Can I Get a Witness? w/ Terry Ishee W3

Anthony: And that makes for a great segue into our next Bible passage, which is for Pentecost. Jesus said, I’ll send the Spirit and the Spirit is sent. John 15:26-27 and 16:4-15. It is a Revised Common Lectionary passage for Pentecost, May 19.

“When the Companion comes, whom I will send from the Father—the Spirit of Truth who proceeds from the Father—he will testify about me. ²⁷ You will testify too, because you have been with me from the beginning.

But I have said these things to you so that when their time comes, you will remember that I told you about them. “I didn’t say these things to you from the beginning, because I was with you. ⁵ But now I go away to the one who sent me. None of you ask me, ‘Where are you going?’ ⁶ Yet because I have said these things to you, you are filled with sorrow. ⁷ I assure you that it is better for you that I go away. If I don’t go away, the Companion won’t come to you. But if I go, I will send him to you. ⁸ When he comes, he will show the world it was wrong about sin, righteousness, and judgment. ⁹ He will show the world it was wrong about sin because they don’t believe in me. ¹⁰ He will show the world it was wrong about righteousness because I’m going to the Father and you won’t see me anymore. ¹¹ He will show the world it was wrong about judgment because this world’s ruler stands condemned. ¹² “I have much more to say to you, but you can’t handle it now. ¹³ However, when the Spirit of Truth comes, he will guide you in all truth. He won’t speak on his own, but will say whatever he hears and will proclaim to you what is to come. ¹⁴ He will glorify me, because he will take what is mine and proclaim it to you. ¹⁵ Everything that the Father has is mine. That’s why I said that the Spirit takes what is mine and will proclaim it to you.

So, on this Pentecost, Terry, we celebrate the companion, the Holy Spirit coming to us to guide us into all truth. I’m going to ask you to get a bit personal here to testify. So how have you personally experienced the presence and the truth guiding power of the Spirit?

Terry: Yeah. I’ve been a pastor for 27 years and I …

Anthony: You’re getting old.

Terry: I’m getting old, brother. I’m getting old. I started crazy young. I started crazy young, but I didn’t grow up in the church. But when I found the church, it was a Baptist church. And it’s a tribe that I love, and I try to love. Man, sometimes they make it really hard to love them.

And the Trinity for — and this is the old Baptist joke — the Trinity for the Baptist is Father, Son, and Bible. And that’s really what it feels like, right? It’s just study the Bible.

And so early on in ministry, the Holy Spirit was this real stranger. Of course, we acknowledged it as part of the Trinity, but it was the mysterious part of God. And we just left it at that. And then I’m casting a large shadow on a large group of people, but typically that’s the experience of that denominational life.

And as I grew in maturity and grew in my own leadership, I became more and more fascinated with the Holy Spirit. And by no means am I charismatic or I know I’m — it depends who you talk to, right? We’re all shades of different kinds of charismatic. But man, the Holy Spirit has been something in my life that has truly transformed and has made a significant impact on my spirituality. Of every discipline that I have in my repertoire — my daily, weekly, creating a rule of life and a rhythm of seeking to be with God — a silence and reflection on the Holy Spirit has been probably number two.

Man, someone, when I was a young kid — I started ministry when I was 19 years old. I joined a church planting team, and someone said, as a young pastor, I never wanted to come across as a moron or an idiot, which was just hard to do when you’re that young. Of course, you’re going to come across that way.

But someone said, Terry, God makes a promise. He says if you pray for wisdom, he will be faithful and give you wisdom. And so that is my number one spiritual practice is I plead for wisdom from God Father, Son, and Spirit. And I believe wisdom is a beautiful gift that God gives us.

And then right behind that pleading that almost, incessant pleading for wisdom — and it’s even a joke in my family. My daughter, like she’s contemplating dating some bonehead. And I just tell her, “You’re 18. I love you. You love Jesus. I know your life call, your core values, and who you are in the kingdom. Make wise decisions.” And they always make fun of me because that’s my go to: make wise decisions; make wise decisions. God will give you the wisdom to make a wise decision.

But second to that, making wise decisions, seeking wisdom, is I want to hear. I want to hear from God. I want to hear from the Holy Spirit. And so, I actually try to carve out significant time and just sitting still. I’m not the best meditator.

I’m not the best kind of silence person. My mind wanders and I’m all over the place. But one of the things that I’ve discovered is absolute silence isn’t the point. God wants that the journey that our minds go on when we sit and try to be still, Jesus just wants to jump in on that. The Holy Spirit wants to guide that and be in that. And so, I will carve out significant amounts of time to simply, Lord, what’s your next step?

And even Anthony, I don’t think I’ve even told this to you. So, I’ll tell you right here. My daughter is 18. She’s about to graduate high school and go off to college. And we’re going to be empty nesters. And so, we’ve been praying Lord, what’s next for us? So much of our ministry over the last 15 years has been neighborhood based and school based because we are highly missional incarnational people. And all of a sudden it feels like our neighborhood, we’ve lost more neighbors in the last three years than we had in the last 17.

We’ve been in this house for 20 years. We’ve just valued incarnating into one place and sticking, staying put. And we’ve lost more neighbors in the last three than the first 17. Amen. And so, the neighborhood is turned over. It feels different. Almost feels like there’s a release here. The school, obviously we don’t want to be the creepy people that keep coming to school after your kid graduates, which those people exist. And so, we don’t want to be like that.

So, we’ve just been discerning and praying to the Holy Spirit. Lord, what’s next? What’s next for us? Where might you be leading us? And I carve lots of time out just to sit and listen.

And the Spirit has been so faithful that I can look back in my life. Every church plant that I’ve been a part of, the decision to start two separate coaching and consulting firms, joining Forge America 14 years ago, taking on the executive director role two years ago — every one of those moments, there was a season of just sitting in silence and just hearing like, Lord speak.

And if you were to ask: Terry, have you heard the audible voice of God in 27 years, 32 years of following Jesus? I haven’t, but have I felt the nudging and the prompting of the Holy Spirit? I hear it all the time. I feel it all the time. And it’s one of those things where I think it just comes to: can you sit still enough?

And again, it’s a presence issue. We have to enable — if you’re to be a great missionary, when we do missionary training, we want you to have presence with your neighbor. You can’t truly share good news if you don’t know what good news would be to them. So, you have to build a sense of presence. And in order to build a sense of presence, you have to build a sense of proximity, right?

I can’t know what would be good news to my neighbor, if I don’t know my neighbor. The only way to know my neighbor is to be in proximity to my neighbor. The same thing is true of the Spirit. We can’t expect to have presence with the Holy Spirit if we aren’t in proximity with the Holy Spirit. Now, I know that the Holy Spirit is with us at all times. And so, we are technically in proximity of the Holy Spirit all the time. But are we intentionally putting our minds on that proximity?

And so that has been a game changer for me. And for me, I really truly feel like every decision that I’ve made has truly been, and every blessing that God has bestowed on our family has been in cooperation with God and in seeking him and seeking wisdom from the Spirit.

Anthony: Yeah, that’s good. I like that — proximity, the intentionality of that proximity. And with that proximity, in my mind, I’m seeing the picture in scripture of Jesus with Peter at Caesarea Philippi, where Peter proclaims that Jesus is the Son of God, Messiah to the world, and Jesus affirms him.

And then in the same scene, Peter’s opposed to the mission of God, therefore, the cross. And he says, get behind me, Satan. You’re like, Peter’s got to have whiplash. I just was affirmed and now I’ve been corrected.

And earlier I’d mentioned it comes with coaching the aha’s and the oh moments. And the Spirit is leading us into truth, meaning also revealing what is wrong in the world and what doesn’t look conformed in our lives to the Son of God.

Anything you want to talk about regarding that? How the Spirit is leading us into that kind of wisdom, the aha’s and the oh’s?

Terry: Yeah, so repentance has been something that has been a bit of a theme in my life. A great friend of mine and actually the founder, one of our founders, a co-founder of Forge America, Alan Hirsch has written just a wonderful, beautiful book on this idea of repentance, reorientation. And it’s called Metanoia. And so, the metanoia moment is that pivot moment, that pivotal moment of turning.

And in my own life, I had a dear friend, Paul Gokey. He’s now in the Houston area. We used to early in our church planting journeys, we’d commiserate with one another because planting a church — which Anthony, I know you’re a church planter and you’ve worked with lots of them — it sometimes can be a very daunting and hard task.

Anthony: Sure enough.

Terry: And we would commiserate, and we’d sit, have lunch, and talk. And I remember one afternoon, we were sitting there just chatting and Paul had said, hey part of my life, I seek to live with an ongoing posture of repentance.

And man, that was a seminary class, that was a seminary degree in a conversation. It changed so much for me, how I viewed God, and how I view my response to God. And as we got into it and dug into it, it wasn’t an ongoing posture of repentance that he was beating himself up or constantly in confession of every little thing he did, but it was a posture of repentance or a posture of reorienting himself around Jesus as king.

And Lord, and when I began the task, the challenging task of, can I live my everyday walking, breathing, sleeping life, attempting to orient my life, to make everything the focus of my life, put on everything I see, put on the lenses, the glasses, the sunglasses, the lenses to see Jesus as king? Could I begin to live that sort of life?

And as I began that, what I found was this idea where you walk with the Spirit, and this ability to acknowledge the areas of my life where the world has won over the Spirit, and how do I begin to surrender that piece of me, that God might invade that part of my being and fully make me whole as he intends me to be.

And that’s been a life-changing process. Do I do it perfectly? No. Do I struggle with it? Absolutely. But there is this sense of I’m going to give it the old college try. I just want when my feet hit the ground in the morning, I want to orient my mind: Jesus is King today, just as he was yesterday, and he will be tomorrow.

And so, what are the implications of Jesus is King and Lord of my life? What’s my implications for the next hour and trying to live life that way. And some might be listening to this and say, Oh my gosh, that sounds horrible. That sounds like a, such a burdensome way to live. And like you had mentioned earlier, it sounds like I’m giving up my life, but I have found so much joy and happiness and contentment in that very life that there is something freeing in knowing that in a moment’s notice, I can turn my attention to Jesus as king and say, “You are king and I am not. I give you my life, do with it as you see fit. Change me, form me, make me into the person you want me to be, Lord.”

And man, there is something so freeing in that because it’s not about me. It’s not about, Lord, what do you want me to do to change me? But it’s, Lord, you change me, you do it. I’m certain all he wants for me is to surrender. And so, when I can live a life of surrender of reorientation around him as king it’s been life changing. It has been the greatest sense of connectedness and intimacy with God that I’ve ever experienced.

It’s wonderful.

Anthony: Yeah, that’s so good. I had a similar experience where my friend and brother said that exact same thing, that repentance is ongoing in life. It’s not a one and done scenario at all. And you mentioned Alan’s book, Metanoia, this whole changing of my mind, which changes my action.

And I find for me, Terry, that’s where the rubber meets the road when it comes to repentance. Does what I say have congruence with what I do? And generally, when there’s a disconnect there, that’s where repentance has to be once again offered up like, “Lord!”

It’s like somebody might ask me, are you faithful? And this is where Karl Barth helped me; it’s a spectrum. To the extent that I’m faithful, I’m faithful. Help me in my unbelief Lord, right? That is ongoing repentance.