Theology in the Raw - When God Seems Distant: Dr. Kyle Strobel

Episode Date: February 2, 2026

Register for the Exiles in Babylon conference! April 30-May 2 (Minneapolis, MN). Kyle Strobel (Ph.D. University of Aberdeen) is a systematic theologian who teaches spiritual theology for the Biola University Talbot School of Theology Institute for Spiritual Formation and Spiritual Formation Focus programs. He’s the author of several books including his most recent book When God Seems Distant: Surprising Ways God Deepens Our Faith and Draws Us Near.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

It's not your job to make the Christian life feel a certain way. It's drawn near to your Lord. Most of us when we pray, we pray like we imagine a good Christian would pray. And so we shouldn't be surprised that the whole time in prayer our mind's wandering and we're falling asleep because literally our body knows we're bored. Friends, welcome back to another episode of Theology in the ROM. My guest today is Dr. Kyle Strobel, who has a PhD from the best university in the world. That is University of Aberdeen in Scotland.

He is a systematic theologian who teaches spiritual theology for Biala University and Talbot School of Theology's Institute for Spiritual Formation and Spiritual Formation Focus programs. He's also the author of several awesome books, including his most recent book, When God Seems Distant for You, You Do You Do You Have YouTube Channel. Okay. You want to see my face. Here it is. Here's this book, When God Seems Distant, Surprising Ways God Deepens Our Faith and Draws Us Near, which is the topic of our conversation. What do you do? when you feel dry, you feel like you're in a desert, you feel like you don't feel God anymore. Does that mean God has left you? Does that mean something's wrong with you? Surprise, surprise.

No, it does not mean something is wrong with you necessarily, unless something is wrong with you. Or it definitely doesn't mean God has left you. We talk all about that. Really fascinating conversation with Kyle, always love his wisdom and insight and how he integrates intellectual rigor with spiritual formation.

Don't forget the exiles of Babylon. conference is upon us. If you're hearing this for the first time, you already missed the early bird special. Sorry about that. But I've been talking about it for seven months. So you've had your chance, I guess. April 30th to May 2nd, it's going to be a barn burner. I need to figure out a better analogy. Barn burner makes me feel like I'm really old. Anyway, it is going to burn the barn down maybe. We're talking about lots of things, including AI and the church, the gospel, mental health, two perspectives on Christians in war, two perspectives on the historical reliability and the Bible, and also the gospel and mental health. It's going to be amazing. Head over to Theology and Rawe.

And register soon because space is filling up. All right, please welcome back to the show, the one and only Dr. Kyle Stroble. Kyle Stroble, welcome back to Theology and Ra, man. Always enjoy talking with you. We met years ago at Aberdeen University doing our PhDs. And, uh, kept up over the years. You're doing well. You've written how many books since your PhD, is it? Yeah, that's a good question. Since my P, I think eight. Okay. Yeah. Seems like it. Something like that. Yeah. So I've been busy. It's good to see you as always, Preston. It's always fun to get to run into you in various places and on here every now and again.

Yeah, no, this is, I've been hard at work for several years on several projects. So it's weird because I feel like a lot of them are coming to fruition over the next year or two. there's actually a lot of stuff coming out. So that's got, it's been kind of fun. Yeah, several irons of the fire. Well, okay, this one really caught my eye. You know, I get a lot of, just to be honest, I get, you know, publicist, send me books every day. I get emails.

Hey, do you want to look at this? Look at that. 90% I'm just like either, I just not, it's not, it's not spiking my interest or it's like, I'm kind of filled up or, hey, that looks like a cool book. I just don't have time, you know, just not in my wheelhouse of things I'm thinking through. When yours came up, obviously I know you. and so I was like, you know, going to push this to the top of my interest level.

But honestly was not because I know you because you've written lots of books, but the topic of this book is what really grabbed me. When God seems distant, surprising ways God deepens our faith and draws us in the years. I was like, ooh, that seems really interesting because not a lot of people are writing on this. And I'm only a few pages into it, but I want to read a paragraph here, and I'd love for you to unpack it. It seems like this might open up various avenues for conferences. So you say this is page 13, you and John. Although no one taught us this explicitly through these early experiences of excitement

and joy and delighted in God, we began to equate our experience with God's presence itself. Right there, I was like, oh yeah. I mean, that's 100% what I've done in my Christian walk. And so when I'm not feeling an experience. I equate that with God is not here. He must be somewhere else. He must be distant.

Maybe it's me. Maybe it's him. Probably it's me. Probably it's not him. I want to keep reading, though. You say, we talked about God, quote, showing up when we feel passionate, as if God's presence could be judged by our feelings. I mean, every line here is profound.

So when we experienced joy and excitement and the goodness of obedience, we felt like we could rest. in the presence and comfort of the Lord. But years later, something else emerged. We grew tired. We became bored. We kept on serving, learning, praising, and giving in all the ways we knew how. But the initial joy wore off. I'm guessing a lot of people listening could have written that paragraph.

Maybe it was for a season. Maybe it was a season when that paragraph seemed real. Maybe they're going through that right now. Can you unpack that idea of the relationship between God's presence and our, we'll say, subjective experience or alleged experience with God? Those two are not the same, you're saying. That's right. Yeah. So, I mean, let me put this in a bit of a broader kind of context for John and I.

So this book is the second book in a trilogy that we're writing. The first book was where prayer becomes real, which was our attempt to kind of, introduce spiritual formation through the lens of prayer, because we're convinced that one of the biggest problems right now in spiritual formation, is that people have naively thought you can just present biblical ideals, you could present biblical imperatives at people, and not actually shepherd them to their Lord. And so by just offering people spiritual disciplines to do, what people do with that is they see those as fixes, as life hacks. And they think, oh, if I just do this, I'll grow. And so what ends up becoming really plagianism, I mean, we've dealt with this problem in the

past where God doesn't just give us a path to grow. That's not what the Christian life is. It's not just Aristotle. We don't just develop habits to be good. So in our follow-up book, which is this one, we wanted to wrestle with what we think of as a developmental spirituality, which is what does scripture say, and what does the Christian tradition say about the actual lived experience of life with God? And what's interesting is we note in both, we see that the Christian life, either when someone gives their life to Christ later in life, or maybe just kind of owns their faith, that typically what follows is a season of passion, often called consolation on the Christian tradition. And consolation, it's interesting because part of what's going on.

on with, like, we wanted to get to, like, what is God doing in that? And how does that make sense of what he does next? Because typically, in the whole tradition, so I, you know, in this book, we use the Puritans primarily to kind of talk about this. Everyone talks about this. This is one of the, this is one of the funniest parts of the Christian tradition where everyone seems to agree on this, and yet everyone seems to be surprised when it happens. And so there's this shared tradition that we almost generationally forget. And so I actually use Jonathan Edwards as the example, where Edwards at a point in his life

is looking back in his life and he says, you know, I think I was a better Christian for the first two or three years I was a Christian than I am now. And it's like, and everyone says that. Like, that is one of the most repeated kind of ideas in Christian spirituality. And yet everyone who says it is surprised by him. And so what we wanted to get down to is, okay, well, what is, like, why is it that the early years of the faith are often filled with this passion? We're not mature. We're not transformed.

We're not deep. We're often zealous without knowledge. There's all this. But why? Why does God do this? And what the Christian Christian tends to tell us is, and I would say what scripture tells us, and you see this. the Exodus, for instance, I would equate consolation with the plagues. Like, God very visibly and powerfully manifest himself to his people. And then he leads them in the desert, as Deuteronomy

8-2 tells us, to show them what is in their hearts. And it's not what they expect. It's confusing. It's, like, where'd the plagues go? Like, where's all that good food from Egypt? Like, this is a mess. And what the Christian tradition, I think, again, scripture tells us, If you think of the biblical images of like Paul, for instance, 1 Corinthians 3, talking about, you know, you should be spiritual people, but you're on milk. You get this developmental maturation modeling of the Christian life, where in our infancy, God gives us milk, just as we would an infant. But at a certain point, and this is the actual language the Protestant tradition tend to use, is God will then wean us. and you have children, Preston, you know, weaning children isn't fun, and children don't think you're doing them any benefits, right? This is, you're against them in it.

And so what the Christian tradition has told us and what we think is going on is that after this initial season where God has weaned us off of the world onto the things of him, he's done it through pleasure primarily. And in that season of consolation, the problem is we have come to equate to God's presence and maybe even his acceptance with a certain experience, pleasure, passion, excitement. Well, then God who wants to show us that He is our good, that He is our life, that we should long for Him above all other things. He's going to then wean us off of this pleasure. off of this constellation. And so what we discover is we're in the desert now, just as Deuteronomy 8 told us we would be. And God is revealing our hearts to us. And I think for a lot of Christians, it takes them a long time to know they're in this season. Because what's

happened early on, all that passion has awoken something deep in them, and it's got them moving, right? So now they're involved. They're serving. They're in Bible studies. They're in churches. They're involved in worship teams. They're doing all these things. And then we find one day they wake up and they're tired. And they think, oh, I've got to go to that Bible study tonight. And instead of excitement, it's like, oh, or they're leaving church. And up until now, every sermon was the greatest sermon that was ever preached, right? Because that's what that early passion does.

Well, now they begin and they realize their conversation with their spouse and their car or things like, yeah, I don't, I don't know. This didn't do anything for me today. And suddenly they're experiencing, wow, I'm not experiencing the excitement I used to be. I'm not as passionate as I used to be. And the problem is right there, what do you turn to? And I would say the problem is most Christians, and you may even make this point, is that most Christians think, what have I done wrong? Yes.

Yeah. Instead of asking, what I would say is the better question is, Lord, what does it mean to be faithful to you here? where we actually try to revert backwards in maturation to, I liked it better back then. How do I get that back? And what I would say is interesting in our own tradition is that we would never think you should be passionate. Like no one would think in the process of that you should try to be passionate. Like that was never a good. Like passions are bad.

They're the things you share with animals. So they're not, you know, like your dog's kind of passionate. A child is passionate. They're driven by passions. But you should never try to generate passion because they're a part of your immaturity. And so, unsurprisingly, when we see scripture talking about passions, it's just this negative thing. It's these things that begin in your body and move you against your kind of reason. And yet what we discover is in this season of dryness, most evangelicals,

in particular, turn to passion. I've got to get passionate again. Because phenomenologically, like there's a kind of texture that they've learned about the Christian life, and they've come to equate passion with God's acceptance, passion with God's presence. And the problem is, that's not how you judge the presence of another. Or passion with personal godliness, right? Like, this is, I am a godly person if I'm experiencing these passions toward God when I'm at a worship service or whatever. That's right. And that's why we use the language of God really showed up. Whereas we assume if I leave bored, that means either God didn't show up, whatever that means, or I must not have shown up. Because we're assuming that God's presence will always be a positive

experience. And our argument in the book basically is if you read the Gospels, what you discover is the opposite is true. Life in the presence of God, which is life in the presence of God, which is life in the presence of Jesus, as depicted in the Gospels, is often far from exciting, is often far from passionate, is often very exposing. It's often Jesus saying things like, hey, what are you guys talking about? And they're like, who's the greatest? You know, and like, Jesus is constantly exposing them. Or if you think of a passage like 1st John 319, when you are before him and your heart condemns you. Well, that's interesting. Like, why does John think for Christ? Christians, we will come before God. We'll draw near in the presence of God. And our heart's response

will be to give us an experience of condemnation. We see, we have to navigate these things and begin to give a developmental account of what is going on. So, like, we need a psychological account. Like, what's going on in me psychologically? But then also, what is God doing? And I think a lot of us assume that in negative experiences, God's simply not doing anything. Yeah. And we want to argue that's that's actually the exact opposite of the case. My dog, Tank and I share several traits. One of them is that we love to eat junk food, even though we know it's not good for us.

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Mosh for sponsoring this episode. So when you reflect, so you're saying having lots of passions early on in your Christian walk, especially if that time period is when you're, you know, late teens, early 20s, when just even biologically, right? Your amygdala is more developed than your prefrontal cortex, you know, like it's natural. You know, are you saying that that is good, bad, or neutral? or if those are even the right category. Yeah, yeah.

Because it sounds almost like it could be misleading, but then on the other hand, I could hear you saying that's just a normal part of your Christian maturity, but it's not necessarily maturity. It's just kind of the early stages of immaturity. That almost makes it sound, I don't want to say negative, but it's like, I don't know. Yeah, help us understand those early seasons.

How should we reflect on that? Yeah, no, and this is where this is a profound gift. and it's a profound good. But early consolation, it just like the bottle, like milk. You don't judge a baby

for being on milk, right? But developmentally, if a teenager's on milk, now we have a problem. If a teenager's like, I need the bottle, I got to go to school today.

Something has gone wrong developmentally. And so what we think God's doing in this season is that God is, and I would argue this is what you see in the Gospel of Mark, a lot of what is going on, is Jesus is grabbing their kind of primal loves and interests, particularly as they surround the idea of Messiah. He doesn't thwart those immediately. He affirms them as his, follow me. And it's not until Mark 8 where he gets to the point where they're able to name the truth, who am I? You are the Christ, the Son of God. That then he begins to unravel and kind of pull over. away these false ideas, pull away these fleshly notions that they're using. And so I just think this is how God works. And this is what we see developmentally. To your point, like something similar

analogically mirrors what goes on developmentally by nature. And so in this early season, if you find someone kind of excited and passionate, great, praise God, fuel that. That's not bad. that is a gift because part of what's going on here is in early consolation, one of the things we see, and the example we use in the book is I'll actually give it from a different direction. Imagine you're in a boat, and we don't know why you're in a boat at this point, but imagine you're in a boat, but you're kind of like stuck. You're stuck in the mud, and there's just trash all around you and there's like a burnt out car and there's like, you know, a gun, and who knows what else.

And that's weird, and you're looking around and wow, what is all this junk? Like, this is a mess. well out of nowhere the ravine you're in floods and now you're just kind of bobbing on the top of this lake and you realize my goodness what a gorgeous day and there's the mountains and there's snow capped and you immediately just stop concerning yourself with all the trash at the bottom of the lake

it's irrelevant to you because you've been captivated by beauty well what we think's going on is the exact same thing like I don't think, and God could do this, but I find God tends not to do this. God tends not to take someone who, let's say, is deeply angry, and in conversion just heal them of anger. Right. What tends to happen, though, is it feels like that.

Because you'll see someone, deeply angry person become converted, and they're just not angry anymore. They just don't spout off the same way they do. They're not gripped by it. Well, what's happened is, God, flooded them with consolation. They're now captivated by the things of God. Now they do, like, I just want to be at church.

Man, I just love other. Man, that sermon was amazing. Someone could preach a sermon that, like, totally undoes them. It, like, names every vice they have, and they would leave with a smile on their face. Be like, wow, God is so good. And it's because they're no longer attached, actually, to the vice structures of their heart,

what we used to call the indwelling corruption. They're actually distilled. from it. Because God knows this is not what an infant needs. An infant needs to be weaned off of the world, off of their vices, onto the things of God. And so what we find are people with profound addictions that really kind of transfer those almost immediately to God and to the church and the things of God. And what God will do in consolation is he will start bringing healing to those things. But then once God removes that consolation,

once they find themselves in the desert, what we discover, and of course I'm a seminary professor, so I discover people who now then come to seminary right here almost all the time. What they discover is, I'm still addicted, I'm still angry, I'm still lustful. I thought I left those, but it's come back.

Am I saved? Has something gone wrong? Like, why didn't it stick? And what we want to say is, no, developmentally, of course this happens. God didn't just, God doesn't heal souls like he heals blindness in Scripture. Like he doesn't, like we still see Peter, much later wrestling with very profound things. Like, God now needs to recharacterize your person in love. And the recharacterization of a person takes a life.

And it takes a life where you, in the truth of yourself have to abide. And so what God's going to do is, and he's told us in Deuteronomy 8 exactly what he's going to lead you into the desert to show you what is in your heart because you have to abide. You actually have to draw near in the truth of your life, in the midst of your anger, in the midst of your lust, in the reality of your envy and greed and all these other things. And so we shouldn't judge any of these seasons. And, you know, consolation presumably will come back, although God hasn't promised it comes back.

I mean, Mother Teresa very famously lived decades and just didn't know consolation again. And, you know, she had no consolation. And when you're, again, the word consolation is similar to like passion, emotions. Is that what you're? Well, consolation is going to be a gift of God's pleasure in the things of God. Okay. And so, you know, we draw a distinction. So part of the psychology we're employing here is a much more historic one.

The language of emotions, I find ultimately unhelpful. If Thomas Dixon is right, and I think he is, we actually, the point of emotions as language when they emerged in the 18th century primarily was to de-Christianize psychology and to actually bring confusion into psychology. that the language of affections and passions, which is our historic language, I find actually is more helpful. So the passions are things that begin in your body and often work against the integration of the self, the integration of the person. The affections take the fully integrated reality of your mind, your will and desires, and move towards integration.

So a proper ordering of the Christian life would be an affectionate life that can awaken me at passions at times. Because passions aren't bad. They're part of our humanity. When passions become bad is when we begin to serve them and try to generate them. You know, if you met an 80-year-old couple looking to you for marital advice and they said, you know, we've been married 60 years and I really think we need to get the passion of dating back. you'd probably look at them and be like, you know, I think you've confused some things. Like that wasn't bad, but that, you know, affections are deeper and longer lasting realities. As we used to say, you know, passions are very, they burn hot and quick, but they don't light a life on fire. Affections drive your life. If you want to know what you're affectionate about, what do you do?

And here's the difference. And Preston, this is where I think we've so confused. The language of emotion, I think, is so confused this on this. Too often when people want to know what they care about, they turn to their feelings. And that's what they're looking for in their embodiment, what they're currently passionate about. You look at your life and you look at what defines your life. It's not hard to figure out what you care about. How do you spend your money?

how do you spend your time? What do you fantasize about? What do you give your mind to? Those are the things that give shape to your life. Your passions often ebb and flow. If you want to be tossed by the waves, you live according to your passions. But again, passions themselves aren't bad

because often what will happen, and I think this is what's going on in early consolation, is a person has been gripped by God and the things of God. Their affections have been awakened. But they don't have the maturity to sustain a life. And so their passions end up carrying them. And they begin to think, oh, that's how I live. I just have to keep awakening my passions.

This is what a revivalistic kind of evangelicalism has turned to, which is often why I think we find a kind of delayed adolescence in evangelicalism, a kind of immaturity that's trying to pump their will. full of passion rather than have the kind of character that can sustain a life. And those are, you might think of those as two models of spirit formation, a kind of what I would call

an immature one and a mature one. An immature model thinks, I've just got to make sure I will the right thing at the right moment. And I would say that's the deep belief that I'll never actually be transformed. So most even those I meet, they don't actually expect transformation to happen.

They just think, I must protect myself from circumstances where I'll will wrongly. So this is the Billy Graham rule, which was fine for Billy Graham. If people are trying to hide prostitutes in your hotel room to catch you with a photographer, the Billy Graham rule makes a lot of sense. Most evangelists I meet, it's very disturbing the way they begin to explain this. Because it's like, well, if I meet with a woman one-on-one in a public place, what might happen? It's like, you're in a public.

Let's pause right there. What do you tell me what might happen? Because like, what's the fantasy? You're in a coffee shop. Like, what is the fantasy here? You're in a church lobby. Like I, but notice that the deep belief is, if I'm in the wrong circumstance, I just will make the wrong decision.

Like, at no point do they say, what if I became the kind of person that just wouldn't make that decision? Well, that now is a character that has to be transformed in and by love. that's going to be different than me pumping my will full of passion. And unfortunately, I think we've developed a kind of revivalistic approach to the spiritual life that thinks. And this is what worship services I think often can devolve into, which is they're the kind of fuel pump. Like, I've got to get there on Sunday. And if I could pump enough passion into my person, hopefully I can make it till next Sunday without ruining my marriage, without committing any felonies.

without, you know, and, you know, and that that's part of, I think, why we discover a people so wildly addicted to a very base realities, because we're still trying to fuel our life with what is base. It is a kind of immature, it's, again, it's trying to use the baby bottle to deal with our maturation instead of saying, well, we actually need to be weaned and to be kind of moved onto solid food. Golly, I, my mind is spinning right now. I'm curious, you're Jonathan Edwards guy, right? Yep. Like when you said you prefer the term affections, he's got a famous book,

religious affections, but that's not where I'm going to go. I want to go to John Piper and Christian hedonism. Yeah, yeah. A lot of people this day and age might not even know what that was, but if you were a Christian in any kind of reformedist circles in the 90s, then at least in my circles, Christian hedonism sparked by John Piper's book Desiring God was, I mean, that was our, we didn't put it in our Bibles, but we wanted to.

Like that was just all the craze. And it made total sense to me when I listened to sermons by John Piper, when I read his book. And yet at the time, it came, Christian hedonism came naturally. Basically, that Christ is the greatest, most pleasure. thing. I'm not going to articulate how he did it. But basically, you should find, it seems like he would say you should find passion, your greatest joy, your greatest pleasure, beyond food, beyond drink, beyond anything in Jesus. And that's a good thing. Heedanism is bad when it's focused on the wrong thing, when it's focusing Christ is a good thing, blah, blah, blah.

It came naturally when I was 23. I worked at it when I was 32. And it got exhausting when I was 37. And yet I would still see Piper at, you know, 90 years old or however you, you know, still seems like he's more excited to wake up and spend hours in prayer with God than doing anything else in life. And for me, it's like, you know what? No, prayer is a discipline. It's, it doesn't. I used to, I used to, I remember one time. I was like, I think I was with my girlfriend at college, not the one that I'm, not my wife, but a different girl.

And I remember like, I couldn't wait to end the night. And it was a good relationship. But I was like, all I want to do is pray. That's all I want to do. I want to spend hours in prayer tonight. So I was like, I can't wait for this to end. And I'm going to drink a cup of coffee so I can stay awake. And I genuinely, it wasn't like, oh, I want to want to pray.

It was like, it's all I want to do right now is pray. I haven't felt that in years. I mean, prayer is just discipline, you know, finding this hedonistic pleasure in God. It's like, I used to have that. I just don't think I had that anymore. Anyway, that's a long way to ask. What are your thoughts? I'm sure you're familiar with Piper and Christian hedonism.

Would you be more critical of that approach to Christianity? Yeah, I mean, there's some truths to it that we need to hold on to. There's some things I don't like. I certainly don't like the language of hedonism. I think, you know, Piper grabbed onto some parts of Edwards, but he wasn't an Edward scholar, right? So he has a tendency to when he hears the word affection to equate that with emotion. that's not the same thing. You don't have to feel an affection to have it.

Affection is about willing. It's not primarily about... So oftentimes you equate now what Edwards would say are passions with affections, because now we have the feeling, the texture of them. And so I would say if any time you're doing... And I had the same experience as you. I actually didn't.

I grew up in the megachurches. I grew up in a highly emotive, passionate kind of thing. I actually never got into the Christian hedonism thing. So I became an Edward scholar. Pretty naive to all of that. So I came a different direction. But I think most of us that grew up in that era had a similar experience where what we actually learned. And I don't think he would say.

And I don't think anyone had to say this to us. What we internalized was if you're no longer feeling that same passion. then something's wrong with you. Yes. And I think the problem is now notice that we're no longer walking by faith, but walking by sense, sight. We're looking to have sight. We're looking in our bodies for our assurance. We're looking in our bodies for how we're doing instead of the promise.

And I think the problem is that's exactly what the flesh always wants to do. And so this is where, so like the movement. of this book, like part of what John and I wanted to do in this book, which, you know, we are building off our last book. You don't have to have read, you know, where prayer becomes real first, but we see them together because where prayer becomes real is, is trying to give us an account of you have to draw near to God. Like, you can't, you can't just generate a life. That's what the flesh wants to do. And we see this right away, I mean, in Galatians 3, why did you begin with the spirit and are not trying to be perfected in the flesh? Colossians 2. Why have

giving yourself to self-made religion that is built on asceticism of the body. There is a kind of fleshly spirituality that Christians in the New Testament have immediately turned to, that we are all wanting to. This is exactly what we turn to when consolation wanes. And I think in this kind of school of thought, or the one I grew up in, what ends up happening is we located actually in our feelings. Whereas instead, what we want to say is, I want you so, Preston, if I were kind of shepherding you, and you told me this story as a young 32-year-old, I would say, you know, I'd say, well, you know, President, tell me, when you think about prayer and your first thought is, oh, geez, I don't want to. I don't want to do this. What do you do? Like, where do you turn to doing that? Do you tell God, God, I don't want to do this? Or do you try to pump your will with passion? Like, is the or spiritual, you? spiritual life, the equivalent of a coach's half-time speech when they're down by 20. Because that's the flesh. And so the way we wrote this book is we try to narrate, like, here's what the Christian

life is depicted as in scripture and in our own tradition. Then we, the whole second section of the book actually turns to, here's what you actually do in the flesh to avoid God. And so the first one, how you avoid God in your passion. Like, you choose to be passionate instead of avoiding God, right? Or how you avoid God in your brokenness or in your goodness. I mean, how many of us turn to morality to just not be with God. And what we want to do is we want to send you. No, no, you have to go to God. It's not your job to make the Christian life feel a certain way. And nowhere in Scripture do we find this. It's drawn near to your Lord and draw near in the reality of God, like, it feels like I should care more about this?

Because what else are you going to do? I mean, the only other option is you pretend like you do care? Yeah. And see, this is the problem. So many of us never pray about the things that are actually going on in our lives. As George Herbert once said in one of the greatest chapters ever written on prayer, He says, you know, when the Titanic was sinking, there was a lot of people who for the first time in their lives didn't have to deal with their mind wandering when they prayed. It's a grim kind of thing.

But his point is for the first time in their lives, they actually prayed about what they really wanted. And the point is that most of us when we pray, we pray like we imagine a good Christian. pray. And so we shouldn't be surprised that the whole time in prayer our mind's wandering and we're falling asleep because literally our body knows we're bored. We're bored because we're not even there. We don't care about this stuff. Dear Lord, you know, even the voice we use. Like it's, it's we're showing up as our avatar rather than showing up. You know, one of my favorite Psalms is Psalm 73 where the psalmist shows up as one envious of evildoers. Well, now we're talking. Lord, these people get whatever they want.

Like, now we're talking. Now we're in prayer. Like, we're actually showing up. And so, you know, our vision for spiritual formation, which, you know, one of the original titles, as you know, like you pitch 100 titles and the publisher rejects all of them and you get, I don't know, maybe you have better hope than I do. But one of the original titles was spiritual formation beyond willpower. and we decided no one would know what that meant. And we went with kind of an experience because we all relate to the experience. Where is God when God seems distant? Like I can experience. I understand that.

But the reality is a lot of us are both bored, fatigued, and maybe even just feel consumed because we're trying to live the Christian life by pumping up our will. and what a lot of us have come to is our will has fallen flat and we're too tired even to pump it up anymore. And now that guy is on stage and he's talking about maybe, you know, the anger of man does not achieve the righteousness of God, and we kind of just go, yeah, I've heard this one before. I'm still pissed.

And so, and so like the question is, like, what do we do? And a lot of particularly men that I see, we grow old and we become kind of kind, gentle people. is that the Christian life? Like this is the problem is if unless we're actually giving ourselves to the Lord in reality, allowing him to do what he did with the disciples, which is unravel all of these things, a lot of us just accept this kind of mundane,

this kind of boring kindness that helps us maybe become sort of good. But it also is what, allows us to be taken in by worldly visions of Christianity. If you care about thinking clearly, engaging culture wisely, and building bridges with people who see the world differently, then Talbot's apologetics programs are designed for you. At Talbot, you'll study with leading scholars in philosophy, theology, science, and cultural analysis while joining a diverse community of students, pastors, teachers, engineers, creatives, young adults, scientists, and leaders from around the world. Talbot's M.A. and Apologetics,

and their flexible online certificate will sharpen your reasoning, deepen your understanding of scripture, and equip you to articulate the Christian story with intellectual integrity and relational wisdom. You'll learn how to hold truth with conviction while engaging others with empathy and clarity. If you're sensing it's time to strengthen both your mind and your walk with Christ and to become a bridge builder in a divided world, then this is a strategic moment to begin. Applications are now open, and upcoming cohorts are filling up quickly. today at biola.edu forward slash apologetics. That's biola.orgia.orgas slash apologetics. I'm curious, how do you factor in? So you go from like the passionate, emotional early 20s conversion

to fighting for it in your early 30s and kind of becoming maybe more cynical. Some might deconstruct and then you fall into this kind of nice Christianity, just kind of bored a little bit. how do you factor in just people that are just wired differently? Yeah, yeah. Like some personalities, I don't know what, Enneagram, whatever, but some people may never have really had that passionate experience, largely because they're just not, they're just kind of like more stoic kind of just personality.

Or maybe they were saved in a more liturgical context that didn't put that kind of pressure of like, unless you're weeping and dancing around, you're not a real Christian. Or what about somebody who is the opposite, that they were passionate in their 20s and they're passionate in their 70s, but it's largely due to, like, if they're watching a sports game, they're passionate. If they're watching a movie, they're passionate.

Like, they're just have, they're just wired differently, you know? You know, some preachers, I remember listening to one preacher growing up, and it's like, I feel like he couldn't get through a sermon without bawling his eyes out, you know, we're, but that's more, it's like, it's just, there's nothing wrong with that. It's just like, that's how some people are wired, other people are. are going to read a manuscript, and it's going to be just as powerful. But are there people who might maintain, for lack of better terms, that, and I will say the term passion, that was part of that milk that they needed growing up. But it actually is something that they just kind of came naturally through their whole life.

Yeah, yeah, totally. No, that's a good question. That's not me, but I... Totally. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, we purposely kind of avoided trying to map out the Christian life as like, you'll go through this stage, then you'll go through this stage, and then you... So what we wanted to do instead is we wanted to talk about kind of seasons of the soul and ask questions about what the Lord's doing. And so there's consolation, and the Lord takes us through seasons of consolation.

But then there's early consolation. So up until now you and I've been talking mostly about early consolation. That's going to be the kind of milk bottle, right? That's going to be the Lord kind of just meeting us as baby Christians and treating us as babies. And again, this is, I think there's a, I think it's interesting that Paul seems to know and assume that he should be able to tell who's a baby and he should respond to them like there are babies. And then he should even be able to tell them, you shouldn't be babies any longer. Like, that's just built into the thing in scripture. And so in early consolation, the way that.

that our tradition talks about this, and I think this is probably the best way to do it, is that most people do experience this as a certain kind of pleasure. Pleasure can be of the passionate variety. Pleasure can be in a liturgical context that is just like, the beauty of the liturgy, the glory of art. It can show up into place. I don't think it has to be pleasure, though. So I remember John's father became a Christian at the end of his life.

and at a very old age. And John said it was weird because he didn't really have that same passionate experience I had. But what, he's like, I talked to him about it. Like, what do you experience? Because things had changed. And it was, it was someone who had lived through the Great Depression. It was someone who had lived in farming communities. And it was like the sturdiness of the Lord.

The peace and stability of God. Like we're upholding him. And so I say, in early consolation, what the Lord's doing is the Lord's giving you exactly what you need to move you off of the world onto the things of him. And so the degree to which you lived your life by fleshly pleasure is actually the same degree to which you'll get consolation. So I actually expect some people, like, I lived a very fleshly early life.

I had wild amounts of consolation. I expect the kid who just went to church and just believed it, and it was pretty good. They're not going to have those peaks. They're not going to have the radical kind of experience like I did. It's going to look differently. But the Lord, I think, will still meet them in very profound ways. But it's going to be ways that psychologically they need to move them off of the world onto him. Then I think what the Lord, the two seasons we specify specifically in the book are the deserogically.

desert and then desolation. Desolation is, I struggle with you to use, what word to use about this. The desert's an obvious biblical term. And the desert isn't bad, but it's dry. So like the Lord gives you something in early consolation. It's a positive gift. The Lord's actually granting you something. In the desert, he just, he's not giving you something.

He's just taking that away, the experience of that away. And so what happens in the desert, is you begin to experience your own character. So now you begin to feel the Christian life as if lifted by you. And that's why things just feel dry or boring or you feel fatigued or you're like, oh, I've got to do this again. But then the tradition tells us, and the Catholic traditional, call this the dark night of the soul, the senses, depending.

There's distinctions made there. The Protestant tradition actually uses the language of spiritual desertion. And what our tradition says will happen is the Lord will gift us an experience. of his absence. So just like early consolation, it is a positive gift, but now this positive gift is experienced negatively. And what we argues going on here is God is giving you the gift of revealing that even your virtues are vices, that even your preaching and your service and your giving and your devotional life are veined with vice as well.

And biblically, we would look to the thorn of the flesh here, where God gifts Paul a messenger of Satan to harass him. Because he gave Paul a previous gift, which was the highest degree of consolation possible. He was caught up in the third heaven, and he was filled with consolation.

That's a gift. Praise God. I would love for that gift. But then, because that gift was so high, God knows, developmentally, that's not going to serve him well long term. Because certain kinds of spiritual experiences actually get kind of encoded psychologically in ways that lead us back to ourselves. So to keep Paul from being coming proud, God gives him something that forces Paul to grapple with God's grace is enough for me. His power is made perfect in my weakness. And so in the

gift of desertion or desolation, now we need to come to rely upon God in ways that we didn't even know we had to rely upon God. See, for a lot of our lives, we look at our vices and we think, well, we look at our virtues and we think, well, at least I'm good there, but I'm wrestling with these things, right? Like, I've got the, I've got lost, I've got greed, I got, well, God kind of allows us to do that developmentally. And so developmentally, we do focus on. Well, at a certain point, as you know, President, like, suddenly you hit a stage and it's like, I remember when I was really tempted by some major things. Like, almost it felt like minute by minute. Like it was like, oh, so I go right on the live. It was like, oh, well, I was almost always. Then suddenly it's like,

wow, now I have like eight options in front of me and they're all good. And I've like, and I've got to discern now. Like, what do I give myself to? And it lifeless. And of course, there's still vices. There's still temptation. But it feels and looks differently. well now the Lord is going to show us yeah but Kyle you did that because you want to be seen as great not because you love me Kyle you're grandiose

you're full of jealousy and selfish ambition that's demonic according to James 3 you're actually fueling your writing ministry demonically well you know again this This is what we have to grapple with, right?

Like this is, and I worry that for a lot of us, we are trying to recover excitement. We're trying just to be kind of extrinsically good. And honestly, my worry is not like, that's fine developmentally. That's fine for a season. The problem, though, is that honestly is boring and you're going to be bored and you're going to be uninterested in it. and it's not going to work. And what you're going to experience at a certain point is you're going to wake up and you're going to realize I am bored out of my freaking mind here.

I just don't care about this. And you're not going to be in it. And I think the Lord calls us to something more difficult, but a lot more profound. I'm curious, what would you, or how I'm sure you have these conversations, when you're interacting with somebody who's in those early, passionate stages of Christianity. What do you tell them? Like, as you said, this is like, you don't fault a baby for wanting milk. But do you help them understand that this isn't going to be the...

Yeah. Yeah. What do you tell them? Totally. Without discouraging them from enjoying that season, which may not last in the same way. Yeah, yeah. Well, this is something where I think, you know, in my previous work, particularly with Jamie, and Goggin, the way of the dragon or the way of the lamb. We were obviously very critical of

the church and how churches have helped navigate these things. But let me just say this. Most churches I see do great at this. They do great with baby Christians. They get them involved. They get them excited. They get them in community. And I say do all of that, but then start planting some seeds. Because here's what's going to be hard. So if you meet one of those baby Christians or one of those baby Christians meets someone in desolation, the temptation is that baby Christian is going to look at them and say, they just need Jesus. And vice versa, right? Like, the person in desolation is going to roll their eyes. Like, oh, geez, you know, like, give me a break. Put your hands down. Like, you know, like, that's the problem. And this is why I think we really need each other in this. And, you know,

one of the, one of the interesting things that I discovered actually in writing this in the way we ended the book is I really struggled without end this book because I realized there's going to be a lot of different kinds of people reading this. And so we ended with a kind of choose your own adventure based on like where you're at or what your question is. And so we have like five paths you could take. And the first path was, well, why have I never heard this before? Because that's the question John and I get asked the most. And so I decided to do a kind of a very short, But like, here's what the Protestant tradition has said about this. And I did some more fresh research.

I had done a lot of this already. But I was shocked at how just standard this is in our own tradition. But what I hadn't noticed before is everyone says two things when they talk about the person in desertion. They say, our biggest worry is they're going to start questioning their salvation. Yeah. And that they're not going to find a guide. Yeah. that there's not going to be a spiritual guide to lead them.

And I just thought that, wow, what a fascinating click. Because I think that we even have a greater lack today. I mean, we don't even talk about these things anymore. In early consolation, I think it is an easier time. Like, it doesn't take as much wisdom to shepherd a person in that because it is just, you could just fuel it. But you have to help them begin to navigate. You don't need to make that person like you. and I would actually argue, and we have a whole section of the book on the conscience,

you're going to have to begin to introduce the young believer to their conscience, what it is and what it isn't. And at some point, you're going to have to help them see that they probably are the weaker brother or sister, and that they need to hold their experience pretty loosely and not just apply it to others. is not their job to make other people have their experiences. It's their job to point people to Christ. And I think in First Corinthians, 8 and 10, when Paul's navigating the kind of weaker brother and sister question,

I think you see a lot of similar sort of developmental issues there. Like, it's interesting that Paul says it's an issue of knowledge, but it's not explicit knowledge. So you can't just teach them. Like, the weaker brother doesn't have knowledge, but it's implicit. like it's internalized knowledge, subconscious knowledge. It's knowledge that was developed through, Paul will say, the former association with idolatry.

And so you get pre-converted sin and pre-converted experiences have showed up to shape their Christian life. Well, again, like, for the young person filled with passion, like, that's not even a possibility. They don't even think, they think, no, all that's gone. Like, I know Christ now. at all, and they're unaware. And so Paul, it's interesting how Paul navigates. He's very pastoral here. He doesn't say, pull this person aside, tell him you're the weaker brother, give them the right knowledge. There's no such thing as idols. He knows that if you do that, you'll actually do something damaging to their soul, because this has to be recharacterized. Again, I've come to think, I think this

is true in biblical studies, and you would know this better than I would press. And I would say it's true in systematic theology, which is my discipline, I think we have failed to think developmentally. And that's another way of saying we have failed to think personally about the faith. Because persons just are developmental things. And scripture thinks developmentally, this is why we talk about mature and immature Christians

or baby Christians. Our language, it's embedded. in how we think, but that hasn't always translated to both what we assert as scholars, but also how we shepherd souls. And so I think the real danger is we just present a biblical ideal or a biblical imperative, or we just give people spiritual disciplines to do. And we're not actually shepherding them to the Lord in light of what is really going on in your life. Because a spiritual discipline filled with consolation is one thing. A spiritual discipline and desolation is a vastly different thing. And what we think the role of a spiritual discipline there will be is to expose vice.

And so phenomenologically, it is going to feel negative. It's going to feel like looking into a mirror and seeing the truth of my life. Well, now with James, I have to not turn away and forget what I look like. I actually have to draw near the Lord and the truth of myself. Well, if I learned how to judge disciplines in passion, and I now apply that here, I just think, what is, I don't even know what I'm doing anymore, right? And it's not surprising so many people are spinning off of the faith and are just saying, this doesn't even work. Where's God here? Because it just doesn't, none of it makes sense because we've been taught if God was here. you would experience.

So you are a fan of spiritual disciplines, right? But do you think, like, they can be utilized in a wrong way, or there could be an unhelpful expectation placed on the intended results if somebody is committed to spiritual disciplines? Or how do you, what's your elevator pitch on? Yeah, yeah, totally. Well, yeah, yeah, you know, to remind folks in case they're wondering, like, I am the director of the Institute for Spiritual Formation.

So yeah, we talk quite a lot about spiritual discipline. And, you know, spiritual disciplines are tricky. And I would say one of the ways that the Institute for Spirit Formation here to tell, but one of the ways we differ from a lot that goes on in the spiritual formation movement in general, is our students don't get a focus on spiritual disciplines until a year and a half into their program. Really? Because we have been convinced that the Spirit formation conversation has been very, naive to how the flesh wants spiritual disciplines and how people will use them precisely to

avoid God and not draw near. And I think, and there's a long story I can get into here about what goes on, you know, in terms of the history of ideas in the 20th century, the recovery of Aristotle, the recovery of virtue ethics. But our own Protestant tradition, and I would actually say even the Roman Catholic tradition, does not believe. So no one in the West believes that you could do disciplines to be good and to grow. That's simply as Pelagian. That's not debated. We've dealt with that. That what spiritual disciplines are, to use the old language, are means of grace. And grace was about God's self-giving. And so means of grace were first and foremost about receiving God in his self-giving holy presence and reciprocally

offering my life to him. And so the end, the telos of spiritual disciplines aren't my growth. They're abiding. And this is where I want to pay very close attention to Colossians 2, because Aristotelian habit formation is what the philosophers do. And in Colossians 2, Paul warns against philosophy. And he goes on, I mean, in verse 23 to warn against self-made religion that has the appearance of wisdom, right? It's common sense. That is based on the asceticism of the body,

spiritual disciplines, but has let go of Christ who is our head. And in Colossians 219, we see that the growth of the Christian life is a growth that comes from God. And so what I worry about the spiritual formation movement, and of course guys like Willard knew this, the problem is most of the spiritual formation movement

hasn't been articulated by Willard. It's been articulated by people summarizing Willard. And so oftentimes what happens is that when it gets summarized, it's do spiritual disciplines so you can grow. And I would say, no, that's not what spiritual disciplines are for. The means of grace are forgiving yourself to God, trusting that if you abandon your life to God,

then you will bear much fruit. The goal is to give yourself to God. Christ. The goal is not even your growth. The goal—and again, Willard is the one who taught me this. I remember Willard told me. He said, Kyle, we need—what seminaries should be are places where people learn how to abandon their life to God. That's what it's about. Growth happens as a fruit of that reality, not as the goal of that reality. And so that's going to be a very important way to distinguish these things. So actually, the last chapter of the book, last big chapter of the book, is simply called transformed by love. And the third book is the one we're going to focus most on what spiritual disciplines are and what they are not. But this chapter, we thought we need to have something in here that casts a positive vision of, well, what actually is spiritual maturation and what is my responsibility to that?

like if it's a growth from God and not from me. Nonetheless, I'm still required to act. I'm still required to discipline. Give myself. I still have to live a discipline life. So what is that life? How do I embrace that? And how am I recharacterized in love?

And so, you know, this is a bit of our re-narrating a little bit of what is spiritual formation. Again, I knew Dallas. Dallas was hugely impactful on me. We agreed when we talked in person. I find that we have different audiences. I tend to think Willard wrote to the person who just thought, as long as I show up to church on Sunday, I'll grow. That's what he saw it in his Southern Baptist churches of his childhood.

And it turns out those people aren't buying his books because they're just going to the church on Sunday to grow. The people who are buying his books are people who are often neurotically trying to grow themselves. So some of that, I think, is an audience kind of question. But I think there's also a—I do think Pelagianism has made a full comeback. And if you just look at the titles of books and let alone read them, like, we just believe in self-help now. Like, we have just bought wholesale in. And whether that's habit formation or liturgical formation, we've bought into a kind of Pelagianism of do this and live. And I just—I just—I think we've already had these debates. And I just, I have found something more rich in the Christian tradition. It also, by the way, means of grace, I won't get into the theology here, but Lucy Pepey at Nye, actually have a book coming out on mapping. Yeah, it's an edited volume mapping the Protestant tradition on, on this issue, actually. But it actually explains, like our view of this

explains why Christians are often not as morally good as non-believers. Because when God gives us his grace, we receive something that's alien to us. That's ours because Christ is ours, but it's not yet recharacterized our person. Now I actually have to live a life where that love recharacterizes my person. But in the meantime, you can have an unbeliever who's more kind of moral. And a lot of Christians have wrestled with this. Like, well, shouldn't Christians always be more moral than like unbelievers? shouldn't unbelievers just always be wicked?

And it's like, no, of course not. There are good unbelievers out there because Aristotle was right. You can form a very profoundly moral life. But we have to remember the opposite of sin isn't goodness, but faith. And anything done without faith is sin, as Paul says in Romans 1423. So, like, faith now is this gift that we've received so that we can live this life of love. and we always used to talk about this. And tragically, this is a part of our tradition

that we have failed to recover. Yeah. Kyle, you've given us so much to think about, man. I appreciate the intellectual rigor in which you put into a topic that often, if I can say, lacks that. I don't know. I feel like there's a lot of like grassroots kind of spiritual formation

talk and, and, And it's just so nice to have somebody who's really thought deeply and theologically, philosophically, and historically and historically about these issues. So I would highly encourage people to check out your book when God seems distant. I can personally recommend the first 17 pages. That's where I'm at. I'm sure, based on this conversation what I know about you and just the momentum of you built in the book, it's worth people checking out when God seems distant.

Kyle, thank you so much for your work. and thank you again for being a guest on Theology to Iraq. Great to be with your president.