Seeking the Hidden Thing Podcast

Pulpit NotesNote: the spoken version of this message diverged quite a bit from the text that I brought with me to the pulpit.Today is Palm Sunday or Passion Sunday. Deep into Lent, we are boring into core Christian teachings. Who is Jesus? Who are we as Christians?The text we have in front of us is thought to be an early Christian hymn that Paul is using to make a point, likely because of its familiarity with the Philippian church.The English here in the NIV smooths out the language here in verse five, but in so doing obscures the point that Paul wants to make.It reads literally: “Let this mind be in you which also in Christ Jesus.”We have talked a lot about this fundamental Pauline concept of being “in Christ.” Salvation happens “in Christ.” We have been taken from “the world” and are now “in Christ.” In Christ we are a new creation. In Christ we are raised from the dead.But as we have learned, we don’t yet fully experience this reality today. A big part of the core of our faith is believing in this reality, that “in Christ” we are all these things.We know that until Christ returns this new reality remains hidden “in Christ.” This is why we lift our attention to heaven to where Christ sits at the right hand of God.In the way that Paul lays out his opening sentence here, what he is telling us is how to make this “in Christ” reality something that is revealed in our lives and the life of our community.Interestingly, the “in you” here is actually the plural form. What Paul is saying is that revealing Christ in our lives in not something we do individually, although we all participate as persons. But this is something we do as a community.So, Paul is teaching us that our mind, our thinking, our attitudes, our actions should reflect what is “in Christ.” Our mind is Christ’s mind. What is in you, among you, should be what is in Christ.So, what is “in Christ”?We have talked about this as a change in being, of our essence. We have gone from a space where our essential being is “of the world” to one where we are now “in Christ.” We believe, a core part of our faith is that this transformation has taken place, even if now this new essence is hidden “in Christ.” What is this essence? What does it mean to be “in Christ” to be a new creation, to be the body of Christ?It is easy to read the opening of the hymn and place the emphasis on the fact that the Son of God gave up his equality with God the Father to empty himself to become a servant to humanity to sacrifice himself for us, and if we combine this with Paul’s urgings in the first five verses that we should do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit and that would should consider others as better than ourselves as us being urged to be pushovers, or weak, or to put ourselves and the church at the mercy of bad actors would take advantage of all of this.This is not a call for weakness, but rather one of radical obedience to God the Father. We choose to be gentle not because we are weak, but because we are obedient.We are not the people who get walked all over. We are not a people who get taken advantage of. We don’t let bad actors take us for a ride.We can take a stand and hold our ground. We can say no. We can say, we don’t do that here. We can tell the truth about the reality of sin. We don’t have to ignore sin or bad behaviour. We can tell the truth. We can draw lines in the sand. We can hold each other accountable.Jesus did all of these things and they put him to death for it.The reality that Paul is talking about here is not one of being weak or giving excuse for passivity or to justify Christians being pushovers.In reality, this thing that Paul is calling us to is one of tremendous strength and discipline.What he is calling us to is a life of radical obedience.So here is how it works.You live in community. What do you pursue? Do you pursue what you want, what your plans are, what your ambitions are? Are you thinking about how other people need to be meeting your needs and accommodating you in what you want?Is it all about the respect you deserve? The recognition you deserve? Is it about people acknowledging how much you do around here? Is it about people noticing what you are going through and asking you about what you need? Is it about being upset because no one acknowledges you and your situation?You get the idea. It is not about you. It’s not about me.It’s even not about what I want for the church. And it is certainly not about trying to manipulate people by tugging on their willingness to sacrifice so that you can push your agenda on to people as if your plan, your vision for the church as if it is God’s vision.This is radical.It also means that because this is a communal thing, that when the Spirit of Christ is truly living in us and we are practicing the kind of radical obedience to God that Jesus did, that we can also call people to account for their bad behaviour, just as Paul is doing here in the previous five verses.It is ok to put our collecti

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.seekingthehiddenthing.comBen Fleming is back to discuss a work, Dostoevsky's "Notes from Underground," that underscores the thesis that the west is largely "stuck" playing out the same themes and ideas from the 1850's-1920's.Seeking the Hidden Thing is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Carl Schmitt's short work "Political Theology" offers some key insights into the nature of LLM algorithms, and their key, fundamental fatal flaw. It's the same problem the "the rule of law" has. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.seekingthehiddenthing.com/subscribe

The politics of ideas -- conservative vs. liberal -- and the notion of popular sovereignty persist to this day. We need to understand why populism is a political dead end. Seeking the Hidden Thing is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Sponsorship PartnersFoxNSons CoffeeSteve Fox is one of “our guys” and he sells coffee. Good coffee. If you live in the US — sorry Canadians…too much government red tape involved in shipping coffee over the border…my supply comes hand delivered — he can ship you your coffee right to your doorstep. Go to the FoxNSons website now and use the promo code “kruptos” for a 15% discount.Axios Fitness CoachingJD is also one of “our guys” and he wants to help you get fit and stay fit for what is coming. Head over to Axios and get started today! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.seekingthehiddenthing.com/subscribe

ScriptureEphesians 5:8-148 For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Live as children of light 9 (for the fruit of the light consists in all goodness, righteousness and truth) 10 and find out what pleases the Lord. 11 Have nothing to do with the fruitless deeds of darkness, but rather expose them. 12 It is shameful even to mention what the disobedient do in secret. 13 But everything exposed by the light becomes visible—and everything that is illuminated becomes a light. 14 This is why it is said:“Wake up, sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.”Pulpit NotesToday is the fourth Sunday of Lent and we continue with Lenten themes as we prepare ourselves to remember and celebrate the death and resurrection of our Saviour Jesus Christ.Our text this morning has us mediating on the resurrection life, but in a way where we are looking through the binary battle between light and darkness, the world of light and the world of darkness.The message here is actually a hard sell. It is not one that will resonate with us, given the ways that we have been influenced by the culture around us. Ours is a world steeped in propaganda and propaganda messaging. Many people think of propaganda as the process of making you believe lies. But that is not the true point and goal of propaganda at all.The real purpose of propaganda is mostly to integrate you into modern life, and to support and reinforce the main messages of modernity. One such message is that human beings are always progressing towards a better future. This progress will cost you nothing. It will largely be achieved through social engineering. You will not have to make any hard moral choices and instead will be free to pursue those things that make you happy. Modernity also tells us that there is no God and that all of our needs can be satisfied through material goods.As a cornerstone of this, we are told that because we are free to pursue whatever makes us happy, that the things we do privately to seek happiness are our business and we have a right to privacy.Every day we are bombarded with messages that reinforce these ideas of our fundamental freedoms and the right to do what we please on our own without anyone else meddling in our business.You do your thing and I will do mine. I will leave you alone if you leave me alone.This is the message that we want to hear. Propaganda works best when it is reinforcing messages we kind of want to hear anyways. And it is difficult to speak against the things we want to hear with propaganda. This is the other often misunderstood thing about propaganda: is that we want it, even need it, to survive in the world that modernity has built for us. We are isolated individuals freely pursuing our own private lives as we see fit. This is the world we want, and we want to be told that it is a good thing to want this.We even organize the habits of our church life around this. We struggle to receive elders into our homes for family visits. We don’t want church members to meddle too much in our lives. We like it that the pastor speaks and then we can go away and figure out for ourselves how best to live the Christian life. We don’t want anyone meddling in our lives or trying to disciple us, telling us what to do or what it means to be a good Christian.This message of Paul’s is one that we are going to struggle with because it really pushes back on the spirit of our age, which, truth be told, is an age of tremendous darkness. Paul nails the dirty little secret that no one wants to really acknowledge about the so-called “right to privacy”:“…it is shameful even to mention what the disobedient do in secret.”The so-called “right to privacy” is little more than the right to sin in secret without anyone finding out what you are doing. I have the right to not have anyone looking into or pointing out my sins. As long as I am not hurting anyone, what I do in private is my business. Right?Wrong. And most of us know it. But we don’t like it when people point this out to us.But the good news is that we as Christians, when we are embracing who we are in Christ, don’t live that way. This is not who we are.“For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord.”The first observation we need to make is that this is a simple binary. You are either dark or light. There are no shades of grey. We like shadows and shades of grey because it allows us to convince ourselves that being partially illuminated is better than nothing.Paul here is describing two states of being. Note that he didn’t say were we “under darkness” or “in the light.” Rather, he describes this as the condition of our being, our essence. The NIV here is a really good translation of the Greek.You were once darkness. Your essence, you being was darkness. This was who you are. It’s not like you were a good person trapped in a bad place. Its not like a movie set in a grim, dark world where everything is dark and shadowy and you are good people hiding and h

An interesting piece was brought to my attention: a reflection on the so-called "Cain and Abel" story. I was going to respond with a note, but there is enough here to warrant a short meditation. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.seekingthehiddenthing.com/subscribe

Some recent questions in my replies require longer answers than a mere "reply" can provide. One such query on immigration got me thinking and gave me an opportunity to think through this issue. Sponsorship PartnersFoxNSons CoffeeSteve Fox is one of “our guys” and he sells coffee. Good coffee. If you live in the US — sorry Canadians…too much government red tape involved in shipping coffee over the border…my supply comes hand delivered — he can ship you your coffee right to your doorstep. Go to the FoxNSons website now and use the promo code “kruptos” for a 15% discount.Axios Fitness CoachingJD is also one of “our guys” and he wants to help you get fit and stay fit for what is coming. Head over to Axios and get started today! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.seekingthehiddenthing.com/subscribe

Black Horse recently posted a monologue on the fertility crisis, making the big point that almost everything you think caused it, didn't because most of your assumptions about it are wrong.Here is the video monologue from The Red Ensign Substack (with charts!): https://theredensign.substack.com/p/tre-special-15-modernity-and-fertilitySponsorship PartnersFoxNSons CoffeeSteve Fox is one of “our guys” and he sells coffee. Good coffee. If you live in the US — sorry Canadians…too much government red tape involved in shipping coffee over the border…my supply comes hand delivered — he can ship you your coffee right to your doorstep. Go to the FoxNSons website now and use the promo code “kruptos” for a 15% discount.Axios Fitness CoachingJD is also one of “our guys” and he wants to help you get fit and stay fit for what is coming. Head over to Axios and get started today! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.seekingthehiddenthing.com/subscribe

Ben Fleming and I get together to discuss Edmund Burke because of a series of exchanges on Twitter with Erin O’Toole where he suggested that what is needed today is “ordered liberty.” When we mocked this idea, he suggested that we might benefit from reading more Edmund Burke who is seen as the intellectual forefather of modern conservatism. Ben and I thought to ourselves, “Why not?” So we embraced the challenge and set out to read some Edmund Burke for ourselves, specifically his Reflections on the Revolution in France. I, for one, was glad that I finally got around to doing this reading. It was an interesting read and it explains a lot of what is wrong with so-called “conservatism” today. To his credit, Burke saw today coming. Unfortunately, his prescriptions simply lack any real ability to apply a limiting force on liberal modernity.Sponsorship PartnersFoxNSons CoffeeSteve Fox is one of “our guys” and he sells coffee. Good coffee. If you live in the US — sorry Canadians…too much government red tape involved in shipping coffee over the border…my supply comes hand delivered — he can ship you your coffee right to your doorstep. Go to the FoxNSons website now and use the promo code “kruptos” for a 15% discount.Axios Fitness CoachingJD is also one of “our guys” and he wants to help you get fit and stay fit for what is coming. Head over to Axios and get started today!Seeking the Hidden Thing is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.seekingthehiddenthing.com/subscribe

Pulpit NotesOne of the compliments that people often give when assessing a sermon is that it was “meaty.” What they often mean is that it was heavy in theology or history. It made them think about the text. Perhaps they learned something that they didn’t know before.In our text this morning Paul draws a contrast between milk and solid food. In most of our minds, our default understanding of this is to think of “milk” sort of like a Sunday school level of understanding the Christian faith. Or maybe it is the kind of message that might appeal to new believers.But we want “meat.” Good heavy sermons that you have to chew on for a while first before swallowing and digesting it. Just like a steak. I mean you wouldn’t feed steak to kids. They would just complain how hard it is to chew.So that is the contrast that we have in our minds as we hear Paul writing these words to the Corinthians. But this gets the whole passage wrong.We have to read chapter three here as an application of chapters one and two. In the previous chapters, Paul draws a contrast between the wisdom of the world, which is foolishness to God and the wisdom which comes from God.Paul explains that God’s wisdom comes out of the heart of God, taught to us by the Spirit of God. The man of the Spirit is the one who knows spiritual truths that come from the very heart of God. He is a man, filled with the Spirit, who meets God and is in contact with God throughout his life.The question that Paul is asking here is whether you have made the journey from spiritual infancy and childhood to adulthood. The adult is the one who communes with the heart of God himself by means of the Spirit. He is taught spiritual things by the Holy Spirit, the wisdom that resides in the secret places of God the Father himself.The question that lays in the background here is, “Do you know the heart of God? “Have you met God?” Are you a ‘spiritual’ man, a man of the Spirit?”The implication is that the Corinthians, who love worldly knowledge, worldly wisdom, all the stuff of rhetoric and philosophy, for all their knowledge, they are still children who need milk.What Paul is saying here is that theology, theological rigor, all the things that we would consider to be meat, all of this is the kinds of stuff the world loves. Rational discussions. Debating Christian ideas. Discussing creeds and confessions. Its all spiritual baby food. Milk.What Paul is concerned with here is whether or not you are living the resurrected life. “In Christ” we are a new creation. “In Christ” we have been raised from the dead.Are we living the resurrected life? Are we being transformed into spiritual men and women with spiritual bodies? Are we revealing our resurrected bodies to the world?He draws a contrast in the opening of the passage. Is your focus on “the flesh” or on “the spirit?”Here, the English translation in the NIV is not helping us. Paul is drawing a contrast between two states of being. One is our earthly, fleshly state. The other is who we are in the resurrected life, our spiritual state in the new earth where we have a spiritual, imperishable, resurrected body.The NIV makes it sound like a “horizontal” divide between us and the world. Rather, we should see this more as a vertical divide. Are you stuck in your old, earthly, fleshly way are living; or are you embracing your life that his now hidden “in Christ” in the heavenly realm?The Christian faith is not therapy. It is not life lessons or self-help. The Christian faith is not about getting everything together and living your best life.The Christian faith, the Christian life, the Way, is about revealing the saving work of God that was accomplished in Jesus Christ. Are you revealing the saving work of God in Christ?The σαρκικοί, those who are “people of the flesh” are contrasted to the πνευματικοῖς, the “people of the Spirit.”The σαρκικοί are those who hold on to fleshly characteristics. Paul is thinking here about those who want to hold onto the wisdom of the world. The so-called wisdom of the world tells us we can’t meet God and that if we do there is nothing there to actually know. Not like things you can see and touch. At best all that we can know about God is that we can maybe get a feeling of something greater than us. But this feeling has no real content. There is nothing there to know. It’s just a fleeting emotion.Unfortunately, far too many of us as Christians, most of us, have accepted this critique and said in response, “But God had revealed himself in the scriptures.” So, we study the Bible and we develop complex theologies out of the Bible. None of this is bad. Sound teaching and theology is important. Its just, in Paul’s mind, spiritual milk.The real content, the real meat, comes from meeting God in the Spirit and encountering the deep mysteries of his heart.This is what frustrates Paul. You guys are arguing over who is the better teacher, me or Apollos, but this is the wrong question.Now we have to be clear here, Paul is not s

Ever since the phrase, "You can just do things" hit the online ecosystem, it has troubled me, in large part because it gives the promise that "fixing" everything would be easy if we just had the will. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.seekingthehiddenthing.com/subscribe

This text is one that is surprisingly political and many do not want to hear its message. Revealing the Kingdom of Heaven through the church community is not the same as "taking back the nation." This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.seekingthehiddenthing.com/subscribe

The Black Horse and I get together to talk about the writing and thought of Peter Thiel. We look at several essays written between 1995 and 2010 dealing with the question of diversity, technological progress, the Malthusian problem, the neutral, open society and the question of Athens or Jerusalem, and the return of the “strong gods” and much more. It ended up being one of our more productive and better conversations and that is saying something.Linkshttps://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2011/10/03/swift-blind-horseman/https://newcriterion.com/article/the-diversity-myth/https://www.scribd.com/document/431359952/Peter-Thiel-The-Straussian-MomentSponsorship PartnersFoxNSons CoffeeSteve Fox is one of “our guys” and he sells coffee. Good coffee. If you live in the US — sorry Canadians…too much government red tape involved in shipping coffee over the border…my supply comes hand delivered — he can ship you your coffee right to your doorstep. Go to the FoxNSons website now and use the promo code “kruptos” for a 15% discount.Axios Fitness CoachingJD is also one of “our guys” and he wants to help you get fit and stay fit for what is coming. Head over to Axios and get started today!Seeking the Hidden Thing is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.seekingthehiddenthing.com/subscribe

Ron and I get together to discuss the theology of the church as the covenant people of God under his Kingship and why this is the proper place to begin when talking politics as Christians.Seeking the Hidden Thing is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.seekingthehiddenthing.com/subscribe

I invite David on to talk about Eliade: why we should not just casually accept the idea of "history" and the negative effects it has on society today.Sponsorship PartnersFoxNSons CoffeeSteve Fox is one of “our guys” and he sells coffee. Good coffee. If you live in the US — sorry Canadians…too much government red tape involved in shipping coffee over the border…my supply comes hand delivered — he can ship you your coffee right to your doorstep. Go to the FoxNSons website now and use the promo code “kr… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.seekingthehiddenthing.com/subscribe

Although I don’t talk about it specifically in the message, this reconstitution of the people of God in Christ has many implications for how we understand ourselves, for the meaning of the Lord’s Supper and for Christians as a people, as a people with their own interests and telos. Any Christian political theory worth its salt must begin by discussing the nature of the Christian community itself as the body of Christ and as the re-founding of the people of Israel in Christ in the community of believers. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.seekingthehiddenthing.com/subscribe