Steve Brown, Etc.

Steve Brown: How does the kindness of Jesus heal our sin, shame, and weakness? We're going to talk about it with Scott Sauls on Steve Brown, Etc.

Guest (Female): He's an old white guy, an author, broadcaster, and seminary professor who's sick of religion. And he's brought friends. Please welcome Steve Brown, Etc.

Steve Brown: We're so glad you're here. It is a gift that you give us each week by spending time with us. But we're even. We give you a gift of incredible talk, profound insights, and incredible broadcasting excellence. So, we're even. You don't owe us anything, and we don't owe you anything.

I'm Steve, the aforementioned old white guy. Matthew Porter is our executive producer. He's here, and he's confused. Everybody keeps talking about football, but all he can find on TV is some kind of soccer tournament. And it's been going on for like a month. I just don't know what's going on. Where is the football?

Matthew Porter: It really can be irritating. But you get into it. You know, these guys were kicking a ball around and said, we could make a game out of this. Here we are.

Steve Brown: Our producer Jeremy is in the little glass booth. Jeremy's like a good soccer goalie; he never drops the ball. Well, except for that one time when he thought he did.

Jeremy: Oh, yeah.

Steve Brown: Our one-man IT department, John Myers, is in the tech bunker. John says if your printer won't work, try unplugging it and then plugging it back in. That will remind your printer who actually has the power in the relationship.

John Myers: That's right.

Steve Brown: And Dr. George Beam is the president of Key Life. It's so hot here in Central Florida, George has switched to Celsius just to feel a bit cooler.

George Beam: That's right. I don't know why people complain. It is Florida. I mean, you do expect it to be hot this time of year. And every year they make a big deal out of it. And I want to say, you said the same thing last year and the year before. If you don't like it, go to Alaska.

Steve Brown: Kathy Wyatt is, of course, the soft feminine side of this program. Kathy's the only one here qualified to say our weather is hot as an oven.

Kathy Wyatt: Matthew, Matthew, Matthew.

Steve Brown: We have a great guest today. One of my favorites. His name is Scott Sauls. He's the founder of Healthy Leaders Incorporated and the Sycamore Community, and was in pastoral ministry for 30 years—churches in Nashville, Kansas City, St. Louis, and New York. He couldn't keep a job, so he decided to find something else like Healthy Leaders Incorporated.

He's also taught preaching at master's degree programs. He's authored seven books, and his latest book, which I hold in my nicotine-stained fingers, is titled *The Mercy King: How the Kindness of Jesus Heals Your Sin, Your Shame, and Your Weakness*. Scott, thanks for taking the time to be with us.

You're not writing on something that most Christians would disagree with. In fact, we would wonder why you would write a book like this. Mercy, God—they go together like a horse and carriage, and we all knew that. So, why is there a need for this kind of book?

Scott Sauls: I wrote it, Steve. First of all, thanks for having me, Steve and team. Great to be with you again; always love having our conversations. Minor correction: I'm not a doctor. I've always wanted to be one, but I have not reached your level of intellect in that regard.

Steve Brown: I have not reached that level. I have a number of doctorates, and every one of them are phony. If you had accepted those speaking engagements at the colleges that asked you, they would have made you a doctor like me. Go ahead, I'm sorry.

Scott Sauls: Yeah, it's funny. All of the college speaking I've done, I've never been offered a doctorate. I don't know what that communicates, but nonetheless, why a book on mercy? Candidly, every book I've ever written has been related to where I was at in my own personal life, my own personal walk, and how God was reaching me.

This came out of a season where the prospect of receiving his mercy beyond an intellectual level—I'd always been able to preach mercy, I'd always been able to lead other people into a personal encounter and experience of and belief in the mercy of Christ—and realized decades into my ministry that I was probably still in junior high as a practitioner of receiving the mercy of Christ and owning it for Scott Sauls.

So, honestly, this was a bit of a journaling exercise that Zondervan invited me to turn into a book. So, I repurposed that whole season of my life and the things that God had impressed on me into a book for other people.

And really, I agree with you. Why write a book on something that Christians—I don't know of a Christian that would say that God is not a God of mercy and mercy isn't for us and mercy isn't for anyone who would receive it. But I believe, and you're one of those people, Steve, over the years who's taught me this just through your own teaching and your writing, it's one thing to understand the mercy of God and to be able to propositionally communicate it and unpack it and write a theology of mercy; it's quite another thing to live it and give it away.

I would say that most of the Christians in my life and my experience over 30 years of pastoral ministry have a deep longing, maybe that they haven't even expressed yet, to know the mercy to the depths that God gives it and to really believe in their heart of hearts that God loves them as much as he says he does. I think that's a struggle that all of us have, actually believing it to the point of internalizing it.

Steve Brown: By the way, I can identify with you. I taught grace and mercy and then had a nervous breakdown. It was a God whacking me upside the head and saying, this is for you. Do you think that's true of a lot of leaders?

Scott Sauls: I do. I think, honestly, it's one of the reasons why a lot of us get into leadership in the first place. It sounds a little bit scary, but a lot of us get into leadership because we're working out our stuff. A lot of it traces back to things in life that can point to a brokenness or to a deficiency that we feel. There are family of origin stories and life experiences and all that other stuff that have shaping influences.

But a lot of us, I think, get into ministry in the first place as an expression of our own woundedness. I think that's okay. Paul the Apostle talks about his own thorn in the flesh and how that equipped him to speak and preach the gospel better. He says that to Timothy as well, that he was a blasphemer and a persecuter and a violent man, and it was through that experience and the anxiety and the deficiencies that it revealed and exposed in him that he became a preacher of mercy after encountering the mercy of Christ himself. So, hopefully, this book will help with that message for some.

Steve Brown: And I don't think that most Christian leaders, until they really screw it up or their life falls apart, understand that's why they're there. They don't understand they're working out their own issues, and that's not something they claim for themselves.

I'm not talking to just them; I'm talking about myself. If you'd have asked me if I understood and applied grace and mercy to my own life, I would have said, "Are you crazy? Of course. I'm teaching it. How could I not apply it to myself?" And I was too spiritually dead to hear the angels laughing.

So, God had to—things really fell apart and rapidly. And it was the best thing that ever happened to me. It took me years after that to simply sit down and say, "What's wrong with me? Something is really off, and I'm not sure what it is." I read books and talked to counselors and went to people like you, Scott, who had been there and done that. And that, dear friend, is how I become the spiritual giant that I am today. Why are people laughing?

You're going to love this book. You really will. It's so good. *The Mercy King: How the Kindness of Jesus Heals Your Sin, Your Shame, and Your Weakness*. And it's true. Don't go anywhere.

Welcome back to the program. We're talking to author Scott Sauls. I've been calling him a doctor, and he just told us he wasn't even a nurse. Scott's latest book, which is great, *The Mercy King: How the Kindness of Jesus Heals Your Sin, Your Shame, and Your Weakness*. Scott, you were talking in the previous segment about the longings. I wondered if you'd springboard from that to talk about the way you've structured the approach of the book.

Scott Sauls: Let me grab a copy because candidly, it's been a minute.

Matthew Porter: Well, I can tee it up for you. You've got Movement One: The Longings We Carry; Movement Two: The Hurts We Endure; and then Movement Three: The Hope That Holds Us. And go.

Scott Sauls: This is a program. If you don't talk, it's not going to work. It's always we've encountered this before where the book comes out and you finished writing it a year and a half ago. You're like, "I don't know. I'm already working on a new one." But you're the first one who ever admitted it. I'm impressed with your authenticity.

So, it's a joke that's not really a joke. Having preached for 30 years and written seven books and I have a weekly Substack too where I write a long-form essay, I tend to forget everything within about two days. And my wife will say to me, "Hey, you remember that movie we watched?" or I'll say, "Hey, let's watch this Netflix show," and she said, "We watched the whole series last month," and I'll entirely forget.

Steve Brown: Remind me to borrow money from you, Scott.

Scott Sauls: For sure, right? I don't think it's dementia because I've had this issue since my 20s. Maybe it's just constant distraction. But now that I've got the contents in front of me, I'm happy to talk with you about Movements One, Two, and Three.

So, yeah, the book is divided into three sections, four chapters each, twelve chapters total. The Longings We Carry traces all the way back to St. Augustine and before. "You have made us for yourself, oh God, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you."

It seems to me that from life experience and from observation that the whole human experience is an exercise of trying to fill that longing with something other than what the human heart and who the human heart was made for. The challenge is that God has given us this incredible creation, and the whole point of creation is to point to the glory and the goodness and the kindness and the character of our Creator.

But as it says in Romans 1, we take created things and we try to substitute them in for the Creator, and it creates all kinds of pathologies and dysfunctions and anxieties, etc. Movement Two, then, is the hurts that we endure. Now that we live in a fallen world, everything's broken, everything's tarnished.

I said in a previous interview that our very best experience—if each of us were to articulate the very best experience, the most life-giving experience we've had in this life in a fallen world, it will pale in comparison to the worst experience that Adam and Eve had in Eden before the fall and that any of us will have in glory after the Lord brings us home.

We just don't understand yet. No eye has seen, no ear has heard what it actually means to live before the face of God, and so we carry hurt along the way, and we try to contend with those hurts in all sorts of ways, most of them dysfunctional.

And then Movement Three is the hope that holds us, which sort of attempts to present Jesus and resurrection and the death of death eventually through resurrection as the answer to all of these things. By the end of the book, I hope that the reader's affections are stirred more deeply for Jesus because of a renewed awareness, or maybe a first-time awareness, of how deep his affections are for all of us and for each of us.

Steve Brown: Why don't we go there? What you said is something that most Christians would agree with totally. But we still—and sometimes not just with booze and sex and power and money and work—sometimes we try to fill that emptiness with religion itself. And that can be dangerous too. Do you think that desire has to get so strong and the counterfeit so clear that we'll do what we were created to do, and that has to do with God and finding it all in him?

Scott Sauls: I think so. I work with a counselor here in the Nashville area; his name is Chip Dodd. He combines Christianity with twelve-step philosophy and theology. And his premise for everybody that he works with is to say at the beginning, every person in the world is an addict. And he says there are basically two kinds of people in the world: there are addicts who are in recovery and addicts who are not in recovery.

And if we want to put Christian and biblical language on that, we can say there are two kinds of people in the world: there are idolaters who are in recovery and idolaters who are not in recovery. Maybe there's a middle ground where we're half in recovery, which is really not to be in recovery. But the bottom line is Christ is the hope, the power, the direction, the trajectory of every believer's recovery from themselves and from what we've tethered our hearts to and who and what we have become addicted to and obsessed with that has gotten our eyes off of the one who loved us and gave himself for us.

Steve Brown: Do you think that God turns the screw until it gets so bad that circumstances require that we say with Lincoln, "I've gotten on my knees because there were times I didn't know where else to go"?

Scott Sauls: I think so. To the degree that God wants to claim us, yes, he does. I mean, look at the Bible. Every single book of the Bible itself was written by a sufferer, except maybe Ecclesiastes. And yet this man, even though he's rich and he's got everything, he's got the Laodicean problem where he feels the emptiness of it all in his heart. And so, yes, God has to turn the screws on us.

It's good stuff. You've got to get this book. This would be a great book for a small group study in your church. It's called *The Mercy King: How the Kindness of Jesus Heals Your Sin, Your Shame, and Your Weakness*. And by the way, it also suggests, though doesn't say it out loud, that your sin and your shame and your weakness are probably the best gifts that God has ever given you. We'll pursue that on the other side of the break. Don't go anywhere.

Hey, thanks for spending this time with us. By the way, if you haven't yet subscribed to the free weekly Key Life email, you're making Scott sad. What did he ever do to you? Not to mention how God feels. So, while you're thinking about it, go to keylife.org/subscribe and try it today. And I can promise three free sins if you do it.

I wonder if the phones are ringing. Oh, wait, we're not live. Scott, I wanted to ask you a question about things that we all recognize that Christians believe. Obviously, we know that we're forgiven. We're fairly confident with that. But I think most believers really struggle with the fact that God really *likes* them. And that's different from the fact that for God so loved the world and he loved me and he saved me.

I will frequently say in a message something along the lines of like, "God likes me ten percent more than he likes you." And people chuckle and laugh at that. But I think it really causes people to stop and think about what does that really mean? Every time he says that, or when I was looking through the questions, my immediate thing is, you know, when I look at my sin, it's so hard to go past that and say, how can God like me? I feel like I go to him with the same thing all the time. Isn't he tired of hearing about it and all that other stuff that goes on from there? But the idea that God really likes us—I think believers struggle with that. Is that a sticking point for us as believers, the fact that God really likes us?

Scott Sauls: Immense struggle for sure, immense and I think universal struggle for anyone and everyone who hopes to be close to the Lord and live in his joy. I think the only answer, again, is going back to the truth that has been told to us by God himself. One of which is he does like us. It's no mistake that Jesus uses the metaphor of little children to describe his posture toward all of his children, from kids from 1 to 92. And I think it even goes past 92 and earlier than one.

But just think about the affection of parents for a little baby. A little baby is costly; it costs you sleep, it costs you money, it costs you time, and they smell bad. It costs you so much to welcome a little baby into your home. And yet how many of us would not say that even at their messiest, we didn't like our kids?

Yeah, they irritated us, they annoyed us when they cried and woke us up at 2 AM. And I think we irritate and annoy God. But we irritate and annoy God to the degree that we are behaving and living and thinking and believing against our own flourishing. He's more frustrated with what we're doing to ourselves, I think, than he is with what we're doing to him. He's immutable; God cannot lose his joy, God cannot lose his happiness. He is fully delighted within the Trinity in being himself, and he's fully at home with himself. He did not need us to be complete.

And so that only really leaves room for God being frustrated with us. Think about what the Lord says through the prophet Malachi to the people of Israel: "Don't you understand I have loved you? I have loved you." That's what he wants to get through to these idolatrous people. The first message and really only message, "I have loved you."

And so I think if we can just imagine our own affection toward a messy baby and then multiply that by infinity, we get a thimbleful of what the ocean of God's love must actually be like. And the other is, again, look at the cross. Look at the extent to which he was willing to go for you to claim you, not when you were at your best but when you were at your worst. The love of Christ came to us while we were still sinners. God demonstrates his own love and affection and liking toward us not while we were at our best but while we were still sinners. That's when he gave himself to the uttermost and to the full.

But the other thing is we're in the image of God. And God really likes himself and for good reason. We are the only creatures, we are the only entity in all of creation about which it can be said that we are made in his likeness. And if he likes and loves himself as much as he does, then what must that say about our own dignity from his perspective?

Steve Brown: You know, one of the profound things you said in this book is that Jesus is attracted to the wounded parts of us. The very things that cause us to think that he doesn't like us are the places that attract him to us.

Scott Sauls: What does your doctor ask you the first time he or she walks into the room when you're waiting? Where are you hurting? That's why a doctor is a doctor. A doctor is motivated to heal. The main thing the doctor wants to know about you is not how your marriage is going or how your recreational life is going; your doctor wants to know about your health.

And that's one of the metaphors, too, that the Gospels use to describe Jesus. He's the Great Physician. He's the healer. And he's motivated by it. He's not put off by it. He can't catch whatever sickness we've got. Our contagion will not rub off on him. And so he can get as close as he wants and breathe into us and have us breathe and cough in his face and he won't catch the contagion. But he will pass on the contagion of his goodness and love and the fruit of his Spirit to us if we're willing to inhale when he breathes on us.

Steve Brown: I had Dudley Hall, one of my friends, say after hearing a sermon on grace, "Oh man, I hope that's true." It really is, isn't it, Scott? It really is true.

Scott Sauls: You know, we never get over it. So I just got a letter from one of my heroes, Joni Eareckson Tada. She just reaches out every now and then just to write something kind to my wife and me. And I interviewed on her show, and said some of the same things we're talking about right now. And Joni, who's been walking with the Lord as she has for so many decades, says, "Tell me again that it's true. Tell me again that it's true." And we never get over our need to be told again and again and again that it's true.

Steve Brown: Well, you've done that on this broadcast and you always do. And Scott, we rise up and call you blessed. You keep writing, and we'll keep talking. Thank you so much, Steve. Thank you so much. Guys, don't go anywhere; we'll tell you who we're going to do it unto next week, and you're going to be amazed.