Beeson Podcast, Episode #647 Dr. Chris Wright March 28, 2023 >>Announcer: Welcome to the Beeson podcast, coming to you from Beeson Divinity School on the campus of Samford University. Now your hosts, Doug Sweeney and Kristen Padilla. >>Kristen Padilla: Welcome to the Beeson Podcast. I’m your host, Kristen Padilla, and I’m here today without my co-host, Doug Sweeney. He is actually representing Beeson Divinity School away from the school. But don’t worry, he will be back with us next week. Today’s guest comes all the way from England and we are very happy that he is with us and ministering to our students. Before I tell you about who it is we have on the show, allow me to give you a brief update as to what’s been happening here at Beeson. Beginning this fall, we will begin offering a few evening courses and going forward we will have even more evening course offering for those who are enrolled in the master of arts and theological studies and the master of divinity programs. This will allow those who want to pursue a seminary education while working a full time job to do so. These classes will still be held in person on our campus. So, you or someone you know who is interested will need to live in or near Birmingham to participate. But if this option opens a door for you to pursue a seminary degree, then please contact us. You can reach out admissions office at 205-726-2227 or visit our website at www.BeesonDivinity.com/admission. Secondly, while I’m talking about our degree programs, if you are interested in our new forthcoming PhD program, then I hope you will sign our interest form so that you can be the first to know all the important details regarding the program and the mission. You will be able to find this link in our podcast episode details on our website www.BeesonDivinity.com/podcast, or by going to our news page www.BeesonDivinity.com/news, and searching for our PhD story in our archive. You won’t have to search for long, it’s still a relatively new news story. Well, let me tell you about who we have on the show today. Today’s guest is the Reverend Dr. Chris Wright. Dr. Wright is the Global Ambassador for Langham Partnership. This is a global movement of Christ followers fulfilling the great commission by equipping and resourcing indigenous leaders around the world, to multiply disciples and their families, churches, and communities. Dr. Wright is also a missiologist, Old Testament scholar, Anglican priest, and you may know him because he’s a published author. You may know him by one of his many books. So, we’re so glad to have you with us on campus and on the show today. Welcome, to the Beeson Podcast. >>Dr. Wright: Thank you so much, Kristen. It’s great to be here. Thank you. >>Kristen Padilla: Well, Dr. Wright, as I’ve already eluded to, many of our listeners may know you from your books. But there are some listeners who may be hearing your name for the first time. So, I gave a proper bio of you, but I wonder if you can introduce yourself more personally? Where are you from? How did you come to faith in Jesus Christ? >>Dr. Wright: Okay. Thanks, Kristen. Good. Well, if anybody is interested the accent comes from Northern Ireland. That’s where I was born and grew up. I’m a Belfast boy, really, by origin although I’ve lived in London and England. So, I’m Irish, but not English. But living in Britain, if that makes any sense. Yeah, I came to faith as a boy really. I think I was about five or six. My parents had been missionaries in Brazil and I had older siblings. One Sunday after church I remember my older brother asking me if my name was in the Lamb’s Book of Life. I’m not sure I probably understood what he meant. But he explained that I needed that Jesus would know my name so that I could go to Heaven and so on. I said, well, how do you do that? (laughs) And he told me to open my heart to Jesus and ask him to forgive my sins and I did. And so I have known that I’m a Christian ever since then, really, from childhood. So, it’s a great blessing and privilege really to have grown up in a Christian home from that early age. So, then yes I went to school and everything in Northern Ireland but I did my university degrees in England and Cambridge and then got married. My wife is called Liz. We’ve been married now 52 years, believe it or not, 53 this year. So, we’ve got four grown up children. They are all married. 11 grandkids. We spent a few years in India. You might want to talk about it a bit later. I was teaching theology there in India. And then at All Nations Christian College, which is a missionary training college in England, I was there for 13 years. And then these last 20 something years with the Langham Partnership. >>Kristen Padilla: Wonderful. Some of our listeners, and I know even still some of our student, are in that discernment process – discerning what is it that the Lord is calling me to, or to become? And I mentioned you’re a missiologist, a priest, and an Old Testament scholar. So, I wonder if you can tell us how the Lord led you in each direction and how those vocations all complement one another? >>Dr. Wright: Thank you. Yes, well, they go in almost the opposite direction to the order you put them in because the first one really would have been an Old Testament scholar and that happened because after my first degree, which was in classics and then in theology in Cambridge, I went back to Northern Ireland. I was teaching in high school but there’s an institution called Belfast Bible College and the principal then asked if I would take some evening classes for just general public on different subjects as a theology graduate. And one of the topics he asked me to was Christian Ethics. I’d not actually studied that in my degree, but I thought well that’s okay, I’ll read a few books, bone it up, and then I can teach that, it’s okay. So, I looked around for books on Old Testament Ethics. I thought I should start with the Old Testament and talk a bit about the New and then go on to current issues. But I couldn’t find any books on Old Testament Ethics as such. So, I wrote to my supervisor back in Cambridge because I was thinking of doing a PhD to ask him – did he think that Old Testament Ethics would be a good topic to do PhD research on? And he said, well, it probably would because nobody has written anything on it for 50 years. Which was true at that time. This was going back to the 1970s. So, that’s how I ended up doing my doctorate work on the economics of the Old Testament. Laws to do with land and debt and slavery and interest and all of those sort of things, wealth, poverty, in the Old Testament. So, basically then I got my doctorate in Old Testament studies and that fascinated me. And I just remained a great fan of those scriptures ever since. So, then while I was doing those, this is sort of the second piece of discernment really – I was doing them in Cambridge and we belonged to a local Anglican Church. Actually, I grew up in Belfast, my wife and I both grew up in a Presbyterian Church. So, I was basically born and bred Presbyterian. But in England at that time, in the 1970s, the Presbyterian Church, certainly in Cambridge, was pretty dead. I mean, in terms of sort of theology. And the church at the end of our street was a Church of England – Anglican Church, which was lively, it was evangelical, the vicar welcomed us. And got me leading bible studies, preaching from time to time, involved with him in the church. Bit by bit he began to say would I consider ordained pastoral ministry in the church? Which I’d always been sort of open to, but never really considered until they began to push me in that direction. So, in a sense, that calling came from people in the church who discerned something in me that they thought could be used in the ordained ministry. So, I ended up then thinking okay if I’m now a member of the Church of England I might as well stay in it. Even though one time when I went back to Belfast and one of my aunts heard that I moved from the Presbyterian Church to the Anglican Church and she said to me, “I hear you’ve changed your religion.” She said. (laughs) Which wasn’t quite true. So, that’s how I ended up in the Church of England, the Anglican Church, and was ordained. And did nearly five years in pastoral ministry as an associate pastor, or a curate, as it’s called in England in a church down in the south of London. And then while I was there, I was invited again to go to India to teach and therefore in that sense become a missionary. I never really liked that word, because I thought if I go and teach theology in a seminary in India what makes me different from if I go and teach in a seminary in Britain? I mean, I’m doing the same job but all I’ve had is a jet flight and I’ve become a missionary. I’ve always thought that mission is something for every Christian to be involved in. However, certainly that was an invitation to go and teach in seminary in India, and so we did that. Took my family there. And was there for five years. It was really while we were there that I began by teaching the Old Testament to men and women who were very much in a totally different culture from the one I’d left behind, the Indian culture with all the surrounding realities of Hinduism and gods, many gods – fertility cults, all the kind of stuff that you read about in the Old Testament. Some of the missional aspects of the scriptures began to make much more sense to me. And so I began to think through how do we read the bible for people who are going to be needing to use their bible in the context of the front face, the call light, of Christian mission. So, when I then came back and this is sort of the end of that story ... I came back to the UK in 1988 I then joined All Nations Christian College, which as I said is a mission training college, cross-cultural training, and so all the teaching that I was doing was for people who were either already in or moving into cross-cultural mission service. So, missiology was the third area to kind of be an arrow in my bow or quiver, as it were, of both the Old Testament and ordained ministry. And then missional thinking and writing. >>Kristen Padilla: Well, you mentioned becoming an Anglican priest at the invitation or prodding of someone else. And it’s my understanding that the late John Stott extended a different kind of invitation to you and that was to serve at Langham partnership where you’ve been since 2001. I’m thinking about our listeners who even though I gave a little bit about what this Langham partnership is, I wonder if you can just tell us more about its history and its work and its mission, and what you oversee in your role? >>Dr. Wright: Hmm. Yeah, thanks Kristen. Well, first of all, to go back to where you started, John Stott himself, dear brother, as you say he’s now the late John Stott, he died in 2011 at the age of 90. Really, I mean, I’d known him personally since 1978 when I was just recently after my doctorate and was into Old Testament issues and ethics and so on. And he invited me to speak at a conference on social ethics, evangelical social ethics in the UK at that time. In the 1970s evangelicals were getting more and more committed to holistic integral mission. That the gospel must relate to culture and economic and political issues and John Stott was very much our hero. So, I’d known John through those years. So, when we came back from India in 1988 he asked me first of all to become one of the trustees of what was then the Evangelical Literature Trust, which was one of his ministries. The other was the Langham Trust. And so again I was involved with that aspect of his work. The books and so on that he was having sent to the majority world, to the global south. And so then after my 13 years at All Nations Christian College, around about the year 2000 I was thinking of a move and wondering what should be next, the next phase of my life. And I wrote to John Stott to ask and he then invited me to consider taking over the leadership of the ministries that he had started which was the Langham Trust and the Literature Trust. And so with considerable foreboding in some ways because it was sort of ... it wasn’t as if he was the CEO of a big organization, already had a job description and everything else, it’s kind of taking over from him a vision and some ministries and then seeking to give it structure and shape and organization. So, what Langham does, and by the way, the word Langham is just the name of a street in London. (laughs) It doesn’t actually mean anything. It’s where his church was, still is, All Souls Church, Langham Place. So, when he started these ministries he just called it after the street in London. Langham Trust and the Langham Partnership. Basically it’s because what Stott observed was that the churches outside the West, which we now often refer to as the majority world, or the global South. Basically the great continents of the South – Africa, Asia, Latin America. It’s where the majority of the world’s Christians live. So, the Church in America and the West is basically marginal to world Christianity. We are somewhere at about 25% of those in the world who call themselves Christians. But what John Stott observed was that this great growth of the church outside the West but often it’s growth without depth, without resourcing, without pastoral training, without books and so on. So, the Langham scholar program was providing funds for men and women to do a PhD, a doctorate, in theology and then return to their home country or continent and teach. So, he had a great vision for the teaching of future pastors, that they should be teachers who were both godly and evangelical and committed to the scriptures, but also academically at the highest level. So, that was the theological education. The second program was Langham Literature. Which was getting books into the hands of pastors, but now increasingly trying to facilitate the creation and publication of books by majority world authors, that is from Africa and Asia, for their own context and in their own languages. But also where possible to bring those books and that voice to the western academy and church as well so that we gain some of the riches of what God is doing in other parts of the world. And then thirdly, the program called Langham Preaching which is really trying to encourage the standards of biblical preaching that is not just preaching stories or preaching themes, but genuinely taking the text of the bible and preaching it and expounding it well. And so Langham Preaching is now working in 90 countries, launching movements and trying to change the culture of preaching in different countries around the world. Now almost entirely led by national and continental leaders who are indigenous to their own contexts. It’s not all being done, by any means, by western people. So, those are the three programs. And best place to find out is just through the website which is just www.Langham.org and you’ll find everything there. >>Kristen Padilla: You recently just spoke today a few hours ago to our students at a global voices event, which is sponsored by our global center. And the title of your lecture was, “The Great Story and the Great Commission: Reading the Whole Bible For Mission.” You also have a book which by the time this podcast episode has released it will have already come out. It’s a brand new book called “The Great Story and the Great Commission: Participating in the Biblical Drama of Mission.” So, I’m wondering, both from just the perspective of the book and then also your lecture today, what are you trying to argue regarding the way that we read scripture as it relates to missions and the Great Commission? And then I’m hearing this word “reading the bible for mission” or the “biblical drama of mission.” How do you understand that word? >>Dr. Wright: Big question! Lots in there. Yes. I should just say I suppose to make it perfectly correct, the book is published by Baker. I’m sure they’d want me to add that. Yes, it’s a great story and the great story of course means the story of the whole bible, treating the bible as one whole story. And what I mean by mission, first and foremost, is the mission of God. Part of the problem with a lot of the arguments we have about mission in the church today is because we keep on being very anthropocentric. We think of mission as something WE do. WE go out and be missionaries and then we have to ask – what is the mission of the church? Which is a good question to ask. We need to get there. But I think we need to start by asking what is God doing in the world? And the bible as a whole story tells us that. It tells us that here is a God who created the world, who saw the world go to rack and ruin through our sin and rebellion, but he has chosen not to abandon the world but made a promise that he would bring blessing to all the nations, to Abraham and then pushes that story through the whole of the Old Testament until the coming of Christ. And then sends the disciples out in mission to go to all nations, as he promised to Abraham, until he returns and brings about the new creation – the new heavens and the new earth. So, it’s a story which takes us from creation to new creation, as the story of God. The story of mission. His mission. His purpose. And then God calls us to participate in that as God’s people. So, for Israel of the Old Testament they were called to be a light to the nations. Not initially to go anywhere but simply to be the people of God, to preserve the worship and the name of the Lord, to demonstrate his character and his nature and his revelation in trust until through the Son of God’s coming the incarnate Jesus of Nazareth, we are now then commissioned to go to the nations to bring that blessing to the world. So, I think the importance of reading the bible as a whole for me is that particularly those of us who are evangelicals, we tend to read the bible very tidbit ish. We read a bit every day. Just a little verse here or there. We have a nice promise or two. Or we use the bible just as a few proof texts for our doctrines. Or if we’re very interested in mission, we just use the missionary texts, so-called. The Great Commission at the end of Matthew’s gospel and Mark’s gospel and Luke’s and so on. And we think that mission is just about those after thoughts of Jesus at the end of the gospel. Where he says, “I’m off to heaven, what are these guys going to do with the rest of their lives?” Well, hey, why don’t you go be missionaries? So, mission becomes a kind of end thing at the end of the gospels, whereas I want to argue that actually if we really take the bible as one whole story, then God has had this purpose and plan all through history from the very beginning since we fell into sin. And therefore our participation is basically saying to people, “Get into this story. Don’t miss out on the party. This is what God is doing in the world. So, get involved. Get into the story. And then live it out in your daily work, your daily life, your marriage, your home, your family, your sport, your leisure. And also, if God calls you into various other forms of ordained pastoral or cross-cultural missionary work and so on. But whatever it is you’re doing, get into the mission of God and belong to what he is doing. Because that’s THE story. That’s the true story of the world.” >>Kristen Padilla: I encourage our listeners to go to Amazon or Baker’s website, find your new book, buy it, read it, and then your Global Voices lecture should be on our YouTube Channel @BeesonDivinity. You can go and listen to Dr. Wright give that lecture from earlier today. When I was looking through your books it struck me that you also write about Jesus from the perspective of the Old Testament. One of the questions that our students wrestle with is how do the Old and New Testaments fit together? Can you say a few words about the Old and the New, how they relate together, and Jesus Christ? >>Dr. Wright: Thank you. Yeah, again, a very perceptive question. It’s one where people seem to me to go to two opposite extremes. Both of which I think are ... not necessarily wrong, but misleading. One is to say, well, now we have the New Testament, the Old Testament is exactly that – it’s all old, the clue is in the word. We don’t need it anymore. It’s a bit like the rocket booster that carries the capsule into space and once the capsule is gone you can let the rocket drop away. So, forget the Old Testament. And that I’m sure is wrong, because for Jesus and the Apostles the Old Testament was simply their scriptures. It’s part of the scripture and Paul says it’s all inspired by God and it’s all useful in profitable. The other extreme is those who want to say, “Well, I’m told that the Old Testament is all about Jesus?” In other words, it’s all leading to him and so they have a very Christ centered understanding of the whole bible, which is good. But then they go back to the Old Testament and they’re trying to find Jesus everywhere, like where’s Waldo? You read a passage ... Jesus must be in here somewhere, so I’ve got to find him. And again, to me that’s often misleading because it treats the Old Testament non-historically, it doesn’t accept the fact that this is a journey that leads TO Jesus. Jesus isn’t there yet. Except of course in the sense that obviously the God who is revealing himself in the Old Testament is the God whom we now know as the Holy Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. So, the whole of God is there in that sense, but Jesus is the name of the human being who was born of the virgin Mary in which this God of the scriptures becomes incarnate. And if you find Jesus all over the Old Testament sometimes I think you lose the uniqueness and the unprecedented nature of the incarnation. Which is theologically I think misleading. So, what I suggest in my book, “Knowing Jesus Through The Old Testament,” which is a significant title. It wasn’t “Finding Jesus in the Old Testament,” it’s, “Knowing [Him] Through The Old Testament,” is to show the way in which the New Testament itself, particularly Matthew’s gospel, but all the rest of the New Testament, they see that the Old Testament is what provides the story that leads to Jesus. Without the Old Testament narrative, Jesus is a bit like ET, he just drops in. Who is he? What’s he come? It’s the Old Testament story which he comes to fulfill. But it’s also that the Old Testament makes God’s promise that Jesus then keeps. So, the whole Old Testament is declaring to us that the God who was the creator of the world and the redeemer of Israel is on record as having promised that he’s going to come, he’s going to do this, he’s going to do that, he’s going to save the world, and here is Jesus who does it. So, without the Old Testament, you lack a sense of what it is that Jesus has come to do. And thirdly, who is Jesus? Well, we say he’s the Christ. He’s the Messiah. He’s the Lord. He’s the Good Shepherd. He’s the King. All these words that we have to talk about Jesus. They’re all from the Old Testament scriptures. He’s the Son of Man. He’s the Son of God. Whatever way you talk about Jesus, you need the scriptures of the Old Testament to understand those phrases and the concepts that lie behind it. And then finally it’s the Old Testament that reveals to us the God whom Jesus embodies. And I put it that way round because one of the problems Christians have with non-Christians is non-Christians say, “What do you mean Jesus is God? Jesus never claimed to be God.” He didn’t stand up with a placard and a halo saying, “Hey guys, I’m God.” Because the word “god” in English is just an Anglo-Saxon monosyllable. G-O-D. It’s generic. It doesn’t have any content unless you say, well, which god? Who god? And the point about the Old Testament is that it reveals this is the God who has revealed himself. God says to Israel, “You were shown these things,” the Israelites, the exodus, the redemption ... “You were shown these things so that you might know that Yahweh is God and there is no other.” It’s the God who is the Creator, the Redeemer of Israel, the God of the Exodus and Moses and David. It’s this God revealed in all His compassion and love and justice, etc. This is the God who now walks among us in Jesus of Nazareth. And unless we get that straight we’ll always just argue over “the deity of Christ, yes or no?” When we haven’t even defined what we mean by deity or divinity. So, we need the Old Testament in order to understand all of those things about Jesus and then the purpose of why he came, his death and resurrection, and his plans for the future of the world. So, those are some of the ways in which in that particular book, “Knowing Jesus Through the Old Testament,” I try to explain these things. >>Kristen Padilla: Thank you, that’s helpful. I want to pivot just a bit and hear you reflect on God’s work in the world. Hearing about your work with Langham, hearing about how you spent time in India – I would imagine you have a lot of relationships and you were up close and personal with people and stories of how God is raising up his church, developing leaders, at work in the world, and sometimes for us in the West we can be so isolated, or we get fixated on the stories that are negative happening in the world. I wonder if you can just give us a glimpse into some of the stories that you’re hearing about and the people that you’re meeting through your work about God’s work in the world? >>Dr. Wright: The question then is knowing where to start. (laughs) We all know about the war going on in Ukraine at the moment. A few years ago, I think it was 2018, I was in Ukraine because we have Langham scholars there, that is men who received their doctorates and are teaching in the seminaries in that country through Langham. And I visited them some in Kiev itself, the Ukraine Evangelical Theological Seminary, and another down in Odessa right on the Black Sea, which has been bombed. And we have Langham scholars. I have this tremendous sense of hope because they’re there doing amazing stuff in what at that time seemed to be a country that was discovering itself, was liberated and so on. And then tragically we have this invasion and this war, but what I hear from these men, because they’re all still there ... they’re still serving in that country and some of them have had loved ones killed on the front lines. But what we hear is that they’re using those seminaries as hubs for refugees, they’re taking cars with loads of supplies and going to the front lines and to cities that are being shelled. They’re bringing people out, getting them free, they’re risking their lives. And I receive these reports almost daily from these men whom I know and women, too, because one of them is a sister. And that gives me a great sense both of humility, but also of admiration for how these men who have all of this academic training but they’re using it also for what I would regard as gospel ministry, because they’re seeking to be good news to people in the depths of their pain and their suffering. And of course they’re able to bear witness to their faith and to Christ. Many of these folks that they’re dealing with are people who would be orthodox Christian in the Ukraine and orthodox church. And they’re taking them bibles. In some cases having services of holy communion in the ditches with the troops. And they send me photos of that. It brings tears to your eyes. Similarly, we know about the war in Syria over these last 10+ years. And the exodus of Syrian refugees into Lebanon and we have Langham scholars in Lebanon and support a seminary there. They Arab Baptist Theological Seminary. And many of the churches in Lebanon reached out to these Syrian refugees fleeing from the war, from a country which had been at war with Lebanon for many years. This was their enemy. Reached out in love and compassion, with food and clothing and help and so on. So, many of these Syrian refugees who of course came from Muslim backgrounds, who would never otherwise have had a chance to hear the gospel, end up in Christian churches and many of them come to faith in Christ. I say to myself, well, that doesn’t make the Syrian war or the current earthquake or the war in Ukraine ... it doesn’t make that good. These are evil things. Desperately evil things. But God has the power to bring good out of evil so that even these things can serve the cause of His Kingdom and we in Langham have seen some of our sisters and brothers in those circumstances reaching out and doing quite amazing things. That’s one level. I’ll give you another story. There’s a friend of mine called Rico Villanueva who is a pastor in the Philippines, but he then also became a Langham scholar and did his PhD in England and then went back. And then in the typhoons and the terrible flooding that happens in the Philippines realized that the churches there kept on signing happy songs even though ... there was some sense in which they had no way to find a language that would express what they’re actually feeling inside, which is deep grief and pain and bereavement and so on. And so he did his doctorate in the psalms of lament. And has actually written a book called, “It’s Okay to be Not Okay.” And has become a bit of a reputation of being The Lament Guy, he calls himself now. But he is not only a fine scholar, biblical scholar and a pastor and himself a suffrage in these stations, he is now our commissioning editor for Langham Literature in Asia. Thus to say, he is now seeking out writers in India and East Asia and other places who have got something authentic to say and seeking them to get them into publication and get books written which can then be available to those people and also if they’re in English or could be translated into English to be available in the West. It’s fascinating, isn’t it? To talk about books being translated into English, rather than the other way around. But that is in some cases what’s happening through Langham Literature. >>Kristen Padilla: That’s so encouraging. Even in just the stories you’ve told and even your own story, I’m encouraged – and I hope our listeners are encouraged to hear that we don’t have to think about vocations like scholar, author, pastor in these separate buckets. But to see how the Lord uses all of it and how important theology and the study of scripture is to gospel work on the ground. Those two shouldn’t be divorced. So, thank you for that encouraging word. >>Dr. Wright: That is absolutely true. The gospel itself is intrinsically holistic. It’s good news of Jesus reaching out to people suffering desperately bad news and then being his hands and his feet in that situation. And when the church does that and reaches out in that way, God does stuff. God enters in and the Holy Spirit draws people to Christ. But that’s been true all through the history of the church. The first hospital in the world was created by a bishop in Turkey. Cappadocia it was called them. Bishop Basil. It was actually called [inaudible 00:31:49] in about 360 AD, fourth century AD. Shortly after the Roman Empire had begun to accept Christianity. And he set up this almost a city for lepers and people suffering from all sorts of diseases to apply medical techniques to them. It was interesting, because he had read a lot of Greek medicine [inaudible 00:32:11] and so on. It’s fascinating that even in those days there were some Christians who didn’t like this use of Pagan meds and they thought this is not really Christian. So, even back in those days there were those who were sort of anti-science, even if it was too pagan. But he did, he persevered. He set this up. And so it’s always been the case that Christians have reached out as Jesus did to the poor and the suffering and the needy and the sick – with the love of Christ. And that has then been, as it were, an embodiment of the gospel. In which then the gospel as words, as speech, as a message, as a story, can be heard and received and then responded to by faith and repentance. So, that’s also partly what’s in my convictions and in some of the books I’ve written. >>Kristen Padilla: Beautiful. Well, we always like to end these episodes by asking our guests what the Lord has been teaching them that they wouldn’t mind sharing as a word of encouragement. So, I wonder if there is something that you could share with our listeners that would encourage them as it has encouraged you? >>Dr. Wright: Thank you. Yes. Well, the older you get and the more the world goes the way it’s going at the moment, sometimes it’s very easy to become cynical. It’s very easy to become depressed. Very easy to become negative. And I think the antidote to that is to keep going back to the scriptures and realize that in many ways the world is no worse now than it was back in the days of Judah and before the exile. I mean, it’s worse, there are ways in which it is ... but I read the Book of Jeremiah because I had to speak on this not quite recently to a conference and you just look at what Jeremiah says about the state of his country at that time and boy it reeks of today. It’s a country where they’ve forgotten God. They don’t listen to his word. They are exalting worthless things. They’re telling lies. Nobody even knows how to blush, they’re not ashamed of the evil that they’re doing. There’s violence, there’s bloodshed, there’s murders, there’s sexual idolatry, there’s all sorts of stuff going on in that country. You just read it through the Book of Jeremiah. And what’s God’s answer? An equally skeptical young guy called Jeremiah who didn’t think he could speak three words together. And yet God says, “My answer to this country is I’m giving you a preacher. I’m giving you Jeremiah.” In fact, he says to Jeremiah, “I am giving you to this job.” It’s not so much I’m giving a job to you, as I’m giving you to this job. And then he says, “And I will put my words in your mouth.” In other words, it’s both the givenness of the preacher and the givenness of the word, which then becomes the Book of Jeremiah. Which is both massively judgmental ... it points its finger at what’s going wrong. So, there’s the tearing down and the uprooting as God says in Chapter One. But there’s also the planting and rebuilding. Because there’s always hope. Because beyond and through judgment comes God’s hope, comes the new creation, the new covenant and so on. And so to me reading not just Jeremiah but other parts of the bible, there always has to be this sense of realism about the evil of our world and a radical diagnosis of it but to do so not with cynicism and negativity but to do so with biblical hope and hope is not just optimism. It’s not just thinking, well, things will get better and better in the end. No, they won’t. Jesus said they may well get worse. But it’s the hope that says in the end the future belongs to the kingdom of God and therefore the future is in God’s hands and God is sovereign. And so I can still trust him. And I find that encouraging. I find every morning I try to read a Psalm. The psalms are a tremendous strength. And they are also very truthful. And you read some of those early psalms especially and they are so filled with anger at evil, anger at those who do wickedness, and do it blatantly, and calling out for God to deal with people who are doing what is wrong. And the trouble is we don’t use those psalms in church anymore. We don’t even pray them or sing them. We just want the happy stuff. And I think God says, “I am giving you words that you can use to really express an angry faith,” in God and I mean angry about what’s happening in the world, but a faith and trust in God that God ultimately will put things right. And in the meantime we get on with doing the job of sharing the gospel. So, that’s something of what I’ve been ... I wouldn’t say enjoying, but something that’s been meaningful to me over these recent months and years. >>Kristen Padilla: Thank you. Thank you for sharing. Thank you for being our guest in the podcast and here at Beeson Divinity School. Listeners, you’ve been listening to the Reverend Dr. Chris Wright who is the Global Ambassador for Langham Partnership. We ask you that you would keep Langham Partnership in your prayers. That you would keep Dr. Wright in your prayers. That you would go to their website to see how you can support their ministry. And listeners, we are so grateful to you for joining us again this week and every week. We love to hear from you. We thank you for praying for us. We pray for you. And Lord willing we will be back next week. And I’ll say goodbye for now. >>Kristen Padilla: You’ve been listening to the Beeson podcast. Our theme music is written and performed by Advent Birmingham of the Cathedral Church of the Advent in Birmingham, Alabama. Our engineer is Rob Willis. Our announcer is Mike Pasquarello. Our co-hosts are Doug Sweeney and, myself, Kristen Padilla. Please subscribe to the Beeson podcast at www.BeesonDivinity.com/podcast or on iTunes.