Mark Clark [00:00:01]:
Hey everybody. Hopefully you are doing well. Welcome to the Mark Clark Podcast. It is official. The Problem of Life, my latest book is now out. You could go get it Amazon, you could go to a bookstore and get it. Very excited to give you this resource. And so what this podcast is, it's about a half hour, 40 minute conversation I had with the great Morgan May True, she was one of the early readers of the book and we sit down and have a conversation about a whole bunch of stuff that this book unpacks.
Mark Clark [00:00:30]:
So hopefully this has helped. Helpful to you. A whole episode on the content of the Problem of Life.
Morgan May Treuil [00:00:37]:
What does it mean to listen to the old ache inside you?
Mark Clark [00:00:41]:
I think people in life are told, worldview wise, some different things. So one worldview that we live in in the western world a lot is, you know, you're an animal, you're just an animal and basically you're a body without a spirit. And then the second kind of worldview we bump into is more like the new age philosophy where you're a spirit and your body doesn't matter. So you can do whatever with your body. You can sleep with whomever you want, you can do whatever because it doesn't really matter. All that matters is your soul, your spirit. And the biblical story comes along and says, actually both of those don't fill out the full picture. You are a body and that really matters.
Mark Clark [00:01:22]:
Actually, your body and who you are is a huge pointer to your identity. It's not to be shuffle off this mortal coil. As Shakespeare said, just let me get on with my spirit. But on the flip side, you are a spirit. Genesis chapter two actually says that God at some point breathed into Adam and gave him a soul. Which is why you chase down soulish things in your life. Which is why when you're walking out at night and you're connecting and all of a sudden you feel like a connection to the transcendent, like something on the other side of the veil is really there. When you're listening to music and all of a sudden like as my kids, it just hits different, right? When you're like reading a book and you feel like you're getting wrapped up in this epic adventure that doesn't seem connected to your normal mundane life.
Mark Clark [00:02:11]:
That's because you have a soul. You have this ache for a bigger existence, a more transcendent, more meaningful thing. There was a poet, Victorian poet, Elizabeth Barrett Brown, and she says that every bush, earth is crammed with heaven and every bush is a fire with the presence of God. But only he who Sees, takes off his shoes. The rest sit around and pluck blackberries. It's like you can either go through life realizing every moment is infused with God, the spiritual, soulish things, or you can just say, you know what, I have a Monday to Friday, I'm trying to raise my kids right and make sure they're not murderers. And that's your whole vision for your life? Well, no wonder, culturally speaking, here's what's happened. After 150 years of that secular experiment.
Mark Clark [00:02:58]:
We're more depressed, we're more suicidal, we're more isolated, we're more anxious, we're more full of fear than we've ever been in the history of time. Why those two things are connected. We have forgotten that we belong to God. We have forgotten that we actually are created by God to connect to God and for God. And so we go through this life without the ability to absorb pain. We are the worst culture in history at dealing with pain and suffering. Partly because the question of connecting to God, the transcendent, that religious spark in you to go life is more than just this world in front of me. The natural atheistic vision is all that exists is the physical world in front of you.
Mark Clark [00:03:43]:
Anything you can put through a test tube and go, okay, now I can do a hypothesis. I can put this through a test tube. And now it's true. There is nothing else that exists in the universe than that. In the end, there's no hope in that. There's no identity in that. When you wake up in the morning, why are you gonna go sacrifice? In that mode of thinking, all suffering is against who you are and what you should do. Cause you should just be making as much money as possible, crush as many people as possible on your way to your 77 years and die.
Mark Clark [00:04:10]:
And then the Bible comes along and goes, no, no, no, you don't have 77 years. You have 77 years and then you've got 70 billion years after that and 70 billion years after that where your soul, you've never met, you've never met a normal creature, you've never. A human being is. There's no normal everyday people. Every single person you meet is gonna live forever. Every single person you meet is created in the image of God. And here's what's fascinating. People make fun of Christianity and they say, oh Christians, it's oppressive to women and children and all these kind of things.
Mark Clark [00:04:44]:
And yet Luke Ferry, who's this philosopher, he wrote A Brief History of Thought and he's an atheist, an existentialist and he Talks about the idea that Christianity historically spe. Everywhere it goes, it makes the lives of women and poor people better. It educates them, it lifts them up. All through history, the best thing for any culture is Christianity. Why? Because it says, here's the reason you can't have slaves, because we're made in the image of God, which means every single person is equal in essence. All of these things, that's the driving force behind why you abolish slavery, why the justice system works, all of these things that we love and value. Christianity is the thing that brings that in the world, the biblical picture of who we are as human beings. So the reason you don't like evil, the reason you look around at injustice and say, I'm going to wake up tomorrow and fight it, is because there's something in your soul that says, the universe is broken.
Mark Clark [00:05:40]:
This isn't the way it's supposed to be. If we were just animals, you would never have anything to compare this universe with to say it's wrong. Murder is wrong. Rape is wrong. Genocide is wrong. If we're animals, that nature is red in tooth and claw. Who cares? What? You wouldn't even have a moral construct to say it's wrong. In order to know something is crooked.
Mark Clark [00:06:01]:
C.S. lewis said, you need to know what a straight line is. Well, what is a straight line? The way the universe was meant to be. You walked with God in the garden in the cool of the day, Genesis says, which means it's like an echo in your brain. It's like built into your DNA. It's like nostalgia. You go back in your brain. The reason you fight for justice, the reason you know racism is wrong.
Mark Clark [00:06:25]:
The reason you know all these is because God put it in you at a soul level and said, here's how to think. And when you look around at the world, you know it's broken. So here's what I think we need to do. You know what beauty is? You chase it every day of your life. You know what joy is? Every decision you make. The most powerful, the most powerful impulse of your life is your own joy and happiness. It's the reason you dress in what you dress today. It's the reason you married who you married.
Mark Clark [00:06:55]:
It's the reason you're gonna have dinner where you're gonna have dinner tonight. It's all driven by your own pleasure, your own joy. A lot of people look at Christianity and they go, oh, Christianity, that's about obedience. That's about just being obedient to God so he doesn't, you know, get mad at you. No, it's not. It actually goes back and goes. That sense of longing and beauty and the transcendent and joy and happiness that you fight for. God put that in you.
Mark Clark [00:07:19]:
And one writer has said, the gospel is not a way to get to heaven when you die. It's a way to remove every obstacle of your everlasting joy in God. If we can realize that God is actually fighting for our joy, we'll realize why he gave us a soul. The soul is the thing to actually chase down. A lot of worldview goes, don't chase the joy. Don't chase the pleasure. It's going to lead you wrong now. It can.
Mark Clark [00:07:44]:
If you chase the pleasure and the joy impulse in you and it lands you anywhere but God. If it lands you in sex and ambition and money and all, then you're gonna mess your life up. You're never gonna be fulfilled. Which is where we're at as a culture right now. Why are we more afraid? Why are we more fearful? Why are we more anxious? Why are we more isolated? Because we tried to answer the question of the soul, excluding God and only looking to ourself. One philosopher said, basically, here's what we've done as a culture. We've left behind theology, we've left behind science, we've left behind philosophy. And now we're in a mode where psychology is the main mode of thinking.
Mark Clark [00:08:21]:
So here's what we've done as a culture. It used to be, if you look back, like 1950s, 60s, what did people care about social revolution? I want to change civil rights. I want to abolish slavery back, you know, back in the day. I want to feminism. These were the driving forces of our culture. Class struggles. That's us trying to change the external world. Now, what one philosopher has said is, we don't care about social revolution.
Mark Clark [00:08:48]:
All we care about is personal revolution. All we care about is our own psycho, our own go inside of ourself, find ourself. What's my identity? Who am I as a human being? What's my. All of that. And it started to derail the social revolution and the soul inside of you, the thing that echoes in your brain when you're going to sleep at night and going, I think life actually might be more than money and sex and ambition and work. Don't snuff that as a bad. Like evolutionary thinking will tell you. I mean, pure naturalist evolutionary thinking will tell you, oh, that's just a bad artifact in your brain that helped you, you know, hope in the middle and Your tribe is.
Mark Clark [00:09:31]:
Everyone was dying. You're like, oh, hopefully there's a heaven. The Bible comes along and goes, no, no, no. That's actually something you should listen to because that's the thing trying to guide you home. Augustine said, we are always going to be restless in our life until we find our rest in God, because it's like we're all trying to get home. Have you ever, like. I remember I used to go to this cottage when I was a kid, and we'd go up there every summer and we'd, you know, have, you know, my cousins and my grandparents, we'd all hang out and boat and do all these great things. And I remember we used to go to the same cottage every year and it was like, this is life.
Mark Clark [00:10:06]:
This is. And then we didn't go for a few years. And, you know, I grew up and got a job and whatever. And then one summer, I was driving past that area in a boat, actually, and I said, oh, that's the cottage. And we pulled up and the grass was all overgrown and the shingles were falling off the cottage and the barbecue was all falling over. And I realized, like, there was that sense of home and it's so elusive that, like, we try to go after it. And I remember looking back and go, oh, man, everything in this world is so temporal. It'll never solve the impulse for home.
Mark Clark [00:10:43]:
Everything fails at solving that impulse or that driving echo in our brain. Other than God, because he's infinite. He's the only thing not temporal. We try to solve it. So C.S. lewis said, basically, here's what we tried to do. We're trying to solve our own soul by these temporal worldly things. And that's like making mud pies in a slum when God is offering us a holiday at sea.
Mark Clark [00:11:10]:
We've misread our problem. We've misread what's wrong with us, and we're misreading the solution to that problem. We're trying to solve ourselves by ourselves. And I think, here's what happens. We all come to a place in our life where we realize, well, that's a lost cause, because I know myself. I'm a broken, flawed person. And the reason we're all stressed and anxious and isolated and depressed and all the rest of it is because we're trying to solve ourselves. And we go, wait a minute.
Mark Clark [00:11:36]:
When things go awry, where am I going to look to? I have nowhere to look. There's no God. There's nothing transcendent. There's just me and my Buddies. And if me and my buddies are the hope of the world, I'm going to become pretty hopeless and anxious and fearful that this is all there is. And so all through history, you know, here's a crazy statistic, and a lot of people don't believe this, but Rodney Stark, who's this historian of religion, very respected, he talks about the idea that a religious person, like at a meta level, when you look at the world like 8 billion people, a religious person tends to live seven years longer on average than a non religious person. Now some of us are like, wait a minute, how does that work? Well, it's almost similar to what people say sociologically about married people versus single people not doing anything wrong with being single. Singleness has a lot of cool stuff in it, but what sociologists tell us is that married people tend to live a little longer than single people.
Mark Clark [00:12:33]:
And part of the reason is, is because when you're married, you can absorb the pain of the world better than if you're just by yourself. And so you get a cancer diagnosis, you run out of money, you get fired from your job, you have a partner, a companion that you are absorbing all this stuff with, whereas a single person has to do it on their own. And it's medically more anxious and the implications on your health and all that kind of stuff. It's very similar to the question of whether we walk with God or whether we choose not to walk with God in life. When the world, I mean, here's the thing, we're born into a world that is broken. The world will beat up on you. The book of Ecclesiastes is basically written to tell us the world was not meant to contain gods and goddesses. You're not gonna win at life every time.
Mark Clark [00:13:17]:
You're not gonna be a winner. Most of us, if we're honest, are losers. We're not winners. We fail at our marriage, we run out of money. You know, we tried something and it didn't work. Here's a biblical story. It says, failure is not sin. You're going to fail.
Mark Clark [00:13:32]:
Not trying, not obeying God is the only thing that's sin. Failure. And the beautiful thing about the identity question then is when Jesus comes into your life, he goes, oh, yeah, I took all the failures, I took all the sins on me. You don't have to wear those anymore. All the shame and the guilt that you live with. I mean, I've been a pastor for a long time, and the amount of people that I've sat with and the shame and the guilt of not only things they've done, but things that have been done to them ruin their soul so much that they feel like they shouldn't be able to come to church, they shouldn't contribute anything. There's such a. I can't believe all these things.
Mark Clark [00:14:05]:
And the beautiful thing about Jesus is he comes in and he not only saves you and washes you clean from your sin, he washes you clean from the sins that have been done to you. And he gives you a new identity and a new power to be able to live out this thing for the glory of God and for the good of people. And at the end of the day, I think it's human beings forgetting that task. Go Back to Genesis 1 and 2. What are we born to do? What is our identity? How do you answer the identity question? There's a lot of people who've forgotten this. If all you do is wake up every Monday morning and go, I don't know what my identity, raise kids, go to my job, whatever. But if you go, wait a minute. God at some point looked at me and said, I want you to fill the earth and subdue it.
Mark Clark [00:14:42]:
I want you to bring the beauty of Eden out into the brokenness of the world, the order of Eden out into the chaos. I want you to bring on earth the kingdom on earth as it is in heaven, and I need you. A lot of people need to just be told because they wake up in the morning, they feel unneeded. They feel like, I don't know what I'm here to do. The Bible comes along as you are desperately needed right now. Monday morning. I need you to bring the kingdom of God on earth as it is in heaven. I want you to fill the earth and subdue it.
Mark Clark [00:15:09]:
I want you to bring the goodness of God to bear on the world. I want you to teach a kid how to throw a baseball. I want you to make an omelet. I want you to write the next great book, film. I want you to write music. I want you to contribute. I want you to have a great husband or do a great job at your business. I know you're living in exile and you think you can't contribute to the brokenness of the world.
Mark Clark [00:15:29]:
It's amazing. In Jeremiah, chapter 28:29, Israel is out in exile in Babylon. And they're like, trying to find out what to do. And they're like, what do we do? We're in Babylon. Should we just, like, you know, cower from the world and protect ourself and be scared and God Shows up and he goes, let me tell you what you're gonna do. You're in Babylon, which is not a good situation. You're in exile. Here's what I want you to do.
Mark Clark [00:15:51]:
I want you to plant gardens. I want you to build houses. I want you to have kids. What. What do you mean? These are the things that I'm asking you to do as a human being. And we forget those things and we feel unneeded because we think our little contribution is not gonna matter. And the God of the universe shows up and goes, no, no, I made you in my image. You're like, it's crazy.
Mark Clark [00:16:12]:
Jesus says in John, chapter four, he says, God is spirit. Here's the great thing. When God breathed his spirit into us, he decided he wasn't going to be the only spiritual being in the universe in that moment. He goes, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to take. You know, there's a lot of people who are like, they look back at the science of the way and they go, oh, there's a Homo erectus and there's a Homo sapien, and there's all these kind of things. And John Stott years ago, pointed out, he's like, okay, whatever. Like the biblical story is saying there was already dirt and he breathed into it.
Mark Clark [00:16:38]:
So if you want to say there was all these cavemen running around, great, at some point, God grabbed him, breathed the soul into him, and whatever that was, became homo sapien. What we would say is wise man and that wise man. And there's people who say, it was 70,000 years ago, whatever it was, they started language and they started creating communities and homes and all of these different things. It became a wise man. And at some point, we're made in the image of God. So much soul that he says, hey, listen, I gave you a soul, and you're to. Now on Monday morning, what is your job? Reflect that image out into the world and make the world sing. Make it soar.
Mark Clark [00:17:20]:
Your everyday stuff, every fire is alive with the fire of God. Now go out and live like it. Charles Taylor, the philosopher, said, here's our job to convince our secular neighbor that the naturalistic, material view of the universe is wrong. How do we do that? We re enchant the world. We look at that neighbor and say, no, no, no. God made you, and you gotta walk with God in the cool of the day. And he's gonna call you to do crazy, amazing things. That's your job.
Mark Clark [00:17:47]:
Re enchant the world. My wife, the Other day she was at a coffee shop and she was just got her coffee. She went to leave and she heard like the voice of God, which she doesn't say happens very often. Tell her to go talk to this homeless guy. So she goes over, sits down with this guy, and she said, hey, I know this is really weird, but I just feel like God told me to come over here and talk to you. And he starts crying and she puts his hand and he tells the whole story and how he woke up that morning and said, if someone would just talk to me in the coffee shop today and set aside a couple minutes and talk to me, that would be really good. If you exist, God, tell me about it. And she's like, why did I.
Mark Clark [00:18:19]:
I mean, what was she doing in that moment? She's trying to re enchant the world. She's trying to say, I don't want to just go on with my day and get a coffee and move on. I want to. I want to better a person's life. These are soulish things. These are things that we do. Because Jesus said in the Gospel of John, he said, my sheep hear my voice. So the question is, if you're a Christian, do you ever hear the voice of Jesus anymore? Do you actually ever hear him speak to you and then do something about it? Cause a lot of people who are bored with Christianity, I hear them all the time as a pastor.
Mark Clark [00:18:47]:
I'm bored with church. I'm bored with Christianity. Christianity is so lame. I'm just gonna sit around my three buddies and, you know, chat with each other. And it's like, wait, wait, what version of Christianity are you bored with? I don't think. See, if you think Christianity's boring, I dare you. Today, after watching this video, go out to a coffee shop, sit there for an hour and say, okay, God, talk to me right now about someone in this coffee shop. Something so specific about their life that they could.
Mark Clark [00:19:10]:
I could only know it if you told me and then go up to them and talk to me and then come back to me and tell me Christianity is boring. Your job is to re enchant the world, not sit around and just go through it. Like you prayed a prayer one time and now you're going to heaven when you die. And now you can just care about the mundane things of life. These mundane things are soulish things in fused with the very presence and calling of God on your life. And once that identity shift happens, now the expectation on your life, the desire to do great things is born in you. And the Reason God gave you a soul is because you're supposed to actually chase those things versus ignoring them. I think as a culture, what's happened is we've elevated the victim mentality.
Mark Clark [00:19:57]:
Now, obviously socially there's a lot of legitimate, like there are people who are victims, people have been abused, or even systemically people groups and all that stuff that's legitimate. But what started to happen is we've emphasized that so much so that universities now do things that are like, it's all about you as a student. We can't even bring in. There's been a bunch of cases. Jonathan Hyatt talks about this in his book the Coddling of the American Mind, where he talks about the idea that. Where universities have eliminated certain books where people can't read these. And we're talking about the highest level of thinkers in the marketplace of ideas that are gonna shape culture in the next generation. And they're not allowed to read Homer or, you know, these classic masterpieces throughout because a generation's like, well, I can't.
Mark Clark [00:20:44]:
These ideas are triggering or offensive, and I can't. And so he gives the example of these two women who are coming in to debate whether America, America is a rape culture at one of the high end universities in America. And the students protested bringing in one side of that debate because even the idea that America wasn't by definition a rape culture was offensive to them. So instead of going, hey, as a culture at the highest level of university thinking, we should be able to bring ideas themselves into a conversation and debate them. We've said we're scared of that. We don't want that. That's by default a victim mentality. So a lot of us have gone through a lot of things in our life.
Mark Clark [00:21:30]:
I grew up with Tourette syndrome, a broken home, My dad left our family, a lot of things that really statistically could have had it so that I'd end up in jail or dead at this point in my life. But I became a Christian, Christ changed my identity and said, listen, I know there's been things that have been done to you, but the beautiful thing about the cross is it not only washes you clean of what you have done, but the things that have been done to you. You don't have to live in the shame and the guilt of being a victim or a failure. It's actually that you're more than a conqueror. Romans 8 says, and so I think there's one of the great things about Christianity is it comes along, it sets you on a path in a footing that says, whatever mistakes you have done, whatever has been done to you, you can rise out of it because of what Jesus has done in your life.
Morgan May Treuil [00:22:17]:
What are the ways you're seeing in culture in which people are trying to be God?
Mark Clark [00:22:22]:
So the Genesis story is this story that basically says, our main problem was that we tried to be God. We didn't like the human limitation. And so the serpent comes along and says, if you eat this, you're gonna be like God, knowing good and evil. And we said yes, because we have an inflated view of what it means to be human, of our potential. We aren't happy with the limitations. And so we want to be God. And so I think there's all kinds of different ways we do this in a culture. One way right now, of course, is in regard to our sexuality and the way that we look at our physical world and physical bodies.
Mark Clark [00:22:53]:
And we say, well, we can change those to adapt to how we feel and not necessarily look at the physical world as a hint to who we are, but something we can manipulate and change in regard to how I feel internally. So what's happened is there's been this conversation about sexual and gender and people kind of this whole movement about, you know, hey, these things are fluid, you know. And you look back to the creation story, and it's this story that talks about, you know, night and day, land and sea, male and female, and there's these, you know, opposite realities that build toward reflecting God's image out into the world. And I think culturally, we said, well, let's not put ourself in that corner. And yet the science has come along and said, no, it's. It's actually true. Like, a female has XX chromosomes, A male has XY chromosomes. We're even male and female at the cellular level, at the DNA level, right down to our lungs and our joints and the way our bodies are constructed even at the brain level.
Mark Clark [00:23:53]:
Dr. Luanne Brizendine, who's this neuropsychiatrist, she talks about the idea that the female brain, when we're in utero, the female brain floods with estrogen. And what that does is enhances the communication ability between the left and right hemispheres. Whereas a male, his brain floods with testosterone, and that increases the sexual urges and the aggression. And so you can see that in the way that male and female plays out in life. And so there's all these, like, we are these things right down to the cellular, the scientific level. Now, here's the interesting thing, is that back in the day, people used to look at Christians and say, you have to follow the science. Don't give me your subjective prayer life.
Mark Clark [00:24:36]:
Like, you think there's a God because you feel it. You gotta follow the cold data of the laboratory and trace out conclusions based on what science tells you. Now we're seeing almost a flip in that in the cultural conversation where what you should follow is just what's subjective and internal. And the kind of elevation and prioritization of psychology and the, you know, personhood theory. And then the science is secondary. So chromosomes and discussions about the brain, like, yeah, yeah, yeah, we get that, but that's not as important as how you feel. And so I think this is one way that our culture is simply saying, I'm not happy with the limitations of being handed something that God has made. I want to try to change it up or do something else with it.
Mark Clark [00:25:29]:
And push back against what one writer, one philosopher has called the sacred order. There is a sacred order. And what one writer talks about is the idea of no culture has ever survived when it pushes against the order of things, when we're not happy with the order of things. And of course, the way the universe is constructed is there is an order. If you jump out of an airplane as a human being without a parachute, gravity takes over and you die. If you try to breathe underwater for too long, you die, because that's not the way you were designed. There's an order to the universe and the way things are supposed to function. And when we kick against that order, when we say, no, no, no, I'm not happy with these limitations.
Mark Clark [00:26:10]:
We have an inflated view of the human potential. And over and over and over again, it leads to our. Not our flourishing, but our floundering in life at a macro level, but also at a kind of a micro, individual level.
Morgan May Treuil [00:26:24]:
What does it mean to look pain and suffering square in the face?
Mark Clark [00:26:29]:
I think atheism says that pain and suffering is what it is, but there's no meaning to the universe. There's no afterlife, there's no God. There's nothing transcendent. So deal with it. We're animals just kicking around. And, you know, nature is red in tooth and claw, and that's it. New Age philosophy comes along and says, actually. And so atheism says, because there's evil and suffering and pain, there is no God.
Mark Clark [00:26:50]:
New Age philosophy comes along and says, actually, it's evil and suffering that is the illusion. There is no evil and suffering. It's what they call Maya. It's an illusion, and you shouldn't allow it to come into your brain. You should never acknowledge pain and suffering as a thing. Christianity comes along and says both of those are wrong. That in fact pain and suffering is real, but it doesn't necessarily mean that God doesn't exist. For instance, if the fact that you have a category, oftentimes people say evil and suffering equals God doesn't exist.
Mark Clark [00:27:17]:
There's no way God could allow. But the fact that you have a category called evil means it's actually an evidence for the existence of God, not against the existence of God. You wouldn't have a category called evil if God doesn't exist. If we are just animals roaming around, there is no evil. There's just what is utilitarian for your tribe versus another tribe? Genocide, killing people, dropping bombs on people means nothing. It's survival, the fittest. That's. That's nature.
Mark Clark [00:27:44]:
Nature's brutal. I don't know if you've ever seen these nature videos where, like, you know, praying mantis females are just biting the heads off the males after they've impregnated them. It's like, I've already got what I need from you. You out. It's like we would go, gosh, you can't be biting the heads off of people. Where did we get this idea of morality if not. If we're just animals? If it's just an animal kingdom, the fact that we go, you know, rape is wrong. Pain, you know, dropping bombs on people's wrong.
Mark Clark [00:28:09]:
This justice that. Certainly our culture is all about right. We're fighting for justice, we're fighting for oppressed peoples. All of this, that doesn't exist. If there is no God, there's only what you view to be right versus what I view to be right. But who's to say which one of us is right? And so there's a lot of people, for instance, that say SeaWorld is immoral. Right? Sea World is wrong. You should never capture these whales and use them for entertainment.
Mark Clark [00:28:40]:
It's awful, it's destructive, it's terrible, it's disgusting. But if there's no God, who's to say? I mean, some people want to save whales, other people want to empty the ocean of sharks for soup. What does that. Who's to say which one of us is right if there is no absolute moral standard to compare your morality with, where God builds a moral standard into your soul. Romans, chapter two tells us that in our conscience, he tells us what is right and wrong. It's only from that place that we can have any kind of normal or constructive conversation about justice about what is right and what is wrong in this universe. And so the minute we want to say there is no God because of evil and suffering, the pushback, the acid bites back and it says, wait a minute, where did you get the category called evil and suffering? How do you know that shooting up a movie theater is wrong? It might just be what it is, what it is. It's just animals roaming around doing stuff.
Mark Clark [00:29:39]:
You need God to tell you what evil and suffering is in order to put him on trial for evil and suffering. So the Bible comes along and it goes, it's not that evil and suffering means there's no God. And it's not that evil and suffering is an illusion. It's real, it's true. And it wasn't the way God intended things. So in Genesis 1 and 2, there was no evil and suffering. There was only flourishing. And when we sinned and broke the world, evil and suffering came into it.
Mark Clark [00:30:07]:
And then the Bible goes on this. You know, the rest of the Bible from Genesis 3 on. And it doesn't. Here's the interesting thing, it doesn't mean that God comes down and explains every moment of evil and suffering to us and says, here's why it's happening, here's why it's happening. In fact, when you read the Bible, there's all these people just asking the questions and not really getting detailed answers. But here's what we do know. One writer, Timothy Keller, talks about the idea that just saying that there's evil and suffering, great, you know, that's only half the answer. But what he also says is what we see in Jesus is that the one answer is what we see in Jesus in the cross, the man of Sorrows, the Son of suffering is the answer is not that God doesn't care.
Mark Clark [00:30:49]:
He cares because he became one of us and he died on a cross, suffering himself for our sins. And so this echo through the Old Testament, how long, O Lord, why is this happening? Why is so much pain and suffering and evil? Jesus shows up, embodies suffering and the marketplace of ideas. Christianity is the best version of how to deal with pain and suffering. Viktor Frankl said the definition of despair is basically suffering without meaning. Christianity brings meaning into our pain and suffering and says there's a reason for it, the brokenness, the sin of the world. Jesus has done something about it and now you can have a perspective on your suffering because there's a heaven and there's a place where there's no more pain or crying or tears or anything. And you're Gonna go there one day if you've trusted in Christ. And then that starts to work backward to your Tuesday morning.
Mark Clark [00:31:40]:
What's gonna put steel in your spine is the fact that you wake up and go, okay, I now know whatever suffering and pain I have in this world, these momentary troubles are gonna end up with a glory greater than I could ever imagine. This is Paul's whole argument in first and Second Corinthians. Ergo, I can face this cancer diagnosis, I can face this divorce. I can face the fact that my bank account is empty and I'm feeling the pain and the awfulness of this world. I know God has me. It's not that he shows up and gives me every reason for every detail, but he's with me. It's the beautiful thing about Jesus. The.
Mark Clark [00:32:14]:
The version of God where he says, I am with you is so much better than the version of God where he says, I've thrown a bunch of instructions at you. Hopefully you can figure it out and be good enough to come to heaven one day. Tony Campolo tells the story about showing up to a funeral parlor for his friend for his funeral. And he walks into the wrong little parlor. And there's one woman sitting there mourning the death of her husband, and she's by herself. And so Campolo says that he goes in and he sits during the whole service, and then he gets in the car with her and they drive to the graveside and they sit there and he gets in the car with her again and drives back to this. And she looks at him and goes, hey, listen, you don't know my husband, do you? And he's like, no, I didn't know your husband. And she's like, I kind of figured that out because I didn't recognize you.
Mark Clark [00:32:58]:
And he said, yeah, but you look lonely in there, so I wanted to be with you during your time of pain. And she just grabbed his hand and says, you'll never know what that means. Means to me. And it's like, what did that mean to her? It meant a presence versus just launching ideas at us and hoping we can figure it out. That's what you get in Christianity, the God who is present with us at 2:00 in the morning when you are deathly afraid, God is with you when you're. When that hospital machine is beeping and you're at the end of your life and it's too early in the morning for your family to visit you and they're at home sleeping and the hallways are empty. What is it you need in that moment, you don't just mean, well, hopefully I'll go to heaven when I die because I've been a good person 20 years ago. It's that in that moment, God is with you.
Mark Clark [00:33:48]:
If you. You're talking about the version of Jesus is with you. This is the beauty of Christianity. So we look pain, suffering in the face, meaning we recognize it's real, it affects us, it impacts us, but we can triumph over it because of what Jesus has done.
Morgan May Treuil [00:34:05]:
What does it mean to transform your struggles into strengths?
Mark Clark [00:34:10]:
The fact that we all face pain and suffering. The Bible comes along and says suffering ultimately produces something in us. If atheism is true, suffering is just always a distraction and always negative. And it has nothing to do with who you are, your identity, your purpose. How to find joy in life has nothing to do with any of that. But if Christianity is true, it actually comes along and says suffering produces endurance, endurance produces character, and character produces hope. It has this progression of it's resulting in something. So for me, I have Tourette syndrome.
Mark Clark [00:34:42]:
I have obsessive compulsive disorder. Both things happened in my life when my parents got divorced when I was a kid. And I grew up with some really weird experiences. I'm trying to be cool in high school when you're making weird noises, swearing up people, you know, doing these weird tics and habits. But I look back at my life and I say, I wouldn't want to change one iota of what I experienced, because those experiences of pain, isolation, difficulty made me who I am. It changed the way my brain works. So, for instance, you know, I'm a preacher and I love to research and I love to think. And then I obsess about every piece of the sermon, every turn of phrase, every theological point, every joke, every point of communication.
Mark Clark [00:35:25]:
And that obsessive brain gets pointed at something like an arrow, that brokenness gets pointed and it produces this thing that works. It's helped me in my job. And so Malcolm Gladwell talks about it as the advantage of disadvantage, that there are a lot of people who become CEOs of major companies and they're dyslexic. And the re. He says it's not that they're become that despite their difficulty, it's actually because of it. They have figured out they're kinds of people who figure out ways to get things done based on their limited capacity and they become more creative or more this or more that, you know, whatever. So I think what happens in our life is we have to look at it. No one wants pain in their life.
Mark Clark [00:36:14]:
No one wants suffering. No one wants to experience negative things. But when we realize God can take those things, those experiences, those pains, those difficulties, and actually shape them into strengths, strengths that let you do your job better, maybe. Strengths that maybe let you identify with people in the world that need the hope that you have. But it's only going to come when you crack yourself open a little bit and go, hey, like, there was this time I was preaching and I gave this illustration about my ocd, and I talked about. I used to, like, hit things a certain amount of time so the bad things wouldn't happen, right? I'm getting on an airplane. I'm like, hitting garbage cans and whacking tables and making sure, you know, if someone says, like, a disease, I'm like, well, if I don't do these two things, you know, then everyone's going to get that disease in the room. That's how my brain works.
Mark Clark [00:37:06]:
So I shared that in a sermon. And then she came up to me crying. The next day, I saw her in some park somewhere where kids were hanging out, and she's crying, and she said, Mark, for 20 years, I've been sitting there at my house, and I'll be folding laundry, and I'll take a corner of the towel and I'll connect it to the other corner, and I'll say, if this corner doesn't hit this perfect, my kids are going to die in a car crash on the way home. If I don't put this exactly up in this format, my husband's gonna die of a. You know. And she's like, this is literally how I live every day. But I've never told anyone until you shared from the stage in front of thousands of people, this way of thinking. I never actually knew another human being thought like that because I kept it private.
Mark Clark [00:37:52]:
But when I saw your brokenness, it gave me permission to be not perfect. And so I think when we look at our disadvantages, like an opportunity to enchant the world and engage the world and free the world and give the permission to the world to not have to live in shame and guilt, I think that's when your disadvantage becomes an advantage. And I think that's what we need to do with our struggles under God's grace. Look at our trials and say, yeah, I would never choose this. But in the long run of my life, how is this making me into the person that God wants to make me into so that I can bless the world versus curse the world? Because there are two different ways that suffering One of my best friends in the world is the most joyous, happy, fun loving guy. Every time he walks in the room, he lights up the room with nothing but laughter. But here's the thing about him. You would never guess this.
Mark Clark [00:38:48]:
He has lost not one wife, but two. Two wives have died. He has gone through the pain and the suffering of losing two wives that he loved desperately. How? Because it doesn't have to turn out with him as that most happy, joyous person in the room. It could turn out that he's a shadow of his former self. So what's the difference in that? And how do we, under God's grace, do the things? You know, flourishing in life is not automatic. There are certain things you. You need to do to flourish versus flounder in life.
Mark Clark [00:39:24]:
And when you do those things under God's grace, you become the kind of person that your trials shape you into that end in endurance and character and hope versus a former shell, you know, a shell of your former self and disillusioned and depressed. And under God's grace, you can actually become the kind of person that blesses the world versus cursing it. It.
Morgan May Treuil [00:39:48]:
One of your chapters is become the best in the world at the following three things. What are those three things?
Mark Clark [00:39:55]:
Yeah, it's kind of going on, this, going again back to the way we were created and looking at the garden and saying, if this creation story has anything to do with how I can flourish versus floundering life, what is it? What is it that God asks us to do? And one writer points out, he kind of puts it crassly. He says, the three things we're built for is sex, God and garden. And basically what he's saying is it's like relationships, worship, and stewardship. Those are the three things that literally you as a human being are built for. So sex, I mean, he uses that sex is not like actually, you know, sexual act, but the sexual act as kind of the pinnacle of human relationships. So you are built for other people. Right. God looked at Adam and said, it's not good for man to be alone.
Mark Clark [00:40:36]:
And he made Eve. So we're made for each other. We're made to have relationship, connect, have an ecosystem of social world. And it helps us absorb pain and suffering to have other people in our lives, to bless other people, to serve other people is the best thing for us. You know, they talk about people. I'm not a huge animal person, but they talk about people who have pets are less narcissistic than people who don't. Right. If you look at someone who's never had a dog and never had to care for a cat and never had to care for anything outside of themselves.
Mark Clark [00:41:02]:
They tend to be narcissistic people. Now, when is it chicken or the egg? Which one comes first? But it's like you're made for people. If you isolate yourself from people, you start to shrivel into something other than human worship. We're all built to worship. So every human culture through history, you go back to the Mesopotamians and the Egyptians, and on every continent, every one of them has religion, even though they didn't interact with one another. You go into all of the Mayan culture and all these different things. America, up in North America, Asia, Africa. They're all drawn on walls, building temples, having priests writing sacred scriptures, having songs, connecting to the stars.
Mark Clark [00:41:49]:
What is this impulse in us? We are built to be. It's actually what one writer calls the law of religion. We're actually built as religious people. We can't help but be religious. And so we're gonna point our worship at something. Now, if you point your worship at money or sex or ambition or relationships or work, you are gonna shrivel. Cause every single one of those things will destroy you, become like what you worship. Well, if all you do is worship money and imagine you run out of it.
Mark Clark [00:42:19]:
The thing that defines beauty in our culture, we love beauty. We love looking beautiful. Look beautiful to the world. Instagram photos, all the stuff, the selfies. We love this stuff. Now, imagine your whole identity and your joy is built on looking beautiful. And you get in an accident and your whole face gets marred. Imagine your whole identity and joy is built on your marriage and your spouse.
Mark Clark [00:42:44]:
I just want to get married. I want to marry Tommy. Tommy's the best. We got the best life. Look at all of our life. And now Tommy dies. Tommy gets taken. You're the source of your joy you've now buried.
Mark Clark [00:42:55]:
What are you going to do? Because what's happened is you've worshiped him. We're always gonna worship. And we don't. Just not. Allison McGrath talks about the idea that every culture transcendentalizes things, which means basically, if you're not gonna worship God, even atheists or secular cultures, if you remove God from worship, you're just gonna replace it with all the beauty and sex and love and. And all the money, whatever, job, reputation. So the problem with that is, of course, they're all temporal things that will fail you and disappear and let you down. They will crush you.
Mark Clark [00:43:23]:
You will crush them. So you need to aim your worship At God. God made you. God called you to walk with him in the cool of the day. And then, of course, as time goes on, God reveals himself in the person of Jesus. So what the Christian message is is not to be vaguely spiritual and just worship God, whoever that is to you. Jesus shows up 2000 years ago and goes, I'm God, so I've now defined worship. So when you go into a Christian church and they're just singing random songs and just like, hey, you'll walk with God and, you know, whatever, it's like these songs could be sung in any religious temple because it's generic, vague spirituality.
Mark Clark [00:44:06]:
Christianity comes out and goes, no, no, no, that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about specifically Jesus Christ. The person of Jesus came down, lived a perfect life, died on a cross, rose again. Now your worship has to be aimed and shaped at him. That's what true human being human is. And the third one. So you have relationships, you have worship, then you have stewardship. And stewardship is God saying, fill the earth and subdue it, do something with it.
Mark Clark [00:44:36]:
He makes the Garden of Eden. And in the Garden of Eden, it's almost perfect in there. It's like this beautiful whatever, but then outside of it, it's wild and waste. And what he's asking these two people to do is go and be my regents and take my rule and reign and order and bring it out to the disorder. This is your calling. This is what you wake up in the morning going, this is why I want to accomplish something in my life. This is why I want to do more than just, you know, have a couple kids and have a job and have a home. That's why people who do that, they go after the American dream of the two kids and the nice car and the picket fence, and it never fulfills them.
Mark Clark [00:45:17]:
They stare out the window and go, what am I here to do? That's because you are built to be a steward of the world. To take money and time and energy and talent and use it for the flourishing of all things versus just go through life and accomplish these little mundane things. And so once we start to understand that, then we start to understand even what we do in this life, our work, the way we raise kids, the way we. All these things they have, in the words of Maximus in Gladiator, they echo in eternity, right? What you do in life, life echoes in eternity. It's like everything you do in life. When I used to work at Michael's arts and crafts store and show up there for six bucks an hour and put away googly eyes. The only way, walking from my car in the parking lot to walk in there, put my red apron on. The only way I found joy in that job was because I would cite Colossians 3 in my head and go, my gosh, I am doing this not for my worldly master.
Mark Clark [00:46:11]:
I'm doing this for Jesus. And now all of these little actions that interactions with everybody, the putting away things, the dealing, all this stuff now had a transcendent purpose. It was like, I'm gonna one day, you know, Jesus has this great image where he says, you know, there's this parable of these people who are given these tasks and they're given a certain amount of money. The parable of talents is called. And it's like, hey, you take this five bucks and you turned it into, you know, you didn't do anything with it. Well, you're, you're, you know, you're off. But you, you took the five bucks and you turned it into 10. And you took the five bucks and you turned it into 100.
Mark Clark [00:46:45]:
And then he says this. When you get to heaven, you're going to oversee five cities because of what you did, and you're going to oversee 10 cities. What you do, what you actually did in this life echoes out to the way eternity is going to feel for you, that heaven is going to have a particular vibe because of what you did on this planet. Every time you helped someone, serve someone, love someone, all the generosity that you do, it's all. It doesn't just burn up when this world is over. It's like God redeems it and restores it. And it has something to do with your eternity. It has something to do with the 80 billion years you're going to live after this life.
Mark Clark [00:47:18]:
And so, so, so, so worship, relationship, and stewardship are the three things we're built for. And when we understand how to do the well, we flourish versus flounder.