Teaching | The Familiar Stranger

Hello and welcome to the John Mark Comer Teachings Podcast. I'm Strawn Coleman, your host and part of the teaching team here at Practicing the Way. Each week on this podcast, we share a teaching from John Mark or other trusted voices in the formation space. And it's great to have you with us. Today, we get to hear from our dear friend, Tyler Staten.

Pastor of Bridgetown Church and Director of 24-7 Prayer USA. Tyler gave this teaching as part of our 2024 Pastors Conference about his upcoming book, The Familiar Stranger. It's a book about the person and work of the Holy Spirit. So if you'd like to go deeper in this message, as I'm sure you will, The Familiar Stranger is available for pre-order now and releases on January 28th.

wherever good books are sold. Here's Tyler. You would continue to be faithful to speak the language of each individual heart and the word that each of us needs to hear and to take with us and to live and to practice. In Jesus' name, amen. So everyone's laughing as we cleared off the table, piling. dirty plates and smudged wine glasses into the sink. And just as we head for the door, someone suggests, hey, why don't we pray before we all head home tonight?

And we all stood there in this prayerful silence in my friend's living room. And it was Chris who broke that silence with the first words of prayer. spoke not directly to God, but to John and said, John, I'm having this really clear vision of you. And I think that maybe God's trying to say something to you through it. It's from the opening scene of the old movie Hook. And...

It's worth mentioning that Chris had just met John that night, that he was in town visiting from the UK. None of us had the slightest idea where he might be going with this outdated film reference to the person that he least knew in the world. room. It's that scene where Robin Williams gets to his son's baseball game late and he hurries down to the field, but it's vacant and he's missed the game. Only in this vision, John, you're the kid. You're standing up.

And you're scanning the bleachers, but you can't find your father there anywhere. And immediately when he says that, John... collapses on the ground and just starts weeping hysterically. A couple of us try to reach down to comfort him. And when we do, when he finally is able to say something and he shoots straight up and sits up and just says,

and then throws himself back down and just starts weeping more. Now at this point in the story, There is something that you need to understand, something that I did not know on that night and wouldn't find out until much later, that when John was a kid, his father abandoned him at a Little League baseball game. As a young boy, he was standing there on the diamond in his baseball uniform when his father...

took him by the shoulders and said, I can't be your dad anymore. And that was the last time he has ever seen his father's face. Now, the human brain is a lot more malleable in our adolescence than our adult years because of what psychologists term brain plasticity.

simply meaning that the brain is more flexible in children than adults, making it easier to write new neural pathways on the young brain than it is the older brain. And that principle works well for positive human development. It's why a young person is unable to pick up... or is unable to pick up how to play a musical instrument or speak a foreign language or solve for X more quickly than an adult. Our brains are wired for healthy human development. But the very psychological...

principle that works for something good equally works for something destructive. For instance, there is a much higher statistical chance of alcoholism for people who begin drinking in their teen years than people who begin drinking in their 20s. Why is that? Because of brain plasticity. The young brain is created to write new neural pathways and to write them deeply into our psychology.

Now, in John's particular case, an adolescent experience of abandonment had shaped him deeply at an emotional level.

so deeply that it was actually beneath his logical processing. Pain from his past that was informing his present, even though he was not able to name it, much less heal from it. So as an adult husband, John had long... been resistant to having children because of this deeply ingrained unnamed fear that he would repeat the pattern of his father his life at present was still being profoundly shaped by something that happened to him on a little

league baseball diamond 25 years prior to that and when god pulled that old film scene into the imagination of chris a relative stranger he was doing it for the purpose of healing God was reaching into John's past to uncover a traumatic experience that his love had not yet touched. Because in spite of John's own spiritual journey, his salvation, his years of maturity, he was the pastor. of a thriving community, yet he still lived with this part of his story that he instinctively kept buried.

He still lived always exerting energy to keep this certain part of him buried, like someone holding a beach ball under the surface of the ocean, a story he was keeping unconsciously outside of the reach of God's love. Or so he thought. And the mess that followed on the living room floor that evening was the power of the Holy Spirit recreating within John from the inside out, gently but certainly overpowering the grip that this memory had on his life.

is so much love yes because it is one thing to be told that god loves you to memorize scripture verses, to sing lyrics of redemptive promise, and even to preach sermons about the love of God that touched the lives of others. But it is another thing entirely. to have that love targeted and channeled directly to you. toward your most personal wound delivered in a message that only you could hear that can coach your life like a healing balm. That's a different experience altogether.

And today, John is still pastoring within that community, and he is the father of two amazing daughters. The sort of prayer that Chris offered him in the form of a dated film reference is biblically referred to as prophecy.

And depending on your background, personality, type, and level of experience, that's either thrilling, intriguing, or suspicious, or some mixture of the three. But what I find really interesting about that particular story of the prophetic is that the fruit... of that experience the unwinding of lies the healing of childhood wounds and the renewal of the mind it sounds eerily like the fruit of spiritual formation so what if

The instant supernatural power of the Holy Spirit and the slow formative power of spiritual practices work in complement to one another, not competition. You see, the sad truth is these two methods of formation are often pitted against one another in recent church history. But the compelling invitation is the rediscovery of both the ancient way of apprenticeship to Jesus by formative practice.

and the equally ancient way of apprenticeship to Jesus by supernatural power. You see, sometimes we pray, come Holy Spirit, and then we wait a year or a decade. or a lifetime. That's what I'm doing, for instance, each morning when I sit on my front porch with a cup of coffee in my hand and a candle burning next to me representing the presence of God, and I pray in contemplative silence.

asking God to form me slowly and incrementally into the sort of person who lives in the chaos, stress, and interruptions of everyday life by slow, quiet, inner peace. Sometimes we pray come Holy Spirit and we wait a year, a decade, or a lifetime. Other times, though, we pray come Holy Spirit and we wait a minute or two.

That's what a group of friends were doing in a living room after piling plates in the sink, inviting God to form me instantly and miraculously, fast-forwarding what should take a year, a decade, or a lifetime under normal conditions, and instead do it. it in just a single instant either way it's the same god that you're asking it's the same spirit empowering the work and it is the same experiential surrender that is required to make space within me for the work to happen supernatural ministry

and spiritual formation, miraculous expectation, and daily spiritual discipline. The Spirit's empowering presence and Jesus's easy yoke are not competing approaches to spiritual maturity. They're two sides of the same coin. As a father of young boys, I have become an expert at two critical skills, hyping up an upcoming fun experience and redirecting disappointment. Often, I attempt both back to back. For instance,

I was on the Isle of Wight, this charming English island just south of the mainland, and that morning we had spotted this mini golf course. Hank and Simon, two of my sons who happen to be sitting on the front row right now, were six and four at the time, and they had their hearts set on... trying this mini golf course out. So I decided we'd make the short drive back that evening just before dinner and I was hyping it up the whole way.

We ended up having to park a good distance away because apparently this was a very popular mini golf course. And by the time we had crested the hill walking up this steep embankment, we finally laid our eyes on it, the object of their desire. Closed. I couldn't believe it. It was 5.07 p.m. Apparently they closed at 5. Employees are flooding out. The gates are being locked. There's hours of daylight left, but this place is a ghost town. And that's when my second skill set kicked into opportunity.

Operation. I had spotted a croquet set in the garden side shed of our host home the day before. Now, of course, these two had never heard of croquet because it's more fit for like senior living facility Sunday afternoon than it is.

rowdy little ones on vacation but you work with what you got so i got to hyping up how much fun these big mallets are to swing and how in croquet you get to build your own mini golf course and that kind of thing But when I looked at their little faces, I knew they weren't buying it.

Because they already had a vision in mind, a putter in one hand and a dripping cone of vanilla soft serve in the other. And when you're working against a competing vision, a new one always includes disappointment. And that's a tough sell.

John's Gospel offers the most lengthy account of Jesus' final night. And wedged right in between the Last Supper and his arrest in Gethsemane, Jesus cracks a wry smile and says something along the lines of, Look, my days with you are... numbered, but I'm sending you my spirit and that's even better. In fact, John devotes about a quarter of his gospel to this one evening, and Jesus repeats this sentiment four times, changing the wording, but naming the Holy Spirit by the exact title, Parakletos.

Every single time. He is hammering this point home. So according to Jesus, and he's remarkably clear on this, the Holy Spirit is a staggering improvement to direct face-to-face conversation with God. God's indwelling presence through the Holy Spirit surpasses God's bodily human presence in Jesus. That's what he said. They didn't buy it.

The 12 were looking at Jesus the way Hank and Simon were looking at me on the Isle of Wight trying to sell croquet. You see, they'd been planning their imagined experience of Jesus' kingdom, and it definitely included Jesus. embodied with them. They already had a mini golf playing soft serve cone dripping vision in mind. And so a competing vision included disappointments, a tough sell.

Jesus' first disciples didn't buy it, and in general, Jesus' modern disciples don't buy it either. I mean, honestly, how many of us would trade our experience with God's indwelling spirit to this point in our stories for one? face-to-face chat with God in the flesh. Basically all of us, right?

I mean, regardless of your maturity level, commitment, gifting, education, tradition, most people dotting the pews across the global church today on any given Sunday are a bit underwhelmed with the experience of the very process. that got Jesus so excited. The better plan that made Jesus momentarily giddy on the march to his own execution, we'd trade it back if we could.

The biblical story presents a triune God, three persons, one God, a God in community, Father, Son, and Spirit. And we generally get the Father. He's God in heaven, parenting all of us as children. And we know the Son, Jesus, who came to dwell among us, who made a way for us back into relationship with the Father. The Spirit, though. has become something of an urban legend. We've all heard the rumors, but has anyone actually spotted the Yeti?

From Genesis to Revelation, the Spirit is present, active, and essential. But despite that, the tragic truth is that for much of the church in the modern West, the Holy Spirit has become nothing more than a familiar stranger. The very spirit Jesus gave us as the empowering and bonding agent of the church has in our moment become the mysterious and divisive subject within the church. A 2014 Christianity Today survey asked this true or false question. The Holy Spirit is a force, not a person.

51% of respondents said true, 42% said false, 7% said I don't know. In 2022, the same survey was conducted again to track changing trends in belief among committed Christians. This time, 60% of committed Christians answered true. Meaning nearly two-thirds of American Christians today believe the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity, is a force to be wielded, not a person to know and be known by, a familiar stranger.

And mystery has led to division. For generations across the Western church landscape, there's been a noticeable divide between Bible churches and Holy Spirit churches. By which I mean there are certain churches that major on teaching the Bible thoughtfully, intellectually, and exegetically, but the experience of the Holy Spirit is varying degrees of absence.

While there are other churches that major on ecstatic experience but tend to diminish the Bible to a script for spiritual pep talks. But of course the kingdom of God is not an either or kingdom. It's a both and kingdom. The Bible and the Holy Spirit, thinking and feeling, teaching and experiencing, preaching the gospel and signs and wonders, exegeting the text and offering a word of prophecy.

Presence through suffering and miraculous deliverance from suffering shaped slowly over time by committed spiritual practice and reshaped in a moment through supernatural spiritual experience. The church's bonding agent meant to unite us has somehow become the church's dividing agent driving us apart. Now, though, we're standing at the dawn of a new cultural moment.

You see, today's young adults are far more open than the generations preceding them to experience. And they're resistant to explanation. Today's young adult generations and those coming after them are far more likely to try a yoga class or a mindfulness meditation app or even an hour in a Christian prayer room than they are to listen to a sermon, and that's new.

Post-World War II generations wanted information and answers to hard questions. That's why books like The Case for Christ and Evidence That Demands a Verdict did so well. It was a heyday for apologists. When my mind... And then you get my heart.

But beginning with millennials and increasingly in subsequent generations, a new era is unfolding. Today's young adults are suspicious of experts, forever aware that there's always an alternative perspective on any given topic. But when a message resonates with you, with my experience. That message then puts language to what I've perceived been unable to name. It wins my trust, win my heart, and then you get my mind.

You and I are shepherding the church at a time when across the board, mystery is suddenly being replaced by openness and even hunger for the spirit. And historic divides are being mended as various streams in the church seek thoughtful integration of the ministry of the Spirit in their communities. The doorway that stands open between the church and the broader culture is a thoughtful experiential spirituality, which is grounded in both.

practice-based spiritual formation that integrates the whole person, not the intellect alone, and... power-based spiritual formation that exceeds the bounds of my spiritual practice with God, but invites the spirit to, by his healing power, open my blind eyes, stand up my feeble legs, and even raise.

the long dead parts of me. The barrier that exists today for most apprentices of Jesus isn't one of theology or an altogether lack of openness or desire for the Spirit. The barrier is a lack of model. We lack a way to practice supernatural ministry with honesty and integrity. One of John Wimber's more helpful maxims went something like this.

For anything to be picked up off the pages of Scripture and lived today in community, you're going to need three things. You need a theology, a model, and a practice. So we need a theology. We've got to have a common understanding of what the scripture teaches about any particular topic. And theology has to be rock solid. And shared belief about what the scripture teaches should actually be common across churches.

communities sadly that isn't always the case but it should be and then we need a model we need a shared way of expressing that belief here and now among this particular community in this particular place and a model is not infallible There are no right or wrong models. There's just more or less helpful ones. For instance, the way of teaching, which is a gift of the Spirit, according to the letters of Paul, is expressed different across community, context, and tradition.

Most Catholics and mainline Protestants teach by a homily, which is a brief reflection on a biblical passage. Evangelicals typically offer a long-form teaching, which is meant to persuade, inspire, and mature. So which one of those is the correct model? for biblical teaching. Neither. There's liberty in the expression of the gift based on the needs and personality of the congregation. What we share is the imperative of making disciples of Jesus.

Meaning the most effective model for teaching scripture that serves that end among these people in this place, that's the right model. The ministry of the Spirit often feels inaccessible to the everyday follower of Jesus because we have not offered coherent models. Of course I believe God heals today. Beautiful, me too.

When is the last time you prayed for miraculous healing in the life of a friend? Well, I haven't. Or very, very rarely. I guess I don't know how. Or, more likely, The only time I have experienced that, the model felt manipulative, ineffective, unbiblical, or all of the above. So finally, then we got to have space to practice, meaning we need safe space created within a local church community where it is okay to fail and learn the mechanics of the model together. When a team gathers to practice.

A dance team for a recital or a basketball team getting ready for a game or a band rehearsing for a show. The unspoken agreement is mistakes are okay and perfection is not demanded. Practice is protected space where the stakes are lowered because it's not the recital, the game, or the concert. The pressure's off because we're all on the same team trying to grow in the tools necessary for the main event.

So where is the space in the church that you lead where your people can attempt to hear the voice of God, offer a Robin Williams scene from Hook, a prayerful image to someone else, completely miss the bullseye? And then both of them laugh it off and keep on listening. If every prophetic word, every healing prayer, every discernment process has to be a spot on book of Acts level breakthrough story, we are putting a huge amount of pressure on people.

rather than emulating Jesus, who sent out his disciples with power and risk, debriefed their experiences later, and then learned from both their successes and failures. To return to the teaching example from a moment ago, if someone indicated to me that they thought they were gifted in teaching and wanted to learn more, I wouldn't say, fantastic, you should step into the pulpit this Sunday.

And we know intuitively that there must be space given to any individual to develop that teaching gift where the stakes are lowered and we train up teachers over time through practice. So why then? Would it work any differently with the gifts of the Spirit, which are in the exact same category as teaching biblically speaking?

There's a renaissance awaiting the church, a rediscovery of the biblical imagination and supernaturally empowered ministry, but it is stuck between theology. What does the scripture teach and model and practice? Well, how do we... bring that to life here and now? And have we created space for people to live into that practice together where the pressure's off?

The loudest and most common models we have in today's church air at either extreme, either side of the spectrum. Either it's all theology and no practice, or it's all practice with shallow theology. So what is an expression of the gifts of the Spirit that is biblically faithful, wide-eyed in wonder, and thoughtfully winsome for a 21st century world all at the same time? Well, there's the rub, isn't it?

At Bridgetown, we have by no means cracked the code on this, but we are trying to make a meaningful contribution. In terms of theology, we preach a Sunday series annually on the gifts and ministry of the Spirit offering people language to decode and invite experience. And then as a model, we train up everyone who enters a Bridgetown community. That's our small group structure in a thoughtful biblical model for supernatural ministry through prayer.

And then in terms of practice, we create space for practice-based spiritual formation. Think prayer, solitude, Sabbath, scripture, that sort of thing. and power-based spiritual formation, think prophecy, healing, discernment, and so forth, through quarterly church-wide training workshops here around our stage. and regular practice in tight-knit communities and living rooms all across our city. Now, is that a prescription? Certainly not. But it is an invitation.

The church of the future must rediscover a thoughtful approach to both practice-based spiritual formation and miraculous supernatural ministry. Both pepper the pages of Scripture, and both tend to be mysteriously absent in the church today. The aim of practicing the way and the shared ache and desire that brought you to this pastor's conference is a longing for apprenticeship to Jesus, experiencing his life by his lifestyle.

If our vision of the lifestyle of Jesus includes all of the formative practice while ignoring the miraculous ministry, we're only looking at one side of the coin. If we pit long, slow redemption by the Spirit against supernatural, instant redemption by the same Spirit, we have an unbiblical view of change that is rooted in deism, not in Jesus. And if we hold a miraculous theology, but a purely rationalistic model and practice, we are blind, not sophisticated.

The ancient roots of our faith are contemplative and charismatic. They are uncompromisingly realistic, psychologically viable, and uncompromisingly miraculous, supernaturally powerful. Two sides of the same coin called transformation that are held in complement, not competition, in tandem, not intention.

One without the other just swings the pendulum to a new kind of dysfunction. But the two held together, that's walking the narrow path by an empowered stride. So... What does that bring to mind for you? Where do you find yourself resonating with what I'm offering? Where do you find yourself resisting? And what might be the one... half step that you feel God inviting you to take as an individual or your community to take corporately.

What a message. It feels in there like Tyler is really inviting us to a whole new space for what it means to live this kind of charismatic, contemplative space where we both believe in the eminence and the life and the gifts of the Spirit alongside and in the midst of this long formative journey that we are taking in this moment. So I thought it would be nice to... give our reflection time today to just asking the Holy Spirit to heal these false dichotomies within us between the charismatic.

and the contemplative and to give us a renewed vision for what life in the spirit can mean for us in our time and moment it can be so much power in simply saying God, I sense you're doing something significant here. And I just want to be part of it. I'm open. Do something in me. So if you feel that with me, let's just take half a minute now. To pray. To take a few deep breaths. To open ourselves to God's presence. And to just say, I want in on this Lord. Do something in me.

I'm open. I'm here. So I'll leave half a minute here and then close with Amen. This podcast is from Practicing the Way. We develop resources to help churches and small groups apprentice in the way of Jesus. And all we make is completely free because it's already been paid for by the Circle.

a community of monthly givers who partner with us to see spiritual formation integrated into the church at large. Special thanks for today's episode goes to Fiona from Columbia, Tennessee, Dakota from Sydney, New South Wales, Alexis from Albany, New York, Heather from Bangor, Maine, and Julianne from Center, Colorado. Thank you all very much. To join the circle or to learn more about running a practice in your church or community,

visit practicingtheway.org. Until next time, may the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.