In this first episode of a new seven-part series on CCEF’s distinctives, Gunner Gundersen sits down with Ed Welch and Jonathan Holmes to discuss the first distinctive: “The personal God gets personal with us.”

Together, they reflect on how Scripture presents a God who draws near to his people: from the garden of Eden to the incarnation of Christ to the promised future where God will dwell with his people forever. The conversation explores how the Trinity shapes our understanding of relationships, counseling, church life, and personal ministry. These truths help churches to embody a "culture of pursuit" with warmth and hospitality as natural overflows of a real relationship with God.

The episode also introduces CCEF’s broader distinctives and explains why these priorities continue to shape the ministry’s counseling, teaching, and care for the church.

Mentioned in this episode:

• Our latest episode of the JBC: ccef.org/jbc
• Our distinctives: ccef.org/about/#distinctives

00:00 — Introduction and Journal of Biblical Counseling
01:20 — Welcoming Jonathan Holmes and Ed Welch
02:16 — Introducing CCEF’s Seven Distinctives
06:20 — Why the CCEF Language Is Conversational and Accessible
07:56 — Distinctive #1: “The Personal God Gets Personal with Us”
09:20 — Christianity and the God Who Draws Near
13:00 — God’s Pursuit Throughout Scripture
15:52 — Shame and Distance from God
17:06 — From Theology to Relationships and Care
21:51 — Bringing the Personal God into Counseling
27:23 — God Hears, Sees, Remembers, and Knows
31:52 — How This Distinctive Shapes Church Life
34:00 — A Culture of Pursuit in the Local Church
37:33 — Pursued by God, Pursuing Others
39:56 — Final Reflections and Conclusion

Hello, and welcome to our CCEF podcast, Where Life and Scripture Meet. I'm Gunner Gunderson and I have the privilege of serving as the Dean of Faculty here at CCEF. And before I introduce our two guests for today, I just want to share with you about an important resource that the Lord has enabled CCEF to provide for actually four decades now. For more than 40 years, CCEF's Journal of Biblical Counseling has tried to provide a forum to develop clear thinking and effective practice in biblical counseling. And JBC articles really seek to bring the God of truth and mercy and power into the issues that we face in our counseling, our discipleship, our pastoring. And in the newest issue, you can find articles on Christ's strength and our weakness, restoring the Imago Dei in a dehumanizing age, Christian hospitality as a calling for all believers, wise decision-making, as well as using chaos as a metaphor in counseling, as well as other insights and articles. And so you can explore more of this latest issue, as well as more subscription options at ccef.org/jbc, ccef.org/jbc. Well, I'm excited to welcome two guests to the podcast today, two friends, and that is, my colleague, Jonathan Holmes, our new executive director here at CCEF, as well as Dr. Ed Welch, a longtime faculty member with us. Welcome, gentlemen.

Glad to be here.

Gunner.

And I wanted to ask, Ed, when did you begin at CCEF?

It was in the 1900s, not the 1800s. It was 1981 when I began, and Dave, I think Dave Powlison began six months before me.

That's wonderful. And I asked that not because I didn't know, but only to say that I was born in 1981, and so I think the implication of that is I should say very little and you should say very much in this podcast. I'm kind of the Elihu of the situation here. So thank you so much for joining us, both of you.

Well, like Paul, I appreciate youth and the wisdom of youth.

Thank you, Ed. Well, we're actually thrilled because today we are launching a seven part series with our podcast where we're going to begin discussing and sharing our seven distinctives at CCEF. These distinctives are not necessarily new to us, but we want to ensure that we have a chance to discuss these, to reiterate them, just to explore them together because they really are a joy to hear, to meditate on, to reflect on.

And so we want to share these with you over the next seven episodes. And so what I'm going to do actually is I just share these distinctives, these core values that really seek to kind of lace themselves through our ministry. They're not a doctrinal statement, per se. We have far more robust confessions and statements of faith that we look to for that guidance. But these are distinctives that really get at kind of the core of our mission of restoring Christ to counseling and counseling to the church. And so let me read these, brothers, and then we'll get into the first one. 

Here they are: The first distinctive is the personal God gets personal with us. Second, Scripture comes from the mouth of God. Third, we are embodied souls shaped by a world of influences. Fourth, our hearts are active. Fifth, help and change follow a path, but not a script. Six, care and counsel are pastoral and at home in the church. And seven, biblical counseling engages with the voices around us. 

And as we go here, if anyone would like to read fuller descriptions of each of these, you can find those at ccef.org/about, ccef.org/about, just if you wanna reflect a little bit on some of the descriptions that are provided there. But Ed, I'd love to start with you as we just think overall about the distinctives and then in a moment get into the first one. How did these distinctives come about as you look back on their genesis, some of their origins?

I think early on we had an interest in priorities. Now we think of priorities in counseling. Some things are more important than others. So we know who this person is, but some things stand out and we want to be able to accent those things that stand out in the person's life. So that was part of it. I think the other part is here's the way we all are. So many of us have very similar doctrinal statements.

You know, go through websites for churches and many nonprofits that support churches. They're very, very similar. There are minor differences in eschatology, but usually everything else is very much the same. The differences, however, rely on: “What are the things that we accent in that particular ministry? What do we think stands out in Scripture?” There are some themes, some doctrines that are especially potent. And so that's what we were trying to do. What are the things at CCF that we historically seem to prioritize or accent? So their doctrinal statements, this is more or less our doctrinal priorities.

I remember in the kind of mid-2000s, first starting to come to CCEF conferences and being exposed to resources. And although I might not have put it in terms of an accent or priorities at that time as I was just young in ministry getting exposed to it, I think it's a great way to put it. And it does capture how I felt and what I began thinking about as I heard some of these priorities for interpersonal ministry.

We could say it's a culture. What constitutes the culture? Well, there's a culture within CCEF. If culture is worth its salt, there are doctrinal reasons for the features in the culture. So that's what these are trying to identify.

One of the things that stands out about the distinctives, and you'll hear this when I read the description for the first one, they're written in somewhat of a conversational tone. And I'm curious, maybe why this tone, and what is that tone meant to communicate, if I'm reading it rightly?

We’re practical theologians. And so as a result, to speak abstract theological statements to people, it's not going to be heard. So our work is in the rigors of daily life. The Scripture is unpacked in the rigors of daily life, and it is available to us all. We want it to be available to children. So I think that's…we live on the streets…we don't live in the pulpits as much. We live on the streets with our people. And in street language it is. Accessible language it is.

Yeah, yeah. Ed, that's exactly the word that was coming to my mind when I read our distinctives is, there's an accessibility to it that is very personable and that's very true to who CCEF is. And it's not divorced from deep theology or deep wisdom or from Scripture, but it's a practical application to people in the pews, to people in neighborhoods, and their homes in a way that I think can be understood and can be immediately resonated with. I do think that that tone and that unique approach of CCEF, you know, makes a difference in conversations today.

Well, I think that bridges well into the description of the first distinctive, because in this first distinctive, I think we really see the roots of personal and interpersonal ministry and the reason why ultimately we want to be deeply engaged with people in the textures and contours of their lives. So Distinctive One is, “The personal God gets personal with us.” 

And then here's the description: “The triune God, Father, Son, and Spirit, has always known reciprocal fellowship and unity, and he has created us to participate in that fellowship. He welcomes us to himself through Jesus Christ. The Spirit connects us to Jesus, and Jesus is the only way to the Father. This foundational reality has critical implications. God's plan is to be close to us, and for us to draw near to Him. Herein lies the source of our interest in relationships and human connection. In response, our care for each other is inviting and familial.” 

I find that description to be so warm and to embody what it's describing, which again, I really appreciate. But can we unpack this a little bit? What stands out to both of you as you kind of rehear this distinctive and this description?

Yeah, I think one of the things that comes to mind when I hear that, and Gunner, I agree, there's a warmth and a personableness that matches the distinctive itself. And I can't remember where I originally heard it. I think maybe it was a Tim Keller sermon that I was listening to. But, you know, Keller was kind of, you know, just trying to show, do a little compare and contrast between Christianity and really all the other major world religions, Greek and Roman mythology and in all of those settings, to some degree, you have gods or a god singular, but a god who remains very distant from the interest of things that are going on in the world, a god or gods who are manipulating, controlling, but who have very little interest in these little peons, as it were, that they've created. And one of the things that Scripture draws our attention to from the very beginning is our God is not like that.

We serve a God and we know a God who is intimately interested in the affairs of the people that he has made and created. Even that language of, “He invites us to participate in fellowship with him,” I think is so rich. And that's something that I think you're going to find laced all throughout CCEF’s materials, is a God who is deeply aware and deeply interested in the people that he has created and that he wants to be in relationship with.

I was thinking similar things. I was thinking, “That's just beautiful. It is just plain beautiful!” I'm so glad to be part of an organization that has that is not just a distinctive, it's really truly it's introductory. And to invest our work and our lives and digging in and drawing out. I also appreciate being part of an organization where you have this word personal. And I guess the question is, well, where is that in the Bible? How do you find a verse where the word personal is identified? Well, you don't necessarily find the word all over the place. So immediately that distinctive says, other theologies, many theologies, frankly, they will begin with the Trinity. That's where they start.

Well, we are fairly ordinary people in our theological thinking. And what this distinctive says is we are beginning with the Trinity. The fact that we live before and with and are being brought into the triune God makes all the difference. The fact that from the very foundations of the world, now I'm thinking my mind is moving to what the passage is in John, where John seems to specialize in this, in the 14, 15, 16, those chapters, that the Son loves the Father and seeks to bring glory to the Father. The Spirit wants to bring glory to the Father and the Son. The love that the Father and Son and Spirit had for each other predates us. It was part of the very beginning of our world and has always been who God is.

So what we're doing is living out really the implications of the Trinity in our present relationship with the Lord, our present personal relationship with the Lord, and our personal relationship with each other. So yeah, I thought it was beautiful. I loved it.

Yeah, yeah. Ed, I love what you're saying too about that word “personal” of, where do we, can we chapter and verse that word “personal” and attach it to God? And you know, the answer is most likely not, but from the very first pages of Scripture, we see God's personability and getting personal with us. It shows up everywhere. 

It shows up in Genesis 3 where God is looking for Adam and Eve and the phrase that the writer uses is he's walking in the garden, right? It's this Hebrew metaphor for friendship where it would have been a practice for God to on a daily basis come and walk with Adam and Eve and that desire of God to get personal curious all the way throughout, right? It shows up in Exodus where he builds a tabernacle and he desires to meet with his people to get personal with them and you know really finds its climax in the incarnation where we see God and human flesh come to dwell with us. And so, whether or not we see that word “personal” show up, immediately, from the first pages of Scripture, we see it. We see it everywhere.

If we are identifying “The personal God gets personal with us,” if we are beginning by accenting that, then we better find it everywhere in scripture. We better find it on the first pages of Scripture. And I'll just add to some of things you're saying, Jonathan, that in Genesis 1, what do you have? You have this God who is personal. He invites us. He doesn't just command us to do certain things. He invites us to participate in his very mission, and he's going to hand it over to us. He's going to hand it over to the Son who will hand it over to us. So there's this delightful, sweet invitation that goes throughout the days of creation. And then you have being created in the image of God. The challenge is, what does that mean and how do we understand it? There are all kinds of ways we can describe the image of God in us. 

One way that sort of suits Genesis is we are the ideal walking partners with the Lord. We are just the perfect walking partners. You can take your dog for a walk and you can enjoy going for a walk with the dog, but there's something more suited. Having someone who is like you and loves you. That's the perfect walking partner. So we are created in God's image. We're like him more in a different way than all creation is like him. So we uniquely can know joy and fellowship in the context of a walk.

Yeah, and I think it makes sense too then of anything that crops up that would violate or impede or keep us from being able to have that personal relationship with God is seen as not good in Scripture, whether it's sin or other people or the things that we encounter. Those are things that must be eliminated because we want to do whatever we can to get close to Jesus. And that's, yeah.

One of the human struggles that have certainly become more dominant in my own thinking because it concerns me so much is the problem of shame. Now shame concerns me for all kinds of reasons, but one reason is “You are unworthy and you cannot speak to God. You cannot come before him. So I'll speak personally, but I think I can also speak for CCEF as an organization…When a person feels like they cannot come to the Holy God and speak with him, when that is so basic to living with God, we come close and we have things to say. We speak from our hearts to him as he speaks to us. Anything that inhibits that closeness in that that freedom in the way we speak to our God is something that concerns us. So as a result, when we know of shame in a person's life, it has a certain priority because shame will indeed keep us from coming close and keep us from speaking from our hearts.

Right at the middle of this distinctive description, there's this kind of hinge. And after talking about the Father, Son, and Spirit and their inner relationship and invitation to us to fellowship, it then says, “This foundational reality has critical implications.” And it goes into that reality about the Lord is the source of our interest in relationships and human connection. And then in response, our care for each other is inviting and familial. Can you talk about that hinge and how the nature of our relational God then flows out in the way that we care about, and care for, and move toward one another?

That movement I think you're identifying, Gunner, is a movement that we so are blessed to have: moving from “Who is our God and so, therefore, who are we?” But it's also something we want to make sure that we maintain. So we write it as a distinctive, that the movement of our thinking moves from, “Who is our God, who is our God and how do we know him?” And then therefore, “How do we live with each other? How do we speak with each other?” So I'm still thinking about different words for personal, close, coming near, face turned toward someone, knowing and being known, I love you, I get you, to be understood by another, to know those things that are important in somebody's heart, their joys, their sorrows, their fears, and to have the freedom to speak about them together and then to speak about them to the Lord who hears and is moved by what we say. Personal is to be responsive where we are affected by people, by the words they speak. So we carry their burdens with us. They somehow get etched into our souls. 

Excuse me for going on, you guys, but what I'm doing is I'm so glad to be able to reflect on this distinctive and just using some words that realize that this goes through the most important features of our lives.

Yeah. Gunner, when you identify kind of that hinge point of the foundational reality and critical implications, just even zooming out a bit, I think that that is a distinctive for CCEF in that we're not just satisfied with having good theology, right? But we actually want to know, “How does this work out in real people's lives? You know, we're not content to just have a knowledge about God, but we want to know how does this knowledge of a personal God who gets personal with us?

How do we put more words to that, right? Like Ed was just describing, how do we talk about it? How do we make that concrete and real to the people that we're privileged to live life with, to share life with, to be in local churches with? And that's something that, again, I think that you're going to see not only in these distinctives, but like you mentioned earlier in our JBC articles and our conference talks, we're practical theologians at heart. We want to know how these things make a difference in real time with real people.

I was thinking of the image of the foundation of a home, and then the framework of the home, and plumbing it out, and adding electric. But to live in that home, you want a living room and you want a kitchen and you want to have spaces that are crafted for human habitation and fellowship and intimacy and warmth and connection. I'm so thankful that that's what the reality of the Trinity provides, not only a foundation and framework, but it actually gives us a picture too of the living room, of the fellowship of, and inviting us into that same intimacy, and then teaching and training us. I know it's what it's done for me over my time as a believer and in ministry. It's consistently training me and reshaping me to seek to think in a similar way in my own relationships, to pursue the way that I've been pursued, to love the way that I've been loved, which is such a high calling, which then makes the presence of the Holy Spirit such a need and a gift to empower along the way.

Ed, I've noticed that in your counseling, you are consistently working to connect and direct people toward the person of Christ, to face him, to speak to him, to open up their hearts to him. Can you talk about just why that's central to your counseling and what you're seeking to facilitate and cultivate?

I can give you illustrations of it. Sometimes before a counseling time, I might frame it like this. We are, we're just ordinary people talking. We are, there's nothing ordinary about what we're doing. That we are speaking because God has spoken to us. We are, you are going to share your life, the important things in your life because that's the kind of thing we do in God's house before him, and we even include his people. So as a result of that, let's pray. Let's pray that indeed we would be thankful people who are sharing our struggles, knowing we have a God who hears and allows people to partner with him in the care of our souls.

So that might be a kind of introduction that I would have. Something else: At the end of a counseling session, I might say, “Let me pray a prayer of blessing over you. Because God does in Christ, and he even allows us to pray these prayers of blessings over each other, because now we are all a part of a royal priesthood.”

They might say, “Here's how you have blessed me today, is I have seen something of Christ in you, your faithfulness to Christ in the midst of such hard things, your willingness to listen to things that are true about Jesus and what difference that makes in a hard relationship. You have blessed me. Let me pray for you that you would be a blessing to other people today.”

You see, now, those are, we would say, “Hey, they're nice things. They're really nice. They're sort of sweet.” But they're not just that. They're theological. They're, how could we not do things like that in the way we care for other people? What else? To simply be saying things like, “This is what the Scripture says, but no, here, we want to pray that we would hear the very words of God to us, that these would not be mere words, but they would be arresting words that reach our hearts. And we respond to those words. He speaks to us. And then after he speaks to us through scripture, he waits. And so, okay, well, now it's your turn. Speak to me. What do you do with this? This is not simply information on a test. These are words of life. Does it make sense? Do you, are you resistant to them in some way? What do you want to say in response?” Those are some of the ways that this distinctive works out in counseling relationships and everyday relationships.

I started thinking, Ed, as you were sharing about 1 Thessalonians 2, where in very short order, as Paul reflects on his ministry to the Thessalonians, he talks about being like a nursing mother to them and then calls them brothers or siblings in Christ. And then he also refers to himself as like a father, exhorting them and encouraging them. And in just such short order, he includes like every relationship within a household as some form of like a multi-angled embodiment of what it means to love another person and to care for them. And it's such a sweet picture of like engaging at that level. And it's clear that his kind of self-conception of who he is in ministry as a result of who the Lord is then affects the way that he expresses that toward other people in interpersonal ministry.

Yeah, Gunner, I had some similar thoughts as Ed was talking and, you know, one of them is this, the reason why this is a distinctive for us at CCEF is because we want this distinctive to pervade how we meet people, how we meet people in real life, and how we talk about the Lord. And I think when you look at different counseling systems or different counseling models, one of the things I want to pay attention to is how was the Lord talked about?

How is the Lord presented? Is he distant? Is he abstract? Is he just black and white letters on a page? Or is God completely absent from the system? Is he not even a feature? One of the things that I think is a true distinctive of CCEF is the way that we talk about the Lord, the ways in which Ed just talked, just from years of case wisdom about ways he wants to bring the personal God into counseling, that's gonna permeate everything that we do at CCEF. And I think that that's going to be something that marks out and distinguishes our approach from other approaches.

Just in that vein, Jonathan, there's a passage I've loved for a number of years now. It's Exodus 2:23–25. It's as Genesis has come to an end and the people have come into slavery in Egypt and the Lord has just begun to work in the life of, you know, Moses' parents to begin the process of raising him. He's been born, but the plan is to redeem in the future. It just says, “During those many days, the King of Egypt died and the people of Israel groaned because of their slavery and cried out for help. Their cry for rescue from slavery came up to God.” And then here's verses 24 and 25, which I love, “And God heard their groaning and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac and with Jacob. God saw the people of Israel, and God knew.” And those verbs, the personal nature of those verbs has really captured me—that he hears, remembers, sees, and knows. Not just he sees like the physics of what's going on and says, “I have the power to change the physics of the situation, I can change the mathematical calculation of this; it's covenantal and relational and seeing and hearing and knowing and caring and moving toward them in love.” To know that I'm part of that story and cared for in the same way seen and heard the same way is really profound.

Gunner, let me take a little tiny piece out of what you just said. You used the word covenantal. And I think because of this distinctive, we are oftentimes not willing to allow the word “covenant” to just sort of rest as a thing in itself because it evokes too much of something legal. It's contractual. It's this legal relationship, which it is, which establishes the truthfulness that God wants to communicate to us. So he's using the covenant format to do it.  But my point is this, he would prefer to remind us that it's personal. So we might go to Song of Solomon, “I am yours, you are mine.” That's one way to identify the guts of the covenant, where the Lord, under no obligation to himself, comes and makes promises to us, “I am yours and you are mine.” That's our work. That's the enterprise that we share together.

Yeah, it's passages like that that you're sharing, Gunner, and Ed, that are just all over. I think of Psalm 56:9, you know, in the midst of fear and anxiety. David says, “This I know is that the Lord is for me.” And that's the kind of God that we need and that we want in times of trouble, in times of fear, in times of suffering. So, once you see it and you know the personability of God and you look in Scripture, you see it's everywhere. You can't move away from it. And as such, then it's going to color everything that we do here.

And you can see when it's in peril. So what are the worst Psalms? “Why do you hide yourself? Why are you so far away?” That is the most profound curse. This doesn't make any sense. Here is my God who has made these promises, who has come close, who hears us, and it seems as though right now he is distant. That is the deepest, hardest plea from the human heart.

Yeah, yeah. And on the other side of that, the finest and fullest consummation of where all of this is headed is God saying to us, “I'm going to make my dwelling place with you forever and all time. I'm going to live with you for all of time.” And that's so humbling. And, you know, as we've already said, it's so deeply profound. It changes you. It changes the way that you live once you realize this is the very trajectory that you are on for your life.

And somehow bring us into the fellowship that he, the Father and Son and Spirit share together, which is obviously beyond our imaginations, but it's fun to imagine it. That's the intensity of personal that we have in front of us.

So as we stand, you know, between kind of here in the middle of time where God, the Holy Trinity has created his world and he's created people, he sent his son to redeem, he's been at work, but we wait for the day when we are finally with him and the fullness and richness and unhinderedness of that future relationship. As we live in this kind of in-between time, how do we hope just the personal nature of God would affect local church life in this community that God has established through Christ in the Spirit. Can we talk for a minute about that kind of in conclusion? How would this distinctive, we hope, be cultivated in a local church and what might that look like at that street level of a local church?

I was talking to a friend who spoke of, I just asked him about the relationships he had in his church. And he said, “We don't do relationships in our church. And when they do, they come in and they hear the Word. And it's like going to the temple. You come into the temple, you're not sitting around chatting. You're making sacrifices. You're hearing the choir, whatever it might be. And then you go home.”

What we're thinking is, the church of Christ is personal. So we sing together. I think one of the things that has happened to me is I am brought into this personal world, is I sing louder on Sundays. I want my voice to be with my brothers and sisters as we sing about the Lord and as we sing to him. It means in a sermon, “Here is the word of Christ, but it's the very personal word of Christ”. That responsiveness is so fundamentally personal. So there have been times at our church, for example, where we've asked for a sermon response. We're, okay, “What do we do with this?” We thank him. We love him. But we don't just think it. There's something about personal, where it comes out of your mouth. Or it possesses your body and you do things differently. So to have that as the exhortation at the end of a sermon, what are you going to talk about today? What has the Spirit done in you? And then, of course, what else? I think the principle that has guided me over the years at church is Christ has come toward me. The triune God has pursued me.

And so I get to pursue somebody else. He's pursued me as a person who is a bit of an outcast and not, you know, not the rich and famous. And so I want to see, who's not talking to somebody who seems to be a bit distraught, seems a little lost. That's the person I want to go find. And what do I do? I want to, I want to know them well enough to be able to pray for them. No, it doesn't happen every Sunday because sometimes I can't find people like that in our church. Everybody's talking to everybody else. It's like one big scrum of conversations. But those would be some examples of what it looks like in church life. And I'll say one other one, of course, that we speak openly from our hearts. We speak about things that are horrible. We speak about things that are sinful. The Psalms guide us in, if we can speak openly to the Lord about those things, we can speak openly to each other.

I've been thinking a lot about just church life and church membership. Our own church has been thinking a lot about membership and belonging and having conversations about how to get people connected. And as we were going through some survey data recently of people who have made our church their church home, words like warm, hospitable, inviting, you know, seem to come to the surface.

And, you know, somewhere soon after that, you know, preaching, teaching, you know, different programs that are offered. But, you know, those first 30 seconds when people walk in the door are so critical. And especially as we think about the personal, God gets personal with us, I thought to myself, you know, when you think about, you know, church growth policies, what you don't see is people want churches that are cold, sterile, uninviting, a high threshold to enter into, right? That would be a recipe for disaster.

And so the way that this gets into the local church is, well, the local church needs to exemplify this. The local church needs to embody and incarnate a personal God who gets personal with us. So from the first few seconds that a person walks in the door to Ed's point, how do we be on the lookout for them? To be on the lookout for the stranger, the person who's distraught, the person who is just simply alone, who looks a little bit lost.

That's again where this isn't just a theological distinctive, but Gunner, as you've pushed us with this question, it's something that has real-life implications for how we do life in God's body here in the church.

Gunner, you haven't spoken as much yourself. You're asking us questions. I want to make sure that in the little time we have that you have opportunities to say the things in your heart as well. It wouldn't be fair. It wouldn't be as interesting to not have more of your own thoughts.

The word that resonates with me that you shared Ed is pursuit. When I think about the local church, the phrase is a culture of pursuit. And this struck me a number of years ago because I realized that the major doctrines in Scripture are ones in which God is consistently moving toward us. He's the initiator. He initiates creation. He initiates the calling of Abraham, the formation of Israel. He initiates the sending of his Son and his Son comes to us and doesn't say, you can climb up to me, then we can have a relationship, but I will come to you and your sin, your death, your decay.

When Jesus ascends in Acts 1, he then sends the Spirit and the Spirit comes to us and Jesus will come again to us. And I am constantly on the receiving end of the ministry of the triune God. And that being the case, I'm then called and empowered to express that same pursuant initiating ministry. And so when I'm sitting in church and the final song is sung or the benediction is given that has a tendency to remind me to reach out to a person next to me I might not know yet and learn their name. Or if I know their name, but I don't know about their week, ask about that. Or if I know one child, but I don't know their other child, to ask about that. Whatever it might be to seek to pursue and to initiate. And sometimes I feel like it, plenty of times I don't feel like it in that moment, or I don't know what to do, but I just can remember that my Lord has pursued me and has pursued his people so constantly, even relentlessly, throughout his plan that he's revealed to us. And that really does have a way for me of reminding me of who I am on the receiving end of grace and now having the privilege of expressing that through pursuit. And I do believe that when that begins to make its way through a local church, not only those doctrines presented as propositional doctrines, what they have to be, they must be, but communicated as a personal call for us to engage with this God who's engaged with us and then to engage with and pursue one another. I do believe it can reach tipping points along the way where people are pursued and pursuing.

Brothers, it has been a sweet conversation. I think there's so much more that we could share when it comes to this first distinctive. Thankfully, we have six more that various groups of us will get to explore. But thank you not only for joining us today, but to both of you for embodying this distinctive, and the personal way that you love me, that you love your colleagues, and that you seek to teach these things in the church of Jesus Christ. It's been a pleasure.

Right back at you. And I was thinking the same thing, that what a delight to have two people I know well who truly embody the things we're talking about.

Yeah, a sweet thing.

The personal God gets personal with us. Thanks for joining us.