Transcript
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What's up y'all?
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This is Grant Lockridge on the Across the Counter podcast.
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This is our 50th episode and we are pumped about it.
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I can't believe the amount of support that we've gotten from you guys the questions, the comments, the concerns all valuable to us, so that's been a lot of fun.
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We have released 50 episodes now, which is crazy.
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I did not expect to be able to do this for at least 50 weeks straight.
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That's kind of ridiculous because I'm a pretty inconsistent human being, so that's kind of wild 50 weeks.
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In the weeks ahead we are starting to do second round interviews.
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So anybody that we really enjoyed from the last 50 episodes we've asked again to be on the podcast and we're going to be releasing those.
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So stay tuned for some of those.
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But just thank you all for being with us for this long and anybody that's new that's coming into this podcast.
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I appreciate you guys listening.
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You really have helped us a lot just keeping us going.
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So this is my wife, regan Lockridge.
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She's been keeping me accountable to not release anything.
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That's super horrible.
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So, reagan, say hello to the fan base.
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By fan base, I mean a couple of people that enjoy this second hey, hey, reese.
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That's my brother, he listens every week.
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Yeah, reese Hall is the best man alive, and's it.
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That's all there is to it, and yeah, so we are pumped.
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I just wanted to bring my wife in just as like a fun little thing, because we like to have fun with it.
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So rock and rock and roll.
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Regan, you got anything you want to tell the people?
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Thanks for supporting my lovely husband.
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You've probably listened to more episodes than I have, yikes.
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Well, there you have it.
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I hope you guys enjoyed this next little interview.
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We've got Tullian Chavijan on this bad boy and we're super excited.
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It was me and Jared.
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We interviewed him a little bit ago and we're excited to release that.
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So, without further ado, tullian Chavijan and yes, I said that right, pull up a chair across the counter.
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Your one-stop shop for a variety of perspectives around Jesus and Christianity.
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I'm Grant Lockridge and I'm here with my co-host, jared Tafta.
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Today we have on, for the second time, talion Chavijan, and I'll tell you what.
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I read your book, talion, and it was a banger man.
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Carnage and Grace.
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I read it in two, three days, something like that and that was such a fun read, such an honest like I mean you cussed like nothing I've ever seen in a Christian book.
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That was mild.
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I mean I was getting some pushback for it and so I went back through it.
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I'm like how many cuss words that I actually write in this thing?
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and there's like eight or nine, yeah but the eight or nine ones were the worst ones right, yeah, yeah, I uh.
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Well listen, it took you two or three days to read it.
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It took me 18 months to write it and you described it as fun.
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I describe it the writing process as a revisiting of every dark corner of my life, which was incredibly difficult, incredibly painful but at the same time very therapeutic.
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Incredibly painful but at the same time very therapeutic.
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There were some really amazing, surprising things that happened inside me during the writing process that were incredibly healing, that were unexpected.
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So, yeah, I pretty much bled on every page and when I set out to write it, it took me years to decide whether or not I even wanted to write a memoir of the last 10 years of my life, because there is so much carnage but also there's so much grace in those 10 years.
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Once I finally decided that it was time to write it, I determined that it was going to be honest, bloody, real raw.
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I didn't want it to be sanitized.
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That's why I wrote it before I had a publisher, because if I had signed on with a publisher first, they would have had a lot more control or, say, in how the book was written, and I didn't want that kind of pressure.
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I wanted to put it out there exactly the way I lived it, exactly the way I felt it, and I'm super grateful for Lucid Books for deciding to publish it.
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Lucid's a smaller publishing house, but they were completely on board with the message and the way I delivered the message, and so I'm, you know, I'm grateful that it's out of me and I'm grateful that it's out there for everybody to read, because I'm hoping it will be helpful.
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Yeah, I mean just your thought process on grace is massive and it genuinely like I don't know why I didn't.
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I'm learning how to understand grace more and more and your content specifically has helped me a lot as far as just like because I feel like you're always preaching the grace and it's like whoa man, that's too much grace there's no such thing Grant.
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That's too much grace.
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No such thing Grant.
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There's no such thing as too much grace.
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But yeah, I hear you.
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I hear you.
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Yeah Well, thank you.
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That's incredibly encouraging.
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I appreciate it very much.
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That means a lot, so thank you.
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What you got.
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Jared, this is your first time meeting old tully yeah, jared bailed on us the first time around.
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There's no doubt there's no doubt just all these, all these kids, my wife and I, um our families, watch.
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What is that movie?
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A christmas movie where the die got the guy dies, dies and sees the world without him.
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It's a Wonderful Life, nicholas Cage.
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No, it's a Wonderful.
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Life, oh, it's a.
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Wonderful Life.
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Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, the OG one.
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Yeah, so there's a line in there.
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We had four kids in five years and my wife has been bedridden ill for all four of them for about four months at a time.
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And he says at the end of it why do we have to have all these kids before he blows up on everybody?
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Yeah, you feel that, don't you?
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Yeah, we definitely say that sometimes and Grant will message me on the fly and be like hey, can you just happen to record today?
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I'll be like can't swing it, bro, and then he'll just text me and be like, yeah, that makes sense, that's a fact.
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Listen, I'm one of seven kids.
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I'm the middle of seven kids.
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My mom and dad had seven kids five boys and two girls.
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So I know what it's like to have a lot of kids around, grow up with a lot of kids.
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I know what it's like to have a lot of kids around, grow up with a lot of kids.
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It's fun as a kid because you've got brothers and sisters and chaos and playmates and all that kind of stuff.
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But yeah, it takes a toll on the parents.
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So I had three.
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I had three and then I quit.
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I got married the first time when I was 21,.
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Had my oldest son at 22,.
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My second son at 24, my daughter at 28.
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And as soon as she was born and the doctor said she's healthy, everything's good, I got a vasectomy.
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Like a week later, literally like a week later, the doctor, when I went in for my consult, the doctor was like you know, you're pretty young, Are you sure you want to do this?
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And I was like, doc, I should have done this when I was 16.
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It would have seen a hell of a lot of problems.
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But the cool thing is now I'm still relatively young.
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I'm 51 and my oldest son is 29.
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My middle son is 27.
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My daughter's 22.
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And they're three of my best friends in the world.
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Yeah, we talk about that a lot Our parents.
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At the end of the day, the people that our parents want to hang out with the most are us.
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It's cool to think that you're building your crew for the.
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Yes, I have a crew man.
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They're all different and yet they're similar.
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I have a crazy one who will kill someone if I ask him.
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I have a rich one who will kill someone if I ask him.
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I have a rich one who will send me money if I need it and I have a sweet one who will go with me to every music festival I want to go to.
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I've got all bases covered it's like Psalm 127 says that children are a heritage of one's youth.
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Arrows in the quiver and you're making me think of like Green Lantern, like he's got an exploding arrow and he's got like a quiet arrow.
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That's right, I've got, I've got them, I've got, I've got all my arrows.
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That's awesome.
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Well, grant has just sung your praises.
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We've interviewed a lot of people and you know like we love sitting in front of others and everybody's story is powerful and interesting, especially when it, as it relates to God, which is what our podcast is about just had an impact which I kind of like that I wasn't on the podcast because it just allowed space for God to move and work in you guys' connection, but I'm interested now in you know you just said when I wrote the book I wanted it to be real and raw and unsanitized.
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To be real and raw and unsanitized.
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And tell me more about the kind of like, this spirit that the converse of that in the Christian community because, like, what you're saying is essentially like a, it's addressing something in your writing that maybe the supposed community of Christ, like avoids.
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Yeah.
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Does that make sense?
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So, like, tell me more about why.
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Like, why is that important?
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Well.
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Well, the question why is that?
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The case is slightly different from?
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Why is it important to be real, raw, unsanitized?
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In my particular case, my story is real, raw and unsanitized, and to tell it any other way would be dishonest, which is why I use some of the colorful language that I use, because that's exactly the way I felt in that moment.
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And to sanitize that would be playing into what I think is the greatest problem facing Christianity today, and that is a misunderstanding of what the Christian life is, and that flows from a massive misunderstanding of what the gospel is.
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So you know, when I was growing up and going to church, the gospel was what non-Christians needed to believe in order to become Christians.
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But then, once you become a Christian by believing the gospel, now it's all about cleaning up your life, cleaning up your behavior.
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The more sort of lofty terms would be pursuing holiness, practicing godliness.
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Phrases like sanctification I mean words like sanctification and all of that stuff get thrown in there, and what it ends up doing is putting the focus back on us.
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So it's like it took God's blood, sweat and tears to get me in, but now it takes my blood, sweat and tears to keep God happy with me.
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So the primary message that has been going forth from the Christian community for decades now is essentially that the focus of the Christian faith is the life of the Christian.
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And so you know, in order for that, in order to sort of flesh that out, we've developed a whole vision of what it looks like to be a Christian based on that assumption that doesn't allow for dirt, messiness, failure, sin, really.
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I mean.
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One of the things I say in the book is it shouldn't surprise me, but it still does, that the one institution left in the world that at least theoretically, believes in original sin is so shocked when they encounter it, which is mind-blowing to me and as a result, people have concluded that church is the scariest place, rather than the safest place, for fallen people to fall down and broken people to break things.
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And I just I don't think.
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In fact, I was telling my wife the other night, my wife Stacey, I said it is scandalous to me that pretty much anybody can walk into any church, and I know that there are remarkable exceptions to this, thank God but for the most part, generally speaking, anybody can walk into any church of any denomination and not hear the gospel.
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They don't hear, it is finished.
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They get a to-do list.
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They get a sort of do more, try harder inspirational message to be better.
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They get a get cleaner, climb higher for God kind of message but they don't simply get it is finished, full stop, that we live our lives under a banner that reads it is finished, that everything necessary that needed to happen in order to get us right with God forever took place 2000 years ago.
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We're in, it's finished, don't worry about it anymore.
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God's not keeping score.
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God's not up there keeping score and deciding to dole out blessings or curses based on how we're doing or how we're behaving or whatever.
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Now, that's very different than saying that we don't experience the horizontal consequences of our decisions.
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We do, obviously.
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That goes without saying that every decision we make, good or bad, has consequences to it and we experience those consequences horizontally.
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But it's when we conflate the horizontal experience with the vertical reality that God has us and loves us and approves of us, no matter what, because of Jesus, that things get really murky, things get really cloudy and things get really confused.
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So you know part of the method behind my madness, part of the method behind my madness in, even writing the book, deciding to tell my story.
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As raw and unsanitized as the story is, is to kind of break the mold a little bit, to kind of push the envelope.
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Not because I'm trying to be some shock jock, that's not it.
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It's just the fact that I think we have turned Christianity into a sanitization project instead of a real life, real broken people living in a broken world with other broken people and yet loved forever by a gracious God.
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So people wear masks, people pretend that they're better than they are, people try to live up to other Christians expectations and everybody's just faking it.
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They're just faking it.
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They don't feel the freedom to tell the truth about themselves, the you know the good, the bad and the ugly, um, and so I don't know what kind of effect me telling my story will have on people, but my hope is that it will set them free to tell the truth about themselves, knowing that God loves them, even if other people reject them for it.
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So what is the Christian life to you?
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You tell me a lot of what it's not.
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So what is it?
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Enjoying the gift period.
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That's it.
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I mean, I'm a dad of three kids, as I mentioned a few minutes ago, and Christmas mornings, when they were kids or birthdays, I looked forward to buying them gifts that I knew they wanted, knew they would enjoy, and it was pure joy for me to watch them open their gift and just be ecstatic about it and then play with it and enjoy it.
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I got tremendous satisfaction and joy from that, and I think so often we think that God's given us this amazing gift and we have to spend the rest of our lives paying him back for it, and we do that under the umbrella of thinking that that's what really honors God, that's what glorifies God.
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Someone once said they pose this question how do you glorify a water fountain?
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You simply come thirsty and drink.
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You get your thirst satisfied by drinking from the fountain.
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Drinking from the fountain, you don't come with anything, and so I routinely and regularly describe the Christian life as simply enjoy the gift.
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Just live, laugh, love, dance, cuss, enjoy, feel everything that there is to feel in this broken life the good stuff, the bad stuff, all of it.
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Feel it all, experience it all and trust that God is good through it all, trust that God loves us through it all.
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He doesn't love us more when we're being good and he doesn't love us less when we're being bad.
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And just enjoying the radicality of his gift of grace to us is something that I, like I said routinely.
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That phrase, enjoying the gift, is a phrase that I use to routinely describe the Christian life.
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I think we spend way too much time thinking about what the Christian life is supposed to be instead of just living.
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Just live.
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Pray for wisdom along the way, pray for protection along the way, pray for guidance along the way.
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Trust that God is guiding you and protecting you, even if you're not praying for those things, that his guidance of us and his protection of us is not dependent on us routinely asking him for it.
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He loves us no matter what.
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And then just live.
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Enjoy the people in your life.
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Don't worry about sin-sniffing everybody else.
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Don't worry about sin-sniffing yourself as you make stupid decisions in life and you suffer the consequences of those decisions.
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Hopefully become a little bit wiser, and your decisions become a little bit wiser over time.
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Um, but I really think that spiritual growth is coming to a deeper understanding of our daily need for grace.
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That's what it is, and and and there's, you know, biblical support for this, of course.
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Um, you know, in Philipp Philippians 3, when the apostle Paul is describing his spiritual journey, he says I now consider all of that stuff nothing compared to Jesus and what he's gifted me.
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And then he says things at the end of his life like you know, I'm the worst guy that I know, I'm the chief of sinners, I'm the least among the saints, blah, blah, blah.
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And so I think we typically think that spiritual growth is I started low, this is the way I kind of heard, no one ever said these words, but this was implied very strongly that spiritual growth is I'm becoming stronger and stronger and more and more competent every day, whereas according to the Bible and life, what we discover is that spiritual growth is not I'm becoming stronger and stronger and more and more competent every day, it's I'm becoming increasingly aware of how weak and incompetent I am and how strong and competent Jesus was and continues to be for me, how strong and competent Jesus was and continues to be for me.
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So if we want to talk about spiritual growth at all, it's more of a downward growth than an upward growth, if that makes sense, it's.
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You know, I have a friend named Jean Leroux who says if you're not the worst sinner you know, you don't know yourself very well, and I love that.
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Jack Miller, who was a well-known Presbyterian minister in the latter part of the 20th century said, used to say to his congregation cheer up, you're a lot worse off than you think you are.
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But.
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But God's grace is infinitely greater than anything you could ever ask for or imagine.
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So that's sort of my long.
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I've got the short answer enjoy the gift and then the longer answer about spiritual growth being downward, not upward in the way that it's typically presented to us.
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Man, that's a lot to take in.
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So what about-.
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I'll tell you why.
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It's a lot to take in.
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I mean it's.
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I've been there.
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It was a lot for me to take in a number of years ago too, because we've heard the exact opposite our entire lives literally.
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And so I tell people.
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For the most part they're like oh my gosh, your message is so freeing and I'm like timeout, it's not my message, um, it's message, and it only seems new because it's so old and has been lost for so long that it seems like something new.
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But the kinds of things that I'm saying are the kinds of things that Protestant reformers like Martin Luther were saying 600 years ago or however long it was, 500 years ago, whatever, in the early 1500s.
00:23:07.192 --> 00:23:09.020
So I mean, this is stuff.
00:23:11.075 --> 00:23:16.988
I think we've turned Christianity into a behavior modification project, a self-betterment project.
00:23:16.988 --> 00:23:22.105
We call it Christianity, but in reality it's moralism.
00:23:22.105 --> 00:23:24.917
Morality is good, moralism is bad.
00:23:24.917 --> 00:23:39.157
And I think that when you read the Bible through the lens of God's grace, you start reading some of those very familiar passages that you thought said one thing very differently.
00:23:39.157 --> 00:23:43.066
So I was telling my wife this morning.
00:23:43.066 --> 00:24:01.582
I said, first of all, we have this internal problem with receiving this truth Because since the Garden of Eden we've been wanting to do things our own way, we've been wanting to earn our own way, we've been wanting to secure our own rightness, our own righteousness, we've wanted to be our own God.
00:24:02.575 --> 00:24:09.969
So we have this sort of internal, natural, hardwired inside of us drive to sort of do it on our own.
00:24:09.969 --> 00:24:24.039
But then we have these outside messages coming from supposed respected religious or Christian leaders, preachers and writers and things like that, that reinforce that inward drive.
00:24:24.039 --> 00:24:27.407
So we're told do more, try harder, get better, climb higher.
00:24:27.407 --> 00:24:34.298
And that's everything we want to hear Do more, try harder, get I can do more, I can try harder, I can get better, I can climb higher.
00:24:34.338 --> 00:25:14.386
And and it seems temporarily inspirational until life happens, when the shit hits the, the fan, that kind of message falls flat, completely falls flat, um, and you bump up against the lack of your own resources and you start to realize if grace isn't everything, I'm screwed like I'm screwed, um, and that's when, for me anyway, uh, it felt like I became a christian all over again when I started to see that and Jesus became more important to me, the work of Jesus became more important to me, who God is and God's tenderness and love and care, and and all of those things became so much more beautiful and so much more important to me.
00:25:15.776 --> 00:25:24.645
So anyway, so in there's two things, kind of well, three, kind of swirling around in my head.
00:25:24.645 --> 00:25:28.965
I'll give them to you and you can pick door number one, two or three.
00:25:28.965 --> 00:25:34.115
One is I don't know any direction the spirit leads.
00:25:34.115 --> 00:25:36.296
One is the first door is how do you deal with the anger?
00:25:36.296 --> 00:25:49.780
The first door is how do you deal with the anger, because there can be a lot of resentment or frustration related to, you know such a shallow expression of faith.
00:25:49.780 --> 00:25:57.083
Door number two is how do you deal with and you don't have to answer all of these.
00:25:57.083 --> 00:25:58.963
But door number two is how do you deal with?
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You know, in my experience, what you're talking about.
00:26:02.884 --> 00:26:15.369
In my heart it feels like being in communion with people and just begging them to break, Like would you just stop trying to be so together.
00:26:15.369 --> 00:26:25.032
But sometimes that can feel like a, it can be a burden that, like people just don't want to be vulnerable.
00:26:25.032 --> 00:26:31.619
So there's the anger issue, there's a vulnerability issue, and then three, which is completely off the wall.
00:26:31.619 --> 00:26:37.607
But sometimes in my experience, I feel like when we talk to authors, you know that that was the darkest corners of your life and there's.
00:26:37.607 --> 00:26:39.371
You know, that book is written and it was hard.
00:26:39.371 --> 00:26:47.663
But I also want to know what's happening in Tullian's life, like what are the new revelations?
00:26:47.663 --> 00:26:48.709
What are the revelations today?
00:26:48.709 --> 00:26:52.461
Like what is, and then, what are the revelations or the things that you're beginning to piece together for tomorrow?
00:26:52.461 --> 00:26:54.626
That god may be saying so?
00:26:55.750 --> 00:26:59.358
I think I can probably answer all three in a short span of time.
00:26:59.358 --> 00:27:17.166
I've had had to deal with the anger stuff on a lot of levels and specifically directed at the church in 2015.
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That's when I bottomed out got divorced, lost everything, scandal, whole deal.
00:27:22.271 --> 00:27:46.680
But some of my anger was stoked before that because, as I was coming to a deeper understanding of just how radical the gospel is, I started thinking about all of the sermons I heard growing up, the Sunday school lessons, the youth retreats, even the college classes.
00:27:46.680 --> 00:27:48.044
I took the seminary.
