession, there's still an absorption of the moral residue of the culture that is shaped by what we confess and how we live our lives in reality. Right? I mean, it's so interesting if you enter into the world of Christian apologetics, it kind of irritates me because there's such an overemphasis on philosophical ideas like, oh, well you can't have an ethical foundation without God.

[00:52:46] And while I will agree with that, philosophically, we tend to use that as a battering ram, and we call nonbelievers as unethical. I mean, you know what? We can all be unethical. Even within the church. Sometimes people outside the church are even more visibly ethical than believers. This is how fuzzy things are like. Yes, the church is the cultural anchor of these things, and indeed it is. But when they have disseminated so far into the cultural rhythm and the cultural mindset, then that's not gonna be seen by everyone.

[00:53:25] Ideas of individuals today are so strange sometimes it's like we have this idea that people are just kinda floating out there and they have their own ideas that aren't really connected to anything . But everyone learns through families, through community, through stories, through our heroes, through the way we're punished and rewarded, and how we construct the vision of the good life. Like what is normal in that?

[00:53:54] Ethics are communal before they are individual. Our identities and the way that we learn, the way that we grow is communal, even for those who are really highly isolationist.

[00:54:09] If the church is God's distributed dwelling throughout the world, then we should expect the church to affect more than just church people. We're not doing it by force. We're doing it by witness that forms a moral imagination that is like a social contagion. What we might call glory knowledge is spreading outward in sometimes partial or uneven or unconscious ways.

[00:54:38] If ethics are always learned through community norms, then there is no such thing as a neutral environment. Everyone is being trained by something. Which brings us to the next question. If formation is unavoidable, then what does that do to the modern myth of a neutral marketplace of ideas where all ideas are welcomed equally, and discipleship is treated as whatever you wanna do, and it doesn't matter.

[00:55:06] So we have two things that are going on. We have the church that influences culture by existing in a faithful way, and that does happen imperfectly because we also have culture that inevitably influences the church because of its proximity. Does that mean we just push it away and say that we can't engage in that ever?

[00:55:29] No. I would say the church must think in terms of formation, not just information. There is no such thing as a neutral space, and so there are competing ideas of formation out there. And so it is important that we develop habits, that we develop a community because it's not just about information that is taught to people. But humans are always being shaped by our practices, our loyalties, and our communities.

[00:56:01] And so we have to admit that the marketplace of ideas is never neutral. It's a formation machine, and what is it forming? It's not just a host of vague ideas and notions that float out there in some platonic reality. It trains our desire. It trains our attention. It creates our identity and forms our moral instinct.

[00:56:25] So if discipleship is a form of Spirit- shaped formation, then that needs to be happening in the public sphere, and it needs to be interacting in the world in real ways. Ideas are never only just ideas. They're not just propositions out there. They are embodied pathways that come with rhythms, identities, social rewards, and if you repeatedly inhabit certain environments, then you are formed into that.

[00:56:57] So that's why it does matter that we have our own certain cultural sacred spaces within Christianity where we are teaching people and where it is kind of blocked off from the world. But those things need to interact in the world in real ways in order to be influential and to spread that glory knowledge of God.

[00:57:20] All right, so let's go ahead and wrap it up. My point here is that if God's holy presence is distributed through the church, and the church is distributed through the earth, then we aren't just one option among many. We're a sacred community that carries a different story of what humans are for and what the world is for.

[00:57:41] That doesn't happen perfectly. I mean, look at the history of the church. There are some dark periods. There are things that have happened in church history that I think anyone in his right mind would condemn. And yet even through those things, God's active presence has made itself known. Even across the street in that church that you think is very heretical, there are still people who are actively following God and who are distributing God's presence around themselves.

[00:58:14] So it seems like it's really fitful sometimes. It seems uneven and it seems like it shouldn't even work, and yet it does. And that doesn't mean that we don't say that it doesn't matter that the church across the street is heretical, but it does matter that we should go over there and interact with them in some real form, right? Because if they don't know anything about us, then they can't be taught anything by us.

[00:58:46] So what I'm gonna suggest is that there are practical implications of the distributed fire of God's holy presence in the church. We ought to be treating community life as a sacred space that is separate from the world because there is a boundary there where we are forming holy communities.

[00:59:06] We ought to be fostering unity, seeking truth, seeking justice, and sexual integrity and economic integrity, and a whole host of other things that we should be doing within our communities. But the point there is not for moral superiority over the people outside the church. Because the point is to spread that out and invite people into our community, not simply because we have the best culture, but because this is where we should be forming people to live godly lives.

[00:59:42] Now, I don't think we can force that. I don't think we can plan that in some strategic vision meeting at church, but our strategic vision meetings at church can play parts in that.

[00:59:54] All right. Anyway, I'm gonna go ahead and wrap up here. This is a topic that you kind of hear a lot about with the church and how we're supposed to be spreading the gospel and you know, people talk about it in different ways and it's all very important. You know, sometimes people focus on evangelism. Sometimes people focus on discipleship. Sometimes people just focus on conducting their individual weekly meetings and they don't quite know what to do after that.

[01:00:24] But we should all be seeking to grow and to learn from each other and to reach out to find that unity and that it's really helpful to understand that I am not just myself, and that this isn't just about me. It is about my community, and how important it is that I help to be part of that, and that I allow my community to form me and to change me because that is part of this process, the way that I see it.

[01:00:56] With that being said, I will invite you all over to my biblical theology community. I hope that that is a place where people can grow and people can share things honestly and learn about each other and find new ideas and new avenues for discipleship and learning. But I will leave a link to my community in the show notes. It's called On This Rock. And within that community, you will find monthly themes, book studies, and different people who are coming together to talk about Scripture in ways that really dig into the context. So come on, join us if you have not yet.

[01:01:34] Thank you guys for listening. And a really big shout out to all of you who support me financially, whether it's through Patreon, PayPal, or through my community platform, all of that support is encouraging and exceptionally helpful to me right now. So thank you for that. At any rate, I will wrap up for this week and I wish you all a blessed week and we will see you later.