FamilyLife Today®

Dave Harvey: Shortly after you say, "I do," and you begin living together, all of a sudden you get to know one another in a way that no one else knows you because all the fallenness, the frailties, the foibles, the ridiculous things we do, everything comes off and we begin to see each other for who we really are.

Ann Wilson: Welcome to FamilyLife Today, where we want to help you pursue the relationships that matter most. I’m Ann Wilson.

Dave Wilson: And I’m Dave Wilson, and you can find us at FamilyLifeToday.com. This is FamilyLife Today.

Okay, Dave, we got Dave Harvey in the studio. I thought of all places to start, let's have a bench press competition. But it is the epitome of where we're all about strength, and you write a book about weakness. I love it. As I read through it, I love this because not a lot of people do that. So, is that your lane?

Dave Harvey: It's certainly becoming more of a lane as I grow older, as I suffer more, as I lead longer, as I study Scripture, and as I map on the experiences of passages and people in Scripture onto my life. I realize this is not just my lane, this is everybody's lane. This is every Christian's lane, but in a unique way, it's every leader's lane as well. I talk about the clay pot conspiracy as God's remarkable plan for resilience in ministry, and the simple equation is our weakness plus God's power equals resilience.

Ann Wilson: That's great right there. I remember reading that over and over as I opened up your book. "My weakness plus God's power equals resilience." Walk us through that. How'd you even come up with that?

Dave Harvey: I'm thinking about 2 Corinthians 4, and I'm drawing from 2 Corinthians 4. We have this treasure in jars of clay to show the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us. The idea there is that God stores gospel ministry, his treasure, and he stores it not in gold, not in titanium, but in clay jars. In other words, something breakable, something fragile, something perishable.

Why does he do that? Because putting ministry in frail containers somehow displays his surpassing power. God is determined that the way that he wants to exalt his power is by storing treasure in weak people, in these jars of clay. The surpassing power of God is then confirmed not by the breaking of it, but by the durability of the clay pot.

The pots crack, the pots have problems, but they don't crumble. They endure. That's the whole point of the 2 Corinthians passage. Paul has these series of contrasts he goes after. He says we're afflicted in every way but not crushed, we're perplexed but not driven to despair, and persecuted but not forsaken.

The point of each one of them is ministry is harder than I ever knew, and suffering is part of the job description of those called to ministry. We think that's something that's constantly taking us down, but for Paul and for God, carrying the death of Jesus in our bodies is actually what inspires resilience in our bodies.

We suffer, we endure, but we don't tap out. That's the point Paul makes later on. He says we do not lose heart, but we do not lose heart because the life of Jesus is being manifested in our bodies. Carrying death is the means by which we experience the life of Jesus in our bodies. It's what displays his surpassing power.

Dave Wilson: You said that all applies to ministry and leaders, but I'm sitting here thinking that is exactly marriage and family as well. We resist the weakness. There's something in us. I don't want to embrace weakness, I want to embrace power and strength. I sort of run from weakness, and even in the church sometimes we display power, we don't want to be vulnerable.

Dave Harvey: Shortly after you say, "I do," and you begin living together, all of a sudden you get to know one another in a way that no one else knows you because all the fallenness, the frailties, the foibles, the ridiculous things we do, everything comes off and we begin to see each other for who we really are.

That's when the rubber hits the road. Prior to that, we're living out of a vision of what marriage is going to be, but it's a vision completely devoid of the reality of living with a sinner. We just paint the picture of how beautiful it's going to be and how wonderful it is. It is beautiful and wonderful, but it's in ways that we never anticipated.

We discover that we're married to this sinner, and that part of the program is that God brings us together. In bringing us together, it surfaces things in our heart that can be surfaced in no other way than through this close relationship with another human being in the context of marriage. Then you're beginning to see sinfulness more clearly. You're beginning to see grace and how the gospel applies to those things in a sharper way, and you're growing because marriage is bringing that out of us.

Ann Wilson: We've been in ministry 45 years. How long have you been in ministry?

Dave Harvey: I'm in my 40th year.

Ann Wilson: Okay. With that, I had no idea that suffering would be right alongside us in that. Did you when you entered into that?

Dave Harvey: No. I think part of the issue is that God is trying to create circumstances in our life where we are going to learn how not simply to talk about the gospel, counsel with the gospel, speak articulately about the gospel, or even share the gospel, but we are going to embody the gospel.

The only way to embody the gospel is when you have descents, crucifixions, and resurrections. God bakes that into the lives of all Christians, but leaders in particular, because that is a way that we ultimately learn the gospel on the level that allows us to be able to convey it to others with faith and confidence.

Luke Middendorf: Hi friends, I’m Luke Middendorf, president of FamilyLife. For 50 years, God has been using this ministry to restore marriages and strengthen families. That happens because people like you show up. This month, your gift is matched dollar for dollar. Every dollar you give reaches twice as many families with the truth and hope of the gospel. Give today at FamilyLifeToday.com or call 800-FL-TODAY. We’re grateful for you.

Dave Wilson: I gave my life to Christ in college, and I honestly thought life's going to get better now. Life's pretty good. I just had a successful college football season as a quarterback and was nationally ranked. I'm adding Jesus to this equation. It's going to get even better. The portfolio just took an upgrade.

It's pretty good, and now it's going to be even better because now I know who God is made known through Christ. Literally, I go into my junior year in college at preseason All-American on the magazine stuff and end the season in a hospital with a knee surgery. I remember laying in the hospital bed and looking at the ceiling going, "Really?"

I had no understanding of suffering being a part of the walk. I thought it's all victory. I really wrestled right there with God and I felt like he was like, "I'm here. I am right here. This is what you signed up for. I'm never walking away. We're going to walk through these valleys together. There'll be mountaintops, but you're going to walk through the valleys the rest of your life with me." I was several months in, so I'm a baby Christian, but it was something I didn't want, but I think I realized this is just the beginning. There'll be much more, but this is the beginning. That's the Christian life.

Dave Harvey: The beauty of the conspiracy is not simply that it humbles us, and it's not simply that it allows us to embody the gospel. It's that the suffering and the weakness that we feel is not a barrier to our perseverance. It's a condition for achieving our perseverance. It's like the vehicle.

Paul tells the Romans we rejoice in our sufferings because it produces endurance. Suffering produces endurance. James says rejoice in your various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. In other words, it's like God is saying, "I want you to understand the program. Your suffering is not an obstacle to resilience. It's the means God uses to forge your resilience." So, yes, it humbles us, it unites us, it humanizes us. It allows us to embody the gospel, but it's also a key element in enduring in Christianity.

Dave Wilson: Talk about some of the sufferings you've gone through.

Ann Wilson: I was going to say you don't write a book about this unless you've experienced it.

Dave Harvey: I wrote the book because I wanted the reader to understand how the clay pot conspiracy became real for me and for Kim. My life and my ministry does have some unusual features to it. I led a large church for many years. Large churches always have drama, problems, complications, and things like that.

None of that prepared me for what landed in our lap in the early 2000s where a highly publicized drama played out in our denomination where the leader of the denomination had to step aside. I had to take over, and so I came under scrutiny. It was just one of those times where the pressure that I felt was indescribable as the situation became increasingly public and increasingly complex.

While that was going on, an unimaginable series of events converged that triggered our departure from our local church, the place where I pastored for 27 years. My oldest daughter went through a divorce. The criticism regarding her divorce turned from her and her husband to Kim and I and the way we parented.

You carry this storyline, this narrative in our mind where if I just do the right thing, things will turn out right. You inevitably in life arrive in these situations where doing the right thing is not enough. It pleases God, I believe, and it makes a difference in eternity, I believe, but it doesn't seem to bear the earthly fruit that you're expecting.

If the people would just get on the same page, we're doing everything right. We're not aware of how transactional we really are towards God. "Lord, I've punched the clock, I've done things right, why aren't you delivering on your side of the equation?"

We're in the middle of this and we're trying to figure out how to move forward, and there's no way to move forward in order to address the criticisms that are coming to us about our parenting. In the middle of this denominational crisis, we say, "Hey, let's go through an evaluation."

The elders thought that was a good idea. I thought that seemed to be the only way. We went through a nine-month evaluation of our parenting. The elders concluded Dave's made some mistakes, but Dave's qualified for ministry. That didn't seem to help anybody that actually had concerns about us and about our parenting.

In the meantime, my youngest daughter, who idolized her older sister and wanted ultimately to live the life, she was only 13. My oldest daughter gets divorced. My youngest daughter's world just blows apart. She doesn't know what to do with that, so she begins to misbehave.

That's just corroborating evidence that Dave and Kim don't know how to parent. We're like, "We don't know if we know how to parent or not, but let's look at this." We assumed that there's things we're doing wrong. At the age of 52, Kim and I had a hard reset on life and ministry, which is what brought us down here to Florida.

While that's happening, our teenage daughter is just getting rocked by this whole experience. We're leaving Philadelphia, the only home she's known. She's looking at the things that have happened to our family, the things that have happened in our church, and some of the ways that we've been treated. She began to decline into addiction. We eventually lost her to an accidental overdose. Kim and I are now raising her five-year-old son, which we've been raising him since he was born.

Ann Wilson: I just have to say you've described it really well. The heaviness, the suffering, and then for a daughter, that is the ultimate blow. I can't even imagine how you guys could lift your heads. Maybe because you're raising that five-year-old you had to keep going, and your other kids. That is hard, really hard. I think that a lot of people have experienced hard and they don't know which way to go. You're not just writing about suffering, you've walked in the shadow.

Then you've got not only all that going on, but I'm thinking even you're having people that you've cared for and loved in your church and shepherded, now they've attacked you. Then you also have, and here's what we all have, every listener has this, we have an enemy of our souls who's whispering accusations and even maybe things like "if you had only." I'm guessing you and your wife Kim probably faced all of that. How did you guys even get out of bed, both of you?

Dave Harvey: That's a great question, a perceptive one, because it means you know something about how grief plays out and how it attacks your motivation. Your motivation to do simple things, your motivation to even want to get out of bed. We did have the mercy, and I say that deliberately, the mercy of having to raise our grandson. With that came a cause. You had to get out of bed.

I needed like this book, The Clay Pot Conspiracy. I needed to be resilient. I wanted to think about that as deeply as I could, and I wanted to find the passages that I could anchor into. The book is written around seven wonders, and the fourth wonder is "learn love when the church wounds you." The idea is the church is bad, it's actually worse than you think. God is more glorious in the way he works in the church, but if you're going to serve the church and you're going to love the church, then you will become a target of her imperfections. There is a glorious providential sovereign God that ordains that because he wants to teach you things about what it means to love his bride.

Ann Wilson: How did you get to that point?

Dave Harvey: I wanted to think about this story in writing the book without exempting myself from being part of the problem. That particular chapter, I've never taken as much time writing a chapter as chapter four of this book.

Dave Wilson: How did you walk through it when it was happening? Now you're writing about it in retrospect. I've been there, we've experienced church hurt. I know I was at fault in many areas, so I'm not exonerating. I did and said things wrong, but it was hard. In some ways, I shouldn't have been, but I was shocked. I was surprised at how it went down.

You did such a good job even when you described it with being very careful how you said that. When I was in it, there's a part of my soul that wanted to lash out, wanted to go online, wanted to walk into the pulpit and let the church know you don't know what's going on behind closed doors here, but we're not going to be here much longer and I'm a founder.

I didn't do any of that, but there was a bitterness that I found in there getting. Then I've got a wife over here watching it going, "This is wrong," and I'm like, "Yeah, but I'm wrong too, and so I need to own that side of it." Walk us through that a little bit because I think everybody watching or listening, either in their marriage, in a business situation, or maybe in a church situation, has been hurt. There's been betrayals, there's been things done that were wrong. It's hard not to jump into that.

Dave Harvey: It's very hard. Part of the reason why Genesis 3 is so important is because what's taking place there is we're seeing for the first time the character and nature of sin and how sin operates. The way it's operating within the man is it's seeking to convert the man's status from sinner to sinned against. He's trying to achieve a moral high climb and establish a moral high ground where his biggest problem is being sinned against by the woman and by God.

I realize as I'm writing stories, whether it's this story or any story, there's always this desire to convert myself from a sinner to being sinned against. Part of the answer to your question is I wanted to be able to write my own sin into the story and acknowledge it, not just because that's a higher road. Maybe it is a higher road.

Here is what I want to tell your listeners as well. People that are only sinned against are not resilient. People that are only ever sinned against are not resilient because the moral high ground does not deliver the validation that we need. We need the validation that comes from another. We need the validation that comes from the gospel, and you cannot get the validation of the gospel unless you first acknowledge I'm a sinner, I need a Savior.

My biggest problem is not that I'm sinned against, it's that I'm a sinner. If I'm just sinned against, then I don't need an atoning sacrifice. I don't need Jesus and what he accomplished because I'm a victim, and that's my biggest problem in life. Now, people can be victimized in horrific ways. We're not pulling that from the table.

I'm just saying when we think about our story, just think about times in your life where you were ashamed or embarrassed or you feel like you're sinned against. Have you ever noticed that when you think about your stories, you're never in them with all of your junk? You're never in them with all of your sin.

It's always these other people who are coming on the stage of our life committing sins against us or omitting things they should be doing for us and we're the ones, we're just in the drama and we're just spreading cheer and blessing other people and praying and always having other people sin against us. Our biggest problem is we are perpetually and perennially sinned against.

Ann Wilson: This is so true in marriage because I for years and years thought the problem with our marriage is Dave. If he would only, he's not doing this, he should be doing this, and I am doing so much. I don't think it was until God put a mirror up to my face and it was like he was saying, "What part have you played?"

I realized scripture talks about this. You're so busy looking at the splinter in their eye when you have a plank in your own eye. I feel like that right there, when we take responsibility for our own sin, I think that really helped change us.

Dave Harvey: It had the same effect on Kim and I. The first book that I wrote, When Sinners Say "I Do", was coming to terms with the reality that the biggest problem in my marriage was never going to be the other person. It's going to be me. Which doesn't mean that I can't be sinned against, it doesn't mean that things can't happen to me, but when we talk about the fundamental issues that are going to attack our marriage and the things that I most need in order to move forward in my marriage, meaning the gospel, I have to keep my sinfulness intact in order to experience the goodness and truth of the gospel. We came to the same place. We realized this is the thing, and the culture's not going to reinforce that. Sadly, much of the church has lost sight of that as well. We want to move that, not to the center of our lives, but we want to keep our sinfulness in the gospel so that God is magnified all the more by being a Savior for our sin.

Dave Wilson: All right, that was good stuff with Dave Harvey. That guy's deep.

Ann Wilson: This conversation is just so rich. Again, his book is called The Clay Pot Conspiracy: God's Plan to Use Weakness in Leaders.

Dave Wilson: And in your marriage as well and life. You can get it at FamilyLifeToday.com. Just go to the show notes and click on the link, and he's got some free resources there as well. We've got him back tomorrow, so we'll see you tomorrow.

Ann Wilson: FamilyLife Today is a donor-supported production of FamilyLife, a Cru ministry. 50 years of helping you pursue the relationships that matter most.