Release the hounds! Season 4 has begun. We’re launching into our riveting and slightly out-of-the-box exploration of the Kingdom of Light.
As we explore what it means to become more like Jesus, we realize that the journey isn’t just about assuming His characteristics. We must also understand and assume His purpose, His mission. Why did He come to Earth?
Though the West has largely forgotten the Kingdom, when we immerse ourselves in it, we realize just how vital it is to our journey into deep discipleship.
TRANSCRIPTION
The Forgotten Kingdom
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Welcome to Season 4, which is all about the Kingdom! Or perhaps more directly, the Forgotten Kingdom.
The Build-Up to Season 4
If you’ve been listening to Soil and Roots for any length of time, you know I normally do a quick review of the primary themes and ideas we’re exploring.
I eat, sleep, and breathe Soil and Roots, but, unlike me, you actually have a life. I assume you dart in and out of the podcast amid busy schedules, family activities, jobs, hobbies, and such. If you’re part of a Greenhouse, you spend a fair amount of time with your group, but you still have a lot of other obligations.
So, as we enter into this new season, I’m going to set the stage. This first episode of Season 4 is a launching point to get us ready for a deep and pretty out-of-the-box dive into the Kingdom.
Season 1
In Season 1, we set up the problem. Though Christianity consistently and prominently teaches that we are to be disciples and to make more, modern Christianity struggles to do so. This problem is widely accepted and acknowledged across denominations and traditions. It’s been called “the Great Omission.” The evidence of this lack of genuine disciple-making in the West can be seen all over culture and, frankly, throughout the church.
We have yet to explore the impact of the Great Omission on creation and the Seven Mountains of Culture –we’ll begin to look at that this season. It’s an eye-opening and disconcerting discussion.
We have explored the impact of a lack of disciple-making at the individual level and in the human heart. Because of our struggle to make genuine disciples, we often feel a sense of disconnection – an unspoken yet deeply felt sense that there must be more to a life in Christ than what we’re experiencing. We’re doing church, hosting Bible studies, and attending community groups. But the promises of the Bible and the characteristics of a deep disciple don’t seem to match my actual life. In quiet times of reflection, we get the sense we’re missing something.
This disconnection shows up in all sorts of places, oftentimes in our behavior.
Many years ago, Jessica and I were involved in a new church plant in our area, and we served there for about ten years. Recently, I was sitting down with a close friend who worked at the same plant, and we were reminiscing about the people we had met and engaged with over that decade.
The conversation turned somewhat somber as we began to realize the number of affairs, divorces, betrayals, relationship fractures, backbiting, and overall nonsense that had occurred in a relatively small church within a denomination that prides itself on doctrinal accuracy. Though certainly not true for everyone, for all its attention on orthodoxy, the church hadn’t seemed to produce a lot of people who were being formed by its doctrine.
I’ve tried to make this point a number of times. I’m not arguing against biblical doctrine – I’m arguing that solid biblical doctrine, as a set of intellectual statements, may be formative, and it may not. The question of spiritual formation goes deeper than a set of agreed-upon theological statements.
Case in point: We recalled a man in that church who, years ago, had specifically sought a wife who held to the church’s doctrines. In fact, he refused to consider any woman who wasn’t part of his theological persuasion. That was the story he told. A few years later, it was revealed he had been having a long-term affair with another woman, with whom he eventually left his wife and children.
I wondered if the “other woman” also held to his required theological persuasion.
My friend told me a story of a person who found out his pastor was having an affair, and this person wasn’t sure what to do. A well-meaning member of the same congregation revealed that three of the six pastors in her life were caught in affairs. In an attempt to be reassuring, she said, “Keep your eyes on Jesus. It’s Him we’re looking to, not the pastor.”
And now we’re getting to at least one of the roots of the Great Omission. It’s the modern, Western conclusion that “sin is sin,” or that “We’ll all sinners – we all make mistakes.”
While true, we perpetually fail to finish the thought. We now assume we’re going to sin as is, and we expect our leaders to continue to sin with no real expectations for anyone to grow to sin less, or, most positively stated, to love Jesus or anyone else more.
It sounds great on the surface – to just “look at Jesus” when we or those around us fail in some tragic sin. But it’s hard to reconcile this popular, incomplete idea with Paul’s instructions to the Philippians:
“Let us therefore, as many as are mature, have this attitude; and if in anything you have a different attitude, God will reveal that also to you; however, let us keep living by that same standard to which we have attained. Brethren, join in following my example, and observe those who walk according to the pattern you have in us.”[1]
If we’re truly becoming more like Jesus as we’re being formed, then should we not have the confidence of Paul to invite others to follow us as earthly, human examples of Jesus, whether we’re a “professional Christian” or not?
I’m pretty sure that’s the point. It sounds good to encourage people to just “look at Jesus,” but it also provides us a ready excuse to ignore our journey to become more like Him. We seem to be incredibly eager to give up on the journey of sanctification and to accept our sinfulness as an unimprovable fact. But this unconscious and dangerous idea flies in the face of discipleship’s purpose.
How many of us show up to church with the expectation of leaving the service a little bit more like Jesus? Not simply knowing more about Him, but being more like Him? How many of our churches have that expectation? Oh, they may expect us to adopt their belief statements, but if those belief statements have no impact on our hearts, what’s the point?
We’ll just keep having affairs on our theologically correct wives.
There are a host of other reasons for the Great Omission. Lack of church attendance, Western prosperity, lack of doctrinal consistency, innumerable entertainment distractions, not enough focus on the Holy Spirit, too much focus on the Holy Spirit, spiritual warfare, erosion of biblical orthodoxy, being known for what we’re against vs. what we’re for, too much intellectualism, too much emotionalism, a perceived rapid declining cultural morality, Western interpretations of biblical prophecy, a lack of clarity on what the word “discipleship” even means…and the list goes on and on.
So, in an effort to begin to chip away at all of this, in Season 1, we settled on a simple definition of discipleship. A disciple is an apprentice of Jesus for the purpose of becoming more like Him. It’s a life-long journey of formation, character formation, heart formation, or what is now typically referred to as “spiritual formation.” It’s an intentional, cooperative, formative journey to do the things Jesus did, to love like He loves, to relate like He relates, to give like He gives, to desire the things He desires.
I’ve heard it described another way: living as if Jesus were living my life. Ouch.
So far, so good. However, early on in Season 1, things got a little weird. We concluded that this journey of formation is not simply gathering information or adopting the right set of beliefs or even doing the commonly accepted Christian rituals– it’s the progressive transformation of often unconscious, yet extremely powerful, assumptions and conclusions that sit at the bedrock of our hearts called ideas.
If that’s not weird enough, we added this postscript: Ideas aren’t so much intellectual conclusions as they are experienced realities. In a culture that has been somewhat obsessed with rationalism for the last few hundred years, that sentence makes us squirm in our seats.
Soil and Roots. Our roots are our hearts, and the soil is the systems of ideas in which we’re rooted. Our hearts do embrace some ideas because of rational, reasonable instruction or persuasion, but there are numerous other factors in play: when and where we’re born, the ethos of our family of origin, influences from other key relationships, media, nature, joys and celebrations, abuse, trauma, and divine intervention. Ideas seep into our soil from all sorts of places, though primarily through relationships.
I love apologetics, and plenty of people have been argued into the Kingdom – no question. But when apologetics fail, it’s probably time to start talking about story and the relationships that formed us.
These ideas govern us, and they don’t always align with our intellectual beliefs. In fact, they often don’t.
So, the rest of Season 1 explores this admittedly unique way of looking at human nature and discipleship and concludes that our hearts become more like Jesus by experiencing Jesus, and as that happens, these ideas are progressively changed from darkness to light.
If our unconscious ideas bend towards light through experiencing Jesus, an obvious question arises: how do we experience Jesus? If we grew up in church, we know all of the stock answers: read the Bible, attend a weekend service, do devotions, go on mission trips, and join a community group. Those are all good.
But if we also agree that we are living in a culture defined by the Great Omission – that we aren’t being formed into this journey of deep discipleship – we may want to take a look at those good answers to see what we’re missing.
Season 2
Once we explore the journey of discipleship as the progressive transformation of ideas, we face a dilemma. If I am governed by these ideas, can I even determine what they are? Do I have the capacity to unearth, to uncover the ideas and desires that form me?
Doesn’t Jeremiah tell us our hearts are desperately sick? Who can understand them? If my journey with Jesus means I should know Him well, but I should also be growing in my understanding of my own heart and my own story, is it even possible to do that?
The good news is that, yes, at least to some extent, we can uncover the ideas and desires that sit on the bedrock of our hearts. In fact, Scripture is littered with invitations to do that.
Our hearts bubble up their ideas whether we want them to or not. God has graciously wired us with eight indicators – eight signposts that point back down to our hearts. If we’re courageously curious, if we invite God and a trusted friend to help us explore our indicators, we get a pretty good picture of what’s going on beneath the surface.
Many people won’t explore their indicators, but those who do typically take leaps forward in the discipleship journey. Our eight indicators are our thought patterns, emotions, behaviors, health, relationships, words, and how we use time and money.
Season 2 walks us through the eight indicators and how we explore them in order to uncover the ideas in our hearts. Here at Soil and Roots, we call this process Heartview.
Season 3
So, once we defined discipleship as the progressive transformation of our ideas and explored how we determine our ideas and desires, we asked, “What sort of environment is most helpful for this spiritual formation?”
Voila, Season 3. We discovered that human beings are best formed when we experience five key elements. These elements are common to any human formative experience, and they’re the elements that Jesus and His early followers modeled: time, habit, community, intimacy, and instruction. Unfortunately, most of us don’t have access to these types of specific groups. We live in a Gap.
So, recognizing and honoring the pace of Western life, our institutional churches, Bible studies, and community groups, Soil and Roots developed something a bit different: the Greenhouse – an immersive, five-element community specifically designed for the progressive transformation of ideas in our hearts.
It works. When we gather consistently for the purpose of becoming more like Jesus and employ rhythms and practices that recognize our particular time in history, we do, in fact, begin to experience the deep end of discipleship. We reconnect and begin to experience the “more” we’ve been missing. We sense we’re being “spiritually formed.” It’s a life-long journey, but it’s one best taken together.
The Spiritual Formation Movement
You may or may not be aware of it, but there’s actually a “Spiritual Formation” movement here in the West. And it’s growing. It’s only been around for 40 years or so, but it’s becoming an important piece of the Kingdom puzzle.
If you haven’t heard of it, don’t be surprised. I’m not sure they’re trying to be known. I wasn’t aware it existed when I started the podcast, but since then I’ve reached out to a number of pastors and leaders to better understand what the movement is and why it’s important.
There are some common characteristics of people who are, in some way or another, part of it. They tend to be kind. They aren’t particularly hurried. They focus more on listening than talking. Though they’re part of a movement, they don’t seem to be particularly interested in building a platform, social influence, or even institutional growth.
I’m not always sure how to relate to them. I was on a Zoom call a few weeks ago with a woman in the spiritual formation movement. She kindly asked if she could pray for us before we started our meeting. I dutifully bowed my head and waited. 5 seconds passed. 10 seconds passed. I wondered if I had misheard her and if she wanted me to pray. 15 seconds went by. 20 seconds went by. I finally looked up at the screen, wondering if we had gotten disconnected or if she had fallen asleep!
After about 30 seconds, she started to pray softly, and I realized she had, quite naturally, taken time to quiet herself, slow down, and contemplate how she wanted to approach the throne of grace. I was a bit embarrassed – not for her but for me! I never take time to quiet myself before talking with God. I normally just start blurting out whatever comes to mind.
There are several groups that offer classes and retreats, longer-term courses, and cohorts that focus on spiritual formation. They practice some of the things we explore in Greenhouses, such as silence, solitude, and confession. Some seminaries now offer advanced degrees in spiritual formation.
Doctrine is important, but I don’t get the sense they get too riled up about it. It seems they assume that, if we’re intentional about becoming more like Jesus, doctrine will sort itself out in time.
Many of us who grew up in typical protestant churches may not be sure what to do with this growing effort. It doesn’t look much like our modern Christian structures, apologetics, church growth movements, or programs. My sense is the spiritual formation movement endorses and supports those things, but that isn’t their focus.
Their focus is to slow down, listen to God, practice some ancient rhythms we’ve forgotten, and grow together more slowly into more like Jesus.
Spiritual Formation and the Kingdom
So, where does the Forgotten Kingdom fall in all of this?
Some of the pioneers of the movement, like Dallas Willard or Richard Foster, wrote and taught about the Kingdom, though the reason Soil and Roots emphasizes it so much is that the Kingdom remains largely forgotten, but it’s central to this slow, patient journey of heart formation.
Why is it central? Why is the Forgotten Kingdom the first primary problem, and why are we dedicating an entire season to it? Why do Greenhouses immerse themselves in it?
Because if the reason for our discipleship journey is to be formed more like Jesus, that doesn’t just include His characteristics, such as the fruits of the Spirit, wisdom, and sacrifice. It also includes His purpose. Why did He come? What, exactly, is He accomplishing?
There’s an essential overarching context here. We certainly want to grow to do the things He did, though we want to do so in the context of His purpose and mission. If we don’t understand His purpose, we’re going to struggle to become more like Him.
It’s funny, I keep using Michael Jordan as a reference point, considering I don’t like or watch basketball. But I assume most of you know who he is.
If you wanted to become more like Michael Jordan, you probably studied His characteristics. His work ethic, his discipline, and his willingness to take correction and be coached. Perhaps you admired the way he treated his fans or got along with his teammates.
But chances are you wanted to assume more of his characteristics because you saw them as necessary, integral, and central to His driving purpose – to win NBA Championships.
We don’t normally want to become more like someone who doesn’t have a clear vision and purpose. You may be related to the proverbial crazy uncle who’s a nice guy but can’t hold a job, wastes his money gambling, and only shows up when there’s free food. Chances are, he’s not someone you want to be formed more like. You may appreciate some of his characteristics, but you’re not all that keen on his purpose.
We tend to want to emulate people with extraordinary focus and vision. This doesn’t mean it’s always a sports phenom or rock star. We sometimes want to emulate people who change and shape culture and display inspiring selflessness. People like Mother Theresa or William Wilberforce.
If we want to become more like Jesus, it’s essential that we understand His overarching mission. Is His mission simply to save souls and take us all to a disconnected heaven one day, or is His mission bigger and more comprehensive than that?
Back to the Beginning
What will most likely make Season 4 different from other studies or experiences you might have had regarding the Kingdom is the way we’re framing our exploration. Because Soil and Roots is primarily concerned with the progressive transformation of ideas, we’re going to explore the Kingdom through the lens of a cosmic conflict of ideas.
Ideas sit at the bedrock of our hearts. Though we haven’t explored it yet, they also sit at the bedrock of much larger movements. We’ve been looking at ideas as they pertain to our individual formation, but individual formation inevitably leads to bigger and bigger formations, those of marriages, families, communities, cultures, and entire nations.
So, we’re going to explore the Kingdom of Light through the lens of its ideas, and the ideas of its defeated enemy, the Kingdom of Darkness.
If you’ve been listening or reading carefully through the last three seasons, you’ll discover I’ve been dropping hints and breadcrumbs about the Kingdom as an invasion of life-giving ideas into a world that had become overrun with ideas of destruction. The first hint dropped all the way back in Episode 1.
Dallas Willard discussed ideas in his book Renovation of the Heart and made a pivotal claim about idea systems. I just mentioned it in Episode 1, but I’ll share his larger quote here, as it provides some context for this season.
“Now, Christian spiritual formation is inescapably a matter of recognizing in ourselves the idea system (or systems) of evil that governs the present age and the respective culture (or various cultures) that constitute life away from God. The needed transformation is very largely a matter of replacing in ourselves those idea systems of evil (and their corresponding cultures) with the idea system that Jesus Christ embodied and taught and with a culture of the kingdom of God. This is truly a passage from darkness to light.
The apostle Paul, who of course understood and taught about these things, warned us that “our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the powers, against the world forces of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places.” These higher-level powers and forces are spiritual agencies that work with—constantly try to implement and support—the idea systems of evil. These systems are their main tool for dominating humanity.
By contrast, we who have been rescued “from the power of darkness and transferred … into the kingdom of his beloved Son” are to “let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus.” This is an essential way of describing the substance, the underlying reality, of Christian spiritual formation.”[2]
There’s a lot here, but we don’t need to pick it all apart in the first episode of the season.
SUMMARY
Let’s finish this introduction to Season 4 by summarizing where we’re headed.
1. Ideas sit at the bedrock of our hearts. They are largely unconscious assumptions and principles that aren’t so much intellectual conclusions as they are experienced realities. Though some of our ideas are shaped by instruction, many are shaped by experience and relationships. We aren’t brains on sticks.
2. If we accept that Willard is correct, then the kingdom of darkness primarily functions in this realm of ideas, working through elite philosophers, thinkers, and powerful cultural institutions to crop-dust entire people groups with assumptions that seep into individual soils. These ideas are designed to destroy, disintegrate, disconnect, disrupt, and ultimately lead to our deaths, spiritually, emotionally, and physically. Remember, there are no original ideas of darkness. All dark ideas are distortions of ideas of light.
3. We can then begin to frame the inception of the Kingdom of Light as the invasion, the in-breaking of the set of original ideas from Eden, now coming back to reclaim and restore what the kingdom of darkness had distorted all the way back in the Garden.
You may remember from Episode 2 that the kingdom of darkness was born when Adam and Eve embraced any idea of darkness in their hearts and in the soil. Soil and Roots. When Adam and Eve took this dark idea into their soils, what did they experience? Disintegration, distortion, and death.
What sort of ideas did Jesus bring with Him when He established His kingdom? What sort of themes do we find in His ideas? Repentance, rebirth, reintegration, redemption, restoration, reconnection, resurrection.
4. When we begin to frame this conflict between the two kingdoms as a cosmic battle between original, good ideas with distorted, deadly ideas, we begin to grasp the vast revolution that Jesus is leading. He is reversing the curse.
Just as darkness was born because of a dark idea embraced by the first couple, so we are reborn, recreated, and restored when we embrace His ideas of light. Just as the curse is cosmic, distorting all four of our relationships (with God, others, self, and creation), so the cure restores all four relationships.
Just to put a cherry on top, we’ll explore that Jesus didn’t simply teach and exemplify ideas of light. He is ideas of light. We’ll let that one bake in our ovens for a while.
Here are some of the areas we’re going to dig into this season.
1. What is the Kingdom? What do we mean by an in-breaking, an invasion of original ideas?
2. When is the Kingdom? That question has been hotly contested in the West over the past several decades. We’re going to step into that fray.
3. Where is the Kingdom headed? With great fear and trepidation, we’re going to explore some popular views of where the Kingdom and the world are headed prior to the end of this age. Talk about a powder keg. But it’s difficult to understand the Kingdom without exploring various views about the end times.
We’ve touched on ideas of expectation. Our hearts’ ideas about where we’re heading in the future impact our eight indicators right now. In many ways, we relate to the world around us according to what we expect. There is a vast difference between expecting rescue and relief but not expecting restoration and renewal.
4. What is our role in the Kingdom? If Jesus is confronting and defeating ideas of darkness with His ideas of light, starting in the human heart, what is our place in His mission?
5. How do we live in the Kingdom?
The Kingdom of Light is often described as “upside-down.” Jesus’ kingdom generally doesn’t work the way we think it should – His ideas are certainly countercultural and, in some ways, counterintuitive.
This entire season will help us get a clearer picture of Jesus Himself. Jesus and the Kingdom are intimately woven together, so the more we embrace His Kingdom, the more we become more like Him.
The Kingdom is a really, really big deal. And if we’re ready to journey into deep discipleship, it’s vital that we embrace not only Jesus’ mind-blowing characteristics but also His really, really big purpose.
[1] New American Standard Bible: 1995 update (Php 3:15–17). (1995). The Lockman Foundation.
[2] Willard, D. (2002). Renovation of the Heart: Putting on the Character of Christ (p. 98). NavPress.
