JOE RIGNEY | When To Start Fires: Confronting Anxiety in Families and Churches

My name is Will Spencer and you're listening to the renaissance of Men podcast. My guest this week is a fellow of theology at New St. Andrews College in Moscow, Idaho, plus the author of Leadership and Emotional Sabotage. Resisting the anxiety that will wreck your family, destroy your church, and ruin the world. Please welcome Doctor Joe Rigney. You are the renaissance.

As many of you know, I spent most of my life as a liberal, basically until summer 2016, when I discovered that american leftist values are not human universals then trumps election and the circumstances surrounding it finished off my desire to associate with the left, with democrats, and with progressivism as a whole. It was one thing to unwind my belief in the state as a solution to the worlds problems, but it was quite another to dismantle all the socio cultural programming I had absorbed.

The hardest bit I had to unplug was around communication. I noticed quickly my own tendency towards indirect speech, not saying what I meant and dancing around the point. If you listen to me now, you might find that hard to believe, but it's true. I also noticed how quickly I and others would jump to defuse tense situations by placating people, silencing dissent, and bowing to the loudest and most shrill voices, even if they were being unreasonable.

But most importantly, I watched the way that families, communities and conversations were being manipulated by the most shrill and demanding voices among us. In these scenarios, everyone would rush to diffuse tension. This left issues simmering beneath the surface rather than everyone boldly confronting them. This would be difficult enough, except I also observed that the experts at this particular game would often wield unearned power in the situation.

One of the great blessings of COVID for me was that it gave me a chance to sit back and examine where id come from, both overseas and the Bay area, and consider these phenomena from afar. I spent time in group chats with men and observed the way wed all talk with each other. Then, when I took that communication style out into the world, I'd find that things worked very differently.

In fact, I experienced the same manipulative power dynamics I described above, being used against me and others who tried to communicate using clear and masculine speech. And that's when I realized the war we're all fighting today isn't just a cultural war, an economic war, or even a political war. Its a language war with words as the threats and adult forms of temper tantrums as the consequences.

This works by playing upon everyones inability to stand strong in the face of social tension and conflict. It squashes masculine resistance and clear speech and bashes everyone down into speech patterns that constrain expression of certain ideas. By constraining expression, you constrain thought. And that's how wokeness functions. It's awful, anti human and anti male, and it's literally how the liberal world works. Having lived in San Francisco for over a decade, I can tell you that that's true.

And it was the hardest thing to unplug from my own mind because I had to do it one interaction at a time. So you can imagine how shocked I was to see these same patterns inside churches and small groups. I thought Christianity was the masculine religion, with God the father and his son Jesus Christ, the patriarchs, the disciples and apostles, covenants and headship. And amidst all that manipulative speech patterns controlling thought and dialogue, I was shocked. I didn't know what to do.

I can understand constraining unrighteous and ungodly speech, that's fine, but forbidding clear, direct and masculine speech to protect feelings that made no sense to me from within a christian framework. And for a long time I thought I was alone. I didnt know that anyone else could see it. I wondered what to say and how, but thankfully someone else already had it figured out. Which brings me to my guest this week.

His name is doctor Joe Rigney and hes a fellow of theology at New St. Andrews College in Moscow, Idaho, plus the author of the outstanding book leadership and emotional sabotage. Resisting the anxiety that will wreck your family, destroy your church, and ruin the world. Thats a bold claim about the power of emotional sabotage, and its one that I can validate because Doctor Rigney has put his finger on something that ive seen first in the world and that has now infiltrated the church.

Its a silent power that doesnt wield physical force, rather emotional and verbal force, to get its way, which runs directly counter to the gospel. And I think as a nation we were largely unprepared for the arrival of this form of soft power in the 20th century, after millennia of so called hard power. So the soft power crept in unnoticed and took over, crippling every institution that it touched, including evangelicalism.

Stephen Wolffenhe, the author of the Case for Christian Nationalism, might call it the most effective weapon of gynocracy. But now, with a resurgent church, husbands, fathers, and pastors are beginning to encounter this nameless force like I did. And for them it's not merely an academic question. They see it weakening everything around them, including their own households and families.

Which is why Doctor Rigney has performed an admirable service documenting whats going on in brief, clear language, not overburdening the point, and providing a map for faithful leaders to help guide us out.

In our conversation, Doctor Rigney and I discussed his journey into empathy, the unmooring of our virtues, the meaning of a mature adult, being responsible for yourself before God, why battles are ugly when women fight, why virtue requires fear, defining respectable and credible the way that God does, and finally, being the image of God to your wife and kids. If you enjoy the renaissance of men podcast, thank you.

Please give us a five star rating on Spotify and a five star rating and review on Apple podcasts. If this is your first time here, welcome. I release new episodes about the christian counterculture, masculine virtue, and the family every week. Just a reminder that many things about this podcast will be changing very soon. As you heard me say recently, this podcast will soon become the Will Spencer podcast. New brand new topics, new guests, same format you love.

And I hope you won't mind these regular reminders to make sure we all come along together. And please welcome this week's guest on the podcast, the author of leadership and emotional sabotage, resisting the anxiety that will wreck your family, destroy your church, and ruin the world, Doctor Joe Rigney. Pastor Rigney, thanks so much for joining me on the podcast today. Hey, glad to be here.

I've got your book here, leadership and emotional sabotage, with the important subtitle, resisting the anxiety that will wreck your family, destroy your church, and ruin the world. Fantastic. Fantastic. And I want to say before we get started, I want to thank you for this book, because as my listeners know, I spent a long time in the secular world. I lived in the bay area for about ten years, and the principles that you articulate in here about anxiety and empathy is how the secular world works.

When I saw that you were producing this book, I was like, oh, he's cracked the code. So I've been looking forward to speaking with you about it. So, for a first question, how did you encounter the subject of empathy itself?

Cause I saw your sin of empathy talk with Pastor Wilson. When did you realize that this was, like, a thing? Yeah. So I can't remember exactly how I got ahold of Friedman's book, and it may have been that Doug gave it to me, or it may have been that I gave it to him. And so I don't remember. But it was about, it was about a decade ago, and I read. So I read failure of nerve, found it really insightful and helpful, and started using it in the leadership class that I was teaching at Bethlehem.

And then basically, over the next five or so years, it was like the world conspired to prove Friedman's point. Everything, it was all there. And he was writing long before that and had seen it in sort of seed form, but it was as if the world just can fire to prove the point.

And so as a number of the discussions about whether it was race, whether it was about gender, whether it was about abuse, all of these sort of big issues that were substantial issues in the evangelical world and in the wider culture, all seemed to be animated and in some ways hijacked by untethered empathy, by empathy gone amok. And so at some point after I'd been teaching courses on it, I'd been talking to other churches about the way that these dynamics were showing up in their context.

We were seeing some of it even in our own. And so when I was invited to do man rampant, and we need to pick a topic, I said, why don't we do the scent of empathy? And then everybody. And then, so we did that, and then when it released, everybody decided to prove our point again. And so it was just like one after another, you say these things, and then people really do. It does become manifest. It is an teaching opportunity for people to actually see it in action. Absolutely. Absolutely.

When I heard, I discovered that talk after the fact. So maybe within the past year or so. See, it was uploaded maybe three years ago. So maybe. Can you describe some of the blowback that you received from that?

Because I've heard about the blowback, but not actually seen it myself. Yeah. So I would say the order of events in terms of that particular conflict. You know, I'd filmed man rampant, probably in 2018 or so, and then it didn't. But it didn't release for another 18 months.

And in the meantime, I'd written a couple of articles at desiring God, kind of in that screw tape letter format where, you know, the first two articles, one of them was focusing on the way that you can kind of have the kind of compassion that doesn't ever actually want to get their hands dirty. So it keeps it at a distance, tries to steer people shut down. Oh, you feel sad. Please stop. It makes me uncomfortable. At least you have your health, that sort of thing.

And so I hit that sort of ham fisted compassion first and then transitioned to sin of empathy. And I would say those two articles, and then when the man rampant episode released, basically the first place it landed was in kind of the abuse advocate survivor community, and they were really unhappy with it. And so I spent a good bit of time, and some people I would say there was two sorts of people that were upset. One was people who were confused.

They just had never heard the idea that empathy could be a problem. Like that never had occurred to them. And so they were like, are you saying all empathy is bad? Are you saying no? No. Okay. So there was some clarification that I was happy to provide, and then others were clearly using that confusion as a tool of manipulation. So it didn't matter how many times they clarified, they were still going to misrepresent and try to use it as a weapon in order to do their power plays.

And so over the next three or four years, basically every so often, I kept writing things on it, responding, taking it new directions. And every few years, so often it would blow up again. Somebody else would discover it, or it would run, somebody else would criticize it. And so through it all, it was usually those two. Some people hear it, and they can't imagine empathy being bad, and so they just need some help. Right? Well, you can think anger could be good or bad, right?

Anxiety, fear could be good or bad, right? Like, sometimes fear is warranted. Sometimes it's unreasonable. Sometimes anger's righteous. Sometimes it's unrighteous. So these other passions, right, they can be bad. Why couldn't empathy be the same way? And some people are able to get it, others are determined not to get it, because the play that they're running depends upon people not getting it. Yes. Yes. I've got a book here by the author, Simon Baron Cohen.

This is actually Sasha Baron Cohen's brother. It's called the essential difference. It's a book about neurological differences in brain structure between men and women. So he's an atheist. So differences in brain structure between men and women is about as close as an atheist will ever get to goddess. And so in here, he says that the female brain is designed for empathizing, and he defines empathy. And he says empathy has an imaginative and an affective component.

So the imaginative component is you imagine yourself in the other person's shoes, and then you imagine how you would feel. This is the affective component if you were in their shoes. So I'm imagining myself in the quicksand. How would I feel? And then we're supposed to feel that and never question it, which sounds like what you touched on. Yeah. And I think in that respect, the important thing, and I stressed this from the beginning, that in and of itself, that's a perfectly.

That's a very human, God designed thing, both in general and for women. I think that part of the reason, the strength of women in that respect is that intuitive emotion sharing that allows them to be first responders. When people are hurting, they're just right there and they just kick into gear. And it's a good and grand and glorious thing. The problem comes when you take it out of that context and it becomes unmoored from any other concerns, any other issues.

And just the other day, so I preached on this the other day at our church, and I had come across a Cs Lewis quote, or actually it was Chesterton, is the modern virtues have gone mad. The old christian virtues. In the modern world, old christian virtues have gone mad because they've become unmoored from one another. So on the one hand, you have the scientists pursue truth, but their truth is pitiless. And the humanitarian elevates pity, what he called pity. But their pity is untruthful.

Their pity is untethered from truth. And so you have there you have pitiless truth or untruthful pity, untruthful empathy. And it's those things. We actually have to keep these things together. We have to keep them tethered to something sturdier than our own feelings. So as all this is kind of landing on you, you put out these talks, you write these articles, everyone's setting out to prove you right, and they're doing a good job of it. When did the book begin to kind of come together?

Like, I should probably write a book about this. But not just a book, but more Like a manual. Pastor Wilson has a map. Yeah, a map. So part of the WAy the book came together was when I moved out here to moscow. You know, I've had friends who've, you know, gotten into Friedman and read it, but have always had the same thing that I had, which is this is, it's a really great paradigm.

You know, his, his paradigm for dealing not just with empathy, but just leadership in general is a really helpful one for navigating family conflict, for navigating workplace stuff, church stuff. But you have to wade ThrOUgh a lot of stuff. It's not the sort of book that you could just give to anybody because some people are going to stumble over some of Friedman's categories, his psychological language, the evolutionary roots that he's grounding everything in.

And so when I came out here, they said, hey, you've been doing this for a while. Would you want to put, you know, could you pull that together into some talks or into a book or something? And so I said, sure. And it came together actually relatively quickly, partly because, you know, it was the emerging of a couple of different streams. One was for the last few years, I had been translating Friedman's concept of self differentiated leader as sober minded.

So I had been thinking and talking in terms of, when we say, when talking about somebody being a mature adult, what do we mean? And sober mindedness had kind of become this organizing virtue as a way of thinking of someone who is steady, stable, grounded, clear eyed, but also engaged, not checked out. So there's a certain kind of person who can analyze stuff, but they're emotionally totally uninvested, and they're not going to do anything.

And then there's another kind who's just going to do, and they're going to get led by the feelings. Well, you need somebody who's grounded, steady, stable, has a stability of soul, but is ready to act in the right way, and is governed by reason, governed by what's true, governed by what's good. And so I'd already been doing that, and that had been sort of my own take on freedmen over the last few years.

And then I'd done a lot of thinking about man, actually manhood and womanhood and the way that. What does it mean for a man to be the head of his home? What does it mean for the woman to be the body? This head body idea, what was that? And how do we better articulate both? What's sort of the facts of nature, just the way things are. It doesn't matter whether you want them to be this way or not. This is facts. And then in light of those facts, how should we live?

What does it mean to be a faithful head? What does it mean to be a faithful member of the body? And so I'd been working on that separately. And so you kind of had, Friedman, you had my sober mindedness stuff, and you had this manhood, womanhood stuff. And then various experiences I'd been through, I preached through the book of acts. I'd seen enough manipulations and pressures and stresses that it all just kind of, like, came together and was able to be wrapped up into six pretty short chapters.

So all in all, there was a timeliness thing that I'm grateful God's been kind to pull it all together. And you produced a course, which I watched as well, or a series of conversations with Pastor Wilson, and then a course. Maybe you can talk about those also. And then we'll walk through some of the content. Yeah. So the first thing was that the canon asked to do, hey, let's do a little course. And so we did six sessions, put those on canon plus. And that was the initial ask.

And then I said, you know, I wrote about 17,000 words, getting ready for this course. I could probably add another ten, and it'd be a nice little book. And they said, great. And so that's where. So that was the course was first in the book and then kind of coming out of it, you know, Friedman wrote these fables to kind of illustrate some of his fundamental principles. And we and Cannon had the idea, why don't we have you and Doug talk about these fables?

Because they can be a little bit surprising. They're just a little bit. Whoa. That's the way fable, good fables, good myths work. That way they kind of grab your attention. But then they gave us a good base from which to launch to talk about, how does this show up in your Home? Or how does this show up in the Church or in the culture? And so we put together those four little episodes also on canon plus.

Yeah, I'd never heard of FRIEdMaN's fables, but hearing you and DOug work through them, it's like, oh, I've seen this a thousand times in my life. This is basically how the SeculaR WorLD works, right? Especially the rope. Like, maybe talk about the rope and the bridge example quickly, and then we'll just use that to set the stage of what the kind of fable looks like and what they articulate. Yeah. So there's, one of the fables is a guy's going on a journey. He comes to a bridge.

Another guy's walking across the bridge, and the hero of the story is trying to get where he's going to go. He's got a vision for his life. And the other guy comes up, hands him a rope, and then jumps over and then basically holds him hostage. So I'm not, you know, the guy's like, I'll help pull you up. And the guy, the hanger is saying, no, you'll just hold on.

And these are these moments where you realize you're in a hostage situation where the other person is basically saying, if you don't, you're emotionally responsible for me, and I'm your problem. And it's not that I'm your problem in the way that God expects, you know, so a husband's ahead of his home, he's responsible for his. For his household. It's not that.

It's actually, I'm denying, you know, the person who's holding hostage, the hostage taker, is saying, my emotional state is entirely up to you, but it's not really up to you. I'm denying all agency, and I'm going to hold you hostage. And you see that in all sorts of places. You can see it in extended families. The example I used the other day in the sermon was, this is how the trans movement operates. The question would you rather have a dead son or a living daughter?

Is a great example of someone saying somebody's, you know, you have a boy, parents, you know, have a son, and he's been groomed into gender ideology and now is convinced he's a girl. And the activists will come and say, look, mom, dad, you need to get on board with this. And if you don't, you're gonna end up with a dead son. And so if you don't want a dead son, you better accept your new living daughter, and you better pay for the surgeries and the hormone blockers and everything else.

And it's basically a hostage situation that says, mom and dad, this is, if they do something, if they kill themselves, it's your fault. It's your fault. And what are they doing? They're playing on the parents compassion. Parents are compassionate. God designed them to be. As a father has compassion on his children, so shall the Lord have compassion on you. Shall a mother forget her nursing child? Shall she fail to have compassion on the child of her womb?

These are biblical texts that say, fathers and mothers are exhibit a of compassion and empathy and pity and whatever word you want to use. And so that also means there's a danger that they can be manipulated by it, and clever, ungodly agents will figure out how to exploit it. So let's make this grounded and practical, then. So not everyone's going to be dealing, although someone listening may be dealing with this exact situation, with the trans son, the dead son, living daughter.

But it seems like everyone has at least one situation, probably in their lives, where someone has thrown the rope around them and says, now you are responsible for me. And if you don't do what I say, then the hostage gets it, and I happen to be the hostage. So, like, how can men and women, too, how can they spot these situations when they're coming? And how can they, in the moment, wield the righteous no? Or what is the right response in that?

So I think a couple of things is, first, getting so recognizing when it's happening is often a matter, first of becoming more aware of your own passions. So, because oftentimes paying attention to your own hesitations, reluctances, aversions, your angers, your anxieties. Because oftentimes we intuitively are aware of the social environment. We know what's expected of us when you go home for Christmas. You know that there's certain people, certain topics. You stay away from certain things.

When people get agitated, you just kind of begin to maneuver around. So we all do this sort of intuitively and naturally to avoid relational pain. Basically, we want to avoid the emotional pain, relational pain, and we get very adept at dodging. So the first step is becoming aware of when you're doing that automatically. When are you ducking? When are you avoiding? And you can tell that by your own passions.

You know, there's, here's the thing I could say in this moment that would set everybody off. And then you have to ask, okay, am I doing that because of wisdom? Because there's an issue that needs to be addressed, but now's not the right time, but I'm gonna address it later, or am I doing so out of cowardice? I just don't want, I don't want to deal with it. I'm fearing man. And so that's how you diagnose when you're doing it. That's one of the key ways you diagnose.

Then it's getting more clear on the nature of responsibility. What does God act? Who are you responsible for and how. How are you responsible for it? So your first and fundamental responsibility is for yourself. You stand before God, and you're responsible to him for you. You're responsible for your emotions, your attitudes. You're responsible for your actions, for your words, for your deeds. You'll give an account for every bit of it to the Lord. He's the one who will.

You're responsible to him. Then if you're in leadership, you're also responsible for those under you. But you're not to blame for everything under you. So you're responsible, which means you need to address it. But part of, like, if you're a pastor of a church, you're going to be held account for what happened in your congregation. But what that doesn't mean is every sin in your congregation will be imputed to you.

What it means is when you discovered or saw the sin, when you saw that issue, what did you do? Did you lean in? Did you address it? Did you rebuke, correct exhort? Did you use the word, did we bring it to bear? That's what you'll be held responsible for your actions and what you ought to do, and they'll be held responsible for what they did. And so this is like with Adam and eve, right? Eve sinned. But when God, you know, both of them sinned. Eve sinned first.

But when God showed up, he wanted to talk to Adam. Why? Because Adam was the head. Adam, where are you? I want to talk to you because you're responsible for the whole thing. I gave you the law of the garden. You were responsible to teach it to your wife and to make sure she knew what the law of the garden was. And then you were responsible to guard and protect this place from evil. Now you're naked. Now you've clothed yourself. Who told you that you were naked? Why are you hiding?

So he wants to talk to Adam because Adam's the head. But that doesn't mean that eve can say, well, if Adam's the head, I don't have any responsibility here. No, that's not true. Eve's responsible for herself. So that blame shifting thing that all humans want to do, we want to offload blame. Offload responsibility to others is the thing that you have to lean in with. You have to say, no, I'm responsible for certain things, but not for other things.

And so that's what prevents the hostage situation. Can you speak a word of encouragement into men who are experiencing this currently in their lives? And they know with their families or their workplaces or their friends, that if they say the thing, everything will blow up and they will get blamed for the explosion because everything was going along just fine, quote unquote, before, and then you had to go and say the thing, and now all of this chaos, now it's all on you.

Obviously, we know in our hearts that's false, but can you speak a word of encouragement to men that are facing situations like that?

Yeah, this is where, it's where courage is needed. So you get clear on what's happening. Get clear on it. So that means someone can be the occasion for a blow up and not the cause of the blow up. So when Paul's, you know, in the book, I talk about Paul in the book of acts, and everywhere Paul goes, there's a mob. And so the optical illusion that can result from that is Paul causes mobs. And it's actually, no, Paul is preaching the gospel.

What's happening is his opponents are following him around, and everywhere he goes, they lie, they slander, they stir up mobs in order to oppose him. This is an effective means of trying to put a damper on the gospel proclamation. So if you were to say, yeah, Paul causes mobs, you're like, no, you're not seeing it clearly. It's his opponents that are causing the mobs. They're behind the scenes. Pulling. They're puppet masters. They know how to stir people up.

They know how to use slander and false accusations in order to steer people, and they're doing it. And so there's the mob and Paul. What Paul's refusing to do is he's refusing to be cowed by the mob. He's not backing down from the mob. He sees the mob as an opportunity to be faithful, to preach the gospel. And so you got to get clear on, if I say this, I may be lighting a match, but you ought to be able to light matches. Okay?

The issue is somebody else has been pumping gas into this room, and that's what's going to blow up. But it's the person that's pumping the gas that's responsible for it, not me. So I'm going to own my words, but my words ought to be not, you know, my words are not. You're speaking the truth, then it ought to be uncontroversial. If you in heaven, if you said what you said, would the angels react? That sort of question? Right?

Would the saints who have been made righteous, if you said whatever thing that you're going to say in the setting, would they approve it or disapprove it? That's how you should calibrate yourself. What does God think about this? What does the word say? That's the true calibration. Then it's okay. Now, in this context, I'm going to say it and it's going to be uncomfortable, and then you're ready to deal with the blowback. So you know you're going to do it.

And that's where you have to steel yourself with. I know what God thinks. I know who I am. Um, I'm seeking his approval. I'm gonna. I'm gonna speak plainly and clearly. Um, I'm gonna be, um, master of myself. God's restored control of me to me. I'm. I'm self controlled and sober minded. Um, I. My passions aren't running amok inside. So I'm gonna take this blowback knowing that it's coming and I'm gonna try to lead through it. That's, that's how, that's what God calls, um, leaders to do.

So. So I asked first about men, because I think courage and disagreeableness, to use a Jordan Peterson word, is something that's very inherent to men. We're supposed to be disagreeable. Combat battle is disagreeable. But I think one of the things we're also facing today is women having the need to be disagreeable about particularly sins about feminism, for example, that show up within families, and manipulation.

And so I've spoken to a number of women that see many things going wrong within their families, within their friend groups, and they want to speak into it. But women aren't maybe necessarily character or logically designed, made to be disagreeable in that way. Can you speak a word of encouragement to women as well in this regard? Yeah, so we definitely see. So while women are not designed by God to be frontline fighters when battles are, Lewis said, battles are ugly when women fight.

And then he still gave Susan that bow and arrow in Narnia, Father Christmas tells Susan, battles are ugly when women fight. You're not supposed to be in the front lines, but there are times when everything's coming apart where you're going to need that bow and arrow, you're going to need that dagger. And so there is a place, and all women ought to be women of courage. Sarah in the Bible is a model of courage. So in one Peter, we're told, be like the holy women who hoped in God.

Be like Sarah, who submitted to Abraham, calling him lord, who did good and did not fear anything that was frightening, so that fear. So a woman could say, this is going to be awkward in my friend group if I bring up, but this is wrong. God doesn't. This is false. This is not true to the scriptures. Yes, it will be awkward, and there's a hurdle that you have to get over because of the agreeableness, the natural female agreeableness, but faithfulness demands it.

It's still, do you care what God thinks, or do you care what man thinks? Are you seeking to be approved by the world by your friends, or are you going to be approved by the Lord? That's the fundamental thing that you've got to get straight and you've got to anchor yourself in this. Pastoral advice is fantastic.

So to follow on from that, let's say that you're in the room full of people, whether man or woman, room's full of gas, the chronic anxiety, you light the match, the thing blows up, and nothing is ever the same again in any kind of way. Help counsel people through what to do in that moment of grief, like, I've just lost this thing that was precious to me. How would you counsel somebody in that situation who's sitting with that?

Yeah. So then I think, well, part of what you're doing is maybe this would be even part of the advice before you do it, is you're entrusting it to goddess. Right. So a big part of what you're doing in being willing to say it is, Lord, I'm going to say these words, and I'm all. Everything that happens after that, I'm going to say the truth, or I'm going to resist the lie, whatever it is, I'm going to be faithful, and I'm leaving the results in your hands.

And so in the aftermath, if it went sideways. So first, let's start with sometimes we say the thing that we think is going to be a problem, and we're actually shocked that half the people in the room are like, thank you. Like, this actually happens more than you think, where you weren't the only one. Everybody else was uncomfortable with it, too. They just hadn't got there yet. They hadn't gotten to the courage point. And it's you saying, hey, actually, I don't think we need to do this.

It's you saying, no, we're not going to cater to that, no, we're not going to coddle that. And a bunch of people come up to you after and say thank you. Or you discover that if it's in a family context, that one of your siblings had also had the same thought about your extended relative who was causing the problem. And now what happens is, in that moment, you actually bind with them in a certain way.

You're forming the nucleus of a more healthy system, because it's one that's built on the truth and upon, you know, what God thinks and not what the world thinks. The reason the other one's so unhealthy is because it's shot through with worldliness. Yours, you're trying to build something healthier. So sometimes, just know, you might say it and people actually might, might get on board, but say they don't say that.

The herd instinct kicks in and everybody tries to shout you down or get you to apologize. In that moment, you're entrusting the whole thing to the Lord and you're saying, Lord, I don't see how. I don't see the way out. I don't see how this could ever be any better. But I'm going to be faithful and I'm going to leave it in your hands and just keep doing that daily.

I think when it comes to one of the little bits in the book that I don't know if people fully appreciate, but I've appreciated it more and more in recent years, is the way that job, at the beginning, part of what job made job a faithful leader and a faithful father was. His kids are having their parties and he's regularly going before the Lord and saying, lord, I'm going to offer these sacrifices to you on behalf of my kids, just in case they'd sinned and cursed you in their hearts. Right?

And so what job is doing there is taking responsibility for his kids. He's like, I can't reach in there and turn their sin on and off. I don't have that power. Nobody has that power for another person. You don't even have that for yourself. You need the grace of God to change your own heart. So I don't have that power, but I can, Lord, bring it before you and say, I'm responsible. These are my children, and so I am, as the head, I'm going to take responsibility for them.

And so that's what you're going to do both before and after both, when you're, when it's still simmering and when it's finally blown up is say, lord. Yep, okay, I said it. I took a stand. I had some nerve. Um, I I didn't go along the way that we've always gone along in the past. I I stood my ground, and now everybody's mad at me. So, lord, I'm entrusting this to you.

You're going to have to bring something out and help me in the meantime to be cheerful, to be joyful, to rejoice, because they're saying all kinds of false things about me. Lord, help me to do, to obey Jesus who said, when they say false things about you, go do a dance, go have a party, you're blessed. Help me to receive that and help me to maintain my humility. I want to think your thoughts. I want to be wise. I want to be gracious. So you're just.

And you'll notice that what's happening is you're actually becoming a more dependent person. You're becoming more dependent upon the Lord and therefore independent respect to people. Right. Like, you're actually, like, because you're depending on the Lord, you actually have the ability to stand against the crowd, and that's where you, that's where you want to live. Live there. You used a word that I think doesn't get used enough these days, but I think is very accurate. Have some nerve.

Like the word have some nerve, maybe. Can you unpack that a little bit? Because that's a concept we've lost in our world today, I think. Yeah. It's a way of talking about courage, fortitude, backbone, any of those sort of terms. It's. Here's a hard thing that, and it could be social pressure. It could be objective danger. Right. It doesn't matter what it is that produces fear in me. And so the question is, is my fear going to run me? Is the fear in charge? Does the fear win? Does the fear lead?

So the presence of fear is not a problem. If the fear wasn't there, then you wouldn't have. There would be no possibility of the virtue being there either. Right. So you need the fear because you need then the grace of God acting through your mind and heart to overcome it and to not give way, to not buckle. And so if you're standing firm, then you might. We'd say, oh, he's got fortitude because he's standing firm.

If it's you have to move forward, you'd say, he's taking a risk, he's being courageous. But in both cases, yeah, you're planting your feet, you're standing firm in the face of challenge, sabotage, steering, pressure, consequences. I'm going to be faithful to the Lord no matter what. So we started sort of in the home, the friend, the family structure, and in the book, that's where you start, and then you start building out into the. And into the world.

So maybe let's start with the church, because I think the world is being confronted in some ways, but these conflicts that crackle, this anxiety exists within so many churches, and I think people are rightfully afraid to light a match, but maybe in some ways they kind of have to. So maybe we can spend some time talking. Maybe have to isn't the right word, but maybe it's necessary would be a better way of putting that.

Yeah. So I think one of the things I've been writing about more recently, and we'll probably try to pull some things together even in the future, but it's kind of a follow on to the sabotage book is. How does it. What are the mechanics of it? And so I mentioned in the book that often worldliness gets laundered through other Christians, meaning you've got the worldly things happening over there and you don't care what the world says because you've got enough backbone. You know what Jesus said?

The world will hate us, it's okay. But there's a Christian who's closer to them, who does care and has compromised, but you don't care what that Christian says because they're a compromised Christian. That denomination's unfaithful, that church is unfaithful. So you don't care about that. But then there's a person closer, one step closer to you who does care what that group thinks. And there's a person. And so it's just this chain.

And the hard thing to resist is the one that's close to you, right? And this is what, you know, the illustration of the book is when Peter withdrew from the Gentiles because of certain pressures from the circumcision party, which probably means the unbelieving Jews in Jerusalem. And so it's like, how did that work? Well, those unbelieving Jews were making trouble for the church in Jerusalem. James was, you know, people are getting persecuted.

They're getting kicked out of the synagogues, thrown in jail. James is worried about this. He sends. He sends messengers to Peter. So now you've got three steps, three people involved. And those men come to Peter and they say, look, if you keep eating with the Gentiles, it's making it really tough for us. You know, people are not liking it. We have. Our reputation is shot. Could you maybe back off and just for a little bit? Maybe just for a season, you know? And you can.

And we're not told the details, but it's not hard to imagine the kinds of appeals that would be made in that kind of setting. And Peter goes, okay, and he withdraws. And then Leeds, Barnabas comes along with Peter, and then the rest of the jews come along with Peter. And so. And then it takes Paul to finally say, but wait a minute. Wait a minute. No, this is wrong.

And to actually take the stand to oppose Peter to his face, to light the match, which may be really awkward, and you don't know, is it going to blow up or is it going to make peace? And so that's the sort of thing that. The way that the world launders its influence through other christians. So the way I've come to talk about this, this isn't in the book, but it's coming out of the book, I would say, is that oftentimes christians live under the progressive gaze. Under the progressive eyes.

So. Eyes, yeah, eyes, not. Yeah, progressive gaze, not gaysgaze. And I actually get the term. That's true. Yeah, I guess they're both true. But I actually got the terminal from Toni Morrison, who's a novelist, african american novelist, who kind of popularized this, talking about the white gaze.

And what she meant was, there's a way with her as a black author, she always felt like that there was this presumption that her true audience was white people, and so that she needed to speak and act and write in such a way that that was her main audience. She was trying to make sure they were the ones evaluating. White people were the ones evaluating.

And so it was something like, she basically felt like there was this little white man sitting on her shoulder saying, you know, sort of furrowed brow, you know, well, that doesn't make sense. And, you know, you know, and so she said, I couldn't just describe my own experience because I was not writing. And so she said, I had to really work to get that guy off my shoulder and write for the audience I wanted to write for.

Yeah. And what it is, is it's actually just a really creative way to talk about people pleasing. Right. Like, you know what I mean? Like, at some level, it's like the worldly gaze, the progressive gaze, the white gaze, whatever gaze is just a person on your shoulder who's evaluating everything you do. And Christians, this is the thing. Christians have gotten in a habit of doing this by saying, well, the world is watching. The world is watching. And it's like, and that's true.

Jesus says, you know, they'll know you're christians by your love for one another. They're watching. And it's like, yeah, but what, but who else is watching? Is the Lord watching? What does he think about what we just said? What does he think about what we're doing?

That's, again, the more fundamental question, but, because when you live underneath, when the church lives underneath the progressive gaze, when it lives under that sense of judgment, it will then seek to cater and accommodate and placate progressive ideologies, progressive sins. It will speak softly about things that progressives want us to speak softly about, and it will drop a big hammer.

This is the origin of the phenomenon where we talk about people who will punch left but, or punch right but coddle left right. So things that are associated with the right that are culturally unacceptable, the church will just drop hammers. No nuance. No. Let's try to understand that perspective. Nope, just, boom, drop it. And then on the other hand, to the left, it's, well, we gotta nuance this. We gotta be winsome here.

And it's like, what's happening is there's a little progressive sitting on the shoulder that's dictating how and when and why we speak. And so that's how the church and the world. And so, and this is the hard thing for a leader, is it's often the first fight is not with the world, but it's with your elder team. It's your elder team. It's the three guys in that room who have that little progressive on their shoulder. And you're going, but we're just drifting. We're being steered left.

We're being moved left. We're being moved in a progressive, liberal, unbiblical direction. And it's, how do I stop it? Well, it's going to take some courage, some nerve to stand up to them, just like Paul had to stand up to Peter. So there could be someone listening who could be like, that's all well and good, but I'm not Paul. Right. And push back on that a little bit. Yeah. I'd say, well, you better be if you're a leader, you are.

I mean, like Paul says, you know, if whatever you've heard and seen in me practice these things, do it. He puts himself forward. Imitate me as I imitate Christ, he says. So Paul puts himself forward as a model for other leaders, for Timothy, for churches. We're supposed to look at Paul and go, how did he handle these kind of situations? Because he's trying to follow. He's seeking to follow Christ.

So I would say you may not be Paul in that you're not an apostle, but you are the leader in that room. And so the question is, will you be faithful at your post just as he was faithful at his post. Mm hmm. So what can christians listening then do to root out the progressive gaze that lives over their shoulder? Because it seems to me that it's a very powerful force within the church today. Like, it's just living right there. The progressive gaze, the science man gaze.

Like all these different gazes are sitting on christian shoulders and it's not the gospel. Yeah, right. So I would say this is what I think this is Toni Morrison. She just said, you just gotta flick that guy off. Just, but the thing is, here's the danger. This is the, to borrow a Jesus image, he says, you cast out one demon and then you leave the house swept clean. Seven more worse than the first come back and reinhabit. So it's like, it's not enough to simply remove, to simply say, I'm not.

Oftentimes what we're doing when we're writing for that gaze is we're trying to manage results. We're trying to, like that. We want, we're not simply trying to be faithful. We're trying to manage consequences and results. And so the first step is you're not God. You have no control over consequences and results. You can't predict it. You can't with an absolute way. You can sort of anticipate things, wisdom.

You can sort of read, okay, I think I know how this is going to go, but you don't have any control over what happens. You're not goddesse. And so I'm not God. I'm going to step out of that role by trying to manage and be God. You know, I got a friend who talks about, we think of evangelism as being God's pr guy, right? We've got to be his PR spokesman to try to spin everything to, you know, to help appeal to the audience. And it's like, you're not God's pr guy. Your task, you're God's herald.

Say what he said, okay? Say what he said. And where the thing does come into play is, you know, which by your own hesitations, which things you say are gonna cause that. And it's often, that's the signal of what faithfulness means there, right? What, it's no good to gather all the, you know what here. I'm gonna gather all these christians in a room and I'm gonna preach about the sins that aren't in the room.

I'm gonna gather all the christians and I'm gonna address every, I'm gonna address all kinds of sin and I can thunder and everybody, and I'm gonna get amen. Amen. Amen. And it's all about sins that are in that church across town or in that world over there. We're blasting those now. There's a place for that because these christians are going to go out there and they need to know how to live. So you do want to equip people.

But if you're doing, if that's all you're doing, and you never address the sins in the room, you're always right. What sins are in the room? What sins are in the room? That's the sin that's most pressing. And if you're avoiding that one but still thundering against the other one, then you're not being faithful because you're living before the gaze of your audience, right, rather than the gaze of God.

But if you live under God's gaze, if you say, all right, I want to be faithful, and I know what faithfulness looks like here, what you'll often find is God blesses it, right? God, God. God will bless it. And the blessing might be persecution. It might be that kind of hard, hard mercy, right? Like sometimes happens in the New Testament and other times thousands of people get saved.

Thousands of people go, oh, finally, someone said it somewhat, you know, where are the christians who were just testifying to the way things are? And they go, now? I want to. Let me hear more. We'll hear you more about how many times did Paul have these two reactions in the book of acts? Some people said mocked it. Some people blew up about it. They mocked it. They derided it. They tried to persecute him. And then other people were like, we'd like to hear more about this.

Because it was plain, direct, no waffling. He's trying to be winsome. He is attempting to sort of make it comprehensible, but he's not trying to shade it. So one of the dangers is sometimes you'll see pastors who speak in order to be misunderstood.

I've got a friend who, he's working on a project along these lines, the pastors who are gonna say something, knowing that one audience will hear it one way and another audience will hear it a different way, and it allows them to sort of have plausible deniability in both. No, no, I didn't say that. But to this group. Oh, I did say that. Right. And you're speaking to muddle things. Not speaking, to be clear.

And the number of times where Paul or the apostles, one of my favorite things about the apostles is whenever in the early part of acts, Peter and James and John are preaching to the crowds, and then they get hauled before the authorities. And the authorities are like, you're trying to make us guilty of this man's blood. You're saying that we're guilty of the murder of the Messiah? And they're like, yes, that's what we're saying. I'm glad we are communicating. That is.

Yes, you murdered the author of Life, and God raised him from the dead. You've got it. What? And Jesus does the same thing, right? When he condemns, I think he's condemning the pharisees at one point, and the scribes said, rabbi, in condemning that, you condemn us also. And Jesus says, yeah, about the scribes, and just launches into round two. And it's like, like, that's. But because what's he aiming for? He's aiming for clarity, right?

You're always like, a fundamental thing for leaders is you're always aiming for clarity. You want to bring clarity. Please say more about that real quick, because I can see there's a ditch on one side of the road of not saying anything at all. And then there, especially with social media, there's the ditch on the side of the road of making your entire personality about saying the thing.

So how do people who have the courage to get up out of one ditch avoid navigating straight into the other one or even down the road into the other one. Yeah. So I think especially when it comes to the social media question, it's important that all of your efforts to export via social media are grounded in real life community, that you're not treating that online Persona as a substitute for a life well lived with God's people in a particular place.

And so sometimes I think that part of the way it can go wrong is that people have taken. This is a category from a friend of mine named Josh Mitchell, who's written some articles on it. But you take something that's designed to be a supplement and it becomes a substitute. So you can think about the way that vitamins are meant to be a substitute or supplement for meals. But if you replace meals with vitamins and all you're doing is vitamins, it's like something's off.

It's a similar thing with kind of social media, if that's designed to breed connection, but it's not designed to replace face to face embodied life. And so I would say that's the first check I would have, is if I was somebody saying, hey, here's what my life looks like. Am I doing too much? Am I too online? And I would say, well, let's talk about it. Let's talk about what is it like with your wife and your kids? How much is your orientation towards out there online?

Not because being a man and being outwardly oriented, I gotta go build something is good. God designed us for that. Take Dominion. Right, but is the thing that you're building start in your home and then in your community? Or is it entirely digital? And if it's entirely digital, the danger is it can be so carefully curated and manicured, you can present women do it with their Instagram accounts. Here's the life where it's a fake life, it's a curated life.

It shows some true things, but it masks all of reality and therefore creates a false impression. Similar thing can happen with anonymous Twitter accounts or whatever you want to say. I know there's good reasons that some people are anonymous. They could lose their job or whatever, that's fine.

But if you lean into that anonymous identity and not into your embodied reality with your family, your church, if you're not in community with real people, then it's a good bet that that's going to take on a life of its own and just become another way that your passions will be steered. So you mentioned in the book the difference between apostles of the world versus refugees of the world, and speaking to those two. So one of the questions that I had in response to.

That was, how do we speak to apostles of the world knowing that the refugees are listening? Right. Because no one tweet can speak to both people. So how do we navigate that for those of us who are called to speak truth with clarity? Yeah, good. I mean, this is one of the things, you know, to circle all the way back to whenever the empathy thing kind of blew up, I was always trying to discern, as people would throw comments or make criticisms, which 01:00 a.m. i dealing with.

And I would, and I would self consciously respond to both publicly, and I would do so in different ways. So in other words, sometimes it was clear and I would try to do a little bit of a, there would be a little bit of sharper, you know, I'd be trying to, this is combat, and I'm trying to do that.

And then any other time when I thought, there's a good chance that this person is confused or has been lied to or has been manipulated by these other people, I'm going to just totally try to diffuse all of it. I'm not taking. So it was never personal. And it was always, oh, hey, great question. Let me answer that. And the goal was, this is something I picked up from the apostle Paul, was surprise, the importance of surprising people.

So if you remember in the story that I do in the book, in the last chapter where he's before that, that audience, they've been told he's a gentile loving grecophile who hates Moses. And so, and then when he gets beat up, he gets arrested. Then he asks, can I go back out and speak to the people? And the tribune says, sure. And so he goes back out, and they're chanting, it's a mob. And what he does is he immediately begins speaking in flawless Hebrew. And you go, why is it significant?

Why does the Bible record that detail? He'd spoken Greek to the tribune, and he comes out and he's speaking Hebrew, and it says that the crowd responded by being hushed into silence. They were like, wait, what? And it was, he surprised them. They didn't think this guy knew Hebrew. They certainly didn't think he knew that kind of Hebrew. And so he surprised them.

And so I'm always, when I think about that, I'm going, if someone comes out with a snarky comment, but I think it's because of a confusion or at least, or at least there might be other people watching that I'll often deliberately go, I'm not going to take the bait and hit back in kind. Instead, I'll absorb it and try to just say, oh, let me. Happy to be clear, I don't want there to be confusion. Let me answer that question.

And so they were not asking a good faith question, but I will answer it in a good faith because I have my eye on the refugees. I want people to kind of go, well, that's not what I thought he would do. I thought he would be really snarky back.

And so you're always, so that's how I would do it is I am aware, especially in online interactions, it is a combat zone, but you do have non combatants or you have confused combatants and going, I'm not trying to necessarily persuade the person I'm talking to because in all likelihood, if they're an apostle, there's not going to be. And because of the nature of the case, they're in a combat situation. They're going to dig in out of, even if they think I'm right, they're going to dig in. Right?

Like, in other words, if I were to answer their objection in a way that was compelling, they're going to dig in because they lose face. And so people, online interactions are combat, and so people will dig in on stupid stuff because they don't want to lose face. They can't admit that they were wrong. It's like, that's okay. I'm not worried about winning them, but I am worried about people who are observing and who are trying to understand what's the big deal about all of this?

What's the big controversy all about. And that's where, and so that's where I'm wanting to define respectable and credible the way God does, right. Not the way the world does, because the world's going to use respectability. Well, if you don't believe this, you're not respectable and they're going to try to steer you by it. The world is watching. World is watching.

And I'm saying, well, there's truth in wanting to be respectable, but I want my respectability insofar as it's determined or shaped by outsiders. Like, I want to have a good reputation with outsiders. I want it to be people who've actually seen me up close and personal have watched me coach baseball with my kids.

If unbelievers in those contexts saw me and they said, well, we hate what he thinks, but we got to admit that he's a really good baseball coach and really cared for the kids, well, that's the standard. That's that good reputation with outsiders, not random anonymous person online says, you know, you're evil, and therefore I have a bad reputation. It's like, ha, who cares about that? Instead, I'm going to speak over that to this other group who's just observing.

Make them have to contextualize what they might find as sharp words in the larger picture of a man. Exactly right. That's a great way to put it. So you mentioned baseball. So do you mind if we transition, talking about strangely bright real quick? Yeah, for sure. All right.

I really enjoyed that book, by the way. Did you intend for strangely bright and emotional sabotage to come out at the same time, or was that just sort of, like, providential? So. Well, so strangely bright actually came out. It was first released, I want to say, a couple years ago. So Crossway published it first, and it's actually the little cousin of a larger book called the things of Earth, which I published back in 2015, 2016. So the things of Earth was the first version.

How do you treasuring God? By enjoying his gifts. And that book was helpful to a lot of people, but it was a big, fat book. And so I then said, I'm gonna rework the content and write a smaller version that you can give to your mom to kind of, you know, like, write a little book that she'll read because she's not gonna read a big, fat one, maybe. And so I wrote strangely bright, and then. And it just so happened that it released at the same time it re released.

So this new release that cannon just did was a rerelease of an old book, but that was an attempt to kind of get it into a. Give it new life, get it into. New new circles, because I noticed that the strangely bright cover is green, the emotional sabotage cover is yellow. And I think they both deal with some uneasiness that it seems to me that modern evangelical christians have with the world.

First is around the question of the righteous use of power and then the other, and then strangely bright is the righteous enjoyment of pleasure. I thought that was an interesting and providential juxtaposition. Yeah, no, that's right. So I would say so things of earth came first and was really about, okay, we want to be. We're supremacy of God, people. God is greatest. God is the best. God is the chief good, the ultimate good, highest good. But then there's all the stuff. What do we do?

How do we enjoy it rightly? How do we steward it rightly? How do we not abuse it, commit idolatry, but also say thank you? All of those kind of questions. Was the things of earth strangely bright? And then basically, what's happened is I was wrestling with that question probably beginning like 25, 6789. Those years are when I'd been newly married and was trying to navigate that as a christian hedonist. God is most glorified in me when I'm most satisfied in him. But now, what with all the gifts.

So that book emerged out of that season. And then I think what's happened is culturally, the conversation has shifted, like you said, to the use of power or the question of culture, the question of politics, the question of social order, which is basically an extension of how do we live in the world? Right? Like the common thing is I've got to live in a world. It's a world of pleasures and it's a world of sin and a world of power. It's how do you live faithfully there if you've made God supreme?

Because Jesus is lord. And so you're right to recognize there is a shared approach to that question in both of those books. So I listened to strangely bright. Now, normally I read physical books, so I can highlight and make notes, but I listen to strangely bright, so I don't have any notes in front of me. So let's walk through the argument of strangely bright a little bit while preserving some of the mystery and the enjoyment of people to listen or read it.

Sure. Yeah. So the basic idea is, if you believe that whom have I in heaven but you on earth? There's nothing I desire beside you speaking to God. So God, there's nothing I desire then, and that's psalm 73. How should you live? How should you. Okay, Lord, there's not only you, all you. And then you look down the row at church and there's your family. What about them? Do you desire them? Do you love them? Do you enjoy them? That's the tension that the book's trying to address.

And the first and fundamental place is that, well, why did God make that world? Why did he make a world in which he's supreme, but which is filled with all kinds of pleasures, all kinds of enjoyments, all kinds of goodness, whether it's your. I talk in the book about sensible pleasures like food and drink and things that are pleasurable to the bodily senses, relational pleasures, which is people, and then vocational pleasures, the things you do that are enjoyable.

The world is just shot full with all this stuff. Why? And it's because God wants to communicate himself and he's communicating himself in the things that he's made. This is how the Bible heavens declare the glory of God. His invisible attributes have been clearly perceived in the things that have been made, and so that's why God made them, is that they're meant to be revelations of his own character, his own glory, his own grace, and they're meant to draw us back to him.

Well, that means if that's why they're there, well, you can't get. There's no shortcut. You've got to go through the things. He's given the things to lead us to him. So follow the things. So was this a question for christians prior to now, or was this a. Is this. Has this always been present, or is this just a modern manifestation? No, I think it's a universal, as old as dirt problem. The problem has always been, how do you navigate the two fundamental sins?

You can say in the book of Romans, Romans one begins with this description of human sin. The bottom line, sins, there are idolatry and ingratitude. They don't honor God as God, nor do they give thanks. Those are the two fundamental sins. And you can see there's the two ditches. On the one, idolatry is saying to God, okay, I put God on one side of my scales, and I put everything else, all the good stuff, on the other side. Which one do I want? And idolatry says, I want the stuff, not God. Right?

I want this stuff. On the other hand, ingratitude said, well, I don't want to do that. I want to love God. And so I'm not even going to. I won't accept any gifts, right? No God, I. Only you. God, only you. I don't want any of this stuff. And so that's the ascetic route. That's the, you know, the route of ultimate self denial. I'm not going to receive anything good because I don't want it. It's an idle trap. I don't want it to be an idol.

And so those are the two twin dangers that we all human beings have always faced going back to Adam. And so I do think in a wealthy society like ours, it's a particular temptation. And I think that some of the reason that that book has resonated is, you know, John Piper is one of my heroes. I'm so grateful. You know, he changed my life in college, and then I was able to serve alongside him for 18 years or so when we were in Minneapolis.

And his message into the myth of this wealthy society was basically, God is supreme, right? The supremacy of God in all things. Find your deepest delight and satisfaction in God. The way that you glorify God is by delighting in him. And this just shook up a bunch of people who had been comfortable. It's all about having a nice, comfortable middle class life. And it shook people up. And so I thought, what a great. That's true. That Bible, is Jesus going to do that?

But then, okay, you shook them up. Now come along after and they're going to go, okay, but I still have my wife, I still have my kids, I still have my job. I like my chips and salsa. So what now? How do I navigate the world of fish tacos and Doctor pepper, given that God is supreme? And that's the.

So the reason I think that the success or fruitfulness in some ways of men like piper, men like RC Sproul, who elevated the glory and supremacy of God, their fruitfulness and evangelicalism meant that this was going to be the next problem. And I was just, that was, I was raised in that and thought, okay, I see it. I see it in my own life. I see it in other people.

I want to help people to treasure God by enjoying his gifts and then avoiding the idolatry, by generosity and by self denial and by sacrifice and by suffering. How do you face those things? That's what proves that God really is supreme. So maybe to put the books together a little bit, you talk about the crisis of degree in emotional sabotage, leadership and emotional sabotage, and then the importance for the husband, the father, the leader to lead.

Is there a way that a husband father man can lead in terms of rightfully ordering his affections with the things that he enjoys, of the earth for his family and those around him? Absolutely. Because it starts with at one level, it starts with enjoying them. So one of the main applications in strangely bright is, okay, God made the world to communicate his glory, made things, make invisible attributes visible. That's the world is not. Well, guess what? You're a made thing.

God made you to do that. And as a husband and a father, you're either going to tell the truth about God or you're going to lie about it. You're either going to tell the truth to your family, you're going to tell the truth to the world around you about what kind of father is he. So when the Bible says God made fathers to image his fatherhood, okay, what are your kids, they're going to grow up in your home, what do they think fatherhood is? What have they internalized about fatherhood?

So one of the statements that's come out of this for me has been, be the smile of God to your children. And that really does bring together both books, because I can't remember if I said it in the second one, but be the smile of God to your children, be the smile of God to your wife was a way of saying, look, you're meant to image who God is and this is how you lead. This is how you orient a home, is by first and foremost being satisfied in God. You live under the smile of a happy father.

God is happy with you in Christ. This is my beloved son in Christ and I'm well pleased with him. Despite his sin, I'm pleased with him. That's the gospel of justification by faith alone. God's happy with us. Out of that, then I want to communicate that to my family by playing with them. Bye. Raising them in the Lord by delighting in them. And so. And that's both modeling for them strangely bright, as well as leading them in the world. Praise God, sir. Well, beautiful synthesis of those two.

Thank you. That was bringing those together. I love it. That's great. So just. Do you have time for one more quick question? Absolutely. So how much pushback did you get in order to put in the recipe for pumpkin crunch cake? Yeah. So the reason that the pumpkin crunch cake recipe made it into strangely bright is that when I published things of earth, I think in like four or five chapters, I mentioned how much I liked it and I used it as this illustration in things of earth. And so I used it.

And so what would happen is I would go speak someplace and I would have people come up to me afterward and they would be like, oh, we loved your book, but where do I get the recipe? But where do I get the recipe? And it was just like, I'm like, it was just a, like the number of. And it wasn't just, you might think, oh, the ladies wanted it. And I was like, the guys were like, hey, I need to tell my wife how to make this deal. What do I do?

And I would sit there and go, oh, and my wife did have the recipe online at the time, like on her family blog or something. And so I was always, like, giving out this random URL to a family blog post. Just go search. And so then when Crossway asked number of years ago, hey, would you want to do a small version of it? Yeah, absolutely. And I'm not going to make that mistake again. I'm putting the recipe in. And it's funny because everywhere now, everywhere I go, people go, oh, we tried it.

And you are correct, sir. It is in fact that good validation for, yes, my wife makes a mean pumpkin crunch cake. Amen. Amen. Well, thank you. So much. I know it's summer vacation for you. Thank you for taking time out of your summer day baseball and the kids to talk with me today. Yeah, thanks, Will. Appreciate it. Where would you like to send people to find out more about you and what you do? Yeah. So, simplest play.

I mean, only social media I have is Joe Rigney on Twitter, but then lots of stuff on canon plus. So if I was going to say, what's one? Well, I say lots of articles on desiring God. You can go back and find all sorts of stuff. I've gotten dozens, you know, not dozens, half a dozen articles on empathy and various and sundry things at desiring God. But now lots of stuff on canon plus. Excellent. Well, thank you so much, sir. I'll send people there.

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