ATW - Conversation with Rod Williams

Season #2 July 03, 2024

Summary

In this conversation, Melissa Lapin interviews Rod Williams, who shares his journey of faith and the different perspectives he gained from his experiences in various churches and ministries. Rod talks about encountering the love of God through a pastor who made him feel seen and loved. He also discusses his involvement in the Jesus movement and the impact of the charismatic movement on his faith. Rod shares how he experienced a pivotal moment of feeling the presence of God during a difficult time in his life. He emphasizes the importance of being conscious of God's nearness and overcoming shame and guilt. The principal themes of the conversation include the beauty of the body of Christ and working together, the influence of the Holy Spirit, and the importance of embracing both sound doctrine and supernatural experiences. The speakers discuss their personal journeys and encounters with God, highlighting the need to let go of religious and political divisions and embrace love, unity, and individuality within the context of union with God. They emphasize the importance of discerning influences and voices in our lives, focusing on whether they make Jesus bigger or smaller. In this conversation, Rod Williams emphasizes the nearness of God and the unity of the Trinity. He highlights that Jesus is not separate from the Father, but rather, when you see Jesus, you see the Father. Williams challenges the idea that God is distant and angry, and instead presents a loving and merciful God who desires to be close to us. He encourages listeners to focus on Jesus and the Trinity, and to find community and support in their journey of understanding and experiencing God's love.

Takeaways

-Rod Williams shares his journey of faith and the different perspectives he gained from his experiences in various churches and ministries.
-Encountering the love of God through a pastor who made him feel seen and loved was a pivotal moment for Rod.
-The Jesus movement and the charismatic movement had a significant impact on Rod's faith, leading him to experience the goodness of God and see miracles.
-Rod emphasizes the importance of being conscious of God's nearness and overcoming shame and guilt. The body of Christ is beautiful and it is important to work together in unity.
-The Holy Spirit has a powerful influence and can bring about profound encounters with God.
-It is important to embrace both sound doctrine and supernatural experiences.
-Religious and political divisions can hinder our understanding of God and our ability to love others.
-Discerning influences and voices in our lives is crucial, and we should focus on whether they make Jesus bigger or smaller. God is not distant or separate from us; He is near and desires to be close to us.
-When we see Jesus, we see the Father and the Holy Spirit. The Trinity is always present and unified.
-The early fathers and those who were close to Jesus understood that God is good, loving, and for us.
-Fear is not our friend; perfect love casts out fear. We should focus on the love of God and let it cast out our fear.

Episode Transcript

Melissa Lapin (00:07.358)
Hi everybody, welcome to this episode of After a Well. I'm Melissa and I am glad that you joined me. If this is your first time, welcome, glad you found us. If this is not your first time with us, welcome back. Glad that you're here today. I am going to be talking with Rod Williams and he has become very dear to my heart very quickly over the last, I don't know, since August maybe, so six, eight months.

Melissa Lapin (00:38.506)
He is just, I don't know, just a really powerful human being and I love him and I'm really glad that he said yes. So Rod, introduce yourself and we'll go from there.

Rod Williams (00:52.878)
I'm Rod Williams and I've had quite a long journey that includes doing work in the technology industry for many years. I'm retired from that. I was a pastor for a while in Santa Cruz. I work in...

a couple different schools, Cana Seminary and School of Kingdom, and do some speaking and itinerant ministry. We're working on some writing and a video series. We basically

Rod Williams (01:48.202)
what changed after an encounter with Jesus. And so I wanted to kind of jump at the opportunity to participate with her in this. Melissa's become dear to us as well. We've crossed paths several times at school of kingdom events and some classes online. And anyway, I think it's great that so many voices are bringing their perspective to what it's like.

to be human in the context of understanding who Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are. So anyway, looking forward to today.

Melissa Lapin (02:21.686)
for sure.

Melissa Lapin (02:27.722)
Yay. Yeah, I forgot you did all that cool techie stuff and I sat and listened to you and um, what's his name? Chit chatting about all your math things and problem solving and all of that at school at graduation last year. But um, so what, where, hmm, can you tell us a little bit about your upbringing? You know, um.

Rod Williams (02:40.65)
Hehehehe

Rod Williams (02:56.193)
Mm.

Melissa Lapin (02:57.418)
because I know when you talked about it in class a couple weeks ago or on the two Valentine's night, you shared a little bit of your testimony that I hadn't heard and stuff and I really enjoyed it because you've kind of it seems to me and like I don't like do life with you, so I can't say you're like this is how you are, but it seems to me that you

try a little bit of this and that, you know, it doesn't seem to you're a guy that like isn't hard like no to a lot of things if that makes sense that you know you've done traditional church, you've done non-traditional church and in churches and out of churches and those kinds of things and that has to give a person a lot of different perspectives and viewpoints of

just God and Jesus and in the ins and outs and stuff. And so having, starting from there, a little bit of what you, different things that you've picked up from different places you've been, maybe that led to your aha moment. Okay, this is what I believe about Jesus. Does that make sense? That was kind of a long, rambly question.

Rod Williams (04:07.813)
Mm-hmm.

Rod Williams (04:17.478)
Yeah, yeah, well one of the things, I remember David Bowie said one time, you know, of all people to quote something like this, but he said, you know, getting older is the fascinating process of becoming who you were always supposed to be. And that kind of stuck with me, you know, because he's one of those guys who lived the hard charging rock and roll life and nearly lost his life.

Melissa Lapin (04:38.029)
Yes.

Rod Williams (04:47.582)
like so many of those did. He had his epiphany of some sort and was able to change his life as we think of Eric Clapton and other people and then we think of all the people who didn't make it. My life is not that dramatic but there were a couple of times where it got pretty low and I might not be here to tell the tale.

Melissa Lapin (04:47.604)
Yeah.

Melissa Lapin (05:08.619)
Hahaha

Rod Williams (05:17.986)
is you span more time, you have more experiences, and you have a little different perspective, right? And we still value that in our culture, but maybe not as much as we did years ago. So just from that standpoint of having experienced a lot of things, it, I think, gives me a different

Melissa Lapin (05:25.631)
Mm-hmm.

Rod Williams (05:46.474)
a different perspective than a lot of people, particularly younger people who've grown up, they're digital natives and they've grown up being influenced by technology from day one.

Melissa Lapin (05:56.283)
Okay. Right, what did you? Right, were you? Are you old enough to be part of the Jesus movement in the 70s?

Rod Williams (06:05.242)
Yeah, I was in my 20s at that time. So yeah, I'll run through real quickly kind of my story. But my family, we grew up in a very poor part of the South. And my grandmother, I interviewed her, I hope I can find the video and convert it or something. But she remembers coming west to Missouri around the turn of the century.

Melissa Lapin (06:08.355)
Okay.

Melissa Lapin (06:35.643)
Oh wow, okay.

Rod Williams (06:37.246)
So that's a connection in my life. My father used to farm and they still used mules when he was up until the time he was about 15 or 20. So that gives me a connection to a world that a lot of people have not been a part of. So I was from a small town, we had one or two churches.

Melissa Lapin (06:48.466)
Wow, okay.

Rod Williams (07:03.298)
And we'd go to church, but it was kind of, you know, what you see on TV so many times you're there, you don't really know what's going on as a young man. We moved out to California when I was about 12, and I mean, we always had a positive feeling about God, but I wouldn't say we really knew him very well. You know what I mean?

Melissa Lapin (07:27.871)
Right.

Rod Williams (07:31.73)
embodied a lot of great qualities that would have come from Jesus somewhere along the way. But I wouldn't say we knew a lot about how to talk about it. So I became a Christian in a small church in Southern California when I was about 15. And it was a fundamental church. And I wouldn't have known, I wouldn't have had much perspective at that point, but there was a guy who there who really loved people.

Melissa Lapin (07:38.207)
Mm-hmm.

Rod Williams (08:00.918)
And that's what attracted me to this whole idea of Jesus. He had the love of God and the Holy Spirit on him as I could, from my perspective now. All I knew was he made you feel seen and loved and heard. And that was probably the first time I thought, well, you know, God is real and he's interested in me. And so I became a believer.

And I remember the first six months were amazing, you know, reading the Bible, it just came alive, the Holy Spirit was so near. And then over time, you know, the unhelpful doctrine was kind of showing me a distant, angry God. And we had, you know, a pastor. Yeah, go ahead.

Melissa Lapin (08:55.19)
Okay, so let's back up again. Okay, so, did you, were you presented the Gospel as fire insurance then? You don't want to be in it because you said, you know, reading the scripture introduced you, you know, to an angry, distant, angry God. So, because like I grew up, yeah, I grew up with, um,

Rod Williams (09:11.106)
Yeah. No, reading.

Melissa Lapin (09:18.342)
My parents were atheists or whatever. God just wasn't on our radar. We, you know, we, I went to a vacation Bible school with my grandma once a year, you know, when we went up to Indiana and stuff. So not having like a grid for that, you know, cause you, you said you couldn't explain it. So you probably grew up going to church cause that's what you do. Right. Yeah. And so then this guy, what, what was it at 15 that made you want to commit?

Rod Williams (09:34.21)
Uh huh.

Rod Williams (09:40.702)
Right, right, right.

Rod Williams (09:49.354)
Well, I don't know that anyone presented the gospel very clearly when I was a kid, you know, in the South. I do remember it being fairly positive. I don't think there was a lot of fire and brimstone or that kind of thing. They wanted me to be confirmed, I remember, at nine or something. But I didn't understand it and I felt like I would be not genuine if I kind of went along with it. So I kind of had that much awareness that it should be genuine if we're going to participate.

Melissa Lapin (09:56.731)
Okay.

Melissa Lapin (10:06.944)
Hmm.

Melissa Lapin (10:15.624)
Okay.

Rod Williams (10:18.206)
in something like that. So this guy, anyway, he was very loving. My folks were like, hey, we should go to church. Our friend invited us, I don't remember. So it was really through him and he just presented the love of God the way I remember it. There was the talk of destination and all that and of course everybody wants to go to heaven. And so I didn't come into a relationship with God out of a fear of a

Melissa Lapin (10:35.55)
Hmph.

Rod Williams (10:47.266)
destination or anything like that. But really more, and there was a very loving youth group there, you know, we were all different ages and we were all kind of, you know, from different places and a little awkward, but we, there was our group, you know, it was kind of like our neighborhood kind of thing. We did a lot of stuff together and so that experience was good. The, some of the preaching was a little harsh, you know.

I've heard much worse, to be honest. But I left there and went to... Anyway, I wound up going to Bible college because if you're serious for God, that's what you did back then. You know? You've got to do it. If you like to travel, you'd be a missionary. If you're good at music, you'd be a worship leader. If not, then you're probably going to be a pastor. So...

Melissa Lapin (11:17.746)
Hahaha

Melissa Lapin (11:31.09)
Gotta do it. Yep.

Rod Williams (11:44.226)
So I took that. Now, I left out a little bit of a part. Growing up in Arkansas, there wasn't a whole lot to do. So when I was quite young, about second or third grade, I became very interested in science. And I joined the Science Book of the Month Club, and I had chemistry sets and Van de Graaff generators and built crystal radios and all that stuff. So I had a lot of joy from that. I still do, you know, like just building little circuits or whatever.

Melissa Lapin (11:44.244)
Ha!

Rod Williams (12:13.086)
So I was headed on a technology track and I had a neighbor who worked for one of the technology companies in Southern California. We moved out there and he gave me some very helpful training and building things and all that. But when I came into the church, there was this attitude and I think this is relevant probably to a lot of your listeners where there was the sacred and there was the secular.

Melissa Lapin (12:40.756)
Hmm, yeah.

Rod Williams (12:42.334)
Church was where God was and in the world that was inferior somehow to things of church. So I was attracted to that.

Melissa Lapin (12:50.272)
Yeah.

Rod Williams (13:00.782)
I, you know, it's like there's a path that you're moved along once you kind of commit to that. And my Bible school experience was pretty good, you know, and I excelled at that and I was a proud little Pharisee, you know, and I'd go out and speak on the weekends and I did a lot of speaking when I was young and did okay at that. So I wound up at a church, a big church.

Melissa Lapin (13:15.133)
Ha ha

Rod Williams (13:30.398)
in the middle of the country after college. And I thought, wow, man, I'm on my way. I'm going to have a big church, and I'll be successful in that regard in that type of career. And I have a friend, Ken, who says, the trouble with religion is if you're good at it, it's very difficult to get out of. And so I actually ran into a guy.

Melissa Lapin (13:55.786)
Thank you.

Rod Williams (13:59.314)
recently who is from my, he was at that church I was at 50 something years ago and he's still he's still a pastor somewhere you know but he's discovering the goodness of God as well you know and he had been looking for some of us who were from that period you know and we had a wonderful conversation about how we've our view of God has changed and Paul Young had a lot to do with his kind of changing his mindset. Well anyway so

Melissa Lapin (14:06.379)
Oh gosh.

Melissa Lapin (14:27.722)
It's cool.

Rod Williams (14:29.586)
I was good at that, but it was the 70s, mid 70s, and there was still a little racism. I had a bad experience in regards to that because I was from California and I didn't get the memo about not inviting certain people to church.

Melissa Lapin (14:54.005)
Ha!

Rod Williams (14:58.398)
the leadership kind of came down on me. So I didn't know much, but it disheartened me. I said, this doesn't feel like Jesus. And even though I'd lost some of the initial awe and wonder of walking with Jesus in those early days, I still always felt He was near and He was good. And I felt like this shouldn't be this way.

And so I had to go along or I had to get out. And so I got out. And I don't know that it was a particularly great moment of courage or something like that, but it was more like just disillusioning. And it was like, I just can't do this. And so then it was like, well, what am I going to do to make a living? I've gone through college. And I was in my early 20s. And so I got out.

Melissa Lapin (15:41.222)
Heh.

Rod Williams (15:57.258)
Anyway, I got a job in a technology company that actually worked with churches. And one of the guys that I worked with...

Rod Williams (16:08.33)
had become a believer just by reading the Bible with his wife. He was into some new age stuff before that, and then he read the Bible. He was supposed to go to church, so he goes to church. He winds up at Calvary Chapel in the latter part of the Jesus movement. He invited me there, and that's when I encountered again some of the goodness of God that I'd felt early on. You know what I mean?

Melissa Lapin (16:13.119)
Hmm.

Rod Williams (16:36.17)
It's like when you're in religion, you have a dualistic mind or cognitive dissonance or whatever you want to call it. You believe two things. You've been taught this doctrine that God is distant and far away and not by nature love and you're never quite sure how he's going to react. And then there's Jesus who is for you and died for you. And you kind of believe conflicting things.

But you have to be educated to believe those conflicting things. So when I got to Calvary, it was like, wow, they had real music. They had rock and roll music that even though we weren't supposed to as fundamentalists listen to, we all did anyway. It was great music.

Melissa Lapin (17:09.03)
Hahaha

Melissa Lapin (17:25.967)
Right?

Rod Williams (17:33.206)
of course the Beatles and anyway that music you know still the creativity and the goodness of God would bleed through in popular music and sometimes in the church not so much because everybody's you know trying to be so something they're not you know trying to be proper and holy and all that. And so anyway at Calvary.

Melissa Lapin (17:56.001)
Mm-hmm.

Rod Williams (18:00.878)
I heard the great Maranatha bands back in the day. They would have these Saturday night concerts that were amazing. And you know Blonnie Frisbee and some of the young pastors would get up and preach. And there's just the Spirit of God was on it, that's all you can say. I probably wouldn't agree with some of the theology that was there, but the goodness of God was a theme and people would just run forward. I saw so many people become Christians.

Melissa Lapin (18:22.119)
Yeah.

Rod Williams (18:30.382)
I even ran into an atheist I knew at high school one day in the lobby of there. Yeah, it was pretty amazing. So anyway, I would say that was another point of growing and an understanding of the goodness of God was just how casual, casually loved by God people felt there.

Melissa Lapin (18:36.465)
Oh, wow.

Rod Williams (18:58.898)
And there really was something, you know, business owners became believers, artists, musicians, and so there was this culture, whereas in my little fundamentalist group, we were kind of on our own, you know, and then there was everybody else, and you know, we could trace our lineage back to Paul, and you know, and nobody else could, and there was a very, you know, kind of narrow view.

Melissa Lapin (19:21.267)
Hahaha

Melissa Lapin (19:24.662)
Thanks for watching!

Rod Williams (19:28.966)
There were people from all different kinds of backgrounds at Calvary. This is Big Calvary in Costa Mesa. The Calvary Chapel and the Mother Ship. So we had a little home group there for a while. And it grew and some people wanted to get baptized. And I remember thinking,

Melissa Lapin (19:34.855)
Mm-hmm.

Melissa Lapin (19:39.024)
The mothership.

Rod Williams (19:58.562)
of Calvary because Chuck had this thing of like you can't join because he'd had bad experiences with his denomination. He's like we're not joining anything anymore, you know. So I remember one day I said there must be paperwork to fill out, you know, like this is an official thing. Got to be official. Like because we're just having a home group, we're just hanging out, you know, like so but now it was people were trying to get official.

Melissa Lapin (20:08.964)
Yeah.

Melissa Lapin (20:16.583)
It's gotta be official!

Rod Williams (20:27.234)
So I remember setting up this appointment with a guy who worked with Chuck Smith named Renee and he was kind of a completely different personality than Renee. He was a real administrator, you know, kind of organized, not very emotional person and he probably really made everything work there, you know, because Chuck was kind of like, hey, the board would say,

you know hey uh... we can't let those hippies in on our new carpet you know at this building and he'd say great no carpet you know we're not going to say no to people you know and uh... yeah so anyway the uh... I had this appointment with renee and i go uh... so here's the deal you know we've got this home group but we never really joined anything and it's not official blah somebody wants to get baptized and he just laughed the biggest laugh and he was like

Melissa Lapin (20:55.949)
Ha ha

Melissa Lapin (21:02.323)
That's cool.

Rod Williams (21:21.526)
Let me get this straight. You're getting people together. They love Jesus. Some of them want to get baptized. You know? I go, yeah, but don't I have to fill out some paperwork or something? He was like, he just laughed. He goes, what's the problem? Just go do it, man. And it was back in those days, the water was warm there. He's just like, just go down the beach and baptize them. That's what we do. You know?

Melissa Lapin (21:34.94)
Hahahaha

Melissa Lapin (21:42.846)
That's hilarious.

Rod Williams (21:50.578)
And so anyway, that was, that was, I would say that was one of the aha moments of like, oh, I guess some of the ideas I have that I got from my education, and I got some good things from my Bible education. One of them was memorizing a lot of scripture, which is still in, still in there because when a King James verse comes out, I know it's probably from those days, got in there somewhere, you know, but.

Melissa Lapin (21:52.126)
That's funny.

Melissa Lapin (22:09.437)
Yeah.

Melissa Lapin (22:16.792)
haha

Rod Williams (22:19.65)
But anyway, so yeah, I was at Calvary for a while, then the Vineyard when Wimber was there and we began to see miracles. I lost a lot of my fundamentalist friends because they had heard I'd gone to Calvary and they were staunchly anti-charismatic, anti-speaking in tongues, and I was sure I'd lost my mind, which I confirmed with this old friend I connected with, that they all thought I'd lost my mind.

Melissa Lapin (22:46.222)
Yeah.

Rod Williams (22:49.998)
I really wasn't even into that and really didn't see that many miracles at Calvary. We saw a few.

Melissa Lapin (22:57.902)
So what was it that drew you in that? Was it simply just that level of acceptance and love that you were seeing?

Rod Williams (23:09.298)
Yeah, it was mostly my friend. He was, we became best friends. We've since lost touch with each other. But he just had the most genuine love for Jesus that I had encountered because literally he had no training in anything. And he just, what he knew was from the Bible and from hanging out with people in the, basically the Jesus movement in that day.

And so it was a, he didn't have a lot of the bad ideas about a distant angry God, you know. And so I was attracted to that. And in hindsight, you know, our father issues and our family of origin issues come through in how we view God. And so that was part of what was going on in my teenage years and in my early 20s working that out as well. But no, I was, I was attracted to the type of people who hung

Melissa Lapin (23:52.277)
Hehehe

Rod Williams (24:06.466)
genuinely loving, you know, and not uptight and not, just God was good. Jesus was cool, you know, and they were writing music from the heart that really connected. And so we were involved in those days, you know, we heard Keith Green and Larry Norman and all those early guys were doing concerts a lot in the mid-70s, late 70s there.

Even Bob Dylan became a believer, you know, and we went down to San Diego to hear his music when he was traveling with Mark Knopfler and all that. It was an amazing time. So from there, I moved to Northern California and we were briefly involved in a pretty semi-cultish kind of charismatic church.

Melissa Lapin (24:36.669)
Mm-hmm.

Rod Williams (25:04.574)
We thought it was kind of like Calvary because it was a similar denomination as far as their origin. But it's kind of controlling. You're part of Dove's prophetic team. Basically all the things that you say don't do when exercising the prophetic gift, that was what was going on there. Finding all the bad things you could point out in somebody and calling that the voice of God. Anyway, it took a couple of years.

Melissa Lapin (25:25.335)
Oh

Melissa Lapin (25:32.686)
That's so horrible.

Rod Williams (25:35.015)
It is horrible. So it took a couple of years and I figured out that it was controlling and left. And then kind of went to a small church that reminded me of Calvary a lot. It was from the Jesus People Movement days in our town there in Santa Cruz.

Rod Williams (26:02.594)
pretty good experience there. Then we kind of got distance. I left out that I started to go back into technology because I had to make a living, right? So we were repairing these machines that did word processing and helping churches and ministries use those. And I learned to program them.

Rod Williams (26:29.194)
Me and my buddy, we figured out how to make these old machines do things they were never really intended to. And lo and behold, we made some money from that. From there, I bought one of the early personal computers and taught myself to program. And wound up getting a job.

long story short, in a large computer system in a manufacturing company and then from there did consulting. So when we moved to Northern California, we had done some contracts for a large company in Silicon Valley and they had become my best consulting clients. I did about 15 contracts with them so it made sense to be closer to them. So I was working pretty hard.

during that period and I made the mistake of kind of getting disconnected uh... because some things that happened with the sort of cultic church I was telling you about they had heard a lot of folks and the denominational leaders asked us to help those people so we had some people we know some friends of Baxter's uh... Ken Blue and some other folks we had them in to minister to those people

and that didn't go over big with the denomination and they wound up throwing us under the bus after they had asked us to help. And so that was very disillusioning and I shouldn't have let it affect me in hindsight because it's very predictable but it did. And so that spun me out for a few years, you know. But I had a taste of the grace of God from Ken and...

Melissa Lapin (27:53.184)
Hmm.

Melissa Lapin (28:07.588)
Yeah.

Rod Williams (28:16.574)
some of the other folks that we met there. And that kind of mentally put me on a path so that a few years later when I had an illness in my life kind of bottomed out and my wife left and I became a single parent. So I had three boys and was raising them and doing technology.

work, I stopped being a consultant and worked full time in a company, big company. It was a lot of pressure.

Rod Williams (28:57.45)
You know, I think this is one of your well moments here, right? Because I can remember feeling so shameful because divorce was viewed so badly in my denomination and I felt guilty even though it wasn't my initiative for that and I was still parenting my boys. But

Melissa Lapin (29:07.06)
Hmm.

Rod Williams (29:25.326)
There's a lot of shame and guilt and then I had some health issues so it was like the perfect storm you know. And I can remember one night feeling...

so bad and I haven't.

I've had issues of depression from time to time, I guess we all do, but this was a particularly bad moment where I thought, you know, I don't know if this is worth going on, right? But at that moment, it was really interesting because I felt Jesus more near than ever, even more near than when I first met Him.

Melissa Lapin (30:05.316)
Hmm.

Rod Williams (30:11.367)
He's always there, I know now, but being conscious of him.

Melissa Lapin (30:12.87)
Right? Well, we become, yeah, being conscious. So what made this time different?

Rod Williams (30:21.686)
Well, because you see, I still had ideas about God that were contrary to who he really was. And I thought he should be disappointed with me. And of course, shame and guilt and the accuser comes along. But I felt him so near at the same time. You know, it's that cognitive dissonance that we're talking about. And I think for, you know, any listeners here, you know...

Melissa Lapin (30:28.917)
Mm-hmm.

Melissa Lapin (30:33.727)
Hmm.

Melissa Lapin (30:44.438)
Thanks for watching!

Rod Williams (30:52.114)
That's something to look for is when you have feelings that disagree with what you think. And we can't be ruled by our feelings, but we learn how to suppress them, I think. And, you know, in the story of the woman of the well, we were talking about she could feel the presence of God and the love coming from Jesus.

Melissa Lapin (31:01.93)
Hmm.

Rod Williams (31:22.058)
And she gets the revelation of who he is and then no longer feels shame for her situation and runs back to the town and says, come see a man who told me everything I ever did without any hint of shame. And so it's like when we...

feel the presence of God, we're tuned into it, we're conscious of it even though He's always there, then shame loses power over us. And ideas of distance from God, we see them for what they are, that He's really near. So that was a pivotal moment and it took me a while to get healthy physically and you know, we bought a...

Melissa Lapin (31:55.031)
Hmm. It's good.

Rod Williams (32:12.086)
bottomed out financially and in other ways. But it was kind of like, God put me on a trajectory of coming back. And eventually, I was a single parent working a pressure job and I thought I had teenagers coming and going and odd hours, all that stuff. And we had 9-11 happen and that put a lot of pressure on the company I was in. And so,

I said, I've got to go talk to adults, man. Like I'm losing it, you know? And so I went back to a kind of a Bible church in town that was having some classes and there I met my wife Eileen that you met and God started to rebuild both of our lives, you know? And so I think from there...

Melissa Lapin (32:42.922)
Hahaha

Rod Williams (33:11.262)
We had a friend who went to this crazy little charismatic church in town and said, hey, you've got to come. This is really different than where we've been. Because the big church we were in and that we had met in was a cessationist church. And if you don't know what that means, it's the idea that God doesn't do anything supernatural. There is no healing. There's no prophetic gifting. There's no.

Melissa Lapin (33:29.292)
Hmm.

Rod Williams (33:40.83)
you know, real consciousness of Holy Spirit, tangible, no tongues, no manifestations of the Spirit. And so, I mean, I had seen a little bit of that at Calvary back in the day, but still mentally I was like, I don't trust that, you know. And anyway, we went to this little church and we began to experience again another one of those moments where...

Melissa Lapin (33:44.206)
Yeah, no tongs, no, yeah, no nothing.

Rod Williams (34:07.926)
The first time we went there, we were having this conversation in the car about some family issues and someone prophesied over us the right way and they said, you know, it seems the Lord shows me that this is going on and it was exactly what we've been talking about, you know. And they affirmed us in love and it was a beautiful moment, you know. And that kind of like, wow. You know, that's...

Melissa Lapin (34:19.85)
Okay?

Rod Williams (34:37.762)
That's the real thing there. So anyway, God took me out of my cessationist thing and out of my sort of...

I guess we can all be self-centered, but my sister was much older, so I was practically an only child. And then, as I mentioned, I became quite proud doing the speaking and doing well in that religious world. And then as a consultant, you're usually in there to solve problems, right?

you get used to being the guy in charge and you feel good about people expecting you to solve their problems and all that sort of thing. So anyway, God began to show me.

the beauty of the body of Christ and working together. And of course I criticized everything that happened. People would say, well, there's a river in the room. They'd have a prophetic picture, right? Which I understand now, but I didn't understand at the time. There's like, you guys have lost your mind. There's like a river in this room. There's no waterfalls, all this stuff. And then people were kind of falling down under.

Melissa Lapin (35:40.298)
Yeah.

Rod Williams (36:03.922)
and the influence of the Spirit. I go, oh, this is ridiculous. People are just making this up. And the next thing I know, I'm on the ground too. Exactly. And I'm literally sensing water going over my head and I'm thinking, I have lost my mind. This can't possibly be real. And the Lord, there are those moments where the Lord speaks so clearly that...

Melissa Lapin (36:12.254)
Ha ha ha, swimming in that river! Ha ha ha!

Melissa Lapin (36:21.82)
Hmm.

Rod Williams (36:32.65)
it changes something in you. And I remember in that moment, criticizing everything going on around me. I mean, I kind of loved it, but I was kind of like, that's too weird, blah, blah. And so I'm laying there and he says, Rod, it's a metaphor, get over it. He goes, remember?

Melissa Lapin (36:50.758)
Well, I think that's a good point is because not only, and I have found this out in my walk because I'm an alumni of Bethel, I've done Elijah Howe, I mean, like I'm a school junkie. I love knowledge. I'm a learner. I want to know the things. And just processing through all the things, I do a lot of...

Rod Williams (37:09.006)
Mm-hmm.

Melissa Lapin (37:21.044)
I just like self, like self-help stuff. I'm like always, okay, let me work on me, you know, trying to be the best me that I can be. But in that, I have learned one of the biggest things and when I counsel and do coaching and stuff.

Rod Williams (37:27.403)
Yeah, yeah.

Melissa Lapin (37:37.958)
I have these conversations with people and get them to understand that a lot of times we are trying to do an exorcism on our own personality. You know, you can't do that. You know, I mean, it was it wasn't that, you know, like for you being in that situation, it did not necessarily have to be a.

Rod Williams (37:59.046)
Yeah.

Melissa Lapin (38:07.31)
Spiritual thing a religious thing. That's your personality if you're a linear thinker You know You're you're gonna have a hard time with visualizing a you know, a big river running through you know and that kind of and I've learned that and that set me free and that I got so much freedom from that is That there's there isn't anything wrong with me, you know, I am NOT wrong

Rod Williams (38:09.911)
Yeah.

Rod Williams (38:13.239)
Yeah.

Rod Williams (38:32.94)
Yeah.

Melissa Lapin (38:34.718)
Can I learn to manage myself better? Yes, but that doesn't make me wrong or broken or, you know, this happens to me. I cannot be the only person on the planet of 8 billion people, you know, there's a history of people with this personality that deal with these things. And so I think a lot of times we chalk it up to um...

Rod Williams (38:39.275)
Yeah.

Rod Williams (38:43.083)
Yeah.

Rod Williams (38:54.69)
Yep.

Melissa Lapin (39:01.426)
lack of faith or something's wrong with me when it's simply, you know, especially like with the prophetic, do you hear, do you see, do you feel, do you know? You know, those are the four basic and you can have some of them, all of them, whatever. But we wrestle.

Rod Williams (39:11.53)
Yeah.

Melissa Lapin (39:20.57)
We wrestle against ourselves and we try to rebuke ourselves. And you can't rebuke your own personality, buthead. You just got to learn to live with it. You got to deal with it. You got to, you know, understand and acknowledge that X, Y, Z is happening. And this is why. Oh, a millennial thinker. OK, well, let me let me be OK with thinking outside the box or let me be OK with those people swimming on the floor.

Rod Williams (39:30.479)
Yeah.

Rod Williams (39:46.918)
Yeah, yeah, I hear you. It's funny, I just posted something from Steve Backlund this week about, he says, you know, a lot of what we say is our gifting and our personality is just the ways we've trained ourselves to think positively or negatively, right? And so some of it is the negative stuff is training.

Melissa Lapin (40:04.36)
Yes.

Rod Williams (40:11.17)
But some of it is just, that's just who we are. And when we're in the context with someone who's a different way, then we can feel wrong or they can think we're wrong or whatever. So I hear you. And the odd part was when I was in technology, I was very intuitive. And that was one of the things that made me okay at that was I could see things in that.

Melissa Lapin (40:14.207)
Mm-hmm.

Melissa Lapin (40:20.266)
Mm-hmm.

Melissa Lapin (40:31.69)
Mm-hmm.

Melissa Lapin (40:39.483)
Mm-hmm.

Rod Williams (40:40.662)
that world in a visual way. I'm not a real seer, sometimes spiritually. But anyway, it's weird how too, your perception of you in a certain context can be limited, right? But I look back now and it was hilarious because I would just complain to God. I think I shared this the other night. Something was going on and that we needed prayer.

Melissa Lapin (40:54.642)
Yes. Yeah.

Melissa Lapin (41:02.666)
Hahaha

Rod Williams (41:09.418)
pastor came and he had this fit of holy laughter and he couldn't pray. He didn't get a word out, you know. And he just, it just got worse and worse. And the more upset I got, the worse it got for him. And finally I just was angry and I kind of left and I was driving out away and I was like, I'm never going back there. That's nuts. You know, here I needed help and all the guy did was laugh. And, and, and the Lord said Rod,

Melissa Lapin (41:15.863)
Hahaha

Melissa Lapin (41:29.743)
haha

Rod Williams (41:34.218)
you're taking all this way too seriously. And if there was ever a guy who needed to be laughed over, it's you, because you have such a stick up your butt, so get over it. And so we went back. And so what we criticize, I think, can be an indicator too, Candid, of where there's legitimate change.

Melissa Lapin (41:41.886)
Hmm.

Melissa Lapin (41:45.586)
Yeah.

Melissa Lapin (41:59.293)
Yeah.

Rod Williams (42:03.642)
And it's hard to know because sometimes there are things that are wrong and we see them and all that. But when it's this personal irritation thing that isn't so rational, that's probably a clue that he's working on something. I can remember what we did know about from my fundamentalist background in my early days in the charismatic world was...

Well, if there's tongues, there has to be an interpretation, you know, and that's if it's in public, right? So again, we're again, we were there. This this relates to what we were just talking about. Someone these ladies were praying for this person. And we were kind of in a circle. Somebody started speaking in tongues and another person spoke in tongues, you know, in their prayer.

Melissa Lapin (42:37.943)
Right?

Rod Williams (43:00.018)
and I was offended. I couldn't even participate in what was going on because I was so offended. I was like, well, there's no interpretation. Where's the interpretation? You know, that was all I could think about. And again, the Lord kind of interviewed me and goes, well, Rod, you want to hear what they're praying? And instantly I had the gift of interpretation and I could understand in English what they were saying in tongues. And that might be a little weird for some people, but... And it was the most...

Melissa Lapin (43:21.43)
Come on, that's cool.

Melissa Lapin (43:27.334)
So did you say that out loud? Did you give them the turpentine? Oh, okay.

Rod Williams (43:30.018)
Oh no, of course not. Of course not. I was like, I was embarrassed in a family way like Baxter would say, you know, but it was the most beautiful intercession and pleading for this person. So affirming, so loving. I mean, it was so loving. It was like, it had to be God, you know? It was like very interesting. And then it was just turned off and the Lord's like, I can do that.

Melissa Lapin (43:44.682)
Hmm.

Melissa Lapin (43:53.174)
That's cool.

Rod Williams (43:59.99)
you know, if you really want to complain. So there were a bunch of encounters where God wore me down, so to speak, about my objections about the supernatural. And then we started going up to Bethel as well, you know? And then of course we...

Melissa Lapin (44:01.295)
Hmm

Melissa Lapin (44:14.138)
Yeah, well, I think that's cool that as you're saying and just telling these little snippets, and this is a good point too for the listeners, that God's a gentleman.

Like he never embarrassed you with any of it. He just kind of let you be you. He worked with your personality. And he's like, okay, Ron, this is what's happening. This is, you know, and I love that about God. Like the woman at the well, her.

Rod Williams (44:29.195)
Yeah.

Rod Williams (44:34.784)
Yeah.

Rod Williams (44:43.351)
Mm-hmm.

Melissa Lapin (44:50.642)
I bet her life and her as a woman, she was so fragile at that point in her life, you know, because we don't know how old she was, but she had to be significant in age if she had five husbands, you know, were not told if they died or if she was divorced because in Samaria and yeah Samaria, divorce was legal, you know, so she could have been kicked to the curb.

Rod Williams (45:07.639)
Yeah.

Melissa Lapin (45:19.038)
The husband's could have died, could have married, you know, we don't know. We know nothing. There is nothing on this woman in history outside of Scripture or very little. And, you know, she had sons who ended up becoming with her martyrs and evangelists with her. But Jesus, I mean, it says in several of the versions, you know, that

They came to the well and he just kind of sat off to the side and waited for her to come. You know, he did not have to go through Samaria. You know, he chose that route. It was the shortest route, but he, they should have went around by law, but I think it's also a beautiful

Rod Williams (45:58.827)
Yeah.

Rod Williams (46:03.564)
Yeah.

Melissa Lapin (46:12.658)
that he met her at a place of promise because it was that was Jacob's well. That's a place of promise, inheritance, life-giving. There was such significance around that place and God does that with us. Jesus will show up anywhere we're willing to meet, whatever road we're on, whatever path we're on, and he's such a gentleman.

Rod Williams (46:20.894)
Mm-hmm.

Rod Williams (46:39.117)
Yeah.

Melissa Lapin (46:42.438)
when you know I mean now there are those stories that where Jesus just comes crashing in but I still think he does it.

with kindness, you know, he's not going to just invade and dominate and take over. But you know, there are times that I've heard testimonies and different times in my life, he has showed up in a big way that you can't deny. But I loved it with you just because of, you know, the linear thinking and the, you know, that he's just like, hey, right.

Rod Williams (46:54.709)
Mm-hmm.

Melissa Lapin (47:15.626)
What about this? You know, let me tell you what they're saying, Rod. Then you can get back to me, you know?

Rod Williams (47:17.442)
Yeah.

Rod Williams (47:24.564)
Yeah, it was so interesting. Of course, I tried to dismiss that as my imagination or something like that. There's some encounters you have that are so profound that you can't explain it. It takes more effort to explain it a different way than encountering him.

Melissa Lapin (47:33.112)
Of course you did!

Melissa Lapin (47:39.566)
Yeah.

Melissa Lapin (47:49.382)
Yeah.

Rod Williams (47:51.498)
One of the reasons though that I didn't just run from the supernatural was when we were kids in that youth group I mentioned to you, right, our church did not believe in healing and we were cessationists, right? But we had this friend who was in the hospital and I don't remember why exactly but it was something pretty serious.

Melissa Lapin (48:07.999)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Rod Williams (48:20.958)
um, so serious that we all gathered around and without even thinking about it, we prayed, you know, because we loved our friend that she would be healed and she was healed. You know, as I always remember that, I was like, well, I don't believe in healing, but on the other hand, I've seen healing, you know, so yeah, yeah. And I think part of it was just that there was so much love.

Melissa Lapin (48:30.175)
Hmm.

Melissa Lapin (48:37.471)
Hmm.

Melissa Lapin (48:44.854)
Right?

Rod Williams (48:51.19)
And so often we've separated the stuff from love, right? We've separated the supernatural from love, and it becomes another thing we do in religion. But it is something that God does, and he does speak. Now the world will tell you if you hear voices or whatever, you're crazy, right? Because, but it's what's so funny is so many of them are listening to all kinds of voices.

All kinds of influences, but they're not owning it. But some of the behaviors you see, you're like, I don't know who's telling you that, but it's probably not God and it's probably not you. It's something not so good. But yeah, so from there, we went up to Bethel quite a bit and we ran into just...

Melissa Lapin (49:21.369)
Mm-hmm.

Melissa Lapin (49:31.547)
Right?

Rod Williams (49:49.074)
A few people, I'll mention Banning who went on to do Jesus Culture and Joaquin who is now pastoring in Austin. Benny Johnson, when we were doing our church, came down and did some things when we were pastoring with John Crowder down there. They were just very kind to us.

Melissa Lapin (49:53.79)
Mm-hmm.

Rod Williams (50:15.918)
And they had come from a denomination that wasn't really moving in the supernatural, and they had their own sort of rethinking of all that, of the goodness of God. I had even more encounters there. I went through a season where I had sort of pretty dramatic encounters with God where ..

you just kind of get overcome by the spirit. Joaquin seemed to go out of his way to just fry me every time we got together in that regard. God bless him. And other people, they used to do these small schools with about 40 people and somehow they invited us up. And so all the leaders prophesied over us. We saw some amazing.

Melissa Lapin (50:52.992)
Hahaha

Rod Williams (51:12.75)
things during that period of time. I think I'm so glad that is coming back to a lot of the church, aren't you? I love sound doctrine, as you know, you're in one of our Trinitarian classes, that's okay. But the church used to have both. They used to have a clear picture of Jesus, they used to have high Christology, and they

Melissa Lapin (51:23.932)
Yeah.

Rod Williams (51:42.602)
be open to the Spirit of God and to seeing miracles, the prophetic, all the good things that the Holy Spirit does. And the good fruit of the Spirit, which is just love, joy, peace, long-suffering, patience, all the good things, right? And somehow we divorce those, you know. Sometimes we divorce healing from love and we divorce doctrine from experience, you know.

Melissa Lapin (51:51.047)
Yeah.

Melissa Lapin (52:12.509)
Mm-hmm.

Rod Williams (52:12.998)
And experience doesn't determine doctrine. Like miracles don't validate your theology. But when you have the two together, it's sustainable. And that's something we kind of lost was, something would happen and then it's all about miracles. Luther nailed the 95 theses to the door and then all of a sudden it was Sola Scriptura and we elevated the Bible above.

Melissa Lapin (52:31.978)
Yeah.

Rod Williams (52:42.678)
Jesus, we elevated the graph a the written word above the Logos the living word and So we tend to do that, but if we can hang in there and embrace both and grow and look back Because a lot of things we think are new the Church Fathers were talking about Centuries ago, you know and more eloquently than anyone alive today, you know, so

Melissa Lapin (53:02.61)
I'm sorry.

Yeah.

Melissa Lapin (53:10.186)
Right. So that leads me to the question that I was thinking I actually had thought about it earlier. So I think this is a Holy Spirit thing. Can you um

know maybe do a little preach for just a few minutes um on

people who Don't know like maybe what more because I've ultimately loved wins, right? It's all about love and it's all about God But What encouragement can you give to people that would? Just give them peace to know Because I see a lot okay, I'm trying to I have so many thoughts in my head right now

Rod Williams (53:40.505)
Mm-hmm.

Rod Williams (53:59.079)
Yeah

Melissa Lapin (54:00.278)
There's a lot of compartmentalizing, you know, like there's us and them and this denomination and that denomination and you can have the gifts, but you can't do this. And you know, we can pray for salvation, but we don't pray for healing and salvation in itself is a miracle, you know, just cause the person didn't get out of a wheelchair, you know, those guys, like all of this scattered beliefs that we have.

Rod Williams (54:07.778)
Mm-hmm.

Rod Williams (54:11.103)
Yeah, yeah.

Rod Williams (54:22.572)
Mm-hmm.

Melissa Lapin (54:26.918)
What would be your encouragement for people right now? Because we can talk about deconstruction and reconstruction and the crap fest that's happened since 2020 and all the things and churches and shutting down and starting back up and home churches and all of that. And I do have like the listeners that I have come from all gamuts, you know, like even nonbelievers. No, I have nonbelievers that listen. And I love that. And.

Rod Williams (54:40.459)
Yeah.

Rod Williams (54:44.962)
Mm-hmm.

Rod Williams (54:48.363)
Yeah.

Rod Williams (54:52.43)
That's cool.

Melissa Lapin (54:55.842)
I think they're secret believers. They just, you know, they're just not sure how to believe, I guess. So what would you, how would you encourage them? What would you say to people who are just lost and confused and frustrated right now?

Rod Williams (55:06.104)
Hmm.

Rod Williams (55:13.718)
Well, that's a great question. I think I just you probably need to edit this but just to finish up on my journey. After Bethel we met John Crowder, Baxter Krueger, Francois Dutoy, recently met Dubb through Dan McCollum and all that. So that's

Melissa Lapin (55:15.332)
Hahaha

Rod Williams (55:41.294)
That's when we started doing schools and things like that. And so that's kind of, kind of end up the journey there. But yeah, here's my perspective, you know, after all of that, right? I took a stint in a home church network too, you know, I've just done a lot of different incarnations of the body of Christ, right?

Melissa Lapin (55:43.939)
Mm-hmm. Okay.

Rod Williams (56:12.989)
And...

Rod Williams (56:17.434)
We lost the plot, basically, in the church. See, Jesus is the center of all things. It's very simple. He's the creator of all things. The entire universe is inside Jesus. He sustains all things. Nothing was made that wasn't made by Jesus.

Melissa Lapin (56:21.504)
Yeah, for sure

Rod Williams (56:45.922)
Jesus isn't something you walk on, a little stick figure you walk on to get to the real God. He is the real God. We weren't made by a lone, solitary God who does not love by nature and is primarily a judge who reports to a God named justice and holiness above Him. We were made by the loving God.

Melissa Lapin (56:54.942)
Hmm

Rod Williams (57:13.794)
family of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Before we ever entered the picture, they had mutual, indwelling, other-centered love. The ultimate functional family, that's where we get hospitality, belonging, love, connection, family, all those good things. That's the origin of those. Individuality, expression, empowerment.

uniqueness began in them. The Father is not the Son, the Son is not the Father, the Spirit is not the Father or the Son. They're distinct, but they're in union. So union is not sameness, and distinction is not separation. So what we've inherited in the West is a gospel, which is really a non-gospel, that God is different than Jesus, and separate, and not

loving by nature and must be conditioned to love you through a sacrifice by Jesus, who is obviously not God, because we were told that God couldn't be in the presence of sin, yet Jesus hung out with sinners like the woman at the well all the time. So if we can have a God who can't be in the presence of sin, or we can have Jesus be God, but we can't have both. That's where we lost the plot.

is that if you've seen Jesus, you've seen the Father. And Jesus is the creator of all things. So our understanding of God should begin with our location in God and God's location in us. Jesus says in John 14-20, in that day you'll know that I'm in the Father and you're in me and I'm in you.

which is to say we're all together, there's no separation. But we're not sameness. This is where some people kind of get confused is not everything is God. There's God, the creator, and there's creation. We are creation, but we are created to live in union with God and distinction from God. In union, we have belonging, connection, family.

Rod Williams (59:37.762)
but in distinction we have individual value and freedom and agency and we are a unique color of Holy Spirit to paint the glory of God on the canvas of creation. And so my perspective now is that we have an accuser of the brethren, we have kind of a call it what you want, you can say it's a force, you can say it's a person, but we

thoughts that are not helpful to us, we have influences that are not helpful to us, and they divide. Holy Spirit unites people. Wherever you see Holy Spirit moving, people are loving, they're kind to one another. It's love, joy, peace, kindness, patience, all those fruit are evident. Other spirits, like the spirits of religion and politics, divide. And so what you'll constantly hear from them is us and them.

Melissa Lapin (01:00:18.239)
Hmm.

Rod Williams (01:00:37.934)
talk. You know, U2 has that great song about there is no them, there's only us, right? And so, when we're under the influence of Holy Spirit, we begin to see other people as not so different, even if they have different ideas. We can begin to separate their ideas from their identity. But religion and politics tell you your ideas are your identity, right or wrong.

Melissa Lapin (01:00:38.943)
Yeah.

Melissa Lapin (01:01:03.892)
Yeah.

Rod Williams (01:01:07.446)
They give you this, they have a marketplace of false identities that they sell to you through campaign slogans, through social media frames for your profile picture, through advertising, through discipleship classes, through denominational distinctives, etc. It's just division, division.

Melissa Lapin (01:01:23.651)
It... Yep.

Rod Williams (01:01:37.01)
The fundamental group I was in was one of 50-something splits off of something around the turn of the century. You trace the Charismatics, you know, this split, that split, you could draw all these trees, right? So religion and politics divide you up so you're more manageable and controlling, to be controlled. So religion and politics want to control you.

Melissa Lapin (01:01:46.646)
I'm gonna go get some water.

Melissa Lapin (01:01:58.326)
Hmm, yeah.

Rod Williams (01:02:04.942)
for their benefit, whereas Jesus wants to set you free for your benefit, right? Because he made you. So this is important to kind of get this framework because then you can discern what influences are coming at you like you're saying. Because it's easy to feel very fractured in this world, especially right now, because the way that you drive people in religion and politics into your camp,

Melissa Lapin (01:02:10.302)
Hmm.

Rod Williams (01:02:33.398)
is to show the differences between you and other people. And while you're talking about all that identity stuff, you're not talking about policies and doctrines and how they affect you, right? So for example, this doctrine of penal substitution that teaches in the church that God's not okay with you unless he kills his own offspring in order to be all right with you, which...

We wouldn't accept in any other context, but we're told that that's the nature of God, and that's the image you were created in. And so you see that creates cognitive dissonance in you. In politics, it's like if somebody thinks different than you, then you have a label you throw at them that they're just that. And religion does the same thing. Like when we were fundamentalists, those tongue-talkers were crazy, and they're going to lose their minds because of that.

Melissa Lapin (01:03:28.81)
Hahaha

Rod Williams (01:03:31.434)
you know all that stuff. God doesn't speak today. He spoke in the Bible for God's sake once and for all so much to the point that they actually think the Bible is God you know and the Jesus gives us how to read that book. He says you search the scriptures because in them you think you have eternal life but you don't see that they testify of me and you won't come to me that you might have life. So that's the

Melissa Lapin (01:03:43.413)
Hmm.

Melissa Lapin (01:03:57.706)
to.

Rod Williams (01:04:00.662)
I love the Bible more than ever. It's so funny. I was basically taught Biblioidoltery, you know, to worship the ink on the page in the book and memorize it and all that. It's good to memorize it, but the point is that it points to Jesus. So I think the key here is when you're trying to discern voices of influence in your life, are they making Jesus bigger to you or smaller?

Melissa Lapin (01:04:17.267)
Yeah.

Melissa Lapin (01:04:29.494)
Oh, so good.

Rod Williams (01:04:31.166)
Are they telling you that Jesus is different than the Father? Or that if you've seen Jesus, you've seen the Father? Are they telling you that there's a distance between you and God or that He's near? Paul when he's talking in Athens on Mars Hill there, I think it was Athens, he's talking to pagans, literally worshipping all these different gods.

Rod Williams (01:05:00.63)
Does he say to them, oh you're separated from God and if you believe in Jesus, if you say this magic prayer then Jesus will jump in you and now you won't be separate from God? No, what he says is he is not far from any one of us. And that he made you so that you would reach out and try to touch him and connect with him.

He preached the nearness of God. He preached that your location is in Christ. I bow my knees before the Father in heaven from whom every family on earth derives their name. That's Ephesians 3. And then in Colossians 1, 15 through 20, he says that all the fullness of God dwelt in Jesus. Nothing of God was left out of Jesus. And in Jesus, God and man met.

all of man and all of God met in the person of Christ. He was the mobile tapir and acorn made out of skin. He was the mercy seat. He was all of this. And when he died, the veil in the temple was rent into, top to bottom, inside out, once for all. So there is no separation. So that's one of the indications. And when you go back to reading people who were only

years removed from the disciples and Jesus. They talk about a much bigger God. They talk about, and they talk in beautiful language about a loving God, not a God who's angry and separated from you. I love the quote by Athanasius who says, the God of all is good and supremely noble by nature.

Therefore, he is the lover of the human race. You see, the early fathers and the people who hung around Jesus understood that God was good, he was for them. He would sit with you at the well in the middle of the day when no one else wanted to be around you because you were such a sinner and want to talk with you. And that he was for you.

Rod Williams (01:07:21.522)
When you saw Jesus, you saw the Father, he said. So when Jesus is sitting there talking with the woman at the well, the Father's sitting there talking with the woman at the well. And wherever the Father and the Son are, the Holy Spirit is. So the Holy Spirit was present. The Trinity was present when talking with her. When you saw Jesus talking with Zacchaeus and dining at his house, you saw the Father dining with the sinners at...

table at Zacchaeus' house and you saw the Holy Spirit. And that will just make people insane sometimes because they have this picture of this distant, angry, holy, other God. God is not other because he can't be in our presence. He's other because he wants to come utterly close so much that he's in our skin. That's what makes him other and holy. He's different.

Melissa Lapin (01:08:12.874)
Hmm.

Rod Williams (01:08:17.366)
than us who have so many separations in our lives. When you saw Jesus...

dismiss the accusers of the woman caught in adultery, you saw the Father dismiss the accusers of the woman caught in adultery. When you saw Jesus and the Father with that woman, you saw Holy Spirit with her. So when Jesus says, go and sin no more, it's not a, I told you so challenge. If that's your takeaway from that story, you kind of missed the point. But know what he's empowering.

Melissa Lapin (01:08:33.599)
Yeah.

Melissa Lapin (01:08:51.792)
Yeah.

Rod Williams (01:08:54.454)
You don't have to do that anymore. Because if, imagine her feeling the power of God that must have been around Jesus, and the affirmation of the Holy Spirit. In that context, the Trinity present affirming that she's of value and not worthy of being condemned, that's the context in which she says, go and sin no more, right?

Melissa Lapin (01:08:54.566)
Yeah.

Rod Williams (01:09:24.694)
But we tell people in the church, oh, you're always going to be a sinner. You're just a dirty rotten sinner. You know, well, I'm always going to sin. And that's why we have so much sin. But once you begin to see who you really are, that you don't have to do that, that you're loved, when you see that God doesn't run from you when you sin, but he runs to you, like the prodigal father runs when he sees his son coming towards the house, he runs and he has to, he can't.

keep his hands off of him because he wants to hug him, restore his sandals, restore the ring, restore his identity. Now, love doesn't control, so the father didn't go out and hog tie his son and drag him out of the pig pen, but you know he prayed for him every day, and you know he was looking for him. And the minute he turned towards home, he was running towards him. And God, at any moment when we turn our hearts toward home.

Melissa Lapin (01:10:08.831)
Yeah.

Melissa Lapin (01:10:16.212)
Yeah.

Rod Williams (01:10:21.57)
which is the good Father's table. When we turn our hearts towards home, He runs to us. And Jesus said, no one comes to me except the Father draw him or drag him. And so you can't come to Jesus without the Father being involved, without already being accepted by the Father. So you don't invite Jesus in, deplicate the Father, and then...

Melissa Lapin (01:10:43.205)
Hmm.

Rod Williams (01:10:50.434)
Later on you get baptized in the Holy Ghost There is an anointing that comes on people But you can't get Jesus without the Holy Spirit and you can't get Jesus in the Holy Spirit without the Father because they travel in A pack there is no separation They don't have Different agendas. They're one they're one they're one if you've seen Jesus you've seen the Father He had the full anointing of the Holy Spirit. They're all together

Melissa Lapin (01:11:05.782)
Thank you.

Rod Williams (01:11:18.926)
If you've seen Jesus, you've seen the Father. So when Jesus is in you, the Father's in you and the Holy Spirit's in you. And that's so important because many times we associate shame issues with the Father and we imagine, we really have an Old Testament view of the Father of Jesus or we have a pagan view. We think he's Janus, the two-faced Roman God, it's justice and mercy are in conflict, or love and fear are in conflict.

Melissa Lapin (01:11:33.418)
Yeah.

Rod Williams (01:11:48.214)
or we think he's Zeus, he's distant, and once in a while he'll throw a lightning bolt at you, or any of the pagan gods. We don't realize how that's still conflated in our understanding of who God is. But if you've seen Jesus, you've seen the Father. The Fathers always looked like Jesus. That's what Jesus came to reveal, because we had forgotten where we came from. We had forgotten the rock from which we were hewn. And so that was the image in which we were made, and God is restoring that in our day.

And there are more people to connect with if you're listening to this and you say, well, maybe a God who is not distant, maybe a God who's predisposed to love me, maybe a God who looks like Jesus might be of interest because I've heard about a God I was scared of. You know? John says, perfect love casts out fear.

Melissa Lapin (01:12:18.09)
Yeah.

Melissa Lapin (01:12:42.843)
Yeah, it's good.

Rod Williams (01:12:48.482)
Maturity in Christ is not balancing love and fear. Maturity in Christ is letting His love cast out your fear. Because fear is not your friend. Fear is just another spirit that divides, that disempowers. And 1 Timothy, it says, God has not given us the spirit of fear, but love, power, and sound thinking.

Melissa Lapin (01:12:57.951)
Hmm.

Melissa Lapin (01:13:07.282)
Hmm.

Rod Williams (01:13:19.266)
Safe thinking, some translations. So when you're not thinking clearly and you're feeling disempowered and you're not inclined to love, fear is probably nearby. And when we're stressed, we either listen to love or we listen to fear. Who will be your counselor? Love or fear? There is no fear in love. And

Melissa Lapin (01:13:34.89)
Yeah.

Melissa Lapin (01:13:44.223)
So good.

Rod Williams (01:13:48.002)
This is something we need to exorcise from the body of Christ, is this idea that you have to be afraid of God. Do you have awe and wonder? Yes, because He's a mystery. And mystery is not the absence of meaning, it's the presence of more meaning than we can understand, says Eugene Peterson. But there's a difference between that and fear. You think about a little child.

Melissa Lapin (01:14:09.221)
So good.

Melissa Lapin (01:14:13.619)
Yeah.

Rod Williams (01:14:18.902)
I can remember when my boys were little and we went out with our grandfather on this cement ship in our area, which is no more because of the storms we've had. But back in the day, you could walk out on there and fish, right? And when kids are little, they look at you like that's the most amazing thing in the world.

Melissa Lapin (01:14:31.766)
Thanks for watching!

Rod Williams (01:14:48.75)
throw it out there because they're still being not quite coordinated and any dad who's taking little boys fishing realizes he doesn't get a whole lot of fishing done because he's straightening out their lines most of the time. But they're in awe and wonder that you know how to do that and that you're sharing this experience together. But if they were fearful and you observed...

Melissa Lapin (01:15:01.54)
Hahahaha

Melissa Lapin (01:15:06.998)
Mm-hmm.

Rod Williams (01:15:18.242)
them being fearful, you would know there's something wrong, right? Because there's a difference between awe and wonder and a feeling of participation and presence and connection than there is fear. So we've got to be really clear about this in the body, is fear is not our friend. And the reason that we take fear as a substitute for what should be fear.

Melissa Lapin (01:15:29.636)
Mm-hmm.

Melissa Lapin (01:15:40.593)
Yeah.

Rod Williams (01:15:47.074)
the holy wonder and awe at fellowship with the mystery. But we don't get the holy awe and wonder at the fellowship of the mystery because we don't talk about Jesus enough for us to behold that. And so this gets back to the centrality and the simplicity and the power of Jesus who is the center of all things.

Melissa Lapin (01:15:49.385)
Yeah.

Melissa Lapin (01:15:52.776)
Yeah.

Melissa Lapin (01:16:12.658)
Yeah, yeah, and then and I love that I love every word of that because the all and wonder it does it I was thinking that it draws you we're curious we're like oh man let me get closer to that not like we just oh it's just so frustrating that there's that man humans have made God so

Rod Williams (01:16:28.642)
Yeah.

Melissa Lapin (01:16:42.466)
intangible and distant and I hate that and but then on the other hand there's this whole bunch of people now it's like you talk about Jesus too much you know why is it always about Jesus and I'm like oh what else is it supposed to be about you know I mean come on but

Rod Williams (01:16:57.551)
hahahaha

Rod Williams (01:17:02.094)
So that's a wonderful complaint for someone to say about you because like I said, one of the advantages of being older and having been through a lot of different, not everything, but a lot of different movements in the church and some that were, not sure they really were the church, but they were pretty cult-like.

Melissa Lapin (01:17:06.798)
Yeah.

Rod Williams (01:17:31.538)
is you get this perspective of what really works, what really changes people, what really improves their lives. And it is focusing on Jesus. So if someone doesn't wanna hear more about Jesus, and I understand sometimes it can be repetitive, but it's kind of like, do you have any music that you listen to more than once? Of course you do, because you appreciate the music. And sometimes the familiarity of it.

Melissa Lapin (01:17:41.266)
Mm-hmm.

Melissa Lapin (01:17:56.32)
Hmm

Rod Williams (01:18:00.422)
and memories associated with it enrich your life and your experience. And this is why we talk about Jesus. Why does Paul repeat the basics in the preambles of the first chapter or two of every one of his epistles? He's got business to do, right? He's got to correct people who misbehaving and all this stuff. But first it's like remember who Jesus is. Remember who you are in him.

Melissa Lapin (01:18:05.824)
Good.

Melissa Lapin (01:18:22.993)
Yeah.

Melissa Lapin (01:18:27.562)
Yeah.

Rod Williams (01:18:29.878)
Remember what he accomplished and remember how you should see other people in light of what Jesus has done for you. He reminds them of that. Why? Because we need to be reminded of that. Why is the comforter called the comforter, the paraclete, the one who comes alongside? Because we need to be comforted. We're discomforted sometimes. We're distracted. We need to be reminded.

Melissa Lapin (01:18:38.887)
Yeah.

Melissa Lapin (01:18:44.448)
Yeah.

Melissa Lapin (01:18:54.419)
Yeah.

Rod Williams (01:18:56.282)
So much of the church, I've started to have more of an appreciation for liturgy and a lot of the things in the eastern part of the church because

Rod Williams (01:19:15.134)
it reminds us, right? Because we forget, we lose it, we got the world, we have eternity in our hearts, we have the world in our face every day, right? And so we need to connect with what God has put us in our hearts. And that's all I've determined from my, just personally, that's the best I can do for people. I remember years ago, we visited someone who had a college ministry and...

Melissa Lapin (01:19:17.117)
Mm-hmm.

Rod Williams (01:19:45.39)
they were doing something else but he wanted us to say something and I remember thinking what can you say to someone in ten minutes that might help them you know. And I just read Colossians 1 15-20 because we just don't do that enough. We just don't see the beautiful language that describes how big Jesus is and who he is and who we are and him and where we're located and all that sort of thing. So I...

Melissa Lapin (01:19:54.059)
Hmm.

Melissa Lapin (01:20:09.139)
Yeah.

Rod Williams (01:20:14.834)
I don't mind if people complain about that. That's about all I do on Facebook and Twitter and other online things that I'm involved in because there's plenty of politics. A lot of people got that coverage. There's a lot of religious recruitment and this and that and the other, but we're only putting a drop or two in the Amazon every day.

Melissa Lapin (01:20:31.242)
Come on.

Melissa Lapin (01:20:38.491)
Yeah.

Rod Williams (01:20:43.722)
of the online world, but I appreciate what you're doing because having this focus is really what a lot of folks need. So much of what we do is humans.

Melissa Lapin (01:20:45.77)
Yeah.

Rod Williams (01:21:01.666)
is for us to feel significant, to feed our false identity, of comparing ourselves among other people so that we feel good about ourselves. I was pretty good at that for a while, but I realized there was no satisfaction in it, really. Not that God didn't do some good things, which He could win with any hand He's dealt, otherwise none of us would know Him. But...

Melissa Lapin (01:21:05.759)
Yeah.

Melissa Lapin (01:21:12.116)
Yeah.

Melissa Lapin (01:21:28.179)
Yeah.

Rod Williams (01:21:29.822)
As we mature, I think we see, that's why we have the beautiful language of the Fathers, because they caught on to this. They didn't have all the distractions that we have. They didn't have all the divisions. They were just like, hey, do you remember what Jesus did? Do you remember how we felt when we were around him? Do you see this aspect of him? Do you see his relationship with the Father? Do you see these things in the Holy Spirit? They had that sense of awe and wonder and astonishment, and they communicated it.

Melissa Lapin (01:21:41.705)
Yeah.

Rod Williams (01:21:58.562)
beautiful language. So I think more and more of the church is coming to that. A bunch of us are trying to start an online network that's kind of focused on that. It will be an interesting experiment to see how that works out. And you've got people like Dubb doing these schools that

Melissa Lapin (01:22:26.056)
Yeah.

Rod Williams (01:22:26.186)
are focused on that and other people. So I think there is a...

Rod Williams (01:22:34.454)
a trend toward recovering the openness to the Holy Spirit in one hand and sound doctrine in the other. And that's our roots. And there's sustainability in that, there's real transformation in that. Here's one other thing I would say that might be helpful to your listeners is, so often we want a set of steps.

Melissa Lapin (01:22:43.848)
Yeah.

Melissa Lapin (01:22:51.761)
Yeah.

Rod Williams (01:23:02.71)
that we execute to get a certain result. Right, because then we feel proud that we executed it and all that. But many times that's feeding a false identity of not dealing with the real issues that are negatively affecting us, but just giving us something else that we felt like we did. But we, yes, we love control, yeah.

Melissa Lapin (01:23:07.562)
Mm-hmm.

Melissa Lapin (01:23:22.001)
Yeah.

Yeah, well it's control. We can control that, you know? So yeah.

Yeah.

Rod Williams (01:23:32.81)
But the reality is we become what we behold. We manifest what we truly believe about ourselves at the core of our being. And this is why focusing on Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, who they really are, how they relate, the image in which we were made affects us. It's sort of like we look at that rather than ourselves and we become more connected with our true identity.

Melissa Lapin (01:23:39.516)
Yeah.

Melissa Lapin (01:24:00.619)
Mm-hmm.

Rod Williams (01:24:00.686)
Thomas Merton writes beautifully about this, the false identity versus our true identity. Our true identity is found more in silence than in words. And so part of beholding Jesus is inside we become quiet and we can begin to connect with the voice of God again.

Melissa Lapin (01:24:23.326)
Yeah, so good. I think we'll have to, I don't wanna stop. I just wanna sit here. Like I'm whacked right now. I'm sitting here and it's like, okay. But.

Rod Williams (01:24:34.947)
That's good. Well, I purposely went a little longer because I know you're going to want to edit some of that down. Because who probably went...

Melissa Lapin (01:24:40.566)
No, we won't edit it. It's we'll put it all out there. Now I'll cut it in half a little bit, but no, um, But that the silence thing that is that's huge. I have yeah to just Putting my two cents in two different spots the silence Like being quiet just being still That's huge because so much of our society is just big and loud and obnoxious

You know, we don't know how to be quiet. We don't know how to be still. There's so many studies. I study people and I love culture and all of that. And there are studies done, you know, that like other cultures can sit and be okay with each other and not say anything. And we as Americans, for whatever reason, we have to fill the silence. We will talk about the weather. We will talk about stupid shit.

But we've got to fill the silence and we don't know how to just sit and we do especially not with god Because if we sit with god He's going to tell us how bad we've been You know And and so there's that so that that's a whole other Talk on that but then also going back to I think what What would be key for anyone listening? um

Rod Williams (01:25:39.418)
Yeah. Yeah, I hear you.

Rod Williams (01:25:51.967)
Oh yeah, yeah.

Melissa Lapin (01:26:09.474)
A key to understanding this is community. Get in a community. Reach out to me. Reach out. There's a great community online that we're all kind of overtaking the Rethinking God with Tacos community on Facebook. There's some great conversation there. But put...

Rod Williams (01:26:15.546)
Mm.

Rod Williams (01:26:25.27)
Yeah.

Melissa Lapin (01:26:30.142)
We're not meant to do this. We were created by a family for family and we're not meant to do this alone. And I know that there are listeners out there who are absolutely terrified to ask anybody in their immediate community because of the shame of the religious tongue lashing that they'll get, and like, oh, you just need faith or that's heresy or whatever.

Rod Williams (01:26:47.032)
Mm-hmm.

Rod Williams (01:26:53.696)
Yeah.

Melissa Lapin (01:26:58.118)
you know, and they'll get kicked to the curb and ostracized and kicked out of their church like you did and all the things simply for asking questions. So I would encourage anyone who's listening, if you have questions, reach out, reach out to me, email me, melissa at after the well.org. I answer all the emails, hit me up on Facebook, hit me up on Instagram or anywhere else. Because

there are answers. You have questions and there are answers. And just to be able to sit with other people who understand love because they've experienced it and that God's not angry, that's

Rod Williams (01:27:46.018)
Yeah, that's good.

Melissa Lapin (01:27:51.498)
That's what I do. I hold people's hands. I mean, that's, that's what God created me to do is to lock arms and sit with people who, who are in a bad place. They're at the bottom of a dry well and I can hand you a cup of water or I can hand you a rope to pull you out. You know, those are the two things I can do. I won't leave you there either way. You're either going to get a drink and decide what you're going to do with that, or I'm going to put a rope around you and we're going to get you out of the pit.

So I think we should, yeah, let's land the plane there. And yeah, this was good. Thank you, Rod, for taking time out of your day. I love listening to you.

Rod Williams (01:28:30.574)
Oh, thank you. Thank you. So it's a lovely conversation. And I think down the road, maybe we have a conversation about developing a contemplation practice, which I'm kind of relearning. I sort of found that naturally at the beginning of my walk. And I kind of lost it getting busy with all these other things. And

Melissa Lapin (01:28:49.202)
Mmmm

Rod Williams (01:28:58.802)
Some of my friends are more in tune with that and I'm starting to read more on it. There is a world, a more quiet world that we're connected to.

Melissa Lapin (01:29:13.476)
Yeah, yeah for sure. I've um take it and really for me and I've been thinking I've been contemplating a lot about it um the more the closer I get and understanding um Jesus in the Trinity the more

Rod Williams (01:29:25.09)
Ha ha ha!

Melissa Lapin (01:29:38.758)
peaceful I feel myself because by nature I think I'm very hostile. I would rather punch you in the face than talk to you sometime right? I mean I'm like no we're gonna go let's do I'm a doer I'm constantly I mean people would say I'm an alpha female and I'm just like I'm not like a super high achiever but I I'm a goal setter I'm I go I do my hands are in all kinds of things and um

Rod Williams (01:29:41.527)
Yeah.

Rod Williams (01:29:47.251)
hahahaha

Rod Williams (01:30:02.445)
Yeah.

Melissa Lapin (01:30:05.626)
Not busyness. I never find myself busyness because I can always say no, I'm not driven by that But I do like to do things but I have found myself the closer I Get to understanding not that we ever arrive but really just sitting with the reality of the trinity in jesus like that

peace and patience and all of those things. I find myself just sitting and actually not wanting to go do anything. Like my favorite time of my day is when in the morning I get my cup of tea because I'm not a coffee drinker but I'll make a cup of tea and I'll go sit on my sun porch and I just sit. Like I have no agenda, you know.

Rod Williams (01:30:40.523)
Yeah.

Melissa Lapin (01:30:57.314)
And I just sit and it's just quiet and it's so peaceful. And then I find myself just sitting in my car sometimes, like with no music on or anything. I'll just sit because I'm enjoying just being, and I guess that's contemplation. I don't know, understanding I'm doing a Crowder's contemplation course. I bought the little mini course and I'm doing that. And when he talks about

Rod Williams (01:31:24.109)
Yeah.

Melissa Lapin (01:31:27.146)
Contemplation is not an agenda and I'm like, oh, you know, but I was accomplishing something, you know, and like re reworking my mind to, to let go of any and all expectations to do anything. And it's hard. It's so hard, especially in our very loud, shiny world, you know,

Rod Williams (01:31:33.514)
Yeah.

Rod Williams (01:31:45.741)
Yeah.

Melissa Lapin (01:31:55.106)
So, but yes, we could do a whole thing on that contemplation.

Rod Williams (01:31:58.058)
Yeah, that's really good and it's hard to describe. I'm reading A Sunlit Absence by Martin Laird and the first couple chapters in that are such a great introduction to this topic and that's a discussion for another time. I know we've got to land the plane.

Melissa Lapin (01:32:18.21)
Yeah, we can do that. Yeah. But cool. So I want to want to end here then. So thank you everybody for listening for joining this. I guess this is the end of the second episode. I'll have to go back and make an introduction for the for the second one. But again, reach out to me reach out to Rod through Facebook Rod Williams, you know.

Rod Williams (01:32:36.691)
Hahaha

Melissa Lapin (01:32:46.134)
If you got any questions about anything he said, go ahead.

Rod Williams (01:32:49.932)
So on Facebook it's Rodene Williams. There's too many Rod Williams and my wife's name is Eileen so it's Rod plus Eileen Williams. On Twitter we're DeltaKinos. We are on Instagram as DeltaKinos as well but we don't do a whole lot there.

Melissa Lapin (01:32:52.765)
Yeah.

Rod Williams (01:33:16.21)
you know we're uh... we're going to be part of this uh... grace awakening network that's coming up and uh... dubs on there and some of our other friends and uh... it's just beginning so it's a grand experiment uh... it's think on roku and then it's going to be on some other platforms as well but that'll be interesting

Melissa Lapin (01:33:37.582)
Okay. Yeah, I've been seeing that go through the tacos group. And yeah, I want to get connected with that and listen to it and share and all that kind of stuff. So fun fun. So thank you everybody for listening. Thanks for your patronage. And if this is your first time here, thanks. Hope you enjoyed it. If you got questions, hit us up.

Rod Williams (01:33:48.416)
Yeah.

Rod Williams (01:33:52.972)
Alrighty.

Melissa Lapin (01:34:03.386)
If it's not your first time here, then thanks for coming back. And like us, love us, share us on all the platforms, wherever you listen, because we want to stay up in the algorithm, because everybody's got a voice and this message needs to get out that, you know, Jesus wants to meet with all of us and it doesn't have to be big and flashy and religious. So there we have it. So thank you, Rod. I think you're awesome. And

Rod Williams (01:34:19.155)
Amen.

Ha ha.

Rod Williams (01:34:26.215)
Amen. All right.

Melissa Lapin (01:34:31.814)
Hang out for a second and we'll be done with this one.

Rod Williams (01:34:37.346)
Alright.

ATW - Conversation with Rod Williams

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