At the end of the last summer, I went into LifeWay to buy a book by John MacArthur. The problem was, that book didn’t come out for another few days, and I was impatient and wanted a book on Jesus. After looking around a bit, I ran across one of the displays for a new book called Your Jesus is Too Safe. I had never heard of author Jared C. Wilson, but the content that I skimmed through seemed great. So, I bought it and realized quickly that God wanted me to read that book (of course, He did… He predestined it, right?). After reading this book, my view of Jesus was raised exponentially. After reading his book and blog (The Gospel Driven Church), Jared became one of my favorite pastors to read and listen to, and his Tweets are always great. After a few conversations here and there, I asked Jared to do an interview for us and he graciously agreed.
Brandon Smith: Tell us a little about your testimony and calling to ministry.
Jared Wilson: I was raised in the church. I walked the aisle, made a decision, and got baptized at six years old, then did it again at 12 years old after those 70’s rapture movies scared the fire out of me. I was deathly afraid if I wasn’t super-sure I’d asked Jesus into my heart, the antichrist was going to cut my head off. And this sort of colored my Christian walk throughout my adolescence. I was a believer, but a timid, fearful, neurotic, clinging-to-life-insurance one. It wasn’t until real life kicked in, after I was married, had kids, and hit the rock bottom of my own sinfulness in a period of great depression in my early 30s. I was struck by my depravity, my failure, and pondered whether the world would be better off without my presence. In this time, the Spirit was very sweet to my heart despite being very rough with everything else and I had one of those Peter “To whom shall I go?” moments where I was out of options and Christ was truly my only hope. From then on, I have grown in the confidence of the good news that God is for me in Jesus.
I believe God called me into vocational ministry between my 8th and 9th grade years. It was a summer youth camp experience, of all things, but all week long I believed God wanted me to be a minister “when I grew up,” and then at the end of the week, the camp pastor in the altar call invited anyone who believed God was calling them into ministry to come forward. I’d never in my invitational life heard anyone issue that sort of invitation before, and I took it as confirmation that what I had been hearing all week was true. My understanding of “calling” has evolved since then, of course, but I have never doubted since then that God has wired me up to and commanded me to serve in ministry, even during the 9 years or so when I didn’t serve any vocational capacity.
B: In Your Jesus is Too Safe, you describe the Gospel as scandalous. Explain that one.
J: Well, it’s scandalous on the primary level of content, because it demands we accept that God’s Son, who is God himself, died, and that through this death we are forgiven from sins, something our own good efforts can’t do. So that’s a scandal to the flesh.
It’s scandalous also because it demands we accept that this dead God-Man came back to life to triumph over death for us, and everybody knows dead people don’t come back to life and that we all die.
The Bible guarantees this scandal when it says the message of the cross is foolishness. It knows seeing death as the way to life sounds absurd.
But it’s also scandalous because believing it presupposes our dying to our selves, which is something intelligent and “good” people don’t want to do. It goes against our nature to take up our cross, so the call to do that is scandalous.
And it’s always scandalous on the practical level, because living a life centered on the gospel and full of the gospel’s power has us doing things like forgiving people who’ve wronged us, accepting people who aren’t popular or clean or financially advantageous, etc. A gospel-centered life is counter-cultural; it is an offense to people moving according to the way of the world.
B: You told me recently that you were expecting to release your next book/Bible study resource, Abide. Tell us about that.
J: Yeah, it is scheduled for release April 1 (and that is not an April fool’s). It’s a short book/Bible study hybrid sort of thing, which is the specialty of the publisher, Threads Media, who also published Ed Stetzer’s missional Bible study SENT and some other stuff by Jason Hayes and Margaret Feinberg. They are aimed primarily at young adults 18-30’s, but that is mostly a packaging/aesthetic thing, I think. Certainly the material would work with adults of all ages, and probably even upper level youth.
Abide pulls mostly from the Sermon on the Mount, but attempts to answer the question, “How would living the kingdom of God look in the middle of suburbia or other heavily consumerist environments?” And so it takes what I call the 5 kingdom rhythms — Feeling Scripture, Intentional Prayer, Joyful Fasting, Generous Service, and Community — and goes through how to think about and implement those things in the middle of a culture that often shapes our thinking and values another way. One of the unique things about the book, though, is that it is not the typical behavioristic approaches to spiritual disciplines or formation; I tried really hard to center the sessions on the gospel, so it is really a gospel-driven approach to spiritual formation, with lots of learning who you are in Christ and seeing these “things to do” with a sense of Sabbath rest given by the gospel. And that’s why the book is called Abide.
B: I have heard you use the term “Gospel wakefulness,” could you describe that?
J: This is something that has been a passion of mine for the last 3 years or so and should be for the rest of my life. It’s a timely question too, because the book I’m working on now, my official follow-up to Your Jesus is Too Safe, is tentatively titled Gospel Wakefulness: Treasuring Christ and Savoring His Power.
I boil down gospel wakefulness to a sort of quantum leap in how greatly a believer treasures what Christ has accomplished and how sweetly it tastes to his wakened heart. It is neither synonymous with conversion nor really a “second conversion” experience, although for many it is simultaneous with conversion or for others might feel like a second conversion experience. I think it is something that God does at the intersection of our bottomed-out brokenness and the hearing with open ears and seeing with open eyes and feeling with a broken heart the fuller truth of the gospel. I think it’s when the personal gospel goes cosmic in scope for us personally. It is that moment when the prodigal son “came to his senses” in the pig sty, or when the one leper out of ten healed returned to give thanks. But it’s not merely an emotional thing, something transitory. It’s something that the Spirit does to waken us to the astounding wonder of the gospel, in which all other things of this world grow dim and lose their idolatrous luster.
I’m asked not infrequently how to get it. I don’t think you can “get” it; you have to dwell in the gospel daily and ask God to deepen your affections for him, but my theory is that the way God usually brings gospel wakefulness is in times of intense suffering, brokenness, or grief. Most people I know who have what I’d call gospel wakefulness received it during or as a result of some personal brokenness in their life. I’m going to share some of these stories in the book.
B: What do you think is the most dangerous enemy of the Gospel today?
J: Two things: the willfulness of our own hearts to sin and our susceptibility to the devil’s false accusations against our righteousness in Christ.
B: What is the most crucial advice you could give someone who is reading the Bible or studying theology for the first time?
J: Don’t lose sight of Jesus. Keep your theology tethered to Jesus. I am a big doctrine nerd. Debates, discussions, the big books, the whole nine yards. But most of my college years and early to mid twenties were spent heavily invested in things like the rapture, Calvinism, etc. and I wasn’t any closer to loving Jesus or being awed by the gospel for any of it.
I think even being right on the details takes us off the rails in our investment in the Spirit’s work of sanctification when we get Jesus out on the periphery. Don’t talk about eschatology without centering on Christ the King and the gospel of the kingdom. Don’t talk about predestination and free will without centering on Christ who is before all things and in all things and holding all things together and sustaining the world by his powerful word. Don’t get into Old Testament genealogies and sacrificial systems and feasts and festivals and Canaanite slaughters without centering on Christ the fulfillment, Christ the sacrifice, Christ the abundant provision, Christ the joy, and Christ the judge and ruler, the bringer of division and the prince of peace. Winning the theological battles while losing the Christological war is a loss all around.
Jared is the pastor at Middletown Springs Community Church in Poultney, Vermont and author of the book Your Jesus is Too Safe, available here. He also writes a blog called The Gospel Driven Church.
