Christian living is being a daily disciple of Jesus Christ, and being a disciple is being a learner—an apprentice of Christ. It’s to learn to be like him, to live like him, to think like him, to love others like him.
But being a learner or an apprentice of Jesus Christ is no simple thing; it’s rich, multi-faceted and extraordinary. It’s a lifelong process. Of course, it’s also a struggle: there are many obstacles, and many of us get stuck or stalled in our apprenticeship to Jesus Christ, especially after being a Christian for a while.
What would it mean to re-ignite your enthusiasm for learning Jesus Christ? Tony Payne discusses this question with Col Marshall in relation to Col’s latest book on the subject, Warriors of the Word.
Runtime: 40:32 min.
Links referred to:
- Warriors of the Word: Striving to learn Christ in a hostile world (Col Marshall)
- Navigators: The Word Hand
- Find out more and register for “Left right out: The strange position of the political Christian” (Wed 20 May 2026, 7-9pm)
- Support the work of the Centre
Transcript
Please note: This transcript has been checked against the audio and lightly edited, but still may contain errors. If quoting, please compare with the original audio.
Introduction
[00:00:05] Tony Payne: Christian living is being a daily disciple of Jesus Christ. And being a disciple is being a learner—an apprentice of Christ. It’s to learn to be like him—to live like him—to think like him—to love others like him.
[00:00:22] But being a learner or an apprentice of Jesus Christ is no simple thing; it’s rich and multi-faceted and extraordinary. It’s a lifelong process. And of course, it’s also a struggle: there are many obstacles. And many of us do get stuck or stalled in our apprenticeship to Jesus Christ, especially after being a Christian for a while.
[00:00:45] What would it mean to re-ignite your enthusiasm for learning Jesus Christ? That’s our topic in this week’s episode of the Centre for Christian Living podcast.
[Music]
[00:01:10] Tony Payne: Well, hello again everyone. I’m Tony Payne, and welcome to another edition of the Centre for Christian Living podcast. And today, we’re going to be talking about a subject that is very central to or, perhaps, really just another way of talking about Christian living, and that is, what it really means to be a learner of Christ—to learn Christ. And to do this, I’m talking with my old friend—someone who discipled and helped me learn Christ and my co-author of The Trellis and the Vine, Col Marshall. Col, welcome.
[00:01:40] Col Marshall: Good to be with you, Tony!
[00:01:42] Tony Payne: And you’ve gone and written a book without me, this time.
[00:01:44] Col Marshall: I did! You refused to do it with me.
[00:01:48] Tony Payne: Oh, that’s right! So I did.
[00:01:49] Col Marshall: You were busy. I understood. But you helped me get started.
Follower versus learner
[00:01:53] Tony Payne: But it is a book about this subject—about learning Christ—about being a disciple of Christ. In fact, you start the book by arguing that a Christian disciple is a learner, which is an interesting idea and perhaps not familiar to everyone who’s listening, because we often think that disciples are followers: that’s what it means to be a disciple of Christ—a follower of Christ. Why do you say that being a disciple is a learner?
[00:02:18] Col Marshall: I understand why people have a bit of a reaction to it, ’cause it sounds very academic and impersonal, and not exactly what it means to be a Christian. But when you go back—I don’t want to be too nerdy at this point, but the word translated “disciple” in our Bibles—in our New Testament—is actually the word for “learning” or “learner” in the Greek language, and refers to someone who is apprenticed—has the apprentice idea in it—of being apprenticed to a teacher. So it’s more than just sitting through a lecture; it’s actually learning with a view to following, in one sense.
[00:03:01] The problem with just starting with following as the idea of being a disciple is it leaves out that element of “Have we really learned from Christ who he is—who God is—who we are—in order to follow?” So I like the idea of starting with the disciple being a learner. Discipleship, then, could be called “learnership”.
[00:03:27] And the actual language of disciple/learner is all through the New Testament. So Paul can say to Timothy, “Continue in what you’ve learned.” It’s exactly the same word—word for “disciple”.
[00:03:39] And at another point, he says something like, “Whatever you’ve learned from me, practise.” So that’s the same Greek word for “disciple” being translated in the learning language, if you get what I mean.
[00:03:53] Tony Payne: It sounds like one of those situations where a Bible word—a word we’ve just become used to, like “disciple”, which is just a fundamental kind of Bible Christian concept, has kind of just taken on a bit of a life of its own over the years. It just becomes a word we use all the time, and we’ve maybe lost touch with how the readers and writers of the New Testament would have heard that word. When Jesus said to “Come and be my disciple” or talked about “making disciples” or when that disciple’s—they wouldn’t have heard this sort of Christian word we have with all its connotations.
[00:04:27] Col Marshall: No.
[00:04:27] Tony Payne: They would have just heard “Be my apprentice. Come and learn from me. Be a student of me. Go and make students or apprentices of all nations” and so on. And so, it’s really helpful that you’ve kind of refocused us on that in this book you’ve written—that the essence of being a disciple—well, it is just to be a learner and apprentice of Christ, and what does it mean to learn or apprentice ourselves to Christ?
[00:04:51] Col Marshall: Yep. And you see it in Matthew 28 too, because there is the learning to obey everything that he has taught us. So there is the actual learning aspect, which flows into an obeying—a following, if you like—so the two are connected there. But it does start with actually “I’m going to obey everything that Jesus taught us. I’ve got to learn everything that Jesus taught us.” So.
[00:05:18] Tony Payne: Yeah, makes sense.
[00:05:19] Col Marshall: I think following’s a good image. But we’re not literally following in the same way as the first disciples, obviously. But metaphorically, we are following because we’ve learned, through the Scriptures, who Christ is and what he requires of us.
[00:05:34] It’s interesting: the Spirit becomes our teacher. Once Jesus has ascended into heaven, his Spirit becomes our teacher. So there’s all sorts of ideas caught up there in learning and following, and what all that means.
Impetus for Col’s book
[00:05:47] Tony Payne: Well, that’s kind of what we want to explore in this conversation, I guess, is what does learning Christ and learning about Christ and being a learner of Christ mean?
[00:05:56] But I guess, perhaps, a good place to start is why did you write this book in particular? Why this particular book? The book is called Warriors of the Word, and we’ll come back to that title and why that title. But I guess what was the itch that you kind of wanted to scratch? What was the presenting problem that caused you to say, “I need to write something about this?”
[00:06:14] Col Marshall: Yeah, partly it comes out of the kind of ministries I’ve done, which haven’t been primarily the teaching/preaching ministries, but helping members learn. That’s sort of the ministry roles I’ve had. And two things: we spend a lot of time and money training our pastors and teachers, which we absolutely should. But we don’t spend enough time thinking about training our members as learners. One of the early working titles of the book I had was We Have Good Teachers, but What About Us Learners? I think that became Chapter 3 in the book, but it wasn’t a great title. And we want our pastors to be trained—invest in them—go to MTS and college and all the rest of it. But how much in our church life do we spend helping the members become good learners? So that was part of what is motivating me. And things I’ve done in the past in church life.
[00:07:10] The other itch that I’m scratching is an observation generally in church life and just the different churches I’ve been in over the years that in mid-life particularly, our members become stuck in their learning or stalled, or whatever term you want to use, and live off the fruits of the early learning, if they’ve become Christians earlier in life, but plateau and stagnant in learning through those middle years. And as I’ve led groups and so on over the years, I can feel that in myself and then I can see that in the generations coming through. So I wanted to push those in that stalled stage to re-engage in the whole learning of Christ.
How not to plateau in the faith
[00:07:57] Tony Payne: I think that’s something that—well, I don’t know if I’d be a middle aged Christian now, Col; I think that’s perhaps behind me, sadly. But I can certainly identify not only in myself, as you grow as a Christian, and you live a longer time as a Christian, you certainly identify with that sense of it becoming a bit humdrum and a bit normal and a bit stuck.
[00:08:16] But certainly in churches and fellowship that I’ve been involved in, that’s certainly a currently issue—an issue that’s certainly there that people, over time, just get into a kind of a familiar life, and life is just comfortable and going along, and you’re busy with everything in life, and the sense that you have the challenge of learning and growing in your understanding and apprenticeship to Christ, and that that’s something that you actively engage in as a Christian, it’s easy for that to fall away.
[00:08:41] Col Marshall: Yeah, yeah. That’s right. It came out a little bit in the book of, you know, the mid-life crisis—men and women, as they go into their forties and so on, and they start a new hobby or I tried to get my golf game going and could never succeed like you did, Tony, or learn a new musical instrument, or something just to sort of energise those mid years. So this is the most important mid-life crisis and mid-life project to work on. So I’m saying that, I guess, quite explicitly in the book—to not plateau out and not lose that first love.
[00:09:17] Someone pointed out to me as I was talking about it that there is a right sense in which we do just fall into good patterns of being Christian and being in church and all the rest of it.
[00:09:27] Tony Payne: It’s not all so new. You know, it’s not all brand new.
[00:09:29] Col Marshall: Yeah. It’s not all brand new. It’s a little bit like a romantic relationship, which is really fresh and exciting and vibrant, but then you fall into the deeper, longer patterns of relationship, and so it is with Christ, in one sense. But to be going to church thinking, “Oh, I’m not sure.” Even in the back of our minds thinking, “Is it really going to make any difference, going this week?” That sort of thing. Or being in this Bible study group? Or is it just a pattern I’ve got into? And can I make more of it? Can I make the whole exercise of learning—both private learning and corporate learning—can I make that far more effective?
Raising up the next generation
[00:10:06] Col Marshall: I suppose the other thing in the back of my mind was the next generation. So I’m in the mid-70s now. And you think more about the next generation, including your own children or grandchildren. So how to keep those mid-life Christians going so that they’re investing in the next generation—not just themselves, but in the next. And seen some real fruits on that in small groups where the small group members, even in the recent group I’ve been involved in, are really picking up the challenge to be the ones who are helping their families to learn—their children. So all of that.
[00:10:40] Tony Payne: It struck me to—you mention this in your introduction—in that sense, the kind of thing that prompted you to think about this topic and write about it, was this sense of a mid-life faith crisis, as you call it, for some people. But it obviously therefore becomes a really vital and important book for newer Christians—not only for older Christians to invest in younger, but this is the stuff to wrap your head around and understand at the beginning of your Christian life—that this is what the Christian life is really about. And I guess, in a sense, those Christians who are a bit stalled or stuck in mid-life, perhaps, never quite learned that, or never quite understood that about the nature of the Christian life. And so, it’s very much a book for also the newer Christian who wants get a shape of what it really means to learn Christ, and how learning Christ—learning what it means to be a follower and believer in Christ—that learning process is a lifelong learning process and a great joy, as we’ll discover.
Learning Christ: information, submission and union
[00:11:29] Tony Payne: What does it really mean, then, to learn Christ? I guess we should get down to that. What are you learning exactly? And what are the different facets of what you describe as learning Christ?
[00:11:40] Col Marshall: Well, there’s a learning of information—that is, sounds very dry, when it comes to learning Christ and God. But there’s a learning of the truth that’s been revealed in Scripture—the truth about Christ, which reveals to us the truth, then, about God—Christ being his Son, who’s the final revelation of God, according to Hebrews 1. That’s a learning through the Spirit of the wonderful realities of who God is and who we are before God—God as creator; us as his creatures, but also the redeemer and us as the redeemed ones—the adopted ones into his family—the forgiven ones. So we’re learning those truths. We’re learning information. Sounds very dry, but it’s the most exciting, wonderful information anyone could ever learn.
[00:12:38] But then, there’s submission. So information submission is the obedience part. I am thinking now of Matthew 28. “Teaching them to obey everything I’ve commanded you.” That’s the mission of the church. So you’ve got to know everything that he’s commanded, but then it’s obeying or keeping his commands. So there’s a submission. And so, that makes it very personal learning. We’re learning a person, and I go on quite a bit about this in the book: not just intellectual atonement or intellectual information or that kind of thing, but learning the person of Christ in the sense of obeying him.
[00:13:19] But also, there’s another element when you read Ephesians and so on that actually, being united with Christ in his person—being united with him in the salvation that he offers. So it’s not just learning about a person, but actually learning that we are in union with him and receiving all the benefits of union with Christ—of being joined to him for our forgiveness, for our salvation.
[00:13:43] That might be a bit of a ramble. I can summarise it: information, submission and union. There you go.
[00:13:48] Tony Payne: Oh nice! Nice. The reason I like this aspect of the book very much—that we can fall down on either side of those things and often Christianity is presented or, by default sometimes, becomes dominated by one of those things over the other three can imagine a more propositional knowledge-based informational form of Christianity that doesn’t then penetrate into a lived life that flows from and is shaped by that knowledge. But you can just as easily, and we’ve certainly come across in our times, a form of Christian living that just wants to be practical, just wants to talk about what to do, how do I live, what do I do next that just wants to talk about life without talking about the knowledge and understanding that drives our lives. And in a way, you’re just talking about what it means to be a human person.
[00:14:35] Tony Payne: We’re thinking, knowing, understanding creatures who live our lives in response to and shaped by that understanding and framework of the world all the time. And those things are constantly interacting and constantly shaping each other. And so, to become like Christ—to learn what it means to be someone who seeks to be like Christ—who is in union with him and becomes like him—it’s obviously going to involve some kind of learning of and understanding of knowledge and changing of our whole mind, as well as the learning of a new way of life that is integrated with that understanding and flows from that understanding. So I love the way you emphasise both of those things in the book—the information, the knowledge, but also the submission and the life that comes as we keep and learn and obey what Christ has said. That’s fantastic.
Learning the knowledge of Christ: Scripture, doctrine, prayer, suffering, church
[00:15:24] Tony Payne: Those different facets of learning, then—of learning what it means to know him—let’s start there. How do we go about, or how would you recommend that we learn more about the knowledge of Christ? What different facets of that learning would you recommend?
[00:15:39] Col Marshall: Well, I had to think about this—what the Scriptures themselves say about the about the sources of our learning, or how we go about learning. It is ultimately through the Spirit as our teacher: I was reaching John 16, I think. It’s a great chapter about the Spirit being our teacher and leading us into all truth. So we have to have that umbrella truth, which is why the coming of the Holy Spirit in Acts and so on, and the promise of the Spirit in Jesus’ ministry, is so fundamental. That’s how he continues with us—is by his Spirit, and continues to be our teacher beyond the first generation. And then, so what are the resources of the Spirit, in one sense?
[00:16:20] And the thoughts I had were we’re learning the Christ revealed in Scripture, which is the 2 Timothy 3 kind of ideas of these Scriptures being the word of God—inspired the word of God, come from the Spirit. But the theme and the purpose of Scripture is to learn Christ, who is revealed in Scripture from Genesis 1 to Revelation 21.
[00:16:49] I was taught by the Navigators many decades ago to work on the memorisation of Scripture, the study of Scripture, the reading and hearing, and in all of those, to learn to meditate on Scripture with a view to obedience. That was The Word Hand, they called it. And I’ve always remembered that. So am I hearing the Scriptures taught regularly? Am I reading them myself? Am I studying—not just reading in a more general, superficial way, but studying and thinking through the Scriptures. And then memorising: I found enormous help over the years–even remembering verses that I learned many decades ago. Maybe not remembering them as well as I used to, but meditating on the Scriptures as we take them in. So learning the Christ of Scripture.
[00:17:41] But then, one of the things that I’m pushing in the book is to learn doctrine, and arguing for doctrine not being a dry kind of intellectual exercise, but if we learn Scripture without thinking theologically, we learn nuggets and fragments, but we don’t put them all together. We need a coherent framework to understand Christ and therefore, to understand God and his world. And so, I’m pushing the learning of doctrine.
[00:18:08] Also, talking about learning Christ through prayer and suffering. I brought those together in passages like Romans 8 and so on—that there’s a learning ordained by God through the suffering we go through and through our prayer.
[00:18:20] But then, another big push is to learn in the body of Christ. Yes, we read privately, we have our quiet times, we have our one-to-one times, all the rest of it. But we are meant to learn in the body, because in the church, with our teachers and pastors, we are learning together the unity of the faith. And we can correct or appraise the ideas we have. We can also correct the crazy ideas the church might have! But we’re learning the unity of the faith—the oneness of the faith—by coming together. That’s the problem with internet church and COVID and all the rest of it: we can learn individually, but then, get really skewed in our learning, because we’re not learning together as the body of Christ. So I’m doing a big push on that.
[00:19:05] So Scripture; doctrine; prayer, suffering; learning in the church, not just individually. I think they all relate to your question, if I can remember what your question was. How do we learn?
[00:19:16] Tony Payne: Yes, all those things are important, and I liked the way you tied them together in the book—that learning is multifaceted—learning Christ is multifaceted—that it’s all based and comes out of Scripture, ’cause that’s where we meet Christ and that’s where the Spirit reveals him to us. But it intersects and kind of brings together all the aspects of our learning and understanding.
Learning theology
[00:19:35] Tony Payne: And especially your push on theology, which people are often a bit sort of scared about, or think is just for complication and for intellectual people, or something. But we all have a theology. We all do put the Bible together in our understanding in some way.
[00:19:49] And we can either have a poorly thought through kind of slightly shambolic amateurish theology, or we can spend some time actually putting it together and understanding it more deeply. And the more deeply and the more profoundly we do put it all together in our heads, the more it shapes our whole mind and life to be like Christ. And I loved the way you argued for the value of drawing on the rich resources of Christian history, where believers have put together the knowledge and understanding of Christ in ways that are profoundly helpful. I thought that was very good, Col. And I think there’s been a bit of slip away from Christians reading and understanding and seeking to integrate their Bible reading into framework.
[00:20:28] Col Marshall: Yeah, that’s why I’ve got long quotations from various theologians and teachers throughout the book—long in terms of a page or something—to show the value of learning from the teachers, both past and present. The authors who’ve helped us come to a coherent understanding of both particular doctrines, like creation or redemption or revelation or whatever doctrines you want to name, but also biblical theology—that is, the understanding of how Christ is revealed from Genesis to Revelation, and how the whole Bible hangs together. So we’ve got to work on both of those.
[00:21:10] The technical terms, I guess, are biblical theology and systematic theology. I’ve tried to illustrate from various authors who have helped me, and then I’ve asked friends for their recommendation of the ten most important books they’ve ever read to learn theology, and some of those I’ve listed in the appendix there.
[00:21:29] And I think you’ve helped me, Tony, to see that we need to learn to read slowly—both the Bible, but other teachers. And reading is not a great skill anymore in our community, because of all the impact of technology and so on, which we won’t go into now. Yeah, I’m trying to get people to see the importance of reading and not seeing that the reading of human authors is in any way in opposition or a distraction from reading the Scriptures themselves, but how human authors are helping us to understand and have a coherent framework of Christian thinking.
[Music]
Advertisement: Left right out?
[00:22:34] Tony Payne: As Christians, how interested and involved should we be in the political life of our society? Now, some of us couldn’t be less interested in politics. We ignore it as much as we possibly can, and try to just get on with what we see as the important aspects of living the Christian life and ministering to others.
[00:22:53] Others of us are really much more interested in politics. We dive right into the online debates, we keep ourselves informed, and we think that Christians have a real contribution to make politically.
[00:23:04] Now, which of these two kind of approaches is the more faithful Christian approach? Or is it somewhere between the two? And why is it that when we do get involved in politics in some way as Christians and we try to engage in the debate, we often feel that we don’t fit in? We’re not quite Left; we’re not quite Right; we’re kind of both and neither at the same time. Christians often feel marginal in the political life of our society, and wonder where we fit.
[00:23:33] I’m Tony Payne, and we’re going to be examining these questions at a Centre for Christian Living ethics workshop on Wednesday, May 20th at Moore College, starting at 7:00 pm. The title of the workshop is “Left right out: The strange position of the political Christian”, and I do hope you’ll join us to talk together about these important matters.
[00:23:53] You can get all the information, including how to register, at ccl.moore.edu.au. That’s ccl.moore.edu.au. I do hope you can join us on Wednesday, May 20th for this important workshop.
[00:24:08] And now, let’s get back to our program.
Multimodal learning
[00:24:11] This is very helpful, Col, and I love the way you’ve laid this out in the book very clearly and how these different kind of modes of learning—you talk about The Hand—the old Navigator Hand of different ways of interacting of Scripture. But the picture you build up is that learning and shaping our mind is multimodal. It’s not just reading the Bible or hearing Bible or studying it or theologically integrating it or memorising it or meditating it; it—it’s all of those things.
[00:24:36] And they work richly together. And you’re certainly right that one of the problems for reading and learning and growing for us is just how fast-paced and distracted we are generally in our attention and in our lives. And taking the time to slow down, to read at length or read slowly—and that’s what it means, in some ways, to meditate—is to just chew over and think over a small number of verses, or even one Psalm or something like this, where we chew it over—perhaps multiple mornings on multiple days, and just read it and read it, and think about it and sink into it—it changes you. You see things and find out things, and it changes the way you think, just because you’ve given yourself time to sit in it for a while. And we tend not to do that so much these days. Which is a shame.
[00:25:19] Col Marshall: Yeah, I found that with Romans 8 recently: I’ve got in my head that Romans 8 is actually the most important chapter in the Bible, if you want me to go into that.
[00:25:26] Tony Payne: It’s not a bad candidate for that! Yeah, that’s true.
[00:25:29] Col Marshall: It’s because it’s a very personal thing for Jacquie and I, ’cause we get into our senior years, there’s more challenges in life and health and everything else, and anxieties about stuff. The fruit of meditating on it and thinking about it and talking with Jacquie about it, and even recently, and she’s been doing studies on it—we’re doing Romans at church, so it’s all, like you just described, we’re chewing over Romans 8 quite a lot in our church and household at the moment. And so, just goes deeper each time you chew it over and talk about it, and pray about it.
[00:26:01] And the whole idea of our adoption there: someone asked me what’s the big benefit to me in writing my book. I think the theme of adoption was the one that really, really grabbed hold of me—that we actually are co-heirs—joint heirs—with Christ—that we share in his inheritance, in his riches. We are treated by God the Father as if we were brothers and sisters of Christ. They even use that phrase in Romans 8: should be just “brothers”, but they do “brothers and sisters”. So yeah: you think about some big ideas like that.
Teaching others
[00:26:35] Col Marshall: And this ties in with, if I think about “How I’ve learned over the years?”, it’s basically by teaching others. If you want to become an effective learner of Christ and the Scriptures and everything else, think about who you’re trying to pass the message onto—whether it be in the family, reading around the table, answering the kids’ questions, the neighbour, the small group that you lead, the workplace Bible study. I’ve had quiet times and I’ve done personal study and all the rest. But you write a book, you really learn a lot. You teach a sermon, you really learn a lot. You run a Scripture class in school, you going to prepare for that, otherwise you’ll be really embarrassed. So just think about who you can be teaching and you’ll learn a lot.
[00:27:24] They may not! They may not learn much. But you will. Yeah.
[00:27:30] Tony Payne: Yes, when we learn something well enough to be able to articulate it—to summarise it—in “This is a form in which I could pass it on to somebody else”—that’s when you really feel you’ve started to master something, haven’t you. And that can be the case even if you’re listening to this and you don’t have lots of formal teaching opportunities, there are still lots of opportunities to think through, write down, summarise, think about what it is you’re learning and understanding from the Scriptures and in theology and about the nature of the Christian life. How would I articulate that? And how would I pass that onto someone, even just someone in my family or someone in our Bible study?
Learning Christ together
[00:28:04] Tony Payne: You’ve already mentioned, I guess, Col, a number of the ways in which we can learn Christ—to not only learn the knowledge of Christ, but to learn in our experience what it means to live that out and to obey him. Why do we find this hard? We started by talking about how we get stuck or stalled, but what are the obstacles to learning Christ?
[00:28:23] Col Marshall: Yeah. I just want to make another comment on the other thing there, because you are in the process of writing and finishing a book on every member Word ministry, and our two books fit together really well! So I’ve just said the way you learn is by passing on to someone else. So we’re all looking forward to this every member Word ministry. What’s it going to be called?
[00:28:42] Tony Payne: Well, this is very kind of you, Col, to do a kind of reverse book plug in the middle of this conversation! The book that I’ve got coming out is called Let the Word Dwell Richly.
[00:28:51] Col Marshall: That’s right. Yep. Yep.
[00:28:51] Tony Payne: The vital power of the one-another Word. And you’re right: it’s about the fact that, as we learn Christ, we do it together, and we have a profound effect upon one another, and we build one another up, and the whole body grows. How does it grow in Ephesians 4? As we speak the truth in love. One to another. That’s how the body builds itself—as every little sinew and aspect, and every ligament of the body is speaking the Word—the truth of Christ—to one another in the midst of life.
[00:29:21] And of course, Ephesians 4, then, goes on, as you make a point in the book—it then goes on to use this striking phrase, “learning Christ”. It’s the place where that phrase comes in Scripture—in Ephesians 4 there. And that learning is not just the truth that we speak to one another, but the life in which that truth is expressed—and in which that conversation takes place—and in which we keep speaking the truth to each other as we grapple with the things of life together.
[00:29:44] Very good. Well, thank you for that reverse book plug!
[00:29:46] Col Marshall: Ties together very well.
[00:29:48] Tony Payne: It does. And it is very important that we think about it in those terms—as something we do mutually and together, and through which we help each other.
Obstacles to learning Christ
[00:29:55] Tony Payne: But let me have another go at the question I was asking. It sounds fantastic. Like, why would we not do this? This just sounds brilliant. But we do find it hard. What are the obstacles?
[00:30:05] Col Marshall: Well, at the highest level, it’s because we’re in the learning wars with the devil. Right? The one thing that Satan does not want to happen is that people learn Christ. I think, from memory, I talk about this a bit in the book from Ephesians and so on—that the devil is at war with Christ, the principalities and powers are opposed to Christ, and opposed to people learning Christ, and therefore, the church being built. This is a cosmic war that’s being going on ever since Genesis 3, as far as I can tell. So at every level, the devil is not wanting us to learn Christ.
[00:30:47] And so, that can be just through false teaching—people who say the wrong things about Christ, who deny Christ—right through to us just feeling lazy about it all, being distracted or being anxious learners, or disillusioned, or whatever.
[00:31:05] But Ephesians 6’s very important there—that we’re in this battle—see, some people don’t like the title of the book: Warriors of the Word. Sounds very aggressive, not warm and cuddly.
[00:31:15] Tony Payne: Militaristic.
[00:31:16] Col Marshall: Yeah, yeah, yeah. But we are to take up the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God, because it is a battle for ourselves to learn Christ, and a huge battle for us to make Christ known. But this is how the church is built and how the church perseveres is by putting on the full armour of God, the word of God being at the centre of that, and our faith and salvation, and so on. So that’s the overarching reason that we find it hard. It is a spiritual battle, to put it in those common terms.
[00:31:50] At a practical level, that can come out just in terms of the distractions of our age. Our pastor the other day made the astounding claim in a sermon that to be entertained is not a human right or part of our constitution or something like that. And I thought, yeah, I just expect to be entertained. Whether it’s the television or the movie or the book or whatever. So we’re just spending inordinate amounts of time entertaining ourselves to death, someone said, I think.
[00:32:23] Tony Payne: Yes, Amusing Ourselves to Death—distracting ourselves to death.
[00:32:26] Col Marshall: Amusing ourselves to death. Yeah. And so, the thought of coming home from work and spending a couple of hours diving into a text to understand a text and meditating on it, thinking about or reading Peter Jensen on the doctrine of Scripture or something, doesn’t even cross our minds in this age that we live in.
[00:32:45] Now, there’s exceptions and there’s wonderful exceptions, and we all know the exceptions—people who have got this vision. And they’re often the ones who are leading groups and teaching others, so the two go hand-in-hand. But I think increasingly, we’re all worried about it. I know you’re worried about it, Tony, too—just that loss of a reading, studying culture, which leads us into deep convictions about the Christian faith, which we then are compelled to pass on to others. So I think there can be shallowness.
[00:33:22] And I think we just have funny expectations of our pastors: they’ve done all their training, and they’re our teachers, and we go along and we expect to get some deep, deep benefits through their ten hours of study when we haven’t really engaged at all with the process. So we’re expecting to learn in a very passive way through a half hour sermon. It just doesn’t work like that! We might pick up some nice devotional ideas to get us through the week. I think sometimes that’s what we’re looking for in a sermon: I just need something to get me through the week. But that’s not good enough, in terms of deeply learning the Christian faith—deeply learning Christ. So all those basic things: read the passage beforehand. Have a question in mind before you hear the sermon. Write to the minister about some question you’ve got. Discuss it over morning tea. Talk about it in the family. Whatever.
[00:34:12] Tony Payne: And then pray about it the next morning, yeah.
[00:34:14] Col Marshall: Make the most of every sermon.
[00:34:16] Tony Payne: So, yes, exactly. There is this sense in which learning Christ is a struggle for us, because it’s a spiritual issue, and because we’re not in a neutral kind of learning environment; we’re actually in a competitive learning environment, where we’re being discipled or apprenticed, if you like, either to the world under the power of Satan or to Christ.
[00:34:37] And that’s the sense in which a battle, and the sense in which being a Christian is being a warrior, and that’s what I liked about the title. It surprised me at first, but, like all good titles, it drew me in, and the more I looked at what the book was doing and why, I saw it’s a good title, because it frames the learning of Jesus and our apprenticeship to Christ not as some kind like a hobby—like we’ve decided we’ll learn a new language or something. It’s a life and death question, and it’s hard because we’re in a spiritual battle, because of the nature of the world.
The joy and privilege of learning Christ
[00:35:08] Tony Payne: But you also manage, and I loved this section of the book, to cast it not just as an obligation or something we should do, or as a battle to do, or as a set of obstacles. You’ve got this marvellous section where you talk about the joys and the enormous privileges of learning Christ. And I thought that might be a good way for us to round off our conversation. What’s the joy and privilege of learning Christ?
[00:35:29] Col Marshall: Well, as I alluded to before, that the richness of our salvation in some ways is captured by the idea of our adoption more than any other doctrine. I don’t know. JI Packer, and I think I mention this in the book, sort of compared the doctrine of justification and adoption—justification in terms of the legal aspect of our salvation—that we are no longer condemned, that Christ has paid the penalty for our sin, and we are declared righteous by our faith in Christ. But adoption draws us into this very personal relationship of love and sharing in the riches of Christ for all eternity, because we end up in our glorification, beyond our death, in our resurrection, with a new body. That’s why I love Romans 8, because we’re already adopted. But in the redemption of our bodies, the full adoption takes place, when we’re no longer slaves of sin; we’re—we’re slaves of righteousness—perfectly in purity in the resurrection age. So it’s those privileges.
[00:36:42] It’s also the privilege of being chosen. I do quite a bit on predestination, which I know we all struggle with, in some ways—the concept of, in God’s sovereignty, he has chosen before the creation of the world. But that’s what it means: I’ve been chosen before the creation of the world. This is not some accidental salvation. This is not just because someone mentioned the gospel to me. So the richness of our salvation.
[00:37:07] And then, I guess, the other privilege is that we are actually transformed in this life: we do become more like Christ. We do learn to love in a way that comes from Christ himself. The great new commandment of John 13 and so on: we experience that transformation from a self-centred existence to another-person-centred life, which is what Christ has demonstrated to us in his death for us. So yes: so there’s a whole section on these privileges like mining gold that is far more precious than gold.
Conclusion
[00:37:49] Tony Payne: Col, thanks for … I was going to say, “Thanks for writing this book”; I feel like saying, “Thanks for a lifetime that’s led to the writing of this book”, in a sense, because it’s a book that’s arisen out of your long-term learning of Christ yourself. And the wisdom that’s in the book flows out of that and is really encouraging and insightful and helpful in so many ways.
[00:38:10] In some ways, for me, as someone who spends a lot of their every day in the Bible and the Scripture and theology here at Moore College, and has the privilege of teaching others, it was still a real challenge for me as to my personal habits of thinking and learning and application and learning what it means to live like Christ myself. It was a challenge to be that kind of warrior who continues in that process of fighting to learn to Christ and not to be discipled by the world, but not to learn the world as Satan wants us to. It’s a very helpful book in so many ways, and Col, thank you so much for taking all the time and struggle it is to write and to put all these things down for us, and I’d like to commend for everybody that they get hold of Warriors of the Word and dwell in it and chew over it over some period of time, because I think it will change you.
[00:38:55] Col, thanks so much for being with me today, and for having this conversation.
[00:38:59] Col Marshall: Thank you, Tony. And great to chat with you about it as always!
[00:39:02] Tony Payne: We’ll talk again soon.
[00:39:03] Col Marshall: We’ll do it again somewhere, somehow.
[Music]
[00:39:19] Tony Payne: Well, thanks for joining us on this episode of the Centre for Christian Living podcast from Moore College. For a whole lot more from the Centre for Christian Living, just head over to the CCL website: that’s ccl.moore.edu.au, where you’ll find a stack of resources, including every past podcast episode all the way back to 2017, videos from our live events, and articles that we’ve published through the Centre.
[00:39:45] And while you’re there on the website, we also have an opportunity for you to make a tax-deductible donation to support the ongoing work of the Centre here at Moore College.
[00:39:54] We’d also love you to subscribe to the podcast and to leave a review so that people can discover our podcast and our other resources. And we always love and benefit from receiving your feedback and questions. Please get in touch. You can email us at ccl@moore.edu.au.
[00:40:14] Many thanks to Karen Beilharz from the Communications Team here at Moore College for all her work in transcribing and editing and producing this podcast; to James West for the music; and to you, dear listeners, for joining us each week. Thank you for listening.
[00:40:29] I’m Tony Payne. ‘Bye for now.
