That which is built in the flesh has to be maintained in the flesh, but that which is built in the Spirit is maintained by the Spirit. What in the world does that mean, and how are you building?
That's today. Careful about the wise and foolish builders? One man built his house on a rock, while the other built it on sand. And when the storm came, the house on the sand was washed away.
But the house built on the solid foundation stood firm. Today, Chip's going to help us apply the moral of this story to our lives through an insightful conversation with a close friend. But before he gets going, if this is your first time listening to Living on the Edge, or you want to learn more about what we do, go to LivingOnTheEdge.org. You'll find resources on tons of topics and countless programs to enjoy. Well, here now is Chip to introduce his guest and tell us a bit more about today's topic.
Chip? Thanks so much, Dave. I have a special guest, a great friend, Greg Dietrich, and we're going to talk about what it means to build in the flesh versus building in the Spirit. For some, that might be a bit of a weird thought or a phrase you haven't heard. For many, you understand exactly what that is, where we try to do the Christian life in our energy, by our willpower.
We are trying really hard to do the right things for the right reasons, and that often leaves us burned out, discouraged, and not experiencing at all what God wants for us. Today, Greg Dietrich, long corporate experience, a graduate of Cornell, kind of hit the pinnacle, if you will, of the corporate world as the president of Kentucky Fried Chicken. So, Greg, tell us a little bit about, if you will, I want to just jump right in, of kind of your story because a lot of people, if they looked at your life, the one that you say needed to radically change, they would say, that's the life I've been dreaming of.
Yes. If I look back at corporate life, I had made it. I was a success, at least in the eyes of the world. I was an executive at PepsiCo when I was very young. I got assigned to the spinoff team that took the restaurants that were part of PepsiCo, KFC, Taco Bell, and Pizza Hut, to form Yum. I was on the team to form that, and I became the chief people officer of the largest restaurant company in the world.
There were over a million employees around the globe belonging to us and our franchisees. I was the president of KFC for five years. I got to retire early. So, in a lot of ways, I had reached my dreams.
I had achieved the goals that I had set, to your point, that most people would look at and say, that's amazing. Also, in the church world, I had been a lay leader in the church world since my 20s as a deacon and as an elder. I took a couple of years off corporate to be the executive pastor of a megachurch.
As people were looking at me, they would say, wow, in both spheres, Greg has really been successful. But as I was retiring physically, emotionally, and spiritually, I was burned out. I was burned out not only on business, but I was burned out on ministry. As I was finishing up that season, I knew that couldn't be all there was. There had to be more. There had to be more to life. When Jesus said in John 10, I came to give life and life to the full, I knew there had to be more to it. But what was it?
How do I find it? Part of that, as I was leaving, one, our marriage, Shelly and my marriage, which we've been married for 44 years now. But there was a season where we didn't know if we were going to make it. Where every day was, we had to make a decision.
We're going to stay in it, we're going to keep going, and we're going to work our way through it. I was suffering from some anxiety attacks that came after me as performance shifted in the business and rocked my identity, which I'll talk about. As I was leaving, I had no passion to re-enter business. Even though I was young enough to do that, I had no passion to re-enter ministry. The basic joy of life, in a lot of ways, had departed from me. My pursuit of success, in a lot of ways, sent me into this brick wall, which I thought was a brick wall at the time.
It actually turned out to be God. I remember saying to the Lord, I just want to be like Moses after he fled Egypt. He went to the side of the hill to tend his father-in-law's sheep. He didn't want to own them. He just wanted to be there tending them. I said, Lord, I'm going to do that.
Even if you send two burning bushes, I'm not going anywhere. A few weeks into that, I realized I'm only 50. I can't sit still.
I don't golf. I had a time to reflect back and say, how did I end up in this situation? I thought I was doing my best to serve God, doing my best in my career, to serve a church. For my family, I thought I was pursuing success the right way. But essentially, I had become a tired servant, operating out of self-sufficiency.
In that season, that's when I ran out of my own strength. When you run into a brick wall, you have a tendency to surrender. In surrender, I said, Lord, I really need your help.
You've got to do something, and I need your help to make it forward. That was really the beginning season. It started with surrender, which I think is one of the principles you always talk about. Everything good God does begins with our surrender. You have walked through the Christian life. I've been studying the Bible for a lot of years. God gave you some insight and a lens of how I think a lot of people with the best of intentions trying really hard to be very good Christians really land in a place where it feels a lot more like a job, a lot more like no matter how much you do, it never really measures up. What are some ways that you viewed life or yourself or God that really were inhibitors, and then what did you learn that could help those of us that are very sincere and yet may feel really like that tired servant?
Yeah. I remember in that season of really just hunkering down and just being with the Lord and a season of asking Him a lot of questions and trying to hear His voice, I remember in my journal writing down this phrase a couple of times. The first time was, Greg, you got it all wrong. Now, when you don't hear from God in that way very often, and the first thing you hear is you got it all wrong, you're off to a bad start. But at that point, I was just hungry and wanting to learn, and I felt the gentleness of God in the same way that He said that. And what He revealed to me is that my faith had become a code of ethics. It was a series of behaviors that I had identified that would identify me as a Christian, and they became these guidelines and guardrails. And as long as I was doing those things and in those guidelines and guardrails, I was a good Christian. And the Lord just revealed to me in that season that's like the law.
The law gives us behaviors, but it's really there just to point out we can't follow it. And in that season then, the Lord flipped that around. He took me back to the first commandment, which is to love the Lord with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. And as I started meditating on that, I took a word search Bible study through wholehearted and halfhearted love. What He showed me is I was halfhearted in love with Him, that yes, I had a love for Him, but I love these other things more. And so I remember feeling like the guy in the Gospels who said, Lord, I believe. Would you help my unbelief? I said to the Lord in that season, Lord, I love you, but would you teach me how to love you wholeheartedly?
Because I don't know how to do that. The next thing I really felt was that the Lord revealed to me in kind of this phrase, the problem isn't that you don't love me. I'm like, Oh gosh, I got a bigger problem. He says, the problem is that you don't know me because if you knew me, you couldn't help but love me. And at first I was kind of defensive around that because I was like, what do you mean? I read the Bible, I know scripture, I've done memory verses, I've been in church all my life. But what He was showing me in this season is I knew a lot about Him, but I really didn't know Him. And that led me to kind of this whole notion of Lord, would you teach me about you? And one of the ways He did that, one of the ways that He opened my heart chip beyond some of the process and the exercises we do to try to draw close to God was He took me to a Christian workplace conference shortly after I was leaving corporate.
I think He lured me there because He knew I'd go to something like that. And I heard this guy praying. And as he was praying, I felt like I was eavesdropping on an intimate conversation that he was having with Jesus. And I said, wow, I don't know what that is. I thought he was getting up to pray for lunch, but like 10 minutes into it, I realized this is not a lunch prayer. This is somebody who knows and loves Jesus in a way that I don't.
And I don't know what you call it, but that's what I need. And later I found out it was called Adoration Prayer. And ironically, what the Lord did is He took me back to when Shelley and I went through our deep pit around our marriage. We dug in, we went to counseling for over a year.
We drove an hour to find the counselor who really understood us. And one of the things He taught us, He says, don't say to Shelley, I love you. Say to Shelley, I love you because. And so when I say to Shelley, Shelley, I love you because I see the kindness in you when you answer the phone and somebody says, can you meet? And you say, yes, you don't have anything on your schedule when I know you do, but you make time.
Or you get up from the table. I see your love for me. When you get up for the table, you rub my back as you go by me as I'm sitting in the chair. Not because it's your love language, but because you know it's mine. You know, Shelley, I see your kindness to the kids because you're doing things for them they don't even know.
And when I say that to Shelley, our intimacy is much different than if I say I love you. And the Lord was showing me, Greg, it's the same way with me. Why do you love me? Not for the things that I've done for you, your salvation or your sanctification, but what about me?
What do you know about me that causes me to love you? And about that time, as God would have it, there was a panel of people talking and this guy talked about a similar journey to mine. And he said, what opened his heart to God was Psalm 103.
He said, if you can know God in the first few verses of Psalm 103, then you can know God. And it goes, God, I love you because you're the God who heals. You forgive all my sins. And if that's not enough, you heal all my diseases that cause those sins. If that's not enough, you redeem my life from the pit that those sins take me into. If that's not enough, you crown my head with love and compassion.
And if that's not enough, you satisfy me with good things. And I remember just being on a journey for several weeks. It's like really getting to know a God that acts in that way towards me. And it really opened up my heart. So I started the I love you because prayer of adoration prayer to who God is.
And it really changed the trajectory of my intimacy with him. You're listening to Living on the Edge with Chip Ingram, and we'll get you back to Chip's interview with Greg Dietrich in just a minute. But let me quickly tell you, we are more than a broadcast ministry. We're passionate about supporting pastors globally, developing helpful resources, and sharing the gospel with this next generation. So if you'd like to partner with us in these areas, go to livingonthedge.org.
Well, with that, here's the remainder of today's program. That's a really big difference than if you're an activator, if you're a let's make it happen person, if you're a type A personality. And that's how we ended up leading stuff. But I took that into my relationship with God to where, yes, I studied, I memorized verses, I shared my faith. But unconsciously, a lot of it was, I'm doing things saying so that God would love me. In other words, I'm obeying for his love. And I think one of the things you and I have talked so much about is intimacy. And it's different when you love God and you serve from his love. Yeah, absolutely.
I was very performance-based, as I know you were at seasons of your life. And so that really creates a misplaced identity. And so as a result, your relationship is conditional. It's shakeable. As we're performing well, as we're behaving right, as we're doing the right things, it's good, it's strong.
When it's not, it's bad. And so it became this shifting sand. Now, what I discovered is in my head, I knew that I was a child of God. Romans 8 said that, Greg, you're an heir of God's kingdom. You're a co-heir with Christ.
I mean, those are amazing concepts. But the real truth was, I didn't really live from that. I lived for the validation that performance could get me. And that was the truth, not only at work, but at church and in my walk with God. It was like I was working to receive that which God had already given me and grace, and I wasn't receiving it. And I remember you said something to me, and I maybe had even heard it before, but there's just seasons in life where you really take it in and you said, nothing you do today could make God love you anymore, and nothing you do today could make God love you any less. And I remember that landed in the right place in my life, and that seed grew, and it replaced the lie that I had been believing around my performance is what equates to my walk with God.
Well, Greg, I am really close to this story, and I've been sort of a partaker as well as an observer. What I heard you say was, intimacy is at the heart of building in the Spirit, and that the key to intimacy is something that I think is hard, especially, I'm just going to say for men. Maybe it's hard for women too, but adoration, this thought of just telling God how much you love Him for who He is, I watched you change. I mean, I watched a metamorphosis. How did that experience where, you know, it still required discipline, you spent time with Him, but it was through a different lens. How did that change how you saw yourself, and did it have any impact on, say, your marriage or other relationships?
Yeah, absolutely. And by the way, it's interesting because you said it took discipline. I heard a phrase that captured the very heart of this for me, and for me it went from a devotion to discipline to a discipline to devotion. And one is, I am devoted to a series of things, steps, processes that are behaviors and other things that I'm expected to do. And the other is, I discover what opens my heart to that person, and I am disciplined to do those things which open it up. And again, I go back to the marriage example.
Shelley and I had to learn how to rebuild intimacy. And the Lord, He used that experience. He didn't cause that issue in our marriage, but He used that experience to teach us and then said, okay, it's this way with me, and by the way, it's this way with everybody in my kingdom. It's all about you getting to know people and seeing the God design in them and see them through my eyes and my heart so that you can encourage and equip and inspire them. Whether they're your children, whether they're your friends, whether they're the people I put in your life at the grocery store, it's like it's adopting this new lens that then becomes the way you see people and see life through. So it very much shifted that.
And I remember in that season of you got things all wrong. I remember reading the passage, Matthew 11, 28, where Jesus says, my burden is easy and my yoke is light. And I remember saying, I'm not experiencing that. This feels heavy.
Did somebody misinterpret the Greek here or something? And it was an invitation from the Lord to see Him in a new way in the way He works with me. I was a tired servant.
I was burned out on doing the things I was supposed to do. And they were leading me either to some spiritual pride at times, not that I'd admit, but subconsciously or feelings of failure. And what the Lord revealed to me in that season is that I was operating on a self-sufficiency. It was my skills, my talents, my effort that I was counting on to deliver the performance that would validate my faith and my relationship.
And the Lord wanted to break me of that. And one of the ways He did that is He took me to the life of Abraham. He was going to be the father of the nation for Israel. But the problem was they aren't having a baby and he's laid into his life.
His wife, Sarah, is barren. And so they conjure up this scheme for him to sleep with the maidserv in Hagar. And as a result, they birth Ishmael. But the problem was Ishmael was not the child of the promise. And Abraham understood the purposes of God. He knew he was to do this, but he took things into his own hands, became self-sufficient. In that season, there was a reflection for me. He says, Greg, you're a lot like Abraham.
In fact, you not only birthed Ishmael, you've got a whole village of Ishmaels. And I remember the leadership book you sent me from one of your mentors, Chip. And in it, there was this phrase, left to our own devices, we'll run off and do Jesus' will, God's will in our name. And that's what I was like. I was thinking I had the purposes, but I didn't have the plans. And the reason was I wasn't partnering with God. And it's really the heart of the concept where you talked about what's built in the flesh is maintained in the flesh, what's built in the spirit is maintained in the spirit. And the way the Lord walked me through that process is the beginnings of Ironbell ministry.
When we first started out and we were learning these concepts around adoration, I'm like, okay, Lord, I love this. I'm a builder. Show me how to take this forward and what to do with it. And I'm in my let's happen, make it happen mode.
And there's nothing coming from it. And I remember pleading with me saying, Lord, you know me. You know I'm a builder.
Just give me the blueprints and I'll go build it. And I remember getting a gentle rebuke in my spirit. And I felt like the Lord was just saying, Greg, if I give you the blueprints, you'll run off and build it without me. And I'm trying to teach you how to build in the spirit with me, how to partner with me. That step, once again, required surrender.
And I remember being called out to a staff meeting that you were holding and you asked me to facilitate a discussion and I thought I was going to help you. And you gave a talk on 2 Corinthians 12 and you talked about Paul pleading for the thorn to be removed from him. And here's Paul, right?
Three times. And the Lord says, no, my grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness. And I love, for the first time, what really came through, what was Paul's response? He says, okay, I just want to know how to release power. I'm going to boast in my weakness then. So it became this whole aha, like I'm operating out of the wrong system.
I've got it wrong. I'm raising myself up to be self-sufficient and have these skills and make these things happen. And the Lord say, no, it's your dependence and weakness that's going to cause power to rush through you. As I'm listening to you, I'm thinking how many people were there going, wow, what a difference, instead of now that I've got God's will, I've got to go do it. It's let's go do it together. And we're getting fairly near the end of our time and I want to ask you if you have time to come back for our next broadcast because what I happen to know is that there's a journey that you have gone through where you sort of break down how partnering actually happens. I mean, if I'm listening to you right now and I'm a go-getter like a lot of our listeners are, it's like, oh man, I so resonate with that.
But don't leave me out there like, hey, good luck, you know, here's the great concept. And in fact, that's one of the reasons, Greg, that I told you as you begin to unpack this and I've watched you do it in your life, that's why it needed to be a book. And of all things, imagine the title of this book, Building in the Spirit, Discovering the Life God Destined for You. And I just want to say to people, you know, I had the privilege of writing the foreword and I think the first line is, I can't think of a book that most Christians need to read any more than this one. And that's not hyperbole, it was more of, I meet so many Christians that are so sincere, have the right intention, and just over time, and maybe because it's such a struggle in my own life, is we have done a lot in the flesh and there's a lot of tired Christians, burned out Christians, or now they've even gotten to where they're faking it a bit.
And I'm talking about leaders, I'm talking about pastors even, I'm talking about missionaries, and there's this private isolation and I think it breaks God's heart. When we're in His yoke, it really is light, or it really fits, is a good translation there. That illustration you shared, I use all the time in my own personal journey, because left to myself, I'm a, thanks to the blueprint Lord, I'm running. And it's like, what are we going to do together? That is, you know, He puts His arm around me, let's go get them together. So, if you are resonating like me, building in the Spirit, we have that available here at Living on the Edge, just go to our website, we would love to help you build in the Spirit and really grow spiritually. Any final thoughts before we wrap things up, Greg? I would just say, if you can come away from this discussion understanding that we are working from value, from a validation standpoint, from a good Father who says, I love you, I'm with you, and now we get to partner with Him to do the things that He's laid on our heart, then I think you're off to a really good start. Amen. It just takes such pressure off and brings such joy in. Amen. Amen.
