Key Life Network

Steve Brown: Listen to me, you're qualified. Let's talk about it on Key Life.

Matthew Porter: Key Life is a radio program for struggling believers, sick of funny religion and pious clichés. Our host and teacher is seminary professor Steve Brown. He teaches that radical freedom leads to infectious joy and surprising faithfulness.

Steve Brown: Thank you, Matthew. If you were listening yesterday, we're talking about some of the lies that neutralize us as a witness to Christ. You have no idea how many times I've heard people say, "I'm not a good witness, I don't know enough," or "I'm not a good witness, I'm not good enough," and a thousand other comments like that. Listen, you're qualified. You know why you're qualified? Because you don't know enough. You're qualified because you're not good enough, and I'll explain.

The Scripture, by the way, was not written for experts or academic theologians. Much of Scripture was written from prison cells rather than from churches or cloistered academic offices. Maybe our words would be more powerful if we spoke from prison. Be that as it may, Scripture was written by and for "dirt under the fingernails" believers. Institutional Christianity, as with any institution, requires organization or planning.

The wandering tribe of tent dwellers in the Old Testament and by and large the uneducated fishing buddies and nobodies in the New Testament have, maybe by necessity, morphed into religious institutions, technical religious language, and in-the-know leaders. The institutions include formal recognition, which would be ordination or a degree, a PhD, religious graduate schools—those are seminaries—and powerful structures of influence. I'm part of that and I understand it.

But there's a great danger of forgetting our heritage—a Gospel meant for normal people with dirt under their fingernails. In a wonderful article in First Things magazine, "The Mystery of Israel," the writer quotes a Jewish friend who says, "I love Catholics, but you guys are trying to impose your lofty rational Hellenistic God on our desert God, our hilltop God, our angry bush God, and it doesn't work for me."

The writer references the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks who says this: "The God of the Hebrew Bible was never the God of academia. The God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob is neither the unmoved mover nor the ground of being, but an historical God who has put himself in dialogue and relationship with real people, the Jews."

In other words, the God of the Bible reveals himself to normal people in normal ways more than he reveals himself to elders and deacons and preachers and seminary professors and religious leaders. Let me show you what happened. There's a difference between institutions and institutionalism. Institutions are necessary for almost any human endeavor of note. But institutionalism is the hardening of institutional arteries.

If you and I had a significant and powerful encounter with God, we might bring others into a similar experience. We might even start a new denomination, call it the Sons and Daughters of Heavenly Hope. Eventually, our movement would write hymns and build buildings and create schools and write prayers and liturgies to reflect our experience.

Our children might experience something similar to what we did, albeit somewhat less powerfully. Our grandchildren would of course become a part of our new, now not-so-new denomination. But they and their children would start asking uncomfortable questions like, "Why do we sing these hymns? Why do we worship the way we do? Why do we believe what we say we believe? What is this really about?"

The answers received would be less than helpful. We would answer, "Well, just because," or maybe, "We've always done it this way." Those asking the questions would quite possibly leave the religious institutions we created because they had not experienced what you and I originally experienced. They only observed the institutional manifestation of the original experience.

It seems to me that this is at least a partial explanation of the large number of "nones"—those who write "none of the above" on surveys about religious affiliation. There are a lot of them around. Maybe they left because they thought they didn't know enough. Maybe they left because they didn't think they were good enough. Maybe they left because they thought they could never understand the esoteric language of the religious. That's a shame. You think about that.

It's Wednesday, and sometimes on Wednesdays when we have a little bit of time, I take some time to answer one or two questions. As you know, Pete comes in on Friday and we spend the whole broadcast doing Q&A. We love your questions. You can ask a question anytime you want 24/7 by dialing 1-800-KEY-LIFE. That's 1-800-539-5433. Follow the instructions, record your question, and sometimes we put that on the air.

Alternatively, you can send your question to Key Life Network, Post Office Box 5000, Maitland, Florida 32794. In Canada, it's Key Life Canada, Post Office Box 28060, Waterloo, Ontario, N2L 6J8. You can also send your question to steve@keylife.org. Those are also touchpoints where if the Spirit should move, you could send a contribution to help with this ministry. I promise that we'll be faithful and squeeze every dime for the glory of God. If you can't, we understand. Do pause sometimes and say a prayer for this ministry.

Let's look at one or two questions. This is an email: Could Jesus have been married? I suppose. Jesus kind of does whatever he wants to do, and we don't get a vote. I suspect that if he wanted to have been married, he would have been married, but he wasn't. You say, "Oh yes he was, I read Dan Brown's book *The Da Vinci Code*." I have a suggestion for you. If you've got that book, burn it. Read it first because it's a good read and it's a fun book, but Dan Brown's wrong. He's crazy. Jesus was not married to Mary Magdalene. If he had been married, we would know about it, so he wasn't, no matter what Dan Brown says in that book.

Speaking of Mary Magdalene, she sent me a birthday greeting a year ago. Wait, don't go anywhere. I'm not crazy. I have a friend who's very close to a lot of the actors in *The Chosen*. It was my birthday, and he's my very good friend, so he went to the lady who played Mary Magdalene and had her record this very long, complimentary birthday wish for me. I thought it was a joke and I deleted it.

He said, "You did what?" and I said, "I deleted it." He said, "I went through a lot of trouble to get her to record that for you." I said, "All right, send it to me one more time." But I would have preferred Mary, the mother of Jesus, and not Mary Magdalene, the one that they said was a prostitute. But listen, I'll take it, and I still have it, and it was a great kind of thing. No, Jesus wasn't married, no matter what anybody tells you.

This is an email, too: How can God show his unconditional love to people who refuse his unconditional love? I don't know. I wouldn't. God is strange and sometimes he keeps on loving them and loving them and loving them until they finally say, "Okay, have it your way" and they come running to Jesus.

I was loved into the Kingdom that way, and maybe you were too. There is no explanation for grace. It's counter-intuitive and it says God isn't who you think he is. He's a God who is defined by his love, and his love is illustrated in the incarnation of Jesus. For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son that whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have everlasting life. I don't understand that, but I'm glad. Hey guys, thanks for being with us. I gotta go, but first, Key Life is a listener-supported production of Key Life Network.