Character over Achievement: Gospel Culture with Paul Tripp

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Ray Ortlund
I believe that because a covenant creating covenant keeping God created us in His image, we are covenant keeping people together, we’re woven into this magnificent tapestry of covenant together. I believe I literally owe it to you, Sam and to you, Paul, to live by God’s grace and for His glory with nothing less than magnificence.

Ray Ortlund
Hi, I’m Ray ortland, and this is you’re not crazy. I’m with my dear friend. Sam Albury, hey, and we’re here to say you’re not crazy for following Jesus, loving Him, staying open to His love Amen, just getting up every single day, putting one foot in front of the other, no matter what we’re facing, trusting Him, putting our hope in Him, and we keep going, and we keep going, and we keep going living that way. We don’t see the actual significance of our lives in this moment. We’re looking beyond the moment. And we get together and we remind each other. We look each other right behind. Say you’re not crazy. Okay, you guys, and you say that to me, and we cobble together, you know this, this positive energy that the Holy Spirit gives through the gospel, and we keep going, because this is so not crazy. Thank you for listening today or for watching however you’re participating. We respect you. You matter. You’re why we’re doing this. So thanks for jumping in.

Sam Allberry
I’ve got a quick question for you. Okay, what is your favorite Paul trip book?

Ray Ortlund
Well, actually, that’s a really interesting question. You honest answer. I’ve not read a Paul trip book.

Paul Tripp
There you go.

Ray Ortlund
So, yeah, thank you for utterly humiliating me.

Paul Tripp
I only have 30 books out there. So yeah, I mean, that’s I’ve just been cut down to size in one sentence.

Ray Ortlund
Well, you can admit you’ve never read one of my books, so that’s okay.

Paul Tripp
No, I’m not.

Ray Ortlund
What about you, Sam?

Sam Allberry
Well, I know this will be the answer lots of people have, but it’s new morning mercies. Yeah, it’s just been a wonderful donation. Well, I ask because we’re joined by Paul Tripp again. Thank you so much, Paul for being with us.

Paul Tripp
Clearly not because Ray has been benefited by my books,

Ray Ortlund
far better. I know you personally. Yeah, there you go. Yeah. Hey. All right, let’s, let’s do honor time right now. Romans 1210 says outdo one another in showing honor. It’s the only competitive command I know of in Scripture, and everybody wins. So Paul, you’re going to sit there and take it like a man. Okay, here, Sam, what do you respect about Paul?

Sam Allberry
Well, this, this was evidence in our previous episode. But your your openness about your own heart and your understanding of our hearts, I sense a I feel consoled by the gospel when I read your writings, Paul, because you know from your own broken hearted issue, you know our broken heartedness, and you write into it, and you bring us the reassurance and consolation of Jesus. I’ve always loved that verse in Luke where Simeon was waiting for the consolation of Israel, and Jesus shows up. Yeah, he is our consolation, amen. And you point us to that wonderfully.

Ray Ortlund
Here’s what I respect about you, Paul, you’re a theologically serious man. You’re not a compromiser. You’re not sloppy and slipshod. You care about what we Christians believe here you are sitting right now at this moment with a Bible open in front of you that is so paltry. Okay. Now the other part of it is this, you deeply care about personal integrity, honesty, humility, and what Francis Schaeffer called the beauty of human relationships. And all of this is a coherent, integrated whole. The beauty of human relationships and your personal integrity and humility and openness are not an afterthought. They’re not an add on, they’re not a glaze poured on the surface of robust Christianity. But your convictions tell you they’re part of robust Christianity. They’re in the recipe. That’s who you are to your core, you. Well, Paul trip, it is a privilege to know you.

Paul Tripp
I love you, dude, thank you. Feelings are mutual. Can I respond? I think we’ll cut this bit. Yeah, I want to respond two ways. First is that I think that there is way, way too much personal reputation management in Christianity, where I’m way, way more concerned that you think well about me than being me, and it’s exhausting, and it’s a denial of the gospel, because if I believe the gospel, there’s nothing that could be known or revealed about me that hasn’t been covered by the person and work of Jesus. I don’t have to do that anymore, and that’s just freedom. It’s just freedom. Yeah,

Ray Ortlund
recently on, excuse me on Instagram, I think Alan noble posted a graphic that said, Live today, as if this is the day when you’ll finally be found out.

Paul Tripp
That’s great. And when you, when you live in that reputation management thing, you’re just giving messages all the time to people, don’t don’t bother getting to know me. Don’t bother speaking into my life. And that’s a recipe for disaster. Yeah,

Sam Allberry
something you said in our previous episode, which has really landed on me is we’ve, we’ve, we’ve talked a lot about gospel doctrine, creating gospel culture. You helped me see that actually gospel culture is what helps us understand gospel doctrine, that passage in Ephesians, that we need other people to help us understand the truth in the first place. Wow. Well,

Paul Tripp
we talked last night at dinner about Psalm eight, and I want to mention Psalm eight again, because it’s surprising where this goes, and it’s really germane to what we’re talking about. Let me read here. Oh Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name and all the earth you have set your glory above the heavens. I mean, that’s just lofty and soaring. What would you expect the psalm to say next something lofty and sorry, and this is where the psalm goes out of the mouths of babes and infants, you will establish strength because of Your foes, to still the enemy and the avenger. Uh,

Paul Tripp
uh, this is, this is God in all His magnificent glory, soaring, magnificent glory, saying, I defeat the enemy with the words of infants. Is that a Christianity I’m uncomfortable with, seriously infants

Paul Tripp
that’s written to humiliate me and take me off my high horse and pride. I have myself and pride. I have my knowledge and pride. I have my personality and pride. I have my ability to communicate, and God says that’s not what I use. I use a gentle voice of an infant be a baby before me. That’s what silences the enemy. And that’s just the opposite of this macho, loud, personality driven Christianity that has swept over us. Pushy, yeah, yeah. It’s just, it’s, I believe that psalm is, is just meant to shock us, because it’s so counterintuitive to the way we would normally think.

Ray Ortlund
Let’s, let’s press into that right now. Last night, at dinner, we were discussing, it’s hard to know what the right word is but the meltdown, the demolition, the decline, whatever of American evangelicalism. And by evangelicalism, I mean Bible, believing Christ, honoring gospel, preaching, doctrinally serious Christianity. And I. Over the last decade or so, we’ve seen such injury to that, that that network and that body here in our nation, we don’t despise American evangelicalism. We’re not looking down our noses at it. We I grew up in a healthy evangelicalism. I revere it and and I grieve the losses, the injuries, the the decline that we have suffered. And if that is the case, and I think many of us sense that it it is. I think of it as building that’s being demolished to prepare the way for something new to be built, and we’re in the middle. It’s like we’re watching it in a video in slow motion over the last 10 years or so and and it hasn’t finished being demolished yet. We’re under the Lord’s discipline, but in order to build something new in the next generation, if there, if that’s a valid assessment. Paul, I would love to hear your thoughts. And Sam, I would love to hear your thoughts. How do we rebuild for the future? We don’t want to just recreate what what the Lord found not usable. He says in Second Timothy, in a great house, there are many, many different kinds of vessels, some for noble use, some for ignoble and we can be vessels fit for noble use. It looks like we proved to be in our generation, not vessels fit for noble use. But how can we invest in the rising generation? How can we build for the future? What can we do now that will help the next generation rebuild in the future,

Paul Tripp
if you permit me to talk diagnosis before we talk here. Okay, I don’t think this is the only element, but I think it is is a element. I think that over some generations, there’s been a cultural change in the way we prepare people for ministry, and now the ministry preparation experience is conceptual and not relational, and it’s informational and not pastoral, and that has harmed us, and so I go through three years of intense study of Scripture and theology, but it’s completely separate from my Life. It’s completely separate from my heart. There’s no application to that at all, and it’s not the relational thing that we talked about in Ephesians four Paul takes so seriously, even busy students have casual friendships and not really pastored by a professor. So I get comfortable with this, all being about this, the concepts and ideas of Christianity. In fact, I’m taught to think that spiritual maturity is that it’s doctrinal accuracy and biblical literacy. It’s not that those are two different things. And so we’re set up then to be isolated, to be arrogant, to be fighters. We shoot our wounded because it’s all it’s all a world of ideas to us, and so we’ve watched the falls happen. We haven’t seen in at least a decade a major ministry leader fall because of theology, not one. It’s all been character. It’s all been heart. Well, I think unless we have some, some revival, some revolution in the way that we prepare people to minister, we’re going to see more falls. Now that’s not everything, but I think that’s that’s surely an ingredient to why we’re in the place we’re in. Now, look, my anger was able to grow in seminary because no one knew me. Wow. No one had a clue who Paul Tripp was. I was a set of grades. Now, I graduated with honors. No one knew me. How can that happen when we’re preparing people for ministry of the gospel that you can, you can go through the whole thing and not be known? So I think we can do better. And this, this priority of relationships that’s all throughout Scripture, but burst in the epistles, we better take seriously, and we better start using whatever platforms we have to disciple the coming generation that it’s not doctrine and oh yeah, We’re supposed to be nice to one another. It’s orthodoxy, as described in Scripture, is impossible without those relationships. That’s what’s taught. Wow.

Ray Ortlund
Sam, what do you think? What do you most long to impart to the generation rising up behind you? I think my,

Sam Allberry
my, my ambitions have shifted over the years. I still have things I still would long to do for the Lord, but my, my ambition now is to be a healthy Christian and a healthy church, yeah. And if I, if I can do that and not do anything else, I’ll be very thankful. I don’t ever want to do less than that. The Lord has given me the opportunity of serving as a pastor and writing and speaking. Those things are a wonderful privilege, but they count for nothing if I’m not being a healthy Christian. And to be a healthy Christian, I need a healthy church. So I guess that’s what I want other guys to have as their ambitions. Let’s make that our priority, that the Lord will take care of the rest. There’s things, truths I’d love to do a better job of communicating to this generation. I want people to know the goodness of Jesus, the kindness of Jesus to taste and see that the Lord is good. There’s a flavor to him. There’s a flavor to his word. It’s too easy for us to have sort of mission, mission ministries, strategies and goals and and miss that character piece. Yeah,

Paul Tripp
I was thinking as you’re talking for me, I want to fight assessments of arrival, that I’ve arrived and I’m okay. I want to be needy, and God reminds me of my neediness. Sunday, I was sitting in the pew where I love to be, and listening to a beautiful gospel sermon on Psalm 45 and choking back tears as I was listening, because it was just penetrating my heart and the combination of conviction and gladness at the same time, and that’s where I want to be. I think that’s, that’s so, so important. Then I’m, I’m HUNGRY FOR GOD’S instruments to be in my life. I’m I’m a hungry student of God’s word. I I’m hungry for a deeper communion with Jesus and with my wife. And that’s, that’s all the product of of neediness. And,

Sam Allberry
yeah, one of the things I keep coming back to and having to re preach to myself is that growth in the Christian life is needing Jesus more, not needing Jesus less. And that was a that was a big breakthrough for me, when I began to realize that,

Paul Tripp
yeah, the the move of grace is not from dependence to independence, it’s from independence to greater dependence, yeah, and

Sam Allberry
which is the opposite to every other skill in life. Oh,

Paul Tripp
it that’s, I think one of the things we need to recognize is how radical, unnatural, counterintuitive, the gospel is and that’s why I need you in my life. And need I need you to talk to me. I need you to like you, say, to say you’re not crazy. This, this way that is so different from everything else you’ll find everywhere else, is the way that, since. Saying this isn’t, yeah,

Ray Ortlund
I think what I want above all else, there’s a lot that I want, but I want to live with integrity, and I want to die with integrity, so that, you know, someday, presumably, somebody will mention to you, I heard Ray Orland died, and you’ll say, really, I’m sorry to hear that. What happened? Well, whatever the story is next, that true account. I want that to have integrity. I wanted to have some beauty. And if, if I can do that by God’s grace, that would mean a lot to me, amen, I think that would be a gift, that that’s a gift my dad gave me. He lived with integrity. He died, literally died with integrity, beauty and being impressive, being a big deal, I’ve come to regard that with contempt. I don’t have time. It doesn’t mean anything to me anymore. I’ve had my heart broken by guys that I loved and respected and they they walked away from Christ. They walked away from everything they said they believed in. I believe that because a covenant creating covenant keeping God created us in His image, we are covenant, keeping people together. We’re woven into this magnificent tapestry of covenant together. I believe I literally owe it to you, Sam and to you Paul, to live by God’s grace and for His glory with with nothing less than magnificence. I owe that to you, and you owe that to me absolutely. Don’t you stab me in the back? Yeah, yeah. And I owe it to you to be by you know, in all my flaws and all my weakness by His grace alone, for His glory alone, to be something of some kind of an inspiration, an uplifting presence. I owe that to you.

Paul Tripp
And there are, and there are a couple patterns now in our evangelical culture that are against that, and in many ways driven by the dominance of social media, we should not discount in this conversation that when Steve Jobs decided to give us a screen instead of a keyboard, human culture changed. We’ve all changed as a result, and a lot of that is permitting habits of communication into our lives. It shouldn’t be that the person who disagrees with Paul Tripp is not Paul Tripp’s enemy. I do not have the right to respond to them as if they’re an enemy. Yes, that’s happening all over the place. We’re naive one another, yes, and Ray, not in the back, in the chest. And then there’s this culture of pride. That’s that. It’s, it grieves me so much. I young guys that I mentor. I’m, I’m, I’m very willing to rebuke them for this, because I love them. Stop posting pictures of you with some famous Christian now, who is that meant to help that doesn’t ennoble the life of anyone doesn’t move anyone toward Jesus. You’re just bragging, and you’re permitting yourself to put you in the front of the story. Stop it, and I don’t need a picture of your sneakers. That’s all just selfism, and we’ve gotten comfortable with doing that. I don’t if you’re a pastor, I don’t need to know that you just ran a marathon, because all that stuff is it’s putting me in the middle of the story. I’m not in the middle of the story. The most important words the Bible, the first four in the beginning, God. This is God’s narrative. It’s about him, and I want you. To be out of the the sin of the story, so I can promote the God who is in the story in your life, amen. So I, I have, I have made them. I’m just not going to do that stuff. And anybody who’s close to me, I see them falling into that. I say, you have to stop this. You have to be honest about why you’re doing this. This is putting you in the center. So we’re developing these habits that are part of this crumbling that we’re we’re talking about, that are out there, all, all over the place. I mean, you have this happen, but, and I don’t, I don’t ever respond to this, but I have had the most disgusting, ungodly things said about me that are put in a public forum. Does Paul trip sometime get it wrong? Absolutely. Get home only privately. Talk to me. I want to hear you. I want to face where I’ve sinned. I want to face my weaknesses and failures. If I need to talk to you about theology, because you wonder about that in me, let’s have a conversation, but you don’t have the right to trash me, because if you get comfortable with doing that, how are we ever going to do this relational thing that God uses to advance his work in this we’re never going to Do it, just not.

Ray Ortlund
This is so weird. This is so me. When I see that kind of thing about you, or or SAM, or any of my my precious friends, whom I so love. And but then it comes and finds me too. I always feel better because I you know, God’s goodness, his his grace and mercy are infinite. There is no end to the beauties of God. Evil is parasitic, small and temporary. There’s there’s only so much evil that will ever appear in all of human history, there is no limit to the grace and goodness of God. So if one little, tiny fragment of evil lands on me, then there’s that much less that can land on you. So sign me up. I don’t want to landing I don’t want all of it landing on you guys, and the more that lands on me, the better. Yeah, that’s how I feel.

Sam Allberry
We need to finish in a moment, Paul, but as you, as you look around and see the sort of wider Christian landscape, what gives you most encouragement right now?

Paul Tripp
Relationships like this, people that I see, that I am, God is blessed to be in my life that really believe in the captive, captivating call of God on their lives, and that’s what they get up in the morning for, that’s their passion, that’s their joy, and want to be In relationship with other people that that share that joy, that’s just, that’s just so encouraging to me. And I don’t, I don’t think the landscape is is all bleak, but I, I do think that God is doing more than just pruning a few branches. He may be sawing at the trunk. Yeah.

Ray Ortlund
Let me finish up, Sam, if you don’t mind with my making a recommendation in Second Peter, chapter one, the apostle says, and I will see to it that after my departure, you may be able at any time to recall these things. So he wrote these things down for his for the next generation. And Tim Keller did that with his wonderful this is a PDF I downloaded for free from the gospel and Life website. And he wrote this the last two or three years of his life, the decline and renewal of the American church. It is so insightful, well researched. This is Tim Keller. It’s really well done, the decline and renewal of the American church by Tim Keller. So I downloaded the PDF, printed it off, I took it to FedEx Office. They bound it for me like this, and I’m recommending now. I’m reading this with my son, Gavin. Tomorrow morning, we’re gonna get together and discuss the next chapter in this and I would recommend get that PDF, print it off, make two copies, or even better, three copies, and recruit one or two. Guys and get together like every two weeks, or every week or once a month, something on regular basis, and plow through it chapter by chapter, get together for coffee and discuss it and how this can help you invest in the future. It’s all about how God can rebuild what he himself disciplines and breaks down. Give us a title one more time. Yeah, the title again, is the decline and renewal and renewal of the American church. By Tim Keller, wonderful

Sam Allberry
Paul. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for hosting us in Philadelphia. We’re here, yes, in Philly for a couple of days, which is just a joy to be with you. Thank you for what you’re doing. Thank you for your service to the kingdom, brother, yeah, and thank you for listening. It’s always great to have this opportunity to share. And as Ray said, we are so grateful for you giving us.