Ep 25: The World As Best As I Remember It, Vol II

Season 2 ends by asking critical questions about modern Christianity: how has postmodernism impacted our faith and our churches?  How has it impacted our discipleship?  Brian digs into three primary concerns: the disproportionate elevation of the intellect, the devaluation of the individual, and the loss of an integrated view of ourselves and reality.  

Lastly, we discuss a potential criticism of Heartview – the habit of uncovering our hidden ideas and desires.  Doesn’t it focus too much on the self?  Isn’t it just Christian navel-gazing?

We’ve covered a ton of ground so far!  Over the first two seasons, we’ve introduced the three primary problems in the West: the loss of the Gospel of the Kingdom, the loss of genuine discipleship, and the loss of true communities of spiritual formation.  That last challenge – what we call The Formation Gap – will be the focus of Season 3.  Stay tuned!

As always, you can find out more about the Soil and Roots podcast by visiting www.soilandroots.org.

TRANSCRIPTION

Ep 25: The World As Best As I Remember It, Vol II

Welcome to the last episode of Season 2!  As always, welcome to those of you listening on your own or with your families, and to those who are part of Soil and Roots Greenhouses.  We’ve talked about them on and off for the past two seasons, but if you don’t know what they are, we’ll be exploring them in detail starting next episode!  As a hint, they are groups of 4-12 people who gather regularly to explore deep discipleship, spiritual formation, story, and how we grow to be more like Jesus.

We’re finishing up our exploration of the Discipleship Dilemma, one of the key obstacles to our spiritual formation.  And we’ve discussed how to solve it.

We started Season 1 by reminding ourselves of a condition in modern Christianity articulated by Dallas Willard – the Great Omission. We are struggling to make genuine disciples – apprentices of Jesus who are being formed more and more like Him.  Evidence of this shows up in lots of places, but we tend to feel it as a sense of disconnection: from God, from others, and even from ourselves.  In our quieter moments, we wonder if there is more to the Christian life than what we’re experiencing.  In fact, there is, and it’s found in what we call “deep discipleship.”

Willard said that this process of becoming more like Jesus centers around the transformation of ideas in the depths of our hearts: often hidden, unconscious assumptions that govern and power who we are and how we operate in the world.  Sometimes these ideas align with our beliefs, but not always.

We then dug into what an idea is, how many sets of ideas there are, and how our hearts come to embrace them.

Here in Season 2, we’ve vetted what is one of the primary problems that hinders our spiritual formation: the Discipleship Dilemma.  Our journey to become deeper friends with Jesus is somehow interconnected to our willingness to explore our hearts – the ideas and desires that truly form us.  We don’t hear much about this process of “self-probing” in modern times, which is the dilemma.

So, we’ve looked at this dilemma from a few different angles, but we don’t want to be a podcast and ministry that only talks about problems.  We want to propose solutions!  A key part of the solution to the Discipleship Dilemma is practicing Heartview – the very practical way we learn to discern what our hearts are up to.

According to Jeremiah, our hearts are deceptive and sick (Jer. 17:9). When we become Christians, the Holy Spirit makes His home in our hearts, but we are still at war as we wrestle with ideas of darkness and ideas of light.  That’s a bummer.

But the good news is that our hearts have a way of expressing their ideas, even when we aren’t aware of it.  Our ideas show up in our thoughts, emotions, health, behaviors, relationships, words, and our use of time and money.

Not to oversimplify Heartview, but it’s just a habit of looking at our Indicators, then at Jesus and His indicators, and exploring the differences.  Do we think like He thinks?  Do our words sound like His?  Do we relate to people the way He does?  Do we emotionally react the way He does and to the things He does?

After all, if the point of discipleship is to become more like Jesus, we need to understand ourselves, and we need to understand Jesus.  And that takes courageous curiosity.

Evil in Idea Systems

Last episode, we took a sweeping view of the last 2,000 years of Western thought, and I proposed to you that the chaos, nonsense, and harm in our current age exist because of a war, a spiritual war of ideas.

Remember, Dallas Willard taught that darkness spends most of its time attacking humanity through powerful idea systems.  Why?  Because it’s an efficient way to spread evil. The devil is a crop duster. He spreads his ideas into the air…air that we all metaphorically breathe.

Willard was commenting on this spiritual warfare from Ephesians 6 when he wrote, “These powers and forces are spiritual agencies that work with the idea systems of evil. These systems are the powers’ main tool for dominating humanity.” [1]

If you’re concerned about the breakdown of the family, the increasing power of governments, and the cultural loss of truth and reality, you are concerned about a war between two Kingdoms in the realm of unconscious ideas.

This war centers on monumentally powerful Ideas of Identity.  Who are we?

After taking a saunter through the history of Western thought, I proposed to you that we are in a new era, an era in which many human beings have no context for assuming that their identity is found in a divine being or power.  Instead, the assumption is that we are divine beings.  If you suggest that to them, many will disagree, but humans are asserting divine characteristics at almost every turn.

I get to decide who lives and who dies, and I get to determine what’s true and what’s not. I get to decide my gender, my sexuality, my happiness.  I get to decide my identity.  My own version of reality.

These are claims of divine rights.  And we make divine claims to satisfy our desires.

Here’s the problem with that. In Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis wrote, “For any happiness, even in this world, quite a lot of restraint is going to be necessary; so the claim made by every desire, when it is strong, to be healthy and reasonable, counts for nothing.  Every sane and civilized man must have some set of principles by which he chooses to reject some of his desires and permit others.”[2]

Most of us don’t want to hear that today, that our desires may need to be restrained, and our unconscious ideas should honor some set of principles.  Those are offensive statements to someone who unconsciously assumes they have divine authority.

As Carl Trueman wrote, it is a Strange New World, and it’s one that Christians better come to grips with pretty quickly.  Because engaging with a culture of wannabe gods presents challenges we haven’t seen before.  And the assumptions we make about cultural engagement, evangelism, political work, church institutions, and neighbor engagement need to be revisited and reconsidered.  If there was ever a time for us to be Sons of Issachar, people who understand the times and what to do, this is it.

So, as we close out this season on the Discipleship Dilemma, let’s take a look at a few ways post-modernism has influenced modern Christianity and its institutions, and thus our individual spiritual formation.

Post-Modernism and Christianity

Quick reminder: there are four primary periods in Western civilization and thought: ancient history, the Middle Ages, modernism, and postmodernism.

Though the Middle Ages certainly weren’t perfect, the underlying assumptions (what we call Ideas in the Air) were most likely the closest to biblical reality in that period.

Jesus and the birth of the church turned Greco/Roman ideas on their heads, and though it took a few hundred years, medievalists understood basic anthropology, culture, and God’s preeminence over all things, and His involvement in all things.

The Age of Modernity tore at the fabric of those ideas, and by the time we reached post-modernism and the moral revolution in the 1960’s, many if not most of the Ideas in the Air from the Middle Ages were forgotten or corrupted. Modern Christianity hasn’t escaped that corruption.

Three Examples

Let’s explore just three pieces of evidence of post-modernism in contemporary Christianity: the disproportionate elevation of the intellect, the decline of the individual, and the loss of a holistic, integrated view of reality.

1. Disproportionate elevation of the intellect

Post-modernism obviously developed out of modernism, and modernism began to fragment humans into parts and culture into pieces.  When Descartes said, “I think, therefore I am,” modernists took him very seriously.  The Age of Reason elevated the mind, the intellect, over other aspects of humanity that make us…well…human.

It also elevated certain fields of study, such as science, over other disciplines, such as music and the arts.  We still see this prioritization play out today, with public school systems cutting their arts programs first when they face budget problems.  The arts tend to take a back seat to reading, writing, and arithmetic.  What’s the underlying message?  The so-called “rational fields” of study are more important than the arts, which are considered expressive and passionate.  This is a natural outcome of a society that values facts and figures over artistic expression and creativity.

Our five senses, our relationships, the arts, nature and creation, beauty, spirituality, emotional experience – these are things modernism devalued. And that carried into post-modernism.  What can be observed and studied is where truth is found.  What can be expressed and valued is simply a matter of opinion.

We prize the natural and ignore or condemn the supernatural.  Facts are essential, emotions are volatile and unpredictable.  Theology and doctrine are the crux of Christianity. Story, experience, intimacy, nature, and creation…these often get relegated to the back seat.

Though post-modernism is only seventy or eighty years old, it’s already beginning to collapse under its nonsensical weight. Whereas just a few years ago, post-modernism meant that truth was relative, so “you do you” and let’s just leave each other alone, that no longer cuts it.

The popular slogan “you do you” has been replaced with “I’m going to declare my reality, and you’re going to embrace and affirm it.”  That’s a profound and quick shift in the unconscious ideas in the air.

This is why “tolerance” is being thrown out the window.  True tolerance means we disagree, but we respect each other and our disagreements.  But that isn’t the modern definition of “tolerance.” Tolerance now means that we may disagree, but you will accept and affirm my position and my “truth” …or else.

This phase of postmodernism is shrugging off its previous commitment to rational thinking, a leftover from modernism, and replacing it with the self-deification I talked about in the last episode.

But overall, the modern Church still disproportionately elevates the intellect.  Knowledge, information, and rational thinking continue to be held up as the highest human endeavor, and the church often reflects it.

Corporate worship is necessary, and the preaching of the Word is essential. But as I’ve argued before, many Protestant churches unconsciously assume that the weekly sermon is the pinnacle of our spiritual formation.  Many churches organize their time, resources, and energy around the weekend corporate worship service, and the peak of the Protestant service is the sermon.  There are very strong biblical and traditional reasons for corporate worship and preaching, of course, but have we elevated the intellectual interaction with a sermon to the point where we forget or ignore the other necessary elements that form us?

In many churches, the point of singing songs and praising God is to prepare our hearts for the sermon. We tend to evaluate and grade our pastors based on their sermons.  Many churches hire pastors based primarily on how they construct and deliver their sermons.

But is the sermon the primary way our hearts are formed into the likeness of Jesus?

That would be an odd conclusion, because there’s no other type of experience where we would consider a thirty-minute monologue to be the prime catalyst of our spiritual formation. We looked at various highly formative experiences back in Episode 11: the New Testament church, our early childhood, the military, marriage, and college. None of those experiences assumes a weekly, non-interactive lecture is the pinnacle of our formation.

In Desiring the Kingdom, James K.A. Smith opens his book by creatively and compellingly arguing that the modern mall is a more immersive, spiritually formative experience than the average church.  From its intentional architecture, lighting, atmosphere, presentation, engagement of all five senses, messaging, and relationship–building, the mall encourages… worship.[3]

It brings us into an immersive culture whose objective is to mold us to desire the things the mall offers.  Marketers and advertisers have a deeper understanding of human anthropology than many Christian institutions.  Advertisers know our desires aren’t shaped primarily through intellectual argument or apologetics. They’re formed by engaging the totality of our humanity through a holistic experience that molds our desires through atmosphere, community, imagination, and human interaction. Through story, through engaging our hearts, not just our heads.

There is some further irony here.  Many churches are comfortable serving the entire human being in immersive communities…when we’re children.

Our Kids Get It

Take the average Sunday school class.  Sometimes there’s story time, or maybe a hands-on arts-and-crafts project. I loved those as a kid.  The kids may sing or play a game that illustrates the lesson for the day.  The Sunday School room is probably decorated with colors and pictures – visual reminders of the beauty of creation and God.

Sunday school isn’t just a lesson. The kids are encouraged to participate, to ask questions, to explore the topic.  The teacher intentionally asks questions to help the kids embrace the subject.  The children hang out with their friends.  They laugh, they joke, they talk together about what they’ve learned.

Vacation Bible School?  It’s Sunday school on steroids.  There’s an immersive theme that carries through the entire week. Gasp – the kids sometimes go outside to hear a lesson, see a skit, or play a game that reinforces the study.  They eat together, they share stories.

All of the senses are engaged, the topic or study isn’t a monologue (it’s a dialogue), and the assumptions of close fellowship, communication, and community are built into both Sunday school and VBS.

But something happens when we become adults.  Some of us look down our noses at a church that uses PowerPoint slides, visual aids, or, heaven forbid, decorations and props on the stage to support a lesson.  Then there are those crazy churches that use smoke machines and lights – those don’t belong in a church.  Creating an immersive worship experience that entices not only our ears but also our eyes?  That’s just too contemporary.  What about a drama team or liturgical dance?  Shameful.  Those don’t appeal to our…intellect.

As a musician, I’ve participated in just about every type of church service you can imagine -from Pentecostal services with people running around barefoot and waving flags to high church services with awesome pipe organs and huge choirs. So, I’m not knocking one style of worship service over another.

I’m saying that while we intentionally foster spiritually formative experiences that engage far more than the intellect for our children, we then “grow up” and expect that the adult worship activities must appeal primarily to the mind, and we often get offended by churches that incorporate things that appeal to our heart, or our eyes, or our nose, or our emotions.

How about Bible studies or small groups? When was the last time you held a small group outside and used nature to support the lesson?  Try playing Duck, Duck, Goose on your porch with your adult group before your next get-together. I guarantee your discussion time will be the best it’s ever been. Someone needs to start a VBS for middle-aged Americans.  That would be amazing.

In his book Knowing God, J.I. Packer wrote, “…there can be no spiritual health without doctrinal knowledge, but it is equally true there can be no spiritual health with it, if it is sought for the wrong purpose and valued by the wrong standard.”[4]

Yes, we are to renew our minds, as Paul states in Romans 12.  But Paul doesn’t say the only way the mind is renewed is through listening to sermons and doing Bible studies.  Our minds are renewed through experience, through relationships, through community, through habit. Read the verses around Romans 12:2. Paul mentions presenting the entire body to God, and then he follows up verse 2 by discussing the importance of other people – sharing our unique gifts in tight, intimate communities because we are part of one larger body.

The modern church’s assumption that our spirits are formed primarily through the intake of knowledge is incomplete.  And it’s a holdover from modernism and post-modernism that elevates the intellect over the holistic, biblical view of what it means to be human.

Just one final point on this.  The Bible is an immersive, formative book.  It appeals to the theologian, but it also appeals to the storyteller.  It’s got history, it’s got poetry.  It’s got sex, violence, intrigue, and war.  It’s got romance, betrayal, heartache, and heartbreak.  It has villains and a hero.  It tells us about Saul going to the bathroom and about terrifying experiences with angels. One guy dies because he dropped the ark of the covenant, but Jesus saves the adulteress from stoning.  It’s earthy, and it’s heavenly.  It answers many questions but also leaves a lot on the table for us to explore, which we’ve been doing for a few thousand years.

It appeals to our intellect.  But it also appeals to our hearts, it appeals to our senses, it appeals to our spirits, to our emotions.  It’s a grand narrative that invites us to go along for the journey but also to see our own stories woven into it.

The Bible recognizes and appeals to our humanity – all of it.  Not just our minds.

2. The devaluation of the individual.

In post-modernism, the individual isn’t special or unique.  We’re all higher-level animals trying to eke out our existence in whatever ways please us. Post-modernism inevitably leads to large institutions, big governments, and centralized control. The individual loses her uniqueness and becomes a statistic.

How does the devaluing of the individual play out in modern Christianity?  Ironically, it’s often through growth.

I’ve heard pastors of growing churches over the years celebrate their church’s expansion while bemoaning the challenges of growth: constant capital campaigns, more and more programs, and the fact that people get lost in it. The pastor and staff can’t get to know everyone anymore.  There are just too many people.

But God is apparently moving because more people are showing up, so we’re going to build bigger institutions to handle the growth.

As churches grow, people go from being unique faces with unique stories to numbers.  Maybe the church started as a small group where the pastor could legitimately disciple others, but he’s not really a pastor in that sense when his congregation grows so large.   He becomes a preacher, a teacher, perhaps a business leader, a CEO of a large non-profit.  But he can only engage with a small number of people.

So, the church invests millions of dollars in infrastructure that’s used maybe 20 hours per week, and the pastor grows in influence. He writes books and has a radio program. That’s all fine and good. We live in a communication age, and we certainly need good teaching and preaching.

But, where is the individual?

We tend to blame so-called “consumer Christianity” on the individual Christian. Too many people are staying home, or they come to church only to receive and not to give.

Really?  Have we stopped to consider that when we build large churches in which most of the congregation won’t have any relationship with a pastor or leader, and are instead formed into the idea that they grow in Christ through coming to a weekly event to receive a sermon (not to dialogue about it), to buy some books and maybe a coffee…some may get the idea that we are, in fact, to consume Christianity?

Can we not agree that, at least in some cases, the modern church has made Christianity a product? Perhaps the mall analogy isn’t that far off from the church after all.

And why do we assume that butts in seats mean God is moving?  Churches grow for many reasons. Maybe the population around the church is growing. Maybe the teaching is heretical, but people love it.  Maybe the pastor is funny, and people enjoy laughing.  Maybe they like the music’s style.  Maybe the church has few expectations for its people or asks little of them, so it grows because it’s an easy place to check the box.

People show up for lots of reasons. It doesn’t necessarily mean God is moving.

So, you have one church that’s growing attendance at 50% per year, and another that isn’t growing at all, but that pastor is pouring his life into his small congregation, and they are being formed into the likeness of Jesus because of it.  Are you going to tell the second pastor that God isn’t moving because he isn’t building a new building?

Does this type of thinking impact pastors?  How many pastors seek advice and counsel from pastors of larger churches, just because they’re larger?  Sometimes I think the megachurch pastors should hang out and ask for advice from the guys with 100-person congregations.

Here’s the irony. Church leadership can easily prevent people from falling through the cracks. They can get to know every person who comes on Sunday morning.

Cap the growth.

When we grow to such and such a number (250, 500, 1,000, whatever) we’re going to cap the church and plant another church with another pastor three miles down the road.  We’re going to plant neighborhood churches of a certain size so that the pastor and the staff can build relationships with everyone in their congregation and have a tremendous local impact.

I don’t know if that sort of solution ever crosses people’s minds, but it seems like an idea we should at least consider.  If we want to honor and serve the individual. If we don’t want to accidentally cultivate consumer Christianity.  If we want to make disciples, we need to understand that making disciples is not simply a matter of offering sermons, teachings, and books for people to consume, regardless of how gifted a communicator the senior pastor is.

It’s probably obvious I’m not a big fan of large churches, nor am I a fan of Christian celebrity culture. Over my career, I’ve worked with leaders of large churches and small churches, and I prefer the humility, intentionality, and grounding of a pastor who isn’t trying to build a platform and who wants to love and care for each member of his congregation.  Yes, they give up bigger salaries and name recognition, the approval of other pastors, and maybe even their envy.

I’ve worked with a few large church pastors who seem to keep their feet on the ground.  But not many.  Too many of them begin to believe their hype.

However, it’s certainly true that God works in and through big churches.  They have facilities, money, and resources that smaller groups don’t have.  They certainly spread the Gospel and impact communities.  And some large church models do intentionally try to emphasize individual spiritual formation, though I don’t know how effective those efforts are.

What I’m saying is that, generally speaking, the larger the institution, the smaller the individual.  The larger the institution, the less personal discipleship there is.  And the emphasis on church attendance growth and building larger institutions over the spiritual formation of the individual and family aligns with post-modern concepts. It certainly isn’t New Testament or medieval, both of which emphasized the value and uniqueness of the individual, and a small community required to form hearts into the heart of Jesus.

Our motivation should drive us to be faithful, not necessarily successful.  So, we should be careful not to apply post-modern and post-industrial metrics to our spiritual life. God’s economy doesn’t work like ours.

3. The third evidence of post-modernism in the church is the loss of an integrated view of reality. 

My guess is that one of the other primary problems, the Forgotten Kingdom, is due in no small part to modernism and post-modernism.  And so, we unconsciously assume we are disintegrated people living in a disintegrated world, and not the other way around.

What do I mean by disintegrated people?

Take an average Christian couple whose been married for ten years or so. They go to church; they do Bible study.  They talk about Jesus with people when they have an opportunity.  But if you were to ask them to rate their marriage on a scale of 1-10, they might be honest and give it a 2 or 3. There’s no adultery or major sin. They just sort of exist together.

Why?  Because, although they say they believe the Gospel of the Kingdom, that’s not the Idea of the Gospel in their hearts.  They don’t hold to the idea that the Gospel radically transforms all aspects of life and creation – including marriages. They have their fire insurance. They’re going to heaven when they die.  But instead of confronting the brokenness and woundedness in themselves in their marriage, they just plod along.

A Christian marriage is a metaphor for the church’s relationship to Jesus.  I don’t think that marriage is characterized by bad ideas, bad habits, and simply existing with one another.

By accepting a mediocre marriage, we practice disintegration.  We promote the idea that the Gospel is about our souls, and not about all four relationships: with God, ourselves, others, and creation.

How about the Christian who claims that Christians shouldn’t engage in politics, but should simply “Preach the Gospel?”  That engaging in politics risks being infected by the world and is out of focus with the “true mission” of the church?  Our role is to evangelize, so if we just save everyone, the politics will take care of itself.

This is just one of the dangers of making converts and not disciples.  The Parable of the Sower tells us the potential impact of evangelism. It doesn’t always stick.

Remember, evangelist Ray Comfort said that some 80-90% of all verbal professions of faith may be false.  In an emotional moment, people say a prayer or make a profession, only to immediately return to the lives they were living without any genuine heart change.

A convert who isn’t being discipled can do damage to the Kingdom. Just consider those very vocal Christians who make the news every four years and proclaim their loyalty to a candidate for office who supports abortion or assisted suicide, or who supports the destruction of the family.

We sit back and gasp and say, “Well, how could they believe such things?”  Easily.  It’s what happens when we think the church’s job is only to evangelize, not to build effective communities of discipleship.

If Christ is Lord of All, and if Colossians 1 tells us Christ came to reconcile everything, then did He come to reconcile or redeem government? That’s worth marinating on.

Modernism began to split religion from the rest of culture.  Marx told us that religion is the “opiate of the masses.” He thought it was a drug to make people feel better, while the elites and intellectuals took over to discover and promote the real truth.

Post-modernism finished the job. The separation of church and state (at least as it’s currently promoted) sends a clear message to people of faith that the state has its business, and the church has its.  But don’t bring religion into the state. Those two things can’t mix.

But of course, they can mix, and they do mix.  They must mix.  We live in an integrated world.  You can’t have a political stance without a religious one.  Everybody on the planet has a worldview, and everybody’s worldview is rooted in (guess what) our theology.  How we view politics, business, the family, church, media, the arts, education…they’re all grounded in our theology, whether we’re conscious of our theology or not.

Our view of God, humanity, origin, sin, redemption, and the future shapes every aspect of life, including how we vote, how we shop, who our friends are, what jobs we have, and what causes we support.

When modern Christianity retreats to church buildings and fails to see any major role beyond evangelism, it unwittingly promotes a disintegrated view of reality.  It doesn’t seek to increase the cosmic Kingdom of Christ in all of creation and culture.  It positions itself as a continually weakening mountain of culture that shouldn’t have much influence on the other six mountains.

Christ is over all, through all, and in all.  He is working in a myriad of ways, and He uses us in the lives of other people in the same way. And He invites us to engage with creation and culture in myriad ways.

Back to Mere Christianity, Lewis wrote,

“He works on all of us in all sorts of ways, not only through what we think our ‘religious life.’ He works through Nature, through our own bodies, through books, sometimes through experiences which seem (at the time) anti-Christian. When a young man who has been going to church in a routine way honestly realizes that he does not believe in Christianity and stops going – provided he does it for honesty’s sake and not just to annoy his parents – the spirit of Christ is probably nearer to him then than it ever was before. But above all, He works on us through each other.”[5]

We are integrated people living in an integrated world. And the more we begin to notice Jesus growing His Kingdom through all of creation and culture, the easier it is for us to join Him in that work.

Ok, lastly, I’m going to close with just a brief comment on a criticism of Heartview.

Heartview as Navel-Gazing?

This whole season has been about looking at ourselves.

Granted, I’ve said like a hundred times that Heartview is a journey that must be taken with God and at least one trusted friend, but the essence of Heartview is exploring our Eight Indicators.

It takes time and energy to ask questions about why we think, feel, behave, relate, and speak the way we do.  Why we’re physically, mentally, and spiritually healthy or unhealthy, and why we use time and money the way we do.

A criticism could be leveled that Heartview spends too much time on the self.  That it’s selfish, Christian navel-gazing, too focused on me and not enough on other people.

There are entire strains of modern Christianity that would look at Heartview and consider it a waste of time or perhaps even harmful. Just spend more time in prayer. Read your Bible more.  Go learn some apologetics.  Go serve others and get your mind off yourself.  Get your mind on Jesus because that’s who Christianity is all about.

Well, Christianity is all about Jesus.  But guess what? Jesus is all about you.

This comes down to a question of love and desire.  If we desire to become more like Jesus, it is because we want to love like Jesus.  Love the Father like Jesus, and love others like Jesus.  Love ourselves like Jesus.  Love creation and culture like Jesus.

My argument has been that modern Christianity often makes some bad assumptions about the Gospel, about what it means to be human, and about what truly makes a disciple.  A disciple may well be someone who memorizes a lot of Scripture and agrees with solid doctrine.  He may be someone who has deeply spiritual experiences, worships with hands raised, and uses the gifts of the Holy Spirit.

But isn’t a disciple…truly…someone who should remind us of Jesus?

In John 5, Jesus makes this remarkable statement:

“You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; it is these that testify about Me; and you are unwilling to come to Me so that you may have life.”[6]

Jesus is a person.

Jessica and I have been married for a few decades now.  We’ve become more and more like each other in many ways.  We think alike; we can complete each other’s sentences.  We sense the other’s emotions.  We’re both free to get angry and complain, but we are also free to be sarcastic, silly, and goofy.  We’re comfortable talking to each other, and we’re comfortable sitting in silence.  We disagree on a few topics, and we know what they are, but for the most part, we’re unified in how we see the world.

When we first met, Jess was pretty serious, but now she’s more lighthearted, sometimes uncommonly loud, and boisterous. She pokes fun at herself and others, but is also a fantastic listener.

I used to be the life of the party, but over the years I’ve slowed down, become more thoughtful, and more sober-minded.  I still laugh and joke, but I’m calmer. We’ve rubbed off on each other, and we’ve grown to be more alike in the important ways, while still being very much ourselves in others.

There’s a comfort, a deep familiarity, and a bedrock sense that we can be who we truly are as individuals, and still be one.  Yes, that’s built on trust, but it’s also built on a willingness to explore and understand ourselves.

We know each other. We know a lot about each other, but we know each other.

This is the life of a disciple. In our relationship with Jesus, we grow to become more and more like Him. It’s not really about personality per se. We don’t get a crystal-clear picture of His personality from Scripture.  It’s about His character, it’s about what moves Him.  It’s about His heart and His profoundly deep love for God, us, and His creation.

So, is Heartview self-centered and too focused on ourselves?  No.  It does look back to older contemplative practices that we’ve largely lost in the postmodern, high-tech, transient era.

But I think Heartview is the point.  If we truly want to love as Jesus loves, the way to do that is to explore our hidden ideas and our desires, bring them to Him, and ask Him to form our hearts into His.  Does it require us to be vulnerable? Painfully so.  Does it require trust? Absolutely.

But in the end, if we grow to think, feel, act, relate, speak, and love like Jesus, isn’t it worth it

[1] Willard, D. (2012). Renovation of the Heart (p. 98). NavPress.

[2] Lewis, C.S. (1980). Mere Christianity (p. 100). HarperOne.

[3] Smith, J.K.A. (2009). Desiring the Kingdom: Worldview, Worship and Cultural Formation, (pp. 19-24). Baker Academic.

[4] Packer, J.I. (1973). Knowing God (p 22). InterVarsity Press.

[5] Lewis, C.S. (1980). Mere Christianity (p. 190). HarperOne.

[6] New American Standard Bible: 1995 update (Jn 5:39–40). (1995). The Lockman Foundation.