Good News for Our Bodies

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Collin Hansen
For as long as I’ve been paying attention some 20 years or so I’ve heard Christians complain that we need more attention on the body. That is a theological attention on the body. I’ve heard that Catholics have much deeper, more comprehensive theology of the body. I’ve seen Protestant evangelicals try to make the case for attention to the body. But for some reason or another, the arguments often just don’t land with readers. I don’t really know how to explain the disconnect. We worship the God who became flesh and the incarnation of Jesus. When Paul talks about the body, he’s referencing all of life. I mean, that’s how far our views have diverged from his. We live in a time that esteem self expression, mind over matter, not self sacrifice of the type that engages the body. But Sam alberi aims to help us in his new book, what God has to say about our bodies, how the gospel is good news for our physical selves. book published by crossway.

Allberry is a world traveled speaker and apologist and serves on a leadership team at Immanuel Nashville. And in this book, he encourages Christians to look forward, but not to a time when we’ll have a full head of hair and flat stomachs. I would look forward to that. But instead when we anticipate resurrected bodies that glorify and serve Jesus perfectly, and what good news that is, for our broken bodies, Sam writes this, the problems we experience with our body, whenever ultimately going to be solved by our body, we may be able to ameliorate some aspects of our bodily brokenness. We can cure some ills and ease some pains. But we cannot fix what has been broken. The only hope for us is the body of Jesus broken fully and finally for us, by looking to his broken body, we find true hope for our own. Sam joins me on gospel bound to discuss intimacy, technology, avatar, colorblindness, masculinity and femininity, and much more. Sam, thank you for joining me.

Sam Allberry
Good to be with you. Thanks, calling.

Collin Hansen
Sam, how is the body a gift because I gotta be honest, I don’t often feel that way.

Sam Allberry
Yeah, and you’re not alone. feeling that way either. It’s a gift because it’s, it’s the means by which God has given us to exist on this earth is the means by which he’s given us to have life. So

in the biblical way of thinking, it’s not that we are primarily spirits, and we happen to have a body, and God created Adam, he didn’t make a spirit called Adam, and then look for something to put Adam into. He animated matter from the ground and breathed life into it. So without our bodies, we don’t have life, we don’t have the capacity to exist and to know one another, and to know God so much has that has been spoiled by the fall and matches our experience of the body is therefore mixed. It is nevertheless a gift, to have bodily life and to have flesh and blood.

Collin Hansen
Do you think, Sam that the Christians tend to think of the body as intrinsically bad? And I’m wondering if so why would that be the case?

Sam Allberry
I think we often do. And there are some reasons for that some biblical ish reasons and some cultural reasons. biblically, Paul often uses for example, flesh as kind of shorthand for our our fallen nature. And so it’s easy to extrapolate from that shorthand, that the body itself is just intrinsically bad and intrinsically wicked. And obviously, our flesh is, is fallen. It’s been subjected to frustration along with the rest of creation. But the fact is that the Bible speaks elsewhere very positively about our bodies, David could serve his fallen body, it was fearfully and wonderfully made. And Paul elsewhere uses much more positive language, he talks about our our bodies, being offered to God has a sacrifice, it’s pleasing to Him. So our bodies aren’t all bad and that point of view, but I think, because we are and I’m immediately out of my depth using a computer analogy, but because we have, we’re running new creation software on old creation hardware, we do have a new, a new heart, a new mind, a new spirit. But we are still living in the flesh of this age. And so the body is so often a vehicle for sin. It’s so often one of the ways in which many people have been sinned against and so there are many scars spiritually, emotionally as well as physically that we carry in our bodies, some of them self inflicted, many of them inflicted by others. So there’s their shame And there’s pain. And there’s all kinds of remorse and regret that go along with our bodies. And obviously culture then adds Paul kind of piles on by, by really suggesting that the real you is the inner you, and that the body is is purely an accident of evolution and utterly incidental to your real understanding of who you are.

Collin Hansen
I saw what I was going to turn to next here, Sam, that you you argue in this book that our generation is most at risk of forgetting that embodiment means we need to relate physically. So did you explain to some of those factors that you’ve come across that make that especially difficult for the people who are listening to this disembodied podcast right now?

Sam Allberry
Yeah, and that and a lot of it is to do with technology, I think it’s technology. Plus the sort of anthropology that we’ve we seem to have drifted into, and this particular time, have really combined to sort of make the body sometimes an encumbrance, sometimes just an irrelevance. And, technologically, we can you and I can have this conversation across so many 1000 miles and time zones and all the rest of it. We don’t need our bodies in the way that we used to, to be able to relate to one another, we can Skype zoom call, and have ways of being in touch with each other that are our virtual. But at the same time that that isn’t enough, and joyous though it is to see your face on my computer screen, it would be even more joyous to be sitting across the table from you. And

Collin Hansen
I think sharing barbecue in Birmingham, Alabama, as we’ve done

Sam Allberry
before, even better see, I couldn’t I couldn’t enjoy that if I didn’t have a body enjoy too much of it, I might not have a body for much longer, I suppose.

Collin Hansen
testcase right here.

Sam Allberry
And I think, you know, we’ve we’ve come out of COVID I hope learning something about the, the value of physical presence of virtual staff, our social media stuff gives us an illusion of being relational, but it’s not actually as relational as we think it is. And as much as we need it to be. So much as I can be messaging friends all over the country or in different parts of the world. much as I can be, you know, doing my thing with social media, much as I can be live streaming church. Those things are all good in their way, but they are woefully insufficient for what we are designed for were designed for physical, embodied friendship, community, relationship, and church. So the technology gives us the convenience COVID kind of forced us into that kind of way of relating. And we need coming out of that to rediscover the the importance of physical presence.

Collin Hansen
The way you put it in the book is that technology has triumphed over geography. I mean, you’ve mentioned a number of ways that we can celebrate that but maybe try to explain to some people, I find that American Protestants, at least a lot of whom are going to be the folks listening to this. Assume that technological developments are are always good, that they only add what is technology as its added some things what is it taken away, when it comes to our sense of ourselves, through our our bodies and, and our physical presence?

Sam Allberry
Yeah, it has added incalculable amount. So I’m very grateful for that. But it has made it easy for us to be relationally lazy in a way that actually we most need to be relationally rich. So you know, I’m in the UK now I’m slightly stuck here for visa reasons. My churches in Nashville, I’m so thankful that I can hop on the live stream every week and watch the service. That’s That’s way more than nothing, but it’s nowhere near enough. It’s nowhere near what I would get if I was physically there. And the trouble is, you know, if I was living in Nashville, I’d wake up on Sunday morning, and they’d always be a part of me going cannot be bothered this week. You know, I’m in bed uncomfy it’s raining outside or whatever it might be. And it’s then easy to think, oh, I’ll just watch the live stream instead. And we sort of think we’re still getting most of what we would have got out of being there physically, but the one thing we can’t get is physical relationship and serving others. And so much of our relational depth in the way God has designed it to comes from serving others self giving, being physically present for others. And we can’t do that adequately with with this technology.

Collin Hansen
I’m going to take this idea from you, Sam, I want you to tell the listeners here about the spiritual gifts of showing up.

Sam Allberry
Yeah, this was a dear pastor friend of mine I was placed with when I was at seminary and did a summer placement at this guy’s church. And the church was an Anglican Church in a city in Southeast Asia where the entire church was a microcosm of all the tensions going on in the whole Anglican world. And it was a very difficult season for him as a pastor, a lot of opposition from parts of his own congregation. But he referenced just one particular kind of church member. And he said, that guys, you know, whatever, whatever we put on at the church, he will always be there. And he said, This guy, and because that this pastor was facing so much discouragement, and so much opposition, this guy kind of always been there, front row, whatever it was, the pastor said, He’s got the spiritual gift of, of just being there of showing up. And that guy’s his mere presence, even before he’s opened his mouth, or tried to do anything encouraging. Just the fact that he’s there was was already ministering to that pastor friend, and we could multiply that principle. All of us can think of times when we’ve been in church, and we’ve just seen in our peripheral vision, some precious saints are just seeing them there puts a smile on our face, because we think, oh, man, I know what they’re going through in their life. The fact that they are here, blesses me even before I’ve had a chance to say hello to them, or even they’ve not even noticed I’ve seen them, but they’ve already served me. So there’s so much we, we get intangibly by showing up that cannot be mediated in any other way. In the same way.

Collin Hansen
We can apply this to so many different things in life, Sam, I think about grief. Specifically, what would be a great, great motto when it comes to grief. Just show up? Yeah. What would be a great motto when it comes to Should I go to that funeral? Just show up? Yeah. I mean, on and on and on to it to a small group or Bible study, a regular worship service, all kinds of different things. I mean, who, who has a friend doesn’t? doesn’t like the pop in? I mean, yes, there can be some introverts out there who don’t like that idea. But just the idea that somebody is thinking about you, yeah, and willing to make that effort to just show up.

Sam Allberry
And so much difference. It challenges our idea that we think in such kind of utilitarian terms, we’re activists in the Christian world, and we sort of think, well, I need to be doing something to be useful. I forget, our mere presence itself, is is often doing something. I know when I’ve been in times of deep distress and anxiety, just having a friend sitting in the room with me. Doesn’t have to be saying anything, they don’t have to be opening the Bible and teaching me from it. Their their mere presence conveys so so much.

Collin Hansen
No, absolutely. One thing that Sam, we’ve we’ve come to see from your writings for the gospel coalition, your previous books, is this, this, this idea of how do we recover the good of intimacy, apart from reducing that entire concept to sex? How does that relate here in your book on the body?

Sam Allberry
Yeah, again, it’s another example of how the Bible gives us far broader categories of relational intimacy than our culture, that’s we’ve really reduced it to romantic and sexual gratification and fulfillment. But again, the Bible shows us just a rich nurse and a multifaceted nurse to, to how we can experience intimacy. And physical presence is a key part of that. There are certain friends that I will probably see two or three times a week in the in the course of normal life, and we don’t have to be kind of doing anything, particularly milestone II, when we’re getting together enough to be some big occasion or some grand sort of thing, but just actually being together. Is is nourishing. When I was first moving to Nashville, I was getting to know TJ Tim’s that who’s now my pastor. And we were grabbing coffee one Saturday morning, and he said, oh, I’ve got a skirt. And I said, What do you got on? And he says, Well, I’m actually going to go and get my haircut. And I was like, Oh, I’m really need to get a haircut. Where do you go, where’s a good place? And he said, Well hop in the car and come with me. So we went and grabbed a haircut together. And then it just kind of became a thing for several months that we were going get our hair cut together and it’s a really dumb thing. But it’s on I found that so much. So much life of real life happens in the dumb stuff. Not in the kind of the grand, you know, singular events, but often it’s just a dumb stuff of life. Doing that physically with somebody else makes a difference running errands. You know, I have friends who who meet up and do chores together just to kind of share that time physically.

Collin Hansen
Fold your laundry together.

Sam Allberry
Yeah, I know people who do that occasionally. But again, when I’m when I’m stuck outside the country of the church, I’m belonging to. There’s a couple of guys, if I got to be sat at my desk all afternoon working and they’re doing the same thing, we’ll just open up FaceTime, and we’ll be doing our work. But we’ll occasionally just sort of chat while we’re doing it. And some of that kind of that’s a virtual presence thing rather than the physical presence thing. But just the right company thing can make a huge difference. And if that works through a screen, how much more when they sat around the table with me?

Collin Hansen
Well, let’s let’s talk about our culture’s view of the body and some of the difficulties that we have to sort through, we can look at some popular media to be able to see that so you suggest movie Avatar, as describing our culture’s philosophy of the body. I think we could probably come up with some other examples as well, though, I think we have how many more avatar movies to come,

Sam Allberry
I think two or three days. I keep hanging on to avatar thinking at some point, it’s going to come back to being cutting edge. It’s, it’s 10 years old now the original one, but um,

Collin Hansen
it is but but again, I thought James Cameron was signed for like five more or something like that. But I mean, we can I mean, I could come up with a number. The one I use almost always, in addition to avatar would be Ready Player One, you know, very different in some ways, but the same underlying philosophy. But I do think James Cameron’s view is probably more positive of that philosophy, whereas Ernest Cline’s view I think is more negative for that at least and how I read or watch him. But yeah, use explained from avatar. What does that tell us about how generally speaking, Western culture especially though, that’s going to trans cultural and that that moving in his appeal? And does that give a contemporary philosophy of the body?

Sam Allberry
Well, the main character whose name I couldn’t possibly Remember, you know, the whole premise of the movie

Collin Hansen
Suddenly, I think, and I don’t know how possibly I remembered that was it because soley soley

Sam Allberry
Sally wasn’t either guy landed a plane on the Hudson.

Collin Hansen
Also slowly, Okay, I’m gonna look it up. Anyway, short hooked on max. All right, keep going.

Sam Allberry
So the main character inhabits the body of topmags. No, that’s the other one. So now that I mean, the whole premise of avatar is that a bunch of the main characters, there’s this alien moon, they they go and live that but they they kind of transfer themselves into the physical forms of these alien creatures and spend time with them and kind of, I guess, incarnate among them in some kind of Hollywood II type sense. And the sort of observation and I think I first noticed this, Matt, Matt Lee Anderson, drew my attention to it in a book he’d written. But the kind of unspoken assumption is you can do that you can transfer your body, not just even into a different human body, but into a different creatures body and not lose any sense of who you are. Your physical body, as we experience it, now, in that regard, is is transferable. It has no intrinsic meaning it doesn’t contribute It is simply the container. And we see that ideology reflected when Ellen Page transition to Elliott page, if I remember those names, rightly and did the, the secular equivalent of baptism, which is a Oprah Winfrey interview, you know, that the comment was coming out of the shower, post transition, looking in the mirror and going, there you are, in a way, presumably, that hadn’t been felt previously. The body previously hadn’t felt like it was who they were. Whereas now that that kind of that feels like that to me. And the fact that we can even articulate that shows how separate from our sense of ourselves, our bodies have become.

Collin Hansen
I don’t think Yeah, Jake Sully is the name. Okay. I didn’t, I didn’t realize I don’t think I connected before. What you’re saying there of avatar. too. I mean, you did talk about how that movie is 10 years old, how much has changed when it comes to transgender identities in last 10 years. And now, you can see that those bodies being treated as a kind of, you know, the just the housing of our of that inner identity and thus needs to be shifted, that body needs to be shifted, that avatar needs to change, or that host needs to change so that the true identity can be realized there. We could talk a lot about transgender issues there. But I think you also address racial ethnic issues here as well explain what you mean about what color blindness tells us? Or how does that fit into what you’re talking about here about the body?

Sam Allberry
Yeah, that was actually in the context of gender identity rather than race. And I mentioned color blindness.

Collin Hansen
That’s right. Yeah. colorblind is about sex and gender. That’s right. Explain that. That’s,

Sam Allberry
yeah, it’s, I’m sure very imperfect analogy. But as I was trying to talk about how, obviously one of the things we see repeated in Scripture, is that God has made us male and female, obviously, foundationally, Genesis one, but then repeated at various points and throughout the rest of the Bible, and not least by Jesus Himself in Matthew 19. And, you know, too many contemporary is just that phrase, God has made us male and female, which would sound implausible and offensive, and maybe harmful, and all kinds of other things. Because we don’t have those fixed as, as a kind of pair of categories in our minds. And one of the reasons people will use today for abandoning those categories is the confusion and, you know, diversity of experience different people have when it comes to their gender identity. And so the point I was trying to make is just because there’s such a thing as color blindness, and some people get red and green muddled up, doesn’t mean there’s no such thing as red and green in reality. And this, this, this all came to me as I was, I was borrowing a friend’s car, actually, and the brakes weren’t working terribly well. So every time I came to a red light, it was slightly stressful, particularly when suddenly switch registers I was approaching, but again, it made me think, if you start saying there’s no such thing as red and green, that makes the roads a lot less safe. And I think correspondingly, if we if we start trying to completely abandon the categories of male and female as being biological realities, we’re heading for even greater danger. Society and culturally. Jesus reaffirms where male or female he also affirms that some are born eunuchs. So there’s not, you know, sometimes there is complexity and complication and pain and someone’s experience of their biological sex. But we we don’t infer from that complexity that there’s no such thing as, as male and female.

Collin Hansen
On Sam, I left my most difficult question for last, and the one that I struggle with with the most. And it’s really hard to sit down when you’re writing this book, or publishing an article about the differences between masculinity and femininity. Now doesn’t sound that difficult, in general, because I think we all sense I know what that means. But then you try to do it. And oh, wow, you realize how many different things you have to qualify to caveat. I found that writing in the internet about masculinity and femininity is so difficult because of people’s divergent experiences, problems, struggles, it’s basically impossible. I’m not saying people shouldn’t, I’m just saying every time I’ve tried, it’s gone poorly. People just don’t respond well to that. So I’m gonna ask the impossible question, which is, how do you avoid the problem of saying less than the Bible does about masculinity and feminine femininity, and also including the wisdom of history that’s developed over 1000s of years, without, on the other hand, saying too much about masculinity and femininity, especially by overly relying on cultural stereotypes?

Sam Allberry
Well, I think I mean, that is a huge, it is a huge issue. I think one of the things is even being aware of the possibility of straying in either of those directions helps us enormously because I think so much of our discourse on these things. We’re just presuming we know what we’re talking about, and that there’s so many unconscious assumptions being brought in so many cultural things that are being brought into play as if they’re biblical things. So even just having that awareness of I need to go as far as the Bible says, and no less than no further, even knowing that that’s our aspiration, I think makes a big difference. And it just means we need to be mindful of the the things that are given in creation, that there is such a thing as male and female. The fact that those differences extend beyond biology. Hence, there are scriptures that are addressed specifically to men and scriptures, specifically to women. whilst also allowing for the fact that we see, I think, a range of examples of what a godly man and a godly woman can look like in the Bible, and trying not to baptize our own cultural kind of background or preferences and sort of making that the essence of biblical masculinity. It’s one of those things where it’s easier to say what it’s not the what it is. I remember having a discussion, right,

Collin Hansen
that’s part of the problem. Yeah. Then I’m running into you.

Sam Allberry
And you know, I’ve discussed this with a with a pastor once who, who said, You know, I said everything that men are meant to be physically strong and athletic and have to be mentioned sporting prowess. And I said, Well, what if a guy is just not coordinated and can’t throw a ball. And he says, he has to be made to I suppose if he is disabled, and can’t play sport, and you know a bit bit he’d sort of attached Matt biblical masculinity to in his case, he was talking about rugby. And I sort of thought, well, that may be an application of, of a way of being masculine, but we mustn’t reduce masculinity to that particular cultural stereotype. So that’s one of the areas where I think we end up saying more than the Bible does. I think the church is more prone to saying more than the Bible does in the world is more prone to saying less than the Bible does. And it’s one of those areas where it helps to be in dialogue with other Christians, it helps to be in dialogue with Christians from other cultural backgrounds. Because we need to sort through how much of our own understanding has come from Scripture and how much has come from culture. Because in another part of the world, the very thing that you’re decrying as being feminine might be something that is culturally an expression of masculinity. So we want to recognize our own cultural situation, certainly not to send out signals that would confuse our culture about whether we are male or female. But be hesitant before coming up with a sort of, you know, this is what it means to be a biblical man. And this is what it means to be a biblical woman. Not that we can’t say those things, but we just need to be really careful before we define those things kind of with authority.

Collin Hansen
I’m gonna ask something that might be controversial here, Sam, and I don’t know how you’re going to answer this one. So I like that preface. I think it’s really good to be able to say okay, we clearly have to say what the Bible says we should learn from other Christians and other cultures. Would you also say that we should listen to Christians from history when it comes to this? Because often we can see the clear problems, the blind spots of Christians throughout history when it comes to these, these stereotypes? that’s a that’s a huge, that’s a huge issue there. But is it possible that they are that we need that history to be able to correct some of our own cultural over situatedness? Oh, when it comes to our reluctance there without hesitation?

Sam Allberry
Absolutely no, we need this, this is why the two of the things that most help me with my own blind spots are Firstly, you know, being around Christians from other parts of the world today. But the other thing is, is, you know, having conversations as it were with Christians from different times, and both of those things help us to kind of lose our cultural blinders. And sometimes we’ll learn through church history from negative examples and think, Wow, they they really got that badly wrong. And other times we’ll be learning from from the wisdom of previous generations going, man, those guys thought really carefully in their time about, you know, what it meant to be a biblical man would have meant to be a biblical woman. So I think that that historical view is going to be hugely helpful that the Bible is your authority, but church histories I heard somebody called it once is often the sort of the expert witness. And so seeing how the people of God have grappled with this in the past is going to be instructive. Whether it’s through learning from their mistakes or learning from their from their wisdom,

Collin Hansen
maybe Sam the problem, I’m a verbal processor, so maybe the Problem. Yeah. That was a very properly British comment right there. I appreciate that. I think the issue is that when people appeal to history, they appeal to just one segment of history. They say well our era is wrong let’s go back to this period of time. So it’s not that’s why I think we’re history gets a bad rap when it comes to gender masculinity and femininity because you’re trying to baptize repressed innate some particular time as opposed to the full witness of history. I do think also at the same time, the, the person who coined the term cannot chronological snobbery with with CS Lewis there, he comes across so much as a kind of cosmopolitan worldly figure that Christians of all different sophistication levels can cite. But then we see what he says about masculinity and femininity and sexuality, and he seems very regressive for our culture. But I think that might be an example of somebody where that doesn’t mean Lewis was right about everything. But it does mean he might have some things to say to us that we should listen to, instead of just dismissing by our own standards. So anyway, thanks for helping me come to my some of my own conclusions about that one. I just I just hadn’t thought through that in that way. But thanks for that. That thoughtful response. They got final three questions here for Sam all Barry, we’re talking about his book what God has to say about our bodies of the gospel is good news for our physical selves published by crossway. Sam, first question, final three, how do you find calm in the storm?

Sam Allberry
hiking does a lot to calm me down. Being being in nature and having space not being near a screen. And if you throw a friend into the mix to talk things through with on said hike, then that that helps too. So that that’s one way time with friends I find is always kind of a healthy thing for me if I’m feeling stressed or low. And again, we don’t have to be, you know, trying to fix it. But just going back to our earlier conversation, just the presence of other people. I find calming on in mediates something of what I know theologically to be true of God, but it often feels more real. When it’s being expressed through the kindness of a friend.

Collin Hansen
Sam, do you have to hide that? I’m here like a gift to I mean, you have to force yourself to see other people. Because I know a lot of people struggle with they know they need to see other people physically, but they just can’t often force themselves to do it. It could just be could be shame could be laziness. It’s it’s something that comes naturally to you. Or do you have to remind yourself you have to preach to yourself. I need to see people right now.

Sam Allberry
No, it actually it does come naturally. I always thought I was an introvert because I don’t like big groups. I’m not the kind of loud, bouncy person. But I’ve realized I might maybe I’m an ambivert because I really love company. And I love being with one friend or two friends rather than a whole gang of people. But I’ve The Lord has given me some very dear friends who make it easy for me to say, if I need some company. If I’m feeling low, it’s it’s not a kind of it doesn’t feel like you’re kind of crashing through some. Some barrier you’re not supposed to go through in the friendship to say hey, yeah, things are things are low today. And I’ve you know, and it’s lovely when that’s reciprocated. And sometimes it’s as simple as I’ve got to spend the afternoon doing stuff, I’m really quite low, can I just bring it over to your house and do it in your living room? Sure, it’s good and be around you while I’m while I’m doing these things. It can be as little as that. But I’ve learned how to do that. And it helps when you have friends that that really do make it easy for you to do that. And on the flip side is we’re thinking, are we making it easy for other people if they need to send out a little SOS? Right? Are we making it easy for people to do that with us?

Collin Hansen
That’s good. Sam, where do you find good news today?

Sam Allberry
Well, we, I get to I’ve been I see a lot of good news just through the ministry. I do. And by which I don’t mean that the ministry I do is the good news. But I get to meet Christians in different places in different churches in different parts of the world. And you just get to see glimpses of what the Lord is doing. I was just in Spain this past weekend, doing some ministry with a former colleague in Madrid and just finding out from him, what’s it like in that you These days, what do you guys facing? What are the opportunities and you realize in the language of Colossians, one that the gospel is bearing fruit across the whole world. Our news feeds are very different to the news feeds in heaven. Because the Lord is, is working powerful power awfully. So that helps just just those opportunities. Strangely, social media can help when you when you mute all the people who need to mute to then make sure you’re then actually receiving and seeing encouraging voices that can help to and what a great place, you know, the phone can be it’s normally the source of anxiety, but if there can be some encouragement through that as well, then that’s, that’s really great as well. And obviously, chatting to people at church and that sort of thing.

Collin Hansen
Just came to mind, Sam, be the kind of friend who, when a text message pops up from you, it’s an encouragement, it’s a positive thing that happens and no shade necessarily on my my friends who like to tell me about all the bad things that are happening out there, as they’re often things that I need to know. So thank you for keeping me in the loop. But there is something that happens even physically, when I see a text message pop up, and I’m thinking, Oh, no. Now who has said what? who’s done what what’s happened here? You know, if that’s, that’s something you struggle with at least mix it up a little. I gotta say, Sam is one of those friends where we’re almost always encouragement. So not talking about use.

Sam Allberry
When it’s one of these things, isn’t it you sometimes see a certain name pop up on your notification, and you can suddenly get very tense and thing on knows exactly how the pummeling. And it’s also worth it’s just for that very reason. If sometimes, there are times we need to offer correction and such things to our own other as brothers and sisters. text messaging isn’t the way to do that effectively. And social media certainly isn’t. So when those things do need to happen again, that’s where our embodied nurse becomes hugely significant. So maybe save those conversations for the in person opportunities. And that way, when people hear hearing from you, through text or whatever they they know, it’s not going to be that.

Collin Hansen
Yeah, if we use text messages for quick encouragement, and we use social media for sharing, helpful illuminating, encouraging, sometimes challenging articles or longer, or book recommendations or things like that the world would be a much better place. So we can try to do that ourselves. Last question, Sam. What’s the last great book you’ve read?

Sam Allberry
Well, I knew you’re gonna ask that one. Because I know that’s a regular question.

Collin Hansen
And I know you listened. Okay,

Sam Allberry
I do. I do. I love this podcast. Um, I probably won’t listen to this episode. I was thinking through what I’ve been reading over the summer. And actually, I’ve got to say one of the highlights is was one of your previous guests. JOHN Dixon’s book, bullies and saints, I very good way to get up off the show. I’ve always loved john Dixon’s books anyway, but I remember thinking up I’ll take that on holiday dinner is going to be the kind of thing I’m going to want to read on holiday, but I’m sorry, vacation, but I started it and just didn’t really put it down for the whole rest of the trip. Really enjoyed it very, very well done. And even when he’s giving us the the kind of discouraging parts of church history, he’s doing it in a way that is instructive and edifying. And there’s not another book I’ve seen that sort of does what that book is doing. He makes even the the the mess ups part of an apologetic for the goodness of Jesus.

Collin Hansen
That’s a great way to put it. So that that would be one

Sam Allberry
highlight of recent.

Collin Hansen
I agree. I agree. Absolutely. That’s a great one Sam. Well, thanks everybody for listening into what is turned out to be a gospel coalition Podcast Network mashup hear from Sam auberry, co host of the relatively new and very popular TGC podcast you’re not crazy with our good friend, Ray ortlund and check out Sam’s book, what God has to say about our bodies how the gospel is good news for our physical selves. New from crossway Sam, it’s great to talk to you my friend.

Sam Allberry
Thanks Colin. And I think Sally is also one of the characters in Monsters Inc, as well. So there’s a third

Collin Hansen
we Americans have about three nicknames and they all end in why we just sort of cycle through

Sam Allberry
them, but I’m gonna do a kind of crossover movie with all those different songs.

Collin Hansen
We’ll come back and we’ll do that podcast after you finish that project. Thanks. Thanks, Collin.