(upbeat music) - Welcome back to the Ask Pastor John podcast. This week we welcome author and speaker, Dr. Paul David Tripp. Paul will be filling in this week. And most recently, Paul is the author of the book, "Awe, Why It Matters for Everything We Think, Say, and Do." A book that easily made my top 10 list for the best books of 2015.

And this week we're gonna be talking about awe in the awesome glory of God. And how this awe in God really does relate to everything in life, specifically to our spiritual growth, our Bible intake, our ministry aims, and even to our news consumption, our anxieties, our weight loss attempts, our parenting methods, and our expectations of marriage and romantic love.

All of those are topics for us this week, and it'll be a full week, so let's dive in. Paul, in the book you wrote this, "Spiritual growth is about recapturing your awe." I wanna read that again. "Spiritual growth is about recapturing your awe." That is a great line. Envision us here, how does spiritual growth in the Christian life work dynamically?

- Well, I think the first thing that you need to understand is that God hardwired all human beings for awe. There is a quest inside of us to be amazed, to wonder, to have something that is so great and so awesome and so compelling that we want to live for, that we're willing to make sacrifices for, that it will be the thing that will get us up in the morning.

That's all of humanity. So being connected to God through Jesus Christ is essentially being given back my awe again, because what happens in sin is that awe of God is replaced by awe of other things. Most centrally, awe of myself. So that's what's captured in Corinthians 5.15, that says, "Jesus came so that those who live," very interesting terminology, "would no longer live for themselves." So you could argue that Christian growth is a growth in my awe of God, that the thing that dominates me more and more is the wonder of God and the wonder of my attachment to God by grace.

So you could ask me, "Why do you treat your wife the way you do?" I could say, "Because of my awe of God." "Why do you parent your children the way you do?" "Because of my awe of God." "Why do you spend your money the way you do?" "Because of my awe of God." - Yeah, this is all-encompassing.

So this is really fundamental to what it means to be a creature made in God's image. - That's right. - And that's why I think that it's sad that this kind of language has been lost by the church. People almost, with a bit of wonderment, say, "Why would you ever want to write a book on awe?" And it's because it's not familiar, intuitive language, even to believers.

And the heart of spirituality is living in wonder of the divine. - Okay, so let's get practical. What should a Christian be looking for in the pages of their Bible? - Glory. Glory. You know, if every day I'm not beckoned, wooed, if I could use this term in a positive sense, seduced by the glory of God, I will be wooed and tempted and seduced by something else.

And literally, the thing that splashes across every page of the Word of God is the magnificent glory of God. The scriptures are meant not just to be a sort of logistical wisdom book that helps us to live a better life. The scriptures are meant to finally point us to that one place where our hearts can rest and be satisfied because we're exposed to wonder that's unlike any wonder we've ever known before.

- Yes, so our lives are either captured by the majesty of God, or they will be captured by the fears of life, really. Fears of failure, fears of inadequacy, fears of the future. How does awe in God confront our fears? - I've actually felt that this book that's come out at this time where we're all shocked by Paris and shocked by San Bernardino and shocked by millions of Syrian refugees that have no place to live and are risking death to find a new home, when it seems like the world's at fire, that this book has come out.

And here's why I think that. It's that, it's an understanding that fear, horizontal fear, whether that's fear of acceptance or fear of my physical health or fear of a loss of a job or fear of terrorism, fear is only ever disarmed by fear. It's only the fear of something greater that disarms the fear of something lesser.

You know where you see that? You see that in that great moment when Israel is in the Valley of Elah and they're facing the Philistine army and out that first day comes the great warrior Goliath and says, "Send me your best." And what the army of Israel does is they retreat back in their tents for 40 days and commiserate.

Now there's an army that doesn't have a military problem. They're in fear because they have an awe problem. They're in the tents fearing because they're all amnesiacs because the God who delivered that promised land to them said, "I will deliver these nations into your hands. I am the Lord Almighty." David shows up and David doesn't have that awe problem because David says he delivered the lion and he delivered the bear and he will deliver this Philistine this day.

And so David is willing to march into that valley with a silly shepherd's sling and five stones because it's the fear of God that disarms his fear of this giant warrior. That's how it operates. It's when my heart is so filled and satisfied with that reverential fear of God that I am not then able to be captured by all the horizontal fears of life in a fallen world.

- Yeah, that's so good. So our awe in God, which includes a fear of God, must dwarf the loudest news cycle. - Absolutely. And I wanna just express this concern. I think more than ever before, Christians are news junkies more than ever before through social media and websites and 24-hour news cycle, we are aware of what's happening around us.

And I think for many of us, that has been the rise of fear. And maybe more than ever before, we need to quietly meditate, gaze upon the glory of the Lord so that we do not give way to fear. - Yeah, we must be seduced by God, to use your phrase.

That is so good. Thank you, Paul. We are gonna return tomorrow and transition to talking about awe and the spiritual battle of weight loss, something you have faced squarely, I know. I'm your host, Tony Reinke. Thanks for listening to the Ask Pastor John podcast with guest Paul Tripp. We'll see you tomorrow.

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