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You’re tired.
Not just physically; though yeah, that too.
You’re tired in your bones. In your soul.
Trying to be a steady husband, an intentional dad, a man of God… but deep down, you feel like you’re falling short. Like you’re carrying more than you know how to hold.
Dad Tired is a podcast for men who are ready to stop pretending and start healing.
Not with self-help tips or religious platitudes, but by anchoring their lives in something (and Someone) stronger.
Hosted by Jerrad Lopes, a husband, dad of four, and fellow struggler, this show is a weekly invitation to find rest for your soul, clarity for your calling, and the courage to lead your family well.
Through honest stories, biblical truth, and deep conversations you’ll be reminded:
You’re not alone. You’re not too far gone. And the man you want to be is only found in Jesus.
This isn’t about trying harder.
It’s about coming home.
Hey guys. Welcome back to the Dad Tired podcast. If you have yet to fill up your shoebox for Operation Christmas Child, I highly recommend that you get that done today because National Collection Week is November 13th through the 20th, which is this week, and shoe boxes will be collected all over the country at nearly 5,000 drop off locations.
If you're not familiar with Operation Christmas Child, they have been reaching millions of children each year with the good news of Jesus Christ through these simple shoebox gifts. And since 1993, more than 209 million children in 170 different countries and territories all over the world have received these shoebox gifts, and as a result, they've heard the gospel of Jesus Christ and been invited into discipleship relationships.
I am a huge fan. Of Operation Christmas Child. I think it's one of the coolest ways for a dad to lead his family to Jesus by simply teaching them what it looks like to serve, to give and to be used by God, your little family, to be used by God. To see the gospel sent all throughout the whole world where discipleship relationships can actually happen, where people are hearing about the gospel for the first time, falling in love with Jesus, and then being discipled.
Again, huge fan of what they're doing. You can go to samaritans purse.org/occ. That's for Operation Christmas Child. Again, that's samaritans purse.org/occ. I also wanna thank my friends over at oelo for sponsoring today's podcast. If you are like me and you are into Christmas and holiday lights and you like, like being festive and having cool technology in your home and around your home, then you will love o.
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And arrangements and styles, and it just looks really, really clean on your house. You don't have to worry about getting up on a ladder every year or for every holiday. You can just set it up once. You could either do it yourself or you can get a quote to have them come out and do it for you. But again, these are permanent.
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I love their product and what they've got going on. Make sure that you go over and get a free quote for them by going to oelo. That's OEL o.com. Again, that's OE lo.com. That being said, let's jump into today's episode,
John Mark Comer. So good to see you again, man. You've been on our show several times over the last few years. Anyway, for the audience who may not be familiar with you, tell us who you are and what you're up to these days. Yeah, my name is John Mark Comer, and I just recently moved to Topanga Canyon in la, so living in Southern California after.
20 years in the Pacific Northwest where I was the pastor of Bridgetown Church. Recently I started a new nonprofit called Practicing The Way, which is an attempt to create kind of beautiful resources for churches and communities and groups of friends who follow Jesus to integrate spiritual disciplines for slowing down and.
Resources for spiritual formation into their everyday life with God. I love it man. I want to dive into all that, but I do want to pick your brain for a second on just the West coast. I was just speaking in LA this week and I told them that normally when I speak around the country, I make the joke that I'm from California, but I'm also a Christian.
And usually they laugh. The, the audience laughs 'cause they're like. Most of the country's mind, they're like, well, are there really Christians on the west coast? You know? But you know what's so interesting about that is there were 160 something guys who showed up at 8:00 AM on a Saturday morning to talk about how the gospel is impacting them or can impact them as a man.
And I'm like, this isn't California. You know, this is in Southern California. And so for the rest of the country that's like. Are no Christians on the West Coast. I'm like, well, I think actually God's doing quite a bit. That's kind of me teeing up. I just wanna pick your brain for a second on you have.
Pulse of what's happening in the church, kind of. Especially in North America, maybe even globally, but like from your perspective. 'cause people hear you were in Portland, they know you're from Portland, which Joe Rogan and Elon Musk just said a couple weeks ago. It's the most liberal city in the world. I think that's right.
Yeah. And now you live in Southern California. On your perspective, like for somebody that's listening to this in middle America and it's like, dude is, what's God doing there is like. What's happening there? Like what? What's your pulse on where Christians are at on the coast, especially the West coast?
Yeah, I mean, I think it depends on where you are at on the west coast. You know, you have places like Portland and San Francisco and LA that are very far left and not just left, but very far into the secularization curve and even kind of past secularization curves. So we're new to la. I'm certainly no expert on la, but one striking difference.
I've come down here for years. My sister's been living here for. 20 years or something. So I've come to LA every year at least once, if not a few times for a long time. And I always kind of thought of Portland as LA as pretty similar minus the weather. But now living here, I'm realizing the major, there's one, at least one major difference.
And first off, LA's not as liberal as Portland, but the major difference is it's far more spiritual. Like in Portland you get the kind of spiritual, but not religious. Tagline and you hear that a lot, but what most people mean is just secular. So you know, by spiritual they might mean they do yoga or they go hiking, or they're into mindfulness.
They don't really mean spirituality. They're basically secular people that are just trying to focus on wellness or nature and the environment. But in LA that really does mean spiritual but not religious. I. And you got hipster coffee shops selling tarot cards next to their candles and pottery, and it's very common for people to have a.
You know, I mean, crystals are like a giant thing, of course. All sorts of, you know, new wave psychedelics and people are really interacting with spiritual beings on purpose intentionally that are not under the lordship of Jesus. And so it's just been fascinating. To interact with kind of very pluralistic, universalistic, spiritually charged kind of cocktail, spirituality, mix and match, do your own thing.
And there's such roots of the occult here. Spiritualism here. So that's been an interesting difference and I think that's a little bit endemic. And part of that is because LA has a history of the occult. Part of it's because it's far more multi-ethnic. So what people don't realize about Portland, for all the talk about how left it is, it's the whitest city in America.
I. So it's basically, you know how I would think Portland is almost like the site formerly known as Twitter. It's like, you know, there are these ideologies that live in the Twitter sphere or whatever we call it now, the X sphere that doesn't matter, that are disconnected from just the reality of human life, real relationships, real people, real neighborhoods.
They live in the ideology. Concept space. But in Portland, because it's so white and it's so young, it's a very young city, it's almost like what happens when those ideologies get incarnated in people in a neighborhood and LA you know, is so multiethnic, so diverse, ethnically, socioeconomically, so many different worldviews, so many immigrants here who are not left at all, who are socially conservative regardless of their religious orientation.
And so that makes it more interesting. I think it tempers the kind of majority white, super far left leanings of culture and that's still here, but it's here in a kind of bizarre of other ideas and ideologies and values and systems. So I think what we're seeing in. Many coastal cities and global cities due to a confluence of, you know, universalism and pluralism and immigration and other religious worldviews is really like, almost like a post, you know, I've done work on, I.
pre-Christian culture, Christian culture, and post-Christian culture, and I've done most of my ministry in post-Christian culture, which does not just mean after Christendom. It means in reaction and rebellion against Christendom. So it's not like returning back to gods and goddesses and worshiping Thor.
It's this like attempt to carry forward many Christian values like human rights and justice and peace. In reaction against Christ, and now we're almost moving into a post cdom, into a true kind of pluralism that's a mishmash of kind of everything, cocktail, spirituality or secularism. So it's invigorating, it's challenging.
It shares with Portland, that sense of you're walking down the street. Most people around you think that you are crazy for what you believe and how you're living. Yeah. And uh, I find that intellectually stimulating, but it does mean the only way you can survive as a disciple of Jesus is with a very robust.
Committed communal approach to your life with God, the kind of Christendom. Attend church when you can and live a basic American life and have a few Christian friends and occasionally listen to a podcast. That kind of Christendom model that people are still living off of in parts of the South and middle America.
You will not survive as a Christian, right, right. In LA on that kind of model you have to fla, Ry O'Connor had that great line. You have to push harder against the age that pushes against us. And this age is pushing really hard against us. So our, you know, our discipleship to Jesus has to be very kind of robust counter formation to the, the habit structure that's all around us in the world.
Yeah. People will ask me, you know, what's it like living in South Carolina now versus Living Grow? I was born and raised on the West coast, lived there my whole life. And one thing that I do miss, and I just told the guys this when I was in California, is there's no social benefit for being a Christian on Right.
Where I've lived before. No, it's the, it's the, it's a shame position. Exactly. But what happens is, what I found was, and I didn't even realize this was happening, was you find Christians who, I'm speaking generally, but I guess it seemed easier to find. Followers of Jesus who are more serious about following Jesus because they, it There was more of a counting of the cost.
Yes. On the west coast. Yes. And so there was a deep comradery with your fellow brothers and sisters in Christ because you felt that like we, we are counting the cost together against that culture that's pushing back so hard. Yes. Versus where I now, where I live, there is some kind of social benefit. It took us a long time to find a church out here, which surprised me.
'cause I'm like, there's billions of churches. It feels like everywhere. But there's kind of an, again, I'm speaking generally, but there's an overall kind of just comfort in the South when it comes to following Jesus. There's almost even some social benefits. You almost like a. I passed by a church today that I had attended as we were looking for a place to call home.
It just feels kind of clubby like it's, you can be part of this social club and, but the discipleship cost is the bar is low. And so I told my friends, these guys in California that I just spoke with, I'm like, man, I kind of miss being around some other believers who are like, this is really hard to follow Jesus, and yet I'm still all in.
You used the word invigorating, which most people, I didn't feel invigorated. But God has wired you, it seems like, to be in that kind of culture where you're like, you use the word invigorating, which would not have been in my vocabulary. Like do you feel like God has called you to these types of places?
You said intellectually stimulating, you know, like do you feel a sense of a calling on your life? Like, no, I need to be in these kind of places and having these conversations that are more challenging. Yes, I feel that call on my life, but I don't think that's the call on all followers of Jesus like life.
You know, a lot of people beat up on Christendom or Christian culture and how, you know, so full of compromise and complicity with the world and that's all true. But when you live in a post Christendom culture, you realize, hey, Christen dumb has a lot of great things about it. Yeah, particularly when you're raising children.
Yeah. And the ideologies that just are taken for granted in a place like LA or Portland, they do so much to just dehumanize the human body and the human soul. And so, man, I have more appreciation than I've ever had before for things that I used to mock like in Christian culture. But yeah, I mean, like what, sorry, sorry to interrupt you.
Like what? Like what, what would stick out to you when you say things I used to mock before, now I have like high value for, does anything come to mind? Just all the stuff you're saying, the country club kind of vibe. Yeah, and Christian subculture with music and Christianese and cheesy language and all sorts of people that utilize Christian concepts, but are really just living very worldly lives, you know?
Yeah. And churches that kind of play to consumerism to attract, you know, religious customers. I mean, stuff I'm very unfamiliar with by direct experience because I've spent my whole life in, on the west coast. I grew up in the Bay Area, then I was in Portland for 20 years and now at la, so I've never been in that spot.
We did a 10 month kind of family gap year in Orange County with some mentors of ours, and that was the one and only time I've ever lived somewhere where there is still. A vestige of Christian culture. Mm-hmm. Probably not that different than the South, and it was so disoriented. I mean, I, I just, I had no paradigm for it and part of me hated it, and the other part of me loved it.
It was so great. So it was like disorienting, but I just felt it was hilarious when we were at this gap year and we were, we were praying about. Where to put down roots for the second half of life. We had a few different kind of opportunities and we drove up one day to LA and it's, you know, 45 minute drive or whatever from Orange County up to downtown LA to visit my sister and spend the day in the city.
And there's this moment if you drive up I five north from Orange County, which is very different for those of you not from the west coast. Orange County is like a wealthy kind of, it's more like the south. It is Californian, but it's closer to the south. And then LA is. LA and they're very different. So you have this moment where you're driving up I five and you're just kind of an ugly industrial Southern California like wasteland.
It's not pretty. It's not a tree, it's just you're on a freeway and you're in traffic. There's this spot where you kind of come around this corner and you see downtown la Yeah. And like it kind of spits you out onto a different freeway and you get off, you got off the freeway and it is just downtown LA is very cool and just dirty garbage everywhere.
Massive problem with houselessness, rundown, ramshackle, buildings everywhere. Crime, I mean, it's like very cool. Very dirty. Yeah. Very troubled. All at the same time. Yep. And the moment we came around the corner and saw this, I had this like bodily like experience in my nervous system. This like. Pulse through my body.
That took me a moment to like, what did I just feel? Hmm. And I, I realized it was like a feeling of happiness. I felt like I was coming home. Wow. And I was like, what has gone wrong in my formation? Or I come into a demonized, crazy, far left, incredibly secular, dirty, whatever environment, I'm like, ah, I'm home.
Feels great to be home. I'm like, what? What has gone wrong in my soul? Dude. Yeah. But yes, I feel a call to this is where so much of culture is going, and so I feel a call to try to figure out how to follow Jesus here in a way that is formative and not de formative because you know, we, we gotta sort this out.
'cause the odds of going back to Chris and Domer. Very small in some ways. I relate to what you just said. I felt that as I was driving, I was just in LA this week, I was walking down the streets like where were you in the city? I was literally down, so I spoke down in more towards Orange County. So I got that same experience, like you're kind.
But I stayed downtown the night before I left because I was getting in LA XI was gonna jump on a plane and head home. Yeah, right. So I'm walking all around LAX, you know, I'm trying to find a taco truck where I can just get some, grab some Oh yeah. Good taco before back. Tacos are good. Yeah, that same feeling of like, there's part of me that's like, I'm might get shot.
And also I kind of love it. Like I quite literally had the moments like smile on my face as I'm walking by myself. And I grew up near Stockton, California, which is also, you know, the high, my high school. Spoke 72 different languages on campus and so very, very diverse. And there is part of me that's like, I think that forced me to talk about Jesus differently.
I miss that. Like I miss those kind of conversations where you're talking to somebody who has no context of that like. For lack of better word, southern kind of church traditional cult like you gotta talk to them about Jesus differently and yeah. Uh, I'm even afraid to say these words 'cause I'm like, well I live in South Carolina right now and it's pretty comfortable and I hope that God maybe doesn't call me back.
It sounds great, man. Enjoy it. Yeah. Let me go back to what you said. Yeah. Yeah. Because the invigorating word that may be an overstatement. It is intellectually stimulating. It's exhausting at the same time. Mm. But I think it's like resistance training. I am certainly no exercise fiend. I exercise five days a week, but out of duty.
I hate it. I don't push myself hard enough, but I know that the way. Exercise works, it's all resistance training, all of it. You have to intentionally put yourself in a place where you're pushing and pushing and pushing and pulling and pulling and pulling. And that's where strength and energy and life comes from.
And if you do too much of that, you wear yourself out and you exhaust and kill yourself. Hmm. And if you do a lot of it, then you need these periods of like intense engagement and intense rest. So I think when it's in a healthy balance, that's what it feels like. It feels like the spiritual equivalent of resistance training.
And there are seasons when it feels like too much and it's just like, man, this is killing me. But I think if you can develop robust kind of practices and relational rhythms of Sabbath and life and community and contemplative practice, then you're able to build a life apparatus that can kind of hold.
The resistance training of, of living in a secular space. Yeah, that's a really good analogy. I really wanna talk about your book, but I'm, I'm having more thoughts on, uh, we can talk about whatever you want, bro. I'm just here to hang. I think it's all related, but I think one thing that you said at the beginning was kind of that OC cultish.
I don't remember exactly how you said it, but I guess in another way, you, you worded it was kind of like not there. Forgive me, uh, for rephrasing what you said poorly, but something to the effect of the, you know, there's a worship of gods who are not the God that you know, the God of the Bible. I think sometimes we can get into a mindset where it's just like, whoa, they're believing some crazy stuff and it's just kind of like, maybe it's a political thing or maybe it's just kind of they're out there, but how much of it do you think.
When you're talking about LA and it being like spiritual, I don't know, like demonic or that they're playing in a spiritual realm, that it's not just like, this isn't just a political issue, but there's actually like spiritual strongholds happening here and it's something deeper. There's a deeper warfare happening than what we might give credit to.
I know I stumbled through that question, but does that make sense? Yeah. I mean, are you asking what my opinion is on like. How much demonic energies are behind political ideologies, ideas, people's daily lives in a place like this? Yeah, like for a place like la, and this is happening all over the world, so it's not just la but you might see it in concentrated.
But like when people are practicing these forms of spirituality, it's not just like a kind of cuckoo mindset, but they're actually like dabbling in spiritual things that are right. Like that scripture would give, you know, voice to. Yes. Yeah. I mean CS Lewis, you know, and screw tape letters, which I read with all of my kids.
So for you dad's listening, it's very accessible. Brilliant. Mm-hmm. We stole this idea from Ben sas. Hmm. Uh, whose book on parenting, by the way, is rock and Roll. It's called the Vanishing American Adult. And he has a chapter in, uh, in it where he lays out this idea for what he calls a family cannon, where you put together a library of you pick the number.
But I think for him it's like 50 or 60 books that are the books that most you want to most shape your family line. Mm. And so like, we've been kind of compiling the, the family cannon for the Comer family. When each of my kids. Cool graduate, I'll gift it to them like in a bookshelf or whatever. Like these are the books that we all wanna work through.
So I'm kind of reading through them with my teenagers and one that is like toward the top of the list of the Comer family Canon, his Screw Tape Letters by CS Lewis. And in it he has that famous analogy that you hear all the time in sermons. Where most people err on one of two extremes. Either there's a demon behind every bush and it's like Jose, for church, I got it to flat tire.
It was Satan, you know? I'm like, I don't really, I would imagine that was likely not the Satan, you likely just have not done good upkeep on your car or whatever. Maintenance. And on the other, there's just, everything is explained away through Western rationalistic, secular, materialistic kind of attempts and language and categories put on things that have spiritual, at least animation.
And I think, of course the truth is somewhere in the middle, there are those Christians out there that think everything's a demon. But most Christians I meet, whether they're in the south or in the coast, are way more on the opposite side of the pendulum, where I think they radically underestimate. The level of demonic kind of animation behind anything from a political ideology.
I cannot make sense of the American political scene without seeing Prince powers and principalities in the language in the New Testament, animating ideologies on the left and on the right and intentionally. Bringing them into conflict, chaos disorder, disunity division. I mean, lies is what the enemy traffics in.
And the, the sheer volume of false information from both the left and the right is not a partisan statement at all. And I don't identify with either political party. So I, I can't explain that apart from demonic animation. And you certainly see it in cities where there is intentional effort made to court some of these more micro demonic energies at a smaller level.
And so a lot of people want to say like, Hey, if you're in Orange County, it's just as messed up as la It's just different. One pastor said to me who I love, we sin nicely down here and it's just normal things like materialism and interesting, yeah. You know, lustfulness and ambition. But I really do think it is significantly different in some cities and other places where I don't, you know, like I think there was one mistake made by a certain stream of the church, well meaning mistake where.
They used the word idolatry to talk about kind of what St. Augustine called disordered desires of the heart. So you hear a lot on Idol is not a bad thing, it's a good thing made ultimate. It's when you take something and you make an idol of it in your heart. That I agree with the point that is being made when you hear that, that our desires are disordered and often we love.
The wrong things are. We love the right things, but in the wrong order, and God must be ultimate in our, I agree with the point being made, the words being used. I do not agree with an idol in the Bible is not a broken priority. An idol is not a good thing made. Ultimate. An idol is a physical totem by which people connect with a spiritual entity of some kind.
It is a medium, it is a go-between. Mm-hmm. For people to intentionally engage with demonic spirits. Hmm. And so idolatry is demonic engagement and animation, whether through physical places or totems like crystals or tarot cards or occult practices or ideas. I mean, Dallas Wither did so much great work about how the enemies.
Primary energies go into the ideas and idea systems of the world. And so I'm always looking for, and it is not hard to find demonic energies behind ideas and idea systems in the political polarization on both sides. So I think there is. A significant difference that you see not just in cities there, 'cause this could be true of a small town that is, you know, much more, you see this a lot in like little kind of small, little mountain towns sometimes, or little hippie bohemian enclaves.
Or it doesn't have to be, it could be, you know, it doesn't have to be a major city, but where people have intentionally opened themselves to spirits that are not the Holy Spirit. It does open a portal. To, I think almost like a demonic infestation. So that might sound crazy to some people listening, but I really have come to believe that, Hey guys, make sure you stick around for the rest of the episode because we get into some really, really interesting topics that I know are gonna be helpful for you.
But I just wanna tell you a story real quick. At at the last Dead Tired retreat, I had a guy come up to me and share with me that he was struggling. He had struggled with addiction for most of his life. And he's a recovering addict, and he had that week, he had been clean for a year, but that week he has just had a really, really hard week and he had made the decision in a really dark place that he was going to relapse and not just relapse, but he was going to get high and take his own life.
His goal was to get high to lay in front of a train. He told me, and he's a dad of several kids, he went to go to his dealer that he had used many times before he was sober, and he went to him and asked. For more drugs. And the dealer said, dude, don't do this. You've been clean. Which by the way, crazy, like God using a drug dealer to like help this guy.
But anyway, he said the dealer told him like, don't do this. You know, stay clean. Here's some money. Go get yourself something to eat. Go back home and do the right thing. And he took that as a sign. He was signed up for the dad tired retreat and he took that as a sign like, dude, what am I doing? I need to get to this retreat and get.
Back right with Jesus. And he came and man, God just wrecked him. And he ended up in tears sharing the story with me. And we talked about like, God has a plan for you to be on mission to see, to lead your kids and to your, your family really well. And so, and this is a sign like God is not done drawing your heart to himself.
He has more for you that he wants to use you for. So it was an incredibly powerful moment. But the reason I tell you that is because. God is using this ministry. I literally, I'm not exaggerating in the slightest bit. We hear these stories every day at Dad's Tired. I just got a story yesterday where a guy had been struggling with a different kind of addiction, pornography addiction for a long, long time, again, most of his adult life, and he came into our free dad's tired community.
And a bunch of guys just surrounded him. He confessed sin and a bunch of guys who aren't even like, they didn't even meet him in person, but just said, Hey, I, I get what it's like to struggle. I'm gonna come alongside of you and love you and hear all of who you are. See all of who you are, and still say, brother, I'm with you.
And uh, as a result, that guy started going to counseling. His marriage is restored, and now he's finding health and healing. And so we just hear these stories all the time. Like, dad tired is being used. In massive ways to draw the hearts of God's sons back to himself so that they can be the husbands and fathers and disciples that God is calling them to be.
And so we are trying to raise funds as we do every year at the end of the year, so that we can just grow this mission, continue to do what we're doing, see more guys, millions of more guys, uh, come to know Jesus and be disciples of him. If you believe in that and you wanna partner with us, we're trying to raise, we have a lofty goal every year.
We try to raise. Between 20 and $30,000 at Kickstarts are jumpstarts us into the next year. If that is at all resonates with you, please help us reach that goal. You can go to dad tire.com/donate to help us do that. Again, dad tire.com/donate. Anyway, I love you guys. I wanna share that with you before we move on.
But, uh, let's jump back in. I think your book is, you've written a book on discipleship, which anytime I tell somebody I, you know, I've spent the last 13 years in Portland, your name will come up. Within seconds of me saying something like that. I think you're one of the most gifted teachers of our generation, the way that you can communicate God's word in a way that takes us layers beyond what most of us are learning or have been taught as incredibly significant.
But with that being said, you could have written on a million different things, but you chose to write on like discipleship, which obviously you. John Mark Comer doesn't do anything without putting tons of thought into it. I've noticed. Or it seems. And so as you've put a bunch of thought into like, okay, I want to write what I feel like the Holy Spirit is leading me to write, why did you pick discipleship as the next thing to, to get out there into the world?
That's very kind of you to say those things. Yeah. I mean, maybe you think I'm more thoughtful and brilliant than I am, so I have you fooled. That's fantastic. I picked it because I think it's an open secret that we are living through a crisis of discipleship in the Western Church. Whether you want to call it the Evangelical church or the American church, or the Western kind of majority church, whatever.
It's not new, you know? It goes back. A long ways depending on how you kind of interpret church history. Robert Lovelace, in the late 1970s famously wrote about what he called the sanctification gap, and that was seventies evangelical language for the crisis of discipleship. The gap between the vision of Christian life, Christian teaching, and the everyday life of most Christians.
All of us have a gap between the Sermon on the Mount, the Rodneys, the New Testament, and our daily life. All of us have a gap between what we believe and how we live. All of us do. And one way to frame discipleship is as a lifelong process of with Jesus closing that gap. Hmm. But at some point, the gap becomes so wide that there's no way to explain it away graciously.
And there's no way to not say, okay, something here is seriously off. So Lovelace is writing about that in the seventies and it's gotten nothing but more endemic since that. And we could name, I mean, there are so many symptoms of this all over the place from fall after fall of celebrity pastor to political polarization to Christians on the left and the right that are far more loyal to their political ideologies and the art and the teachings of Jesus.
And this is literally both sides. To radical individualism, to the divorce rate, to pornography, addiction, to, I mean, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And these are symptoms. The root issue is, and the language of of Dallas Willard, that much of this book is attempting to kind of mainstream a lot of his work.
We have a lot of Christians, but not a lot of disciples, you know, so. For all the talk about how America is. So post-Christian still, like the last survey I saw said 68% of Americans self-identify as Christians. Wow. That number goes down every year, but that's still like a large majority. But then a number of independent surveys that actually attempt, and this is really hard, really tricky to measure, but that attempt to measure how many people are actually following Jesus.
Like how many people are disciples of Jesus, of Nazareth. Yeah. And the number comes in right around 4%. Holy cow. So that gap, 68%. I'm a Christian, 4%. I'm a disciple of Jesus. That has, do you know how they were measuring that? How, like what were some of the. Metrics that they were using? It depends on study to study, you know, I mean the, the 68% is pretty easy to measure.
That's people that self-identify. I, I identify as a Christian. 4% would be measuring things like church attendance, any kind of daily devotional practices. Do you hold a Christian orthodoxy? Metrics like that. And again, it is tricky to measure. Yeah. So these are estimates, but let's say it's. Quadruple that.
Right? You still have a giant gap. Yeah. Yeah. So in America there's this unique and, and, sorry, sorry to interrupt you, but even anecdotally, you know, we've both been in the church long enough where you don't have to run studies on it. Like you can just see in your own local churches, people who are professing to claim Christ in like an actual day to day lifestyle of being a disciple.
The counting the cost of falling Jesus, you know? And a hundred percent, yeah, a hundred percent. Our Catholic brothers and sisters have a kind of verbal distinction between Catholics and practicing Catholics. Hmm. The former is kind of like, almost like an ethnic category, like I'm Catholic, I'm from Boston, or I'm from Italy.
The latter is like, I'm a practicing Catholic, meaning like, no, I'm at mass. I pray every single day. Mm-hmm. I live a life of devotion. I think it's time for Protestants to possibly distinguish between Christians and practicing Christians. Wow. Not from a place of judgment. But from a place of clarification.
Wow. So in the book, I don't frame it exactly this way, but I think there are basically two or three ways to think about and explain this sanctification gap, this crisis of discipleship, this 68%, 4%, one way is through the lens of the gospel, which is where you do a lot of work here. Since at least World War II in North America, and because of that far beyond the gospel has often been preached in such a way that you can become a Christian without becoming a disciple of Jesus.
Right? You know what? My seminary professor called the John three 16 gospel. You know, God loves you as a wonderful plan for your life. You're a sinner going to health. You believe in him, you'll die. You know, you go to heaven when you die, which is not the gospel of Jesus. It's not the gospel that you read in the writing of Paul.
But it's the gospel I grew up with. I mean, it's a bit of a caricature, but not that much, and that gospel has nothing, and there are variations on it. There's a reform variation on it. There's a prosperity gospel kind of variation on it, but that gospel has no call to apprentice under Jesus. There's no call at the end to follow Jesus, to become his disciple, to relearn a whole new way of life from him.
And it has more to say about the next life than it does about this one. More about dying than about living. Yeah. And so you have a, an a systemic problem in particular in evangelicalism. With the preaching of and the definition of the gospel itself that has created, Pete Guro has said this has created a two-tier Christianity where you have this wide, kind of large upper band of Christians that have said yes to this.
I. Gospel, but not to the invitation of Jesus to become his apprentice, and then a smaller band of those that are his disciples. But discipleship is thought of as kind of an optional Yeah. Secondary track after quote, conversion for those that are into it. Right. Not as part of his seamless soul. So. That's one reason the gospel.
The other reason is the culture. So the culture has gone farther and farther and farther away into post Christendom secularism, pluralism, spiritualism, post-Christian culture has been around for a few hundred years, but it was isolated in kind of. Elite, wealthy ivory tower kind of academic or cultural elite kind of settings now through a wide variety of factors, in particular through film, television, social media, that kind of worldview, anti-Christian worldview has now been spread throughout the culture.
And again, there's an educated. Leftist version of it and an less edu, more working class. Right. Word version of secularism. They look very different, but they're basically the outworking of the same idea. Hmm. This culture now is less and less and less Christian and more and more defor. And so it's harder now to follow Jesus than it was a hundred years ago, or at least we face a whole new set of challenges, but without the robust life of a discipleship.
And then the third explanation would be. That Evangelicals, who, at least in the Protestant stream, have taken discipleship very seriously, have a couple of fatal flaws built into their discipleship model. Evangelicalism comes out of the enlightenment, and you don't need to be a nerdy philosophy student to kind of get, you know, Renee Decar called Cartesian Thinking named after Rene Decart.
The French philosopher famously said, I think therefore I am. And he was a Christian. He was trying to. Make sense of Christian faith, but that's a great little one-liner for a worldview that you see in the founding fathers and that you see in the founders of Evangelicalism that basically I. Kind of thinks of the human person as a brain on legs.
Mm-hmm. And evangelicalism often just kind of adopted the wider worldview of the enlightenment and didn't challenge it very much with biblical theology about the role of the body, the role of the emotion, the role of relationships, the role of community, the role of the wider environment in forming who we become or don't become.
So evangelicalism often works under the assumption. As a person's knowledge of the Bible or theology increases their spiritual maturity will increase along with it. And I have spent my whole life in Jesus loving Bible teaching gospel preaching churches, and I can assure you that that is at best grossly.
Inadequate. Yeah. And that's not a dig on biblical knowledge or biblical teaching. I read the scriptures every day. I preach the Bible I love. It's not a dig. The problem there isn't that evangelicals focus on the Bible and focus on scripture. Meditation and theology and thinking right thoughts and listening to sermons, and reading good books, and listening to good podcasts.
Great. It's that there's not enough attention paid to the body. Emotion, what in our language today we would call the healing of attachment disorders and trauma, the inner emotional life, the shadow, self-awareness, community, relationships, family of origin, generational family systems, the whole, the wider world that we're a part of.
The ideologies around us, the formative habits that make up our daily lives and morning rituals. Discipleship has to touch on. All of that, every layer of our being. If all you do is just plug new information into the prefrontal cortex of an ordinary American person, I don't care if you live in LA or in some idyllic Truman show, small town in the south, it is not enough to form you into the image of Jesus.
So we need a more holistic, more ancient there's, there's nothing that I'm advocating for that you do not see all over the best. Eras of church history in particular in the first couple of centuries before Constantine. So we need a discipleship that's more holistic. Mm-hmm. More embodied, more emotionally informed, more relational, more practice based, more habit oriented, and more authentic.
We also need one that is more robust to push against the wider cultural forces, and we also need one that is rooted in Jesus gospel. Not the John three 16 gospel, but the gospel of Jesus. Hmm. I think for a lot of people listening that it's hard, and some of this is just ignorance because they've never been taught, like what you just said feels so much bigger than what they've been taught about discipleship.
I think for, if you asked. Majority of North American going Christians, like what do you think discipleship is? They probably have a hard time like fumbling through what they believe that is, and I think a lot of them, either consciously or subconsciously would start to equate. Like first thoughts would be, I should probably meet with a small group of people to go through a book on Tuesdays at Starbucks.
And again, that's, that's not, and that's not bad. That's right. But especially the relational side, that feels like what you were describing as like, oh, you're a committed Christian. Like you've gone the option, like there's an option to go even deeper in your faith and you're gonna commit to one day a week.
Yes. Meeting and going through a study. Right. Like that's kind of the, the idea. And I was a discipleship pastor at a large church for many years and I was like. That was a big call that we were asking people like, are you willing to meet with, you know, two or three people every Tuesday at before work and, and read this book?
And it's like, that felt like the call to discipleship. So when you are describing discipleship, I mean, I think you just unpacked it, but in many ways. But I, I guess if you could just say in a couple sentences for somebody who's thinking through like, is that the call to discipleship? How do you even go from that?
You know, I'm picking on Tuesday Bible studies. Still do those. But if you're, you know, your Tuesday Bible study as a, as the extra piece of being Christian to what you were just talking about, which is like this is a holistic Jesus, the way of Jesus touching every area of your life. Yeah. No, and forgive me if I make it sound like too much.
I have that effect on people and I apologize. Well, Jesus did the same thing. No, uh, yeah. I don't know. I can't pull that. Well, Jesus did it card well, but, but I mean, the, the call to discipleship, I just did a podcast on this where I, I just try to lay out every time in the gospels where Jesus was calling somebody into a discipleship relationship, and the call is.
You walk away from that feeling overwhelmed. Yeah. Most people said no to Jesus'. Call in the gospels. Yeah, that's what I was mean by, you know Jesus, they walked away. Being, that's too big of an ask. Most people did not accept Jesus' invitation to become his apprentice. And again, people get confused because they think that there were only 12 disciples.
There were only 12 apostles, but Jesus had many more disciples, men and women. At least 120. You know, he has sends out 70 at one point. There's 120 in the upper room, there's several thousand in Jerusalem, right after. So it's not a, a defined number, but certainly Jesus had more disciples than just the 12.
Yeah. And but still of the thousands upon thou, it was a household name in Israel and most people did not become his disciple so that there is that dynamic at play. Yeah. So in the book, I attempt to. Simplify all of this and summarize it and break it down to the nitty gritty as Nacho Libre would say. And I basically kind of, I put it this way, that to become a disciple, or I like the word apprentice of Jesus, is to organize your life around three simple goals.
One to be with Jesus. Two, to become like Jesus and three to do as he did, and that's the subtitle of the book, be With Jesus, become like Jesus, do as He did. I'm not trying to be cute or clever. I am just trying to lay out a framework for what it means to be an apprentice of Jesus. So discipleship or again apprenticeship to Jesus is an intentional whole life effort.
And attempt to be with Jesus for the purpose of becoming like Jesus and doing what he would do in the world if he were you. Don't think of it like just a list of habits or practices or spiritual disciplines you need to master. Certainly do not think of it like just a. Quote, Christianity, a word never used by Jesus or any of the writers of the Bible.
Um, a set of ideas that you need to believe in your head and learn about and read books on or a, a moral system. It is all of those things. It's a habit structure. It's a lifestyle, it's a theology. It's a moral and philosophical system. It's all of that. But ultimately it is a life of apprenticeship to Rabbi Jesus in community.
It is a communal thing. You don't do it alone. You do. It's deeply relational. You do it with other people. I. Because the whole point, the tell loss of it, the end goal. Is to become a person of love. And Jesus is not trying just to form Jared into a person of love and John Mark into a person of love. He's trying to form a community.
Yeah. Into love. And so we do this together. We apprentice under Jesus together. And so think of it like apprenticeship and again, that. The Greek and the Hebrew words that are translated disciple can also be translated student. The word literally means learner, but a lot of scholars think apprentice is the best word we have for it because it's, it's a learner, but not like in a western sense of, I.
I learned, I read this book, or I took this class, or I audited this course online, or I went to Bible college. That's all great, but it's a whole life learner. Yeah. So I think of like, you know, in our church we inevitably always have somebody who's in an apprenticeship program, an electrician, you know, apprentice, or a plumber apprentice, or we have a lot of med students that are often in residency, which is a form of apprenticeship, you know, at a very high and technical level.
And if you're an electrician. And you're in a four year, whatever, however long it is. I think plumbing's four years. I forget how long electrician is apprenticeship program. You're learning from a master electrician and you're not just trying to learn about like the theory of electricity. So when you get done, you can like answer questions, right?
You're trying to learn how to like wire a house. You know, you go to walk in and be like, yeah, I got it. I'll bring electricity to this house. I know how to do it. I, I got this. Yeah. And so, you know, that's just not how a lot of people think about Christian faith or Christ himself. Like I'm an apprentice to Christ.
I am with him for the purpose of becoming like him in order to do the kinds of things that he does in the world. I'm apprenticing under him in living in the kingdom of God. So that means it's whole life. That means it's 24 7. You know, a first century disciple would literally follow their rabbi around.
They would spend 24 hours a day with them. I quote this, uh, famous blessing from the first century. May you be covered in the dust of your rabbi, which is what a parent or an uncle would say to a kid if they were going off to apprentice, et a rabbi, because, you know, there were no classrooms and the rabbis were itinerant.
They would kind of travel from village to village. And they would always have disciples with them. So a lot of people don't realize that Jesus did not invent discipleship. It predates him. He used it. But rabbis would walk around, you know, from village to village with a small kind of coy of disciples, and they would teach them as they were walking along these dirt roads from village to village.
By the end of the day, if you're walking behind your rabbi, you know, with 6, 7, 10, 12 other disciples, you'd be covered in your rabbi's dust. It's a blessing. So that's what it means to. Follow Jesus. It means to apprentice under him to go about your life as a dad, as a software designer, as an entrepreneur, as a pastor, as a student, but to go about your life where the, the organizing principles of your life.
The driving aim is to be with Jesus, to become like him and do as he did. I think there's gonna be a lot of guys who are listening to this who, there's some who will hear this and be like, that sounds way more intense than what I was told or what I, I signed up for. And maybe will feel overwhelmed. But there are going to be many guys who hear that and think, I want that.
My soul longs for that. I don't want to just show up on Sundays and get some more head knowledge. Like I want this way of gee to follow the, to apprentice under Jesus to the point where it impacts every area and moment of my life. Yes. Which again, I don't wanna be cheesy, but I think that that probably similar feelings to what people would've.
Felt when they heard the message of Jesus, like, yes. Aching and overwhelmed. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just like, this is so hard, but I kind of, there's part, I want to do this, and maybe that's that narrow road, you know? Yeah. And on one hand, Jesus said you have to count the cost. Mm-hmm. And at the end of the book, I do a little Dallas Willard on Dietrich Bonhoeffer riff, where Bonhoeffer famously spoke of the cost of discipleship.
He was actually dealing. A lot of people actually argue that Bonhoeffer is the beginning of the spiritual formation movement in the Western Protestant church because he's dealing with what he called cheap grace, which is kind of the theological worldview that enables this kind of two tiers of Christians who aren't disciples of Jesus.
Hmm. So he writes about the cost of discipleship. You have to count the cost like it's sacrificial, it's surrender beaut, and he writes beautifully. But Willard said yes to all of that. And you also have to count the cost of non discipleship. Yeah, yeah. Right. So it costs you to follow Jesus. It costs you to live a holistic, embodied, emotionally informed like.
Relational apprenticeship program to Jesus that you follow until you die, but it costs you even more. Yeah. To not live that. To live the American way of life and think about the things that people sacrifice for. They sacrifice for money, for wealth, for career advancement. For nicer houses, for newer cars and shiny toys.
For new marriages, for, you know what I mean? They sacrifice their children. They sacrifice their bodies. They sacrifice their mental health. They sacrifice millions of dollars over a lifetime. They sacrifice. Years of their life and blood, sweat, and toil, and often chronic overwork. And for what? Yeah. You know, is that, is that really better than becoming a person of love and the deep community of love under Jesus?
So you're going to disciple under someone or something. The question is not, are you discipling? Are you following? It's who or what are you following? What are you giving? You're giving your life to something. You're sacrificing your life. You're spending the precious resource of your life on something or someone.
Yeah. The question is who or what. Is Jesus a better option? The other thing that I would say on the more comfort side rather than challenge side, is the call to apprentice under Jesus. I think at least in our day and age is not a call to do more. It's actually a call to do less. So I think one of the reasons Christians who genuinely love God and they want, they're not resistant to, I wanna.
Be formed to be a person of love and Jesus, and you know, I'll be with them and become like, they're not resistant to that. They're just like, oh my gosh, I don't have the time. Most of us are just too busy to follow Jesus in any meaningful way and too exhausted to kind of engender the emotional energy that would be required.
So I think one way to think about discipleship in the modern era is as a disciplined attempt. Just slow down and simplify your life. Yeah. So you know, in the book I write about practices and relational rhythms, but none of it is stuff to add into your already over busy, maxed out, exhausted, 90 mile per hour normal American life.
Yeah. If you attempt to do that, you'll crash and burn. That's where that feeling of overwhelm comes from. Yeah. It's about subtraction, not addition. It's about. Pursuing simplicity, not increasing complexity. It's about less, not more. And so that theme, that's a, a large part of just my work and I've, I've written about that previously continues in this book of, hey, we have to make space in our lives for what matters most.
And most people make space. Most men that I know in the kind of world I live in make space for their career. You know, some of them make space for their family. That's a lot of the work that you're doing. You know, how would the gospel lead us to make space for our family? Other men make space for adulterous relationships, or for hobbies, or for side projects, or for obsessive exercise, or for backpacking or surfing or camping or rock climbing.
We make space for things. Mm-hmm. And whatever it is that we most think will lead us to life. And I think the call of Jesus is to ultimately make. Space for him and life with him and in his community and there Find a life that simply cannot be quantified. That is priceless, man. Beautiful. As dads, that's what we want for our kids.
We don't want a hundred percent, we don't want this compartmentalized. You show up on the Sunday and check a box. Like we know personally that that's not fulfilling enough. And for our own souls and and for our kids, we want that kind of deep apprenticeship. So, man, I could talk to you all day. Pick your brain all day.
I feel like we just scratched the surface, but I don't think we explicitly said the name of the book, so let's get that out there. Where can they, they can get it wherever it's books are sold, but what's the name of the book? When does it come out? It's called Practicing the Way Be With Jesus. Become Like Him, do as He Did.
It's out January 16. It's available wherever books are sold. Awesome, brother. Thank you so much, man. I love having conversations with you. It's so fun. No, I love it. You're a delight. I love your heart, man. The work that you're doing. The dads that are listening, all of us are just, what's that line? Be gentle because everyone you know is fighting a great battle.
Yeah, we're all fighting a great battle. We're all tired. We're dad tired, work tired, we're American tired, we're whatever. And the invitation of Jesus is so gracious and gentle, and I love your heart, man, and it's an honor to live another day. Praise God, man. Thank you, bro.
Hey guys, hope you got as much out of that episode as I did. I could talk to John Mark all day, absolutely thrilled by what he's doing to make massive impacts on the kingdom of God and the church at large. Again, want to invite you to partner with us to see what God is doing expanded all throughout the world to see more men reach for the gospel.
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