Pastor Brian Martin: Hey everyone, welcome back to the Cavalry Callback, a podcast where we take a deeper dive into the weekly sermon at Calvary Evangelical Free Church in Rochester, Minnesota. I’m your host, Brian Martin, and I’m here again today with Kyle Bushre, who preached a sermon this weekend titled This Is Who You Are, looking at 1 John 2:12-14. How is the day treating you, Kyle?

Pastor Kyle Bushre: Oh it’s great. Beautiful day. Got to preach a fun sermon. A sermon filled with confident hope, which is great.

Pastor Brian Martin: Goes the other way sometimes.

Pastor Kyle Bushre: Yeah. Coming off of a full chapter and a half of questioning your faith and all of that. Uh, you know, which we need to do, right? We gotta dive in.

Pastor Brian Martin: Both things are important.

Pastor Kyle Bushre: Yeah. You gotta say true things about yourself, and you got to take the hard statements and apply them to your heart. And you really need to know who you are. But then he turns the tables and he says, okay, let me talk to the church. And I have greatly appreciate that. I love it when I have a Sunday like that. Yeah.

Pastor Brian Martin: Fantastic. Will you, uh, kind of opened on Sunday, um, apologizing for not doing the entire Jesus Freak album, uh, …

Pastor Kyle Bushre: Part of me wants to.

Pastor Brian Martin: I understand, I understand, so, so this is, uh, getting to know you question a little bit. Is there like an important, you know, Christian music album, worship album, whatever, as a part of your story, like, or maybe it’s just a song or something, but maybe in the early days that, uh, because, because you, you came to faith.. I don’t want to say later, but you were what were you, 23, I think.

Pastor Kyle Bushre: No, no, no, I was 20. It was, it was, uh, yeah, it was, uh, it was summer of 98. So that would put me, um, actually, it would have been right after I turned 20, like the month after I turned 20, may of 28 or 98.

Pastor Brian Martin: Yeah. Just curious if there were any sort of, was there a soundtrack to either that season or another season that was really important?

Pastor Kyle Bushre: Well, it was that was about that time that I even started listening to any Christian music I didn’t I very early on, interestingly enough, I got the jars of Clay album with Flood on it because I heard Flood on the radio, and I had no idea that they were a Christian band. I just saw, I just heard the song. I’m like, oh, I want to, I want to get this guy’s album. And I got the album and of course, like, almost none of the other songs sound like Flood from that album. And so I did actually have some early Christian music in my life before my time following Jesus. Uh, and somebody had to point out to me that it was a Christian album. It didn’t even occur to me as I was listening to it.

Pastor Brian Martin: Interesting.

Pastor Kyle Bushre: Yeah. Now I listen to it. I go, oh, wow. Clearly the lyrics here are are honoring the Lord. But uh, no, I would say, um, there was a, there was a great worship, uh, a worship album back when the bands started making worship albums.  You know, like their third or fourth album became the worship album and a band called Third Day…

Pastor Brian Martin: Oh yeah.

Pastor Kyle Bushre: Third Day had a worship…. Yes. And I loved that. I loved that album so much listening to those songs were so powerful and, uh, more gospel content, I guess maybe. I don’t know if that’s what attracted attracted me to it, but fantastically, uh, written, uh, worship songs from Third Day. So that, that probably was the one I, I listened to the most. Of course I love Jesus freak. It was great. Uh, and actually, of the songs on Jesus freak, In The Light is my favorite of those.

Pastor Brian Martin: Yeah. I mean, classic.

Pastor Kyle Bushre: And I, it, it really captures the struggle I think. Uh, you know, I keep trying to find the life on my own apart from you.  I was a 20 year old kid who just came to faith in Christ. And I went from one college to another college, and I didn’t have any friends. I didn’t go there with… I just, I, you know, everybody else already had their friends and here I am trying to find a life, uh, you know, now with Jesus, but on my own. And it was like a sort of turned it was, it was a difficult time in my life. So a lot of those songs had had a big impact on me. Yeah.

Pastor Brian Martin: Do you remember or do you know that DC talk did Saturday Night Live?

Pastor Kyle Bushre: What!?

Pastor Brian Martin: Yeah.

Pastor Kyle Bushre: No…

Pastor Brian Martin: Jesus freak was sung on Saturday Night Live. They were the musical guest. You’re gonna have to look it up.

Pastor Kyle Bushre: I am. Is that YouTube? You can get that on YouTube?

Pastor Brian Martin: Yeah.

Pastor Kyle Bushre: All right.  Oh, I’m definitely going to go find that later.

Pastor Brian Martin: And they I mean, you know they went for it. You know the guys were Toby Mac’s out there dancing and….

Pastor Kyle Bushre: Wow. Okay.

Pastor Brian Martin: Yeah.

Pastor Kyle Bushre: No, I did not know that. I didn’t know it had become mainstream like that. I didn’t know it got out there as widely as …

Pastor Brian Martin: Yeah. It was novel, I guess. And yeah, I’m, I was surprised. I didn’t start listening to Christian music until like the year 2000.

Pastor Kyle Bushre: Okay.

Pastor Brian Martin: So I kind of missed.

Pastor Kyle Bushre: That whole.

Pastor Brian Martin: That whole sort of season. Um, you know, but sort of retroactively, it was like, oh, that was the thing.  So for me, um, I don’t know the name of the album, but. Sonicflood. Do you remember?

Pastor Kyle Bushre: Oh, yeah. Sonicflood. They were awesome.

Pastor Brian Martin: Bright pink CD. I listened to that. I wore that thing out.

Pastor Kyle Bushre: I don’t remember the bright pink.

Pastor Brian Martin: Oh, it was, it was more of a worship sort of album. And interestingly, I got in a conversation with, with my with my teenage daughters, and they were shocked to learn that Heart of worship is not like a new song. I was like, oh, girls, I was singing that. Uh, that’s like what I, I think I auditioned with that song for high school, like youth band back in the day.

Pastor Kyle Bushre: Oh is that right?

Pastor Brian Martin: Yeah, I think so. I think so.

Pastor Kyle Bushre: High school youth band. So you were a singer. 

Pastor Brian Martin: I was a singer, yeah.  I don’t, I don’t….

Pastor Kyle Bushre: Yeah I was going to say, I don’t think you’d play any instruments.

Pastor Brian Martin: No, no, I don’t have the patience.

Pastor Kyle Bushre: Because, man, I would love to see you rock it out on the electric guitar at the same time. Wouldn’t that be fun?

Pastor Brian Martin: I, I should play guitar, like everything about me…

Pastor Kyle Bushre: Yeah. You definitely have guitar vibe.

Pastor Brian Martin: I do, but I don’t have the patience for it, so. All right. Well, we should probably….

Pastor Kyle Bushre: All right. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Pastor Brian Martin: Talk about something else important. Um. I mean, not that good music isn’t important. It helps us connect with the Lord. That’s good. And you know, we can all go down memory lane there for a minute. Um, so I actually want to broadly talk about kind of this, this other interesting thing that I think other people… I don’t know how much people noticed it is what I mean, but, um, but I think it’s actually really important because we were looking at the passage and if you remember, if you, you know, there on Sunday, um, it’s poetic language.

Pastor Kyle Bushre: Yes.

Pastor Brian Martin: And you made an admission that you don’t know exactly what this is.

Pastor Kyle Bushre: Like, what.

Pastor Brian Martin: Your conclusion was, a lack of a conclusion.

Pastor Kyle Bushre: I was asking other pastors last week if they knew what this is. Yeah, I know what it says, but I… What is it exactly?

Pastor Brian Martin: Right. So walk us through… So I know you well enough, and I know your process well enough to know that that’s not laziness. So walk us through your process there. Like, so you were asking other pastors, what else were you doing to try to come up with an answer? Like how did you approach your, your study on, on sort of that question.

Pastor Kyle Bushre: Yeah. Well, I, you know, I have the, the joy and privilege of having had, uh, education in the original languages. So for me, I would be, I open the Greek and I’m looking to find, uh, parallelism and different types of, uh, indications within any type of text as to what it is. Uh, language is structured differently, uh, to give you indications so that, you know, if you’re reading a narrative or, you know, if you’re reading a speech or, you know, you’re reading a poem or things like that. And this, uh, this passage, uh, defied some of the, the things that I would normally look for, say, in a poem. Uh, it doesn’t contain flower flowery language. It doesn’t contain metaphor. For instance. It doesn’t, it doesn’t say the Lord is like a strong tower or something along those lines. So it had that psalm quality to it, and in fact, it had explanation quality to it. I’m writing this because, you know, and then giving us a reason. That’s normal letter writing. That’s what I would normally find in a letter. And yet there was repetition. There were key words that were that came up again, things like, know, you know, the father, you, you, you know, the one who was from the beginning. So, so it had some of the elements, but not others, not the other elements that I would normally look for. And so that’s why… And then to find it in the middle of a letter. So I already know the genre I’m in. Okay. I’m not in a, I’m not in a gospel. I’m not reading prophetic literature. I’m reading a letter from John to the churches. So for this to be inserted, seemingly with his own words, he doesn’t appear to be quoting something else. These are this is information he wants to give. If it contained words that John doesn’t normally use, well, then I would say perhaps he’s quoting someone else. Perhaps he pulled this in. Maybe it’s a sort of a common saying of that time, and he’s using it for his purposes, but it’s it’s all his language.

Pastor Brian Martin: Well, even little children, as a phrase, gets used multiple times in the letter. And it’s in this poetic bit.

Pastor Kyle Bushre: Exactly right. Exactly right. So it but then it’s structured very differently with all that repetition and the change in verbs. So it just sort of defied anything that I, that I’m normal normally used to looking at when I’m in a, in a letter that’s written in Greek. Yeah. And so, you know, what is my process? I read widely, I look, uh, you know, different commentaries, different articles, different, um, you know, people I trust, people I know, uh, that, that handle the Bible well and deeply. And, you know, there’s differences of opinion, as I mentioned on Sunday. So it’d be nice if all of the people I love and respect and know very, very well all agreed that this is exactly what this thing is, because then I would probably just also agree and see their points. But there just isn’t really a… There isn’t just sort of one way of thinking about what this is. So it appears to me, from what I can tell, John just decided that he wanted to write something to give bold confidence to the church in a memorable way. And this was the structure he chose to use. And I do think that that that the repetition, the key words and all that is there for memorization purposes. He wants them to remember this portion.

Pastor Brian Martin: Yeah. Yeah. And when we see that, maybe I can’t remember if you mentioned this in the sermon or not. But when we see that sort of indentation, when we’re, we should read it as something in the sort of category of poetry, even if it’s not literally poetry.

Pastor Kyle Bushre: It’s important to know, though, when you’re looking at that, that when you see that indentation, you’re looking at a translator’s choice.  That wouldn’t be in the original. The original would just have the language there. And so the, the, the compilers of our Greek New Testaments, uh, are putting in helpful points and interpretations as they put things together. And so they saw the poetic nature and the repetition. And then, and then, uh, then the Greek then becomes the reason or the, the basis for writing our English translations. And so it’s in there as well. And that’s kind of how we have it in front of us. So yes, the translators are and are interpreting, they’re pointing us to the poetic nature of what’s there. Um, and I think rightly so. I think that’s the right thing to do because clearly that’s there. Uh, but it would not have been in the original.

Pastor Brian Martin: And it would be an error, of course, to read poetry as like somehow not true, you know, just because there’s artistry to it or whatever. I mean, you know, just take a more, more recent, uh, sort of practical example of like, everybody knows when Columbus sailed to the Americas because of a poem. Right?  And I wouldn’t know, I wouldn’t know it if it weren’t for the poem. And the poem helped me remember 1492, you know, whatever. Like it’s like a thing, right? And I think sometimes, like, like you were saying the poetry, the repetition is about it’s a learning technique or it’s a teaching technique, depending on how you talk about it. And so we shouldn’t dismiss poetry as somehow less true or less of the Lord. You know, it’s not less inspired, but we do have to read it differently, or at least put it in a different context or a different consideration as we’re reading it.

Pastor Kyle Bushre: That’s right.

Yeah. That’s an important piece.

Pastor Kyle Bushre: Yeah. The emphasis when he, when, when the he says to the fathers, um, you know him who was from the beginning, he says it twice, right. I can’t say why, you know, I can’t unfortunately ask him, John, why did you say this twice? But I can infer from the fact that he did say it twice that two things: One, he really wants me to know it, and he really wants me to remember it because of the memorization that comes with repetition. So I think we’re in safe ground if we say that’s the reason it’s there, that’s the reason why it’s structured this way. But I don’t know if we can say a whole lot beyond that.

Pastor Brian Martin: Yeah. Good. So you mentioned, uh, a sort of, I’ll call it a key theological word as you were preaching as well, which is propitiation.  Okay. So it’s an important concept, but it’s also a word we don’t use a lot sort of in common language. So can you just do a lap with us, explain it a little bit, a little bit, and reflect on the importance of what this is and why this is an important theological concept.

Pastor Kyle Bushre: Yeah. So we covered this earlier in the chapter back at the beginning of chapter two, when, when Jesus is, uh, when, when John tells us that Jesus is the propitiation for our sins and of course, a propitiation is a sacrifice that appeases God’s wrath, and it is acceptable to him. Okay. That’s sort of the two qualifiers, that it’s acceptable for what it covers, our sins, and it appeases his wrath. It turns away his anger, his just and righteous anger over our sins so that God moves from being our judge to being our father. And so that’s why I said yesterday, this, this first statement, uh, that little children, you know, you know, the one who has forgiven your sins, right? You, you have your sins are forgiven. That’s what he says. That’s key for the rest of it. You got it. You got to know this so that you can say things like, I know him who was from the beginning. I know I have overcome the evil one. I know that I am strong, all these other things that he says in it, none of those are true unless Jesus has turned God’s wrath away from you, placed it on himself so that he can… So that God is no longer your judge but your father. That’s the change that has to happen first. And that’s why theologically, it’s so important. Uh, and I love the fact that it’s in this poem, uh, that, that it starts off that way because, you know, if it didn’t, I suppose somebody could… And you can do this with any scripture. Truly. You can pull any scripture out of context and apply it to yourself and not follow it in order. But, uh, John gave us a real, a deep gift here by, by making sure that the forgiveness of sins, the propitiation of Christ, is first and foremost for the whole body. And then all of these things are true. So that’s why I mentioned it again this last Sunday.

Pastor Brian Martin: Yeah. Well, it’s it, it bears repeating certainly, because it’s a pretty quintessential piece to our understanding of our sin, for one. You know, and the weight and the cost of it. Right. Um, because it also carries with it sort of debt, payment sort of, uh, connotation as well. I mean, yeah, it’s important for our sin, but it’s also important for the sufficiency of Christ. It’s both things are, I think, wrapped up in that concept.

Pastor Kyle Bushre: So yeah, if you, if you feel like there’s some residual anger that God has towards you as a Christian, you will misunderstand what the gospel is.  And so we don’t use the word propitiation, but a pleasing, acceptable sacrifice that turns God’s anger away is a long phrase to use. Yeah. Uh, yeah. But that is what a propitiation is. And if you feel that it’s not complete or full or totally done for you in Jesus, you’re going to you’re going to carry around this fear of God that is not healthy, like a fear of God as judge, not as father. And, uh, so yes, we have to have a biblical understanding of what has been done to our sins. What has God done with them? Is he carrying a grudge against us because of them? No. He’s poured out all that anger. It’s all gone. It all went on Christ. And so that sets me free. It doesn’t set me free to sin. But when I do sin, when I do fail and that is daily, I don’t think about God as God must be so angry with me, he must hate me. No, he’s saddened as a father would be saddened. He may have to correct me as a father. A loving father may have to correct. But he’s not carrying around this, this anger and wrath that he’s going to pour out on me, that God’s going to get me in any moment. No, that’s that that judgment has been paid in full by Jesus. That’s propitiation.

Pastor Brian Martin: Mhm. Yeah. Yeah. It’s really interesting. And I think I feel like I hear people use phrasing like, I got to get myself right with God. And that always sets off alarm bells in my head. Right. Not that they’re actively rejecting this idea, but they are by that. It’s like I have to clean myself enough up enough to go before the Lord.  No you don’t.  It’s… This isn’t… I mean, it’s a terrible metaphor. This isn’t a first date. You know, it’s not. It’s not. Do you know what I mean? Not not that even we should think of that that way. But, like, the point is, you know, no. God the Father loves you as you are. You know, and I’ve heard people say he loves you too much to let you stay that way. You know, he does have expectations and he does have a call for obedience. But that’s not the same thing as I have to clean myself up, as it were, in order to approach him. No, he is approachable in that sense.

Pastor Kyle Bushre: If somebody says, I need to get right with God, I don’t immediately reject that because what they might mean,  what they might mean is yeah,  if they, what they mean is I need to confess my sin to the Lord. Fantastic. That’s God at work in you. That’s the Holy Spirit’s conviction in you. Fantastic. Go before the Lord. Confess your sin. Claim Christ once again.  Not that you lost him. Not that you lost your salvation. No, no, no, that that’s not how it works. In the same way that I don’t lose my place in my family because I made my family mad. I don’t lose my status with my with my mother and my father. I don’t lose my my kids don’t lose their status with me as their, I’m their father. That doesn’t change even if I’m upset, right? And even if we got to make things right. But if what you mean by I got to get right with God is I’ve got to reclaim his his fatherhood toward me, I have to impress him in some way so that he’ll want me around.

Pastor Brian Martin: I got to behave better so I can be his kid.

Pastor Kyle Bushre: Yeah. That’s just works righteousness. That’s all it is.

Pastor Brian Martin: It is. Exactly.

Pastor Kyle Bushre: That’s all that is. So we. That’s. Yeah. So, yeah, we just have to ask more questions. I don’t mind the phrase, but we got to know more what you mean by that?

Pastor Brian Martin: Yeah. Good clarifying point. So, um, you also spent some time reflecting a little bit on the consistency and the sameness of the gospel throughout our lives, throughout history. Why? Why is that important? Why is the sameness of God and the sameness of the gospel an important part of our understanding of who he is and how we relate to him?

Pastor Kyle Bushre: Well, God is unchanging in that sense, right? So if God changed his mind, then his revelation would be, his special revelation, The Bible, would be something we would have to question. I recently heard, I’m going to I’m not going to be able to to place this exactly, but I read an article recently of a of a leader in a more liberal Christian, not more liberal, very liberal, progressively theological, not liberal in the political sense, liberal in the theological sense, Christian sort of context. A leader in this in this movement who said that we needed a new Bible. They needed we needed to write a Third Testament.

Pastor Brian Martin: Oh yeah.

Pastor Kyle Bushre: Yeah, yeah,  And I thought, oh, why is that? And so I, of course I’m intrigued. I go to read the article and the phrasing is, and here’s where I have to paraphrase a little bit, but I do remember the word that she used. She said the what we have now is problematic, problematic. It’s problematic. And you go, wait a minute. It’s problematic. In what way? Well it’s…

Pastor Brian Martin: And according to whom?

Pastor Kyle Bushre: Yes. Well, it’s problematic, of course, because it doesn’t line up with her values now.  Her, her her secular values that she has brought into and has commandeered the gospel in her church context and taken over this Bible, she knows because she can read it is problematic for so many things that she wants to claim as good and true. And so we need a new Bible. All right. Uh, if we were to have a new Bible, where would this come from? It would have to just come from the people who want to write it now, right? With no knowledge of new knowledge of Jesus, no special revelation given by God. Uh, you know, our Bible is full of people who walked with Jesus, who were apostles. We have the apostles and the prophets, right? So we have authoritative teaching. There would be no authoritative teaching. It would be everybody’s Bible in their own eyes, by their own craft, their own hand, that they would make it themselves. And therefore we would have a splintering of all sorts of different Christian esque, uh, movements, which is what we have, because people have been doing this with the Bible without writing their new Bibles. Right? So we have it already. Uh, so, so then the question becomes, well, what, what do we, how do we prevent this? Well, we do what the what the New Testament writers said we ought to do.

Pastor Kyle Bushre: We stick to God’s revealed word. Yeah, we preach and teach and rebuke and exhort and we listen to hard things come from it that changes us and shapes us and conforms us. The gospel first given right, it’s the first gospel given, the only gospel, the only true, of course, gospel means good news, the only good news there actually is in Christ. And then we stay anchored in that so that when the false messages and the false teachings come, we know they’re false. We know that they are anti Christ. They’re anti gospel. Uh, and so when I say it’s unchanging, I mean that as a comfort. I think John meant it as a comfort to say, you know him who was from the beginning. Yeah. Uh, and then earlier in the book, when he said, you’ve known from the beginning of your walk with Jesus, you’ve known this gospel and it hasn’t changed. Um, that’s that, the importance of reestablishing that or reminding people of that is so that they don’t question what they know, but they question what now is being taught to them. Of course, that’s exactly why John wrote. Does what is coming at me sound sound like the gospel I know, that I’m establishing, that I know has transformed my heart for the fathers, for the older people in the in the church community, that has been the thing I have believed all my life.

Pastor Kyle Bushre: Now it’s possible that you can believe something all your life, even in a Christian context, and be wrong on something, but if you’re wrong on it, it should be because you misunderstood the Bible in these areas, right? And that that sort of change needs to take place. Yeah, we, I, we should be conforming to the Bible in ways that our lives haven’t yet conformed to it, and our thoughts would be included in that. So I might think about God in a wrong way, but I need that to be corrected by the unchanging scriptures that came from the apostles and the prophets.  Uh, that’s good change. Uh, but, uh, we so, so in that way, we shouldn’t be totally closed to the idea that we would be different in our thinking about who God is. But we have to recognize that we need to be, uh, that our, the change needs to come from what God has revealed, not what other people outside of the church are pressuring us to believe. That’s the key.

Pastor Brian Martin: You know, it’s fascinating that that’s where you just landed. Because when I heard the the news headline that you were talking about, actually one of my reactions to it was, I feel like what she thinks should be in there is in there and she doesn’t know it.

Pastor Kyle Bushre: Oh, is that right?

Pastor Brian Martin: You know, and maybe I’m wrong, but things like, um, like, I’m sure if someone wrote a third Testament or whatever that it would be like women are valuable. Yeah. That’s what Christians should believe.  Do you know what I’m saying? Like, um, you know, minorities are valuable. That’s what Christians should believe. I mean, it’s yeah, some of the things she would identify as problems are probably coming from poor interpretations that she’s been exposed to or that she believes or that she’s teaching. Anyway, I just…

Pastor Kyle Bushre: I had a fantastic conversation with a teacher, my history teacher, actually from when I was in high school. She’s the mother of a very good friend of mine. A lifelong friend. And, and she was reaching out to me and she comes from one of these, uh, more, uh, progressive, liberal theological context. And she gave me a video and she said, I really value your opinion. I’d love to know what you think about this. And it was basically a guy that was defining, defining, um, defining progressive theology. And, and she asked, you know, what, what is, what do you think of this? And I hesitated and I thought, do you want to have a real conversation about this? Or do you want to you just want me to just try to find common ground here? So I did a little bit of both. And, but I pointed out, I said, look, what this man is saying in this video is that he wants people to be more loving. He wants people to be more generous. He wants people to be less angry toward one another. He wants people to embrace more loving things. I said, Look, um, I will say for one, I agree with you on all of these points, but you know what? The way he wants to get there is by moving away from Scripture. And I want to move toward Jesus, actually, and this is what I said to this, this teacher, this former teacher of mine. I said, uh, your, your problem is not going to be solved by less Bible. It’s actually be solved by more Bible. You actually need more of Jesus, not less of him.  And these are thoughts, by the way, these are thoughts I get from Tim Keller. I’ve learned so much from that guy as far as cultural engagement is concerned. So a lot of a lot of what I’m saying now is very Keller esque because, uh, he taught me to see the world that way and see the Bible that way. It’s pretty great.

Pastor Brian Martin: Yeah, well, I find it comforting, you know, that that little phrase in Scripture, Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever.

Pastor Kyle Bushre: Yeah.

Pastor Brian Martin: And that’s, that’s a great reminder to us all. And his sameness, in contrast with the way that I change, I change my mind. I change physically, all these things, it’s part of what makes him God and me, me, you know, like it’s just me, a mere human.  I think I think there’s a lot of comfort in that. Yeah. Yeah. Well, we’re we’re there. So I think we’ll use that as our closing thought today. Friends, thanks for joining us on the Calvary Callback. We hope this time was an encouragement to you. And whether you’re a part of our Calvary family or you’re listening from somewhere else in the world, we invite you to …let’s try that again. We invite you to join us in our mission to pursue passion for Christ and compassion for people. For Kyle Bushre. I’m Brian Martin, we’ll catch you next time on the Callback.