Pastor Brian Martin: Hey again everyone, welcome back to the Calgary Call Back, 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. I can’t say your name. Right, Kyle Bushre!

Pastor Kyle Bushre: That’s all right. People usually people, usually people. Butcher, butcher. My last name, not my first name. Usually it’s not the Kyle that.

Pastor Brian Martin: Trips people up.

Pastor Kyle Bushre: Okay, well. You’re good.

Pastor Brian Martin: Uh, it’s probably important to know your boss’s name, so that’s fine.

Pastor Kyle Bushre: And by the way, listeners, we do this all in one take, right? Case in point.

Pastor Brian Martin: Case in point. Yeah. Well, we should, uh, talk about something more redeeming than that.

Pastor Kyle Bushre: Absolutely, absolutely.

Pastor Brian Martin: So we are going to talk about 1 John 1:1-4. And last week we said we weren’t going to dodge the hard questions. So I’m gonna I’m gonna go right to a hard one.

Pastor Kyle Bushre: All right.

Pastor Brian Martin: You talked about kit-kats in your sermon, I did. Give me your this is gonna be controversial. Uh, give me your top three candy bars.

Pastor Kyle Bushre: Oh, that is gonna be hard.

Pastor Brian Martin: I’ll tell you what.

Pastor Kyle Bushre: Kit-kat is not in there. I gotta say, okay, Kit-Kat was a candy bar of convenience for the illustration. It was not.

Pastor Brian Martin: Understood.

Pastor Kyle Bushre: Yeah, right.

Pastor Brian Martin: It wasn’t an endorsement of as much as that before.

Pastor Kyle Bushre: So I should say right off the bat. I am not a sweets guy. Uh, like my wife knows this. That’s not a that is that is not the way to my heart is through sweets but I would say probably, right at the top Reese’s peanut butter cup. Are we counting it? It’s not a bar, per se.

Pastor Brian Martin: I think that’s fair. I mean, it’s like, if you can go to Kwik Trip and look in that aisle and you can purchase it.

Pastor Kyle Bushre: Yeah. If you set them side by side like they do in the package, it creates a bar like structure.

Pastor Brian Martin: I accept your terms.

Pastor Kyle Bushre: Yeah. Okay. Great. So we’re going to go, that’s number one. And then probably a pretty distant second, honestly, for me is, would have to be the Butterfinger.

Pastor Brian Martin: Oh, interesting.

Pastor Kyle Bushre: Yeah, I know it gets stuck in your teeth, but I like it.

Pastor Brian Martin: And to this day, or like childhood memory.

Pastor Kyle Bushre: No. I mean, again, I don’t really eat candy bars. Like, this is just not a thing for me. So, I guess I’d say to this day, I guess I’m sort of guessing there.

Pastor Brian Martin: Yeah, yeah.

Pastor Kyle Bushre: Um, and then, uh, strangely enough, the Three Musketeers.

Pastor Brian Martin: Yeah. Respect I. Know. Yeah. The creamy nougat.

Pastor Kyle Bushre: Yeah. Nobody. It’s so plain that most people don’t like it, but yeah, but I hate to I hate this, I hate to disappoint anybody who was thinking that, that I chose KitKat because KitKat is so amazing. I just don’t I don’t think.

Pastor Brian Martin: That’s awkward since you have those 4000 boxes in your in your office.

Pastor Kyle Bushre: 400 000 Kitkats stolen.

Pastor Brian Martin: That is so wild.

Pastor Kyle Bushre: By the way, listeners, I must tell you that it was Brian Martin himself that brought this to my attention this week. I had already done the history of the KitKat, and I was telling him about it. And he’s the one that said, did you know that 22 tons of KitKat were stolen last month? And I had no idea. So this is it was a group effort on that particular illustration.

Pastor Brian Martin: I mean, I try to have my finger on the pulse of pop culture, you know what I mean? That’s that’s the goal.

Pastor Kyle Bushre: We tackle the hard things here. We do we do the deep research at Calvary.

Pastor Brian Martin: We really do. All right. Well, we better bring some value to people’s lives.

Pastor Kyle Bushre: What’s yours man?

Pastor Brian Martin: We okay? Yeah. No.

Pastor Kyle Bushre: Yeah. Come on.

Pastor Brian Martin: Okay. So, uh, the number one top spot is a this is very specific. Okay. A king size. Okay.  Hershey with almonds. Now, you might be like, why does it need to be king size? Here’s why. Yeah, I could, I could just have like a fourth of it. I don’t need the whole thing. It’s not, it’s not a gluttony comment.

Pastor Kyle Bushre: Okay.

Pastor Brian Martin: Yeah. It’s, uh, it’s that the thickness of chocolate is important to me.

Pastor Kyle Bushre: Oh my goodness.

Pastor Brian Martin: Right. So I would rather have a smaller percentage of a king size bar because it’s thicker than the standard thinner bar because the thickness is I love it.

Pastor Kyle Bushre: You have you have such specific loves in your life. Just very, very nuanced, specific, detailed things. It’s true that you like. So I’ve learned this about you.

Pastor Brian Martin: Yes, I Do.

Pastor Brian Martin: Okay. I also like cookies and cream. Hershey’s cookies and cream.

Pastor Kyle Bushre: Okay, I do. Okay.

Pastor Brian Martin: It’s very different.

Pastor Kyle Bushre: Yeah.

Pastor Brian Martin: And it’s kind of like a little curveball. Yeah.

Pastor Kyle Bushre: I’ll give you that. I feel like that’s such a that’s not that’s not near the, you know, the canon of candy bar. I feel like that’s more of a.

Pastor Brian Martin: It’s a little left of center.

Pastor Kyle Bushre: Yeah, exactly.

Pastor Brian Martin: You know, or right of center or whatever.

Pastor Kyle Bushre: Correct.

Pastor Brian Martin: Yeah, and okay. Because you took the liberty with the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup. Yes, you know, the like variety pack you can get where you get the dark chocolate, the milk chocolate, the Mr. Goodbar, and the crackle.

Pastor Kyle Bushre: Yeah.

Pastor Brian Martin: Amazing.

Pastor Kyle Bushre: Really? I love that, really?

Pastor Brian Martin: Yeah. Because I love variety and spontaneity. So every time I look, it’s like there’s choices.

Pastor Kyle Bushre: All right, all right. Yeah. Well, hey, to each his own, right, I guess.

Pastor Brian Martin: Okay.

Pastor Kyle Bushre: We should probably talk about the Bible.

Pastor Brian Martin: Probably talk about the Bible. Yeah, yeah. Okay, let’s do that. So let’s. Where to begin? There’s so many interesting places. You know, partially because it’s the beginning of a new series, right? So our title, I didn’t say it in the intro because I couldn’t say your name. Right. The life made manifest we’re looking at for anybody listening. 1 John 1:1-4. That’s what our sermon was about. And that’s what we’re looking at together. So because it’s in the title, let me start with this question. You used use manifest because it’s there. It’s in in the scriptures.

Pastor Kyle Bushre: Uses it twice.

Pastor Brian Martin: However, um, that’s a term that has been, uh, I don’t, I don’t know what to say co-opted by certain parts of culture. Sure. Manifesting something, you know, into existence is sort of a new age idea. Yes. So give us a little definition on that. Like there is biblical manifestation, obviously, because it’s used and it’s in the passage right there. And then there’s this new age idea of manifestation. Compare and contrast those for us.

Pastor Kyle Bushre: Yeah. Well, so every word, every word in the English language, every word in every language has a semantic range, right? Every. Everything has meaning. Different meanings. Manifest is one of those words that has a fairly large semantic range. You can use it in a lot of different ways in the sort of popular pop culture, new agey way of using the word manifest. The idea is I create something that doesn’t exist, usually through my thoughts. I speak good words into the universe. I put good vibes. If you’ve ever had anybody say good vibes, send good vibes my way. You know, they’re, they’re getting this idea that I, as the source of an ability to create, right? Make something happen in the future in the world around us. When John talks about the manifestation of the word of life, he’s not saying that something new has been created. He’s saying that all of the stuff from beforehand that we have been waiting for this, this message of God’s Word, the word of life, has manifested meaning. All the prior stuff has come together and coalesced. And when it coalesced, when it came together and made something, it made a man right. God’s plan was to coalesce all of his promises, his signs, his prophecies for the future, his typological characters in the Old Testament, all these things that, uh, teach us about the salvation that he’s going to bring, all comes together and coalesces and manifests in a single man in his ministry. Uh, so I guess the difference there would be, new age manifest. Would we say create something wholly new out of the source? That is my thoughts and actions.

Pastor Brian Martin: Right from me.

Pastor Kyle Bushre: From me or, uh, what John is saying is all of the things that God has promised beforehand all come together in this one man, which was one of the things that the New Testament disciples had the most difficulty with understanding that all the different promises and signs and and everything that the scriptures had to say about the salvation that God was bringing was going to come, and it was all going to be fulfilled in Jesus. And that was what they had to learn after his resurrection.

Pastor Brian Martin: Yeah. You know, another way, another somewhat synonymous word for manifest here is create in a sense, right? And this is one definition or sort of clarification of God and his Godness compared to our humanity, right? Is that he is the only actual creator. He’s the only one who can create, like, you know, we refer to musicians and artists and, you know, actors as creatives, right? Well, none of those people are really creating, they’re arranging things that God has already created.

Pastor Kyle Bushre: Right. Right.

Pastor Brian Martin: Yeah. Into pleasing or helpful ways or whatever. Sure. And so yeah, God can manifest, I cannot. Yeah. And that’s, that’s the difference, isn’t it?

Pastor Kyle Bushre: So yeah. So when something is manifest, it’s made visible, right? So things that were invisible are made visible. Yeah. So a church, for instance, the church exists. All the people who have the Holy Spirit, who trust in Jesus across the globe are part of the big C church. But as our own doctrinal statement says, for the EFCA that is made manifest in local churches, when we come together to celebrate the Lord, you can see the church in a way that you can’t see it when it’s scattered. And so that really is what John is saying here, is that God has brought together all the stuff and it’s Jesus. So yeah, absolutely. God is the only one that can do that, right? He’s the one that can bring together his creation and show us and reveal to us. And so you can almost, you can almost take the word manifest out of the first four verses of this letter and replace it with the word revealed. God has revealed this, but he’s revealed it in one place. In one man. Jesus.

Pastor Brian Martin: Yeah. Fascinating. So that’s actually a good segue to another question I had. So you talked about fellowship a good bit. Yeah. Because it was in the passage and, you the phrase was if I got it right, you can correct me if I’m wrong. That fellowship is the sort of working definition you were using was a spiritually bonded community. Yeah. So I find there to be a tension here, and I’m curious how you work it out. There’s this tension of the fellowship of the local church, but there’s also the global church. Yeah. So how do you see fellowship being the same and or different, you know, with our local church context versus our connection to believers across all places and generations, even although we wouldn’t interact, you know, from many generations ago. But, you know, I would say I have some kind of some kind of fellowship with a fellow believer in Uganda who have never met, don’t speak the language. You know, the same language. But how are those the same and how are those different?

Pastor Kyle Bushre: Yeah, well, I mean, the truth is we are bonded spiritually to all the people across the globe who know Christ and to your point, back through the generations, we’re all we’re all one church together, the.

Pastor Brian Martin: Great cloud of witnesses.

Pastor Kyle Bushre: Exactly, exactly right. So we have we’re all one in Christ in that way, spiritually bonded together. And in that sense, we would have a kind of fellowship. This is not what John is getting at in the first four verses of his letter here, he’s trying to show who is in that group, who is in that fellowship, and who is not in that fellowship. And so he really is talking about the collected body of believers. He’s saying to them, if, you know, if you trust in Jesus, you can have fellowship with us. He’s saying our group would be in fellowship with your group. What does it mean for us to have fellowship in the local church. I really do think that it is tied to a mentality of who is a follower of Jesus, and is also united in a church like relationship, a biblical church relationship with this local church with Calvary. I often say in the membership class that we’re, you know, we’re brothers and sisters with everybody in Rochester who is a faithful follower of Jesus. They’re our brothers and sisters. And yet we’re not responsible for the spiritual care here at Calvary of every believer in this community. We can’t be right. We’re different from the first century in that sense. And that’s a good thing. It’s good to have so many local churches, so many believers in Christ, that they can’t all really be cared for as one local church. So, fellowship for us as a local church is simply assessing who is, who loves Jesus and is dedicated to Calvary as their local church.

Pastor Kyle Bushre: And then that gives us that means we have responsibilities to those folks, and they have responsibilities to the body of Christ here in our church, in a way that your friend from Uganda could not possibly have responsibilities with us. So it really ends up becoming becoming an ecclesiology question, a church question, correct. Uh, and yeah, it can be. I think this is where a strong membership category helps us because it helps us to identify who those folks are. Right. I didn’t, I’m not, I’m not necessarily going to make an argument here now for why membership is so important. That is an incredibly important topic and it certainly is very important, but I think it does help us with identifying what real fellowship should look like in a church and it also helps us to determine who are we not in fellowship with? You know, when we do an intentional process, when we, when we say it out loud together that we’re going to be the church together, that is helpful for understanding who are we responsible and who aren’t we responsible for? We can still, of course, love people. We can certainly invest in their lives, but to in a sense, we can’t be the full fellowship of the church together with somebody who doesn’t want to be. Yeah. Yeah.

Pastor Brian Martin: Or who isn’t present, isn’t present.

Pastor Kyle Bushre: Yeah. Yeah.

Pastor Brian Martin: Absolutely. So would this be a fair statement then we have unity. You know Ephesians four, right? We have unity with all believers everywhere, but we don’t necessarily have fellowship with all believers everywhere because we’re not necessarily with or connected to in relationship.

Pastor Kyle Bushre: It just depends on how you’re using the word fellowship. If you mean it more like unity of the spirit, then yeah, we have a sense of fellowship. But it’s just used in different ways in different places. And I think here in First John, he really is what we’re going to learn about this week. Little, little precursor to this week. We’re going to start talking about who he’s writing to and why. And there definitely are some people that have gone out from the local church who are teaching some errant heretical theology, and they went out from us because they are not of us. Right. And that’s what that that’s the difference between those who are in fellowship and those who are outside of fellowship. And John means something even deeper than part of the local church. He’s saying, if you’re outside of the fellowship of the local church and its commitment to the true gospel, then you’re outside of fellowship, even with Christ and with the God the Father, it. There’s more spiritual ramifications for being outside, than simply you’re not, you know, in attendance at a local church. So deeper spiritual meaning there. But he’s, he’s definitely talking about the manifestation, the church that you can see and whether someone is in fellowship with it.

Pastor Brian Martin: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think another thing that affects that leads us into our next question. You talked a bit about the idea of, um, what it would mean to be an inauthentic Christian, as it were. So what are some of the pieces of evidence you might observe that would indicate an inauthentic Christian life? Like how do you how do you evaluate that?

Pastor Kyle Bushre: Boy, that is tough. Uh, so.

Pastor Brian Martin: That’s, I mean, that’s kind of an unfair question.

Pastor Kyle Bushre: No, well, it’s not unfair. It’s just it’s the content of the rest of the letter. Like, for instance, we’re going to talk about walking in light and walking in darkness this Sunday coming up, you’re going to be calling on every person listening to determine, are you walking in the light or are you walking in the darkness? Because if you are walking in darkness, but you say that you’re walking in light, that would be the inauthentic Christian, right? Right. The hope of John as he writes this, is that his readers will do due diligence in assessing their own hearts and determining is what I’m saying. As a follower of Jesus, I say, I follow Jesus. Am I following Jesus? Kind of got into this last week where I said, the whole letter is going to say, hey, we care about our community. Do you actually care about your community? How would you how would you show us what you’ve done to love and care for your community? As far as sharing the gospel with them? You say that you hate your sin, but do you actually hate your sin? I think I, you know or you just are you just upset about the consequences of your sin? Are you just upset about the reputation that you lose because you’re now being made guilty by others or shamed or whatever it is? You know, the authentic Christian life is going to look different than the way the world would handle those different problems.

Pastor Kyle Bushre: And so, uh, yeah, it really, the letter is a call for self-assessment. And it is also very helpful when I’m in a counseling situation, it helps. This letter helps me to understand the sorts of questions I should ask for self-discovery. Okay, to get to a place where you understand whether or not what you’re saying is actually matching up to who you are on the inside, whether your heart is truly transformed. First John is invaluable for that. That kind of a one on one counseling. But I do think that we lie to ourselves quite a lot. And  there is a very inauthentic Christianity. I’ll put Christianity quotes there. Listeners can’t see me using quote signs, but I am putting that in quotes, an inauthentic quote, Christianity that feels a little like American Western Christianity, Church going whatever that looks like, but is actually pretty far from what the Bible actually describes as a transformed life in Christ and first John is a treasure trove of discerning the difference between those two?

Pastor Brian Martin: Yeah. Yeah. There’s a lot of people who claim to be Christians that are closer to actually being Buddhists in their practices and beliefs. Yeah. If I just try hard and then God’s pleased, you know, and there’s other people who are very frankly, Muslim in their practices in that they’re like, well, if I’m just good enough, I mean, that’s yeah.

Pastor Kyle Bushre: Jump through all the hoops, right?

Pastor Brian Martin: It’s, you know, works based righteousness is what Islam is based on. Right. So it’s very broad strokes, but it is fascinating how often people we have to be careful not to be fooled by labels people put on themselves. Because one of the things that’s unique about Christianity, right? If you decide you want to be a member of a political party, Democrat, Republican, libertarian, whatever, you just decide to and then you become it. And there’s basically no other like you just, I am one and then you are and Christianity doesn’t work that way. No, it’s it’s not a, it’s not actually a self-selection in. Because it’s not just like a raise of the hand, it’s to the entire theme of First John. Are you walking in the light? Are you walking in the darkness? Are you are you actually? Do you actually believe this? Right? And it’s a completely different idea there.

Pastor Kyle Bushre: Yeah. It is. Christian is a label you can put on yourself, but you can do so in a way that fools even you. And, and.

Pastor Brian Martin: Yeah, that’s a great point.

Pastor Kyle Bushre: You know, you can use it, you can use it in such a broad way that to the point where it breaks the very category and you can still use it. And you live in a country that allows you to do that. And no one can say otherwise. And really what you’re doing is you’re living very autonomously, but you’re using words however you like to use them. And I would stress to our listeners, don’t do that with something so important as the difference between eternal life and eternal damnation. Don’t do that with something so important as what is it I think about God, and how am I going to have hope for the future? We want to tell ourselves two things when it when it comes to these really vital categories.

Pastor Brian Martin: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Well, last question for today. All right. Let’s kind of, uh, put ourselves in a hypothetical situation. And it’s one I’ve been in before where I’ve had people say to me things like, you know, skeptics who will say things like, well, if God was real, I think he would show himself to me, you know, and so we have we’re reading this letter from John, you know, who was this real person who actually saw and you made a good point about this on Sunday about I touched, I heard I, you know, he experienced Jesus in the flesh. And there are some people who tell themselves, you know, if that happened to me, then I would believe. Well, there are certainly a lot of people at the time who were contemporaries of Jesus, who saw and heard and even even witnessed miracles and still didn’t believe. So how would you, you know, lovingly, respectfully, but how would you attack that line of thinking?

Pastor Kyle Bushre: Jesus said you you believe because, you see, blessed are those who will not see and yet believe. Yeah, right. So he knew that there were going to be many, many a huge, a huge throng, a generation or generations of the church that would not get the opportunity to walk with him. And to your point, just because you were there, just because you saw the empty tomb. I mean, the guards knew the tomb was empty.

Pastor Brian Martin: Right?

Pastor Kyle Bushre: Right. So I’m not sure why they aren’t. We don’t have their testimony. Maybe they did come to faith, I don’t know. We’re not really told anything about them. But the fact is, there were lots of people who encountered Christ, who saw his miracles, who did see Jesus and hear Jesus and touch Jesus and all these things, and walked away from the rich young ruler, walked away from it. There were a lot of people that walked away from him, not because of who Jesus is, not because they weren’t convinced even of that. He was a very, very important teacher sent by God because they loved themselves. They wanted their own things. They wanted to go their own way. They wanted to be autonomous. That’s really what holds us back from Christ. It is not an experience of him. We have so, so much good documentation, so many reliable witnesses of who Jesus was and what he did. We can see the power of God working through the church in the world today. There’s lots of great reasons.

Pastor Brian Martin: Lots.

Pastor Kyle Bushre: To believe in Jesus and the historical Christ.

Pastor Brian Martin: Not to mention that’s a historical standard that same person, hypothetical person doesn’t hold anything else to nothing else. They weren’t there for World War Two, and they know that it happened, you know?

Pastor Kyle Bushre: So yeah, there’s a lot of trust in the historicity of everything except Jesus for some reason. And why? Because if you did believe, it would have to change a whole lot of things in your life. Yeah. It would cause you to turn from yourself, to deny yourself, take up your cross and follow him. That’s a big call to. And so they don’t they don’t want to do that. And so they push that away and explain it away. So, yeah, I would say to the person who says, I must have an experience, by the way, I have a very good friend. One of my best friends in life is just like this. I talked to him. I’ve shared the gospel with him eight, ten times in my lifetime, at length, in depth as he was going through his divorce. One and two. Right? Just just incredible amounts of time spent with this guy that I love, good friend of mine. And yet when we get to the end and I tell him all the things that I believe about Jesus and he, he agrees with me on every point. The need for God for there to be true morality, the historicity of the documents that just, anything that he agrees with me on. And yet we get to the end of that conversation. He goes, well, I just haven’t had that, Damascus Road experience that you have. I just haven’t had that thing. And to a degree, I understand that. Sure.

Pastor Brian Martin: Because that’s honest.

Pastor Kyle Bushre: Yeah. Here’s the truth. The truth is God is the one that has to do the work in the heart of the person. The regeneration is in the hands of the Lord. It’s not in our hands. There’s really nothing I can do other than to tell them about Jesus. I can’t change his heart, and he’s actually righter than he knows, because it would require a transformation of his heart to believe. But yet here he goes. I need to have this experience, I need to Jesus would have to show up in the path. He would have to. He would have to blind me like Paul. Uh, and then then I would believe, then I would say, and you know what I think? I think even if that happened for my friend, I think you’d find a way to explain it away. Mhm. You know, I had a kind of like a the Ebenezer Scrooge. After seeing Marley’s ghost. Oh, you’re just a bit of mustard that I ate earlier in the day. There’s always some reason why the thing where God makes himself apparent in a person’s life isn’t really what they’re seeing and experiencing. Um, so yeah, I think that, I would any listener who’s thinking to themselves. Yep. As soon as I have that experience, then I’ll believe I’m just going to ask you this question I would pose to you. Are you seeking? Are you seeking Christ? Are you are you looking for the work of God in the world? Are you after or are you avoiding it? Are you explaining away all the truths, all the arguments in favor of a true Creator God who’s come to save you in Christ? Because if you’re really explaining those things away and you’re really not looking and you’re, you’re really just sort of living with blinders on, let’s just be intellectually honest. You’re not really looking for an experience. You’re hoping one doesn’t come.

Pastor Brian Martin: Yeah. Wow. Yeah, I think you’re right. Yeah. And that can be tough. That is people we love.

Pastor Kyle Bushre: Absolutely.

Pastor Brian Martin: And so we keep praying. Yep. What else do you do?

Pastor Kyle Bushre: Absolutely. Because God’s the one that transforms hearts. That’s right. And we keep. So we pray and we share the gospel at every turn that we can lovingly.

Pastor Brian Martin: And we try to live in the light because we want to be a good witness.

Pastor Kyle Bushre: Live as examples.Pastor Brian Martin: Yeah. Yeah. Well, that’s a great way to end today, I think. So, Kyle, thanks for your thoughts. Appreciate that as always. Thanks, everybody 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 if you’re listening from somewhere else in the world, 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 Calvary Callback.