Ep 17: The Bedrock (Bonus Episode)

Why do we sometimes act in ways that contradict our beliefs?  Is it true that “we are what we believe,” or is there something deeper in our hearts we need to explore? What is our bedrock?

Bonus Episode! As we continue our journey through the Eight Indicators, Brian takes a pause to provide some more flesh and context around the Disciple Dilemma and the practice of Heartview.  

And he introduces two new visual resources!  Make sure you pull up Creation Picture 2 and Heartview, two new handouts available for free on the Resources page at www.soilandroots.org.

Let’s dig into the very bottom of our hearts and find out how we might mine the depths of who we truly are.

 

TRANSCRIPT

The Bedrock of Deep Discipleship

Intro: Welcome to the Soil and Roots podcast: digging beneath the surface to uncover the hidden ideas that form us, our churches, and the culture. I’m Brian Fisher.

This is Episode 17: The Bedrock

Introduction

This is a bonus episode, where we take a short breather and back up to digest and mull over what we’ve covered so far. To help us along in our journey, we’re introducing two new visual aids!  So, head over to the Resources page at soilandroots.org and check out the two resources called “Creation Picture 2” and “Heartview.”  We’ll be explaining them in this episode.

Back in Season 1, we started exploring the concept of “deep discipleship.”  It’s the later stages of our journey of character formation to become more like Jesus so that we do the things He taught us to do, relate like He relates, and ultimately love like He loves.

But modern Christianity is suffering from a profound lack of genuine disciple-making. That’s something with which virtually every modern theologian and church leader agrees. Dallas Willard called it “The Great Omission. 

Janet Hagberg and Robert Guelich explained it another way: they suggested there are six stages in our journey to become more like Jesus. But most of our institutional churches only introduce us to and guide us into the first three. Stages 4, 5, and 6 are unknown or mysterious to most of us, the Journey Inward, which includes the Wall, the Journey Outward, and living a life of love. 

We often sense a lack of deep discipleship.  We look at the various promises in the Bible about powerful prayer, abundant life, peace in the midst of trials, unity among diverse groups that seem to defy explanation, and a certain “centeredness” in our identity, value, and purpose.  When Peter talks about the Christian life as “participating in the divine nature,” we just aren’t sure what to make of it.[1]  What we read in the pages of the New Testament seems a bit more like fiction than what we might actually be living.

We may sense this nagging disconnection between ourselves and God. 

Though let’s face it, we’ve become masters at covering up this sense of disconnection with work, busyness, church activities, leisure, various addictions, and even our doctrines. 

Normally, we don’t contemplate heading into the deeper end of discipleship unless we hit the “Wall,” some sort of crisis that shakes up our world.  Sometimes we press into the wall, but often we head back into the first three stages, missing an opportunity to experience a richer journey. 

We concluded that our spiritual formation is often hampered by Three Primary problems currently facing modern culture: The Forgotten Kingdom, the Discipleship Dilemma, and the Formation Gap. 

The Discipleship Dilemma

This season is all about that second problem, the Discipleship Dilemma. In order for our hearts to be formed more like Jesus, we need to know Him and His Kingdom well, and we also need to know ourselves well.  However, this idea of exploring our own hearts, of uncovering the hidden ideas and desires that govern us, is not a common or popular notion in modern Christianity. 

In an age when self-worship is becoming increasingly common, we tend to swing the pendulum too far in the other direction, and we end up missing out on some necessary pathways in our spiritual journey.

Theologians often refer to this part of deep discipleship as “double knowledge” – we search the heart of God while also searching our own hearts.

Authors Randy Reese and Robert Loane explain why this double knowledge is vital to our discipleship:

The sort of attention to our stories that we have been suggesting is akin to the attention Paul suggests when he exhorts the young pastor Timothy to ‘pay close attention to yourself and to your teaching…’ Beyond getting all his doctrine and teaching in order, Paul challenges Timothy at the level of his personal character…

One may object to Paul, saying, ‘Isn’t that a bit selfish?’ or ‘Should I really be thinking about myself like that?’ Is this attention any more self-centered than a pilot taking care to practice and gain confidence in his or her skills before taking passengers for a ride, or any more selfish than an athlete training prior to competing, or a soldier drilling before going to war?

…We can be dreadfully self-deceived in matters of our own heart and true beliefs.  Self-deception is one of the defining features of sin…

…One of the realities that emerges from the testimony of those who have walked with the Lord before us is that a heart to know God more intimately requires an openness to discover oneself more truthfully.[2] 

They sum up, “In many cases we can become stuck in our Christian lives not because we are ignorant of Scripture but because we are ignorant of our own hearts.”[3]

In fact, one of the crucial characteristics of a deep disciple is courageous curiosity. Curiosity about the heart of God, about the hearts of others, and about our own hearts.   When we stop being curious, we stall our discipleship journey. 

Heartview

The core, the center of who we are, is our hearts, our spirits.  But mining our hearts and others’ can be tricky business.  Our hearts are mysterious, they can be deceptive, and they’re often sick.  That’s why attempting to discern our hearts by ourselves isn’t particularly helpful.  It’s a cooperative experience with God and a trusted friend or two. 

The great news is that our hearts can be uncovered and explored if we’re willing to listen and pay attention.  Most people don’t, but those who do find themselves in the deep end of discipleship, where the riches of the faith are found. 

The key to discerning our hearts is found in the practice we at Soil and Roots call “Heartview.”  God has created all of us with Eight Indicators, signposts that point us back to what’s really going on in our core if we’re willing to explore them.  If we’re “courageously curious” and engage God and a friend in the journey, we often find patterns in our Indicators that reveal hidden ideas we may not even be conscious of. 

If we take a breath, pause, and carefully examine our thoughts, emotions, health, behaviors, relationships, words, and how we use time and money, we can uncover these ideas of darkness and light that so powerfully drive us.  And that’s a pathway to freedom. 

Because we don’t normally talk about discipleship like this – the transformation of hidden ideas in our hearts– I’ve tried to explain this journey in a few different ways.

• It’s like finding the 3D image inside popular 90s pictures called Stereograms.  Once we train our eyes to see the images, finding them becomes easier.  The same is true with ideas. Once we train ourselves to spot ideas in ourselves, others, and culture, it becomes somewhat second nature.

• It’s like being “awake” or “attuned” to the heart of God, the hearts of others, and our own hearts. We learn to pay much closer attention to hearts compared to just words.

• We’ve referred to it as “digging beneath the surface” or, like A.W. Tozer said, engaging in a sometimes-painful process of probing our hearts.

To some extent, it’s a matter of slowing down, paying attention to things we normally don’t, and then asking “why?”

Why do I tend to dominate conversations?

Why do I consistently think about my spouse in a negative way?

Why do I struggle to put money away in savings?

Why do certain people or certain words trigger me and set off a flurry of emotions?

Why do I insist that others around me act and behave in certain ways that make me comfortable?

Why am I so preoccupied with how my friends and family members view me?

Why do I feel disconnected from God, others, or even myself?

The reason why so many of us don’t engage in Heartview is probably obvious – when we start looking for patterns in our Eight Indicators and asking “why,” we may not like the answers.  They may point to sin, hurts, harms, or parts of our stories we’d rather not revisit. 

The Story So Far

So far this season, we introduced the first two Heartview Indicators: thoughts and emotions.

Our thought patterns tell us a ton about what’s going on in our hearts.  Sometimes, the underlying ideas that drive our thought patterns are not ideas from the Kingdom of Light.  Our assumptions about God, others, ourselves, and our role as rulers of creation get corrupted or damaged.

In our busyness, we don’t normally stop to think about what we think about, but when we do, we may be surprised.  We discover our thought patterns don’t always match up to the way Jesus thinks about us, others, or His good earth. 

In the Christian community, we tend to view our emotions in one of two ways: either we’re hyper-reliant on them (we bounce from experience to experience to keep our emotions high or happy) or we’re stoic. 

We consider so-called “bad emotions” such as anger, grief, and sadness to be un-Christian.  Having these emotions for too long means we obviously haven’t learned to be content, or we haven’t yet embraced the fact that the “joy of the Lord is our strength.” 

But if we’re to grow into more of who Jesus is, we recognize that Jesus is a deeply emotional human being. David was a man after God’s own heart, and we recognize that he expressed – very clearly – an incredibly wide array of emotions in his story and Psalms. 

And yes, his so-called negative emotions were not only tied to his own remorse when he sinned, but he also expressed emotions when wrongs were committed against him. David expressed anger, confusion, fear, and sadness when he was victimized by other people. 

Emotions are wonderful indicators of the ideas and desires in our hearts.  And emotions will find their way out of us – even if we don’t express them emotionally.

Creation Picture 2

So, while we explore the Discipleship Dilemma, Heartview, and being courageously curious, let’s step back and take a look at our two new visual aids. 

Let’s start with the one called “Creation Picture 2.”  This is the Creation Picture we introduced in Episode 1, but we’ve added some layers and text to it now that we are deeper into our journey. 

Here’s a brief review of what the Creation Picture represents:

The circle represents all of creation and the cosmos.  The seven mountains in the background represent the seven areas of culture: family, education, business, government, media, arts & entertainment, and the church.

The tree in the middle is you, the other trees around you are other people in your life.  The roots of your tree represent your heart, and the roots are planted in the soil. The soil is the ideas that your heart embraces, these somewhat hidden assumptions and principles that interact with our desires. 

So, here’s what we’ve added to this 2^nd version of the picture:

We’ve talked about Ideas in the Air and Ideas in the Soil; Ideas in the Air are now labeled.  They’re found in creation and culture, and also come from other people.  Ideas in the Soil are those specific to your heart.

Remember, ideas come from two places: the Kingdom of Darkness and the Kingdom of Light.  Ideas of darkness are designed to kill you. Ideas of light bring life and flourishing.

Both Kingdoms’ ideas are in the air and in our soil. Ideas in the Air are both dark and light. Ideas in our Soil are both dark and light.  

So, discipleship is when ideas of darkness are progressively changed into ideas of light in our soil. 

We’ve also added some arrows to the picture to help us understand how ideas move.  You’ll see that Ideas in the Air are constantly trying to permeate our soils.

For example, it’s nearly impossible today to watch a show on TV and not be presented with various ideas about sex. Modern culture often presents dark ideas about sex as a biological bodily need distinct from our hearts, our minds, and our souls. It’s become recreational enjoyment regardless of who it’s with. Many people embrace that idea. It seeps into their soils.  That idea eventually leads to sadness, loneliness, and death of a sort. 

The idea from the Kingdom of Light is that sex inside the wonderful structure of marriage brings intimacy, life, and flourishing. 

So, if your idea about sex bends toward light, you’ll reject the ideas that are heavily promoted by most of the mountains of culture. That Idea in the Air won’t get into your soil.

We also find a few arrows pointing up from our soil into the air.  Ideas flow both ways. The ideas in our soil influence culture.  We influence our families, friends, the seven mountains, and nations by living out the ideas in our hearts.  

You’ll now see the word “Heartview” on the trunk of our trees.  Ideas from up from the bedrock of our hearts come out through the branches and leaves of our trees. They come out in our Eight Indicators: our thoughts, emotions, health, relationships, behaviors, words, and how we use time and money. 

Beneath the Surface

Let’s head beneath the surface on the Creation Picture 2.

The top layer is labeled “Beliefs,” and the bottom layer is labeled “Desires and Ideas.”

Why are our “beliefs” not at the very bottom of our hearts? Shouldn’t our beliefs be the bedrock of who we are? Not necessarily, because our core is who we love and what we desire. And, to put it bluntly, we don’t always love what we say we believe.

Lastly, you’ll see the word “Story” faintly in the background in your soil.  This is your personal journey, your family of origin, your early life experiences, and other relationships and experiences that have shaped who you are.

Your story has a tremendous impact on your desires, ideas, and beliefs. 

If you’re a woman who grew up in a home with a strong, loving, attuned father figure, chances are you have ideas of identity and value that bend towards light – they bend towards the Kingdom of God. You are secure in your relationship with God and others, and you understand and embrace your extraordinary value.  Why?  Because, as a child, your heart experienced relationships that solidified good ideas. Your heart learned that your identity was secured and protected by your father and that you had enormous value.  Your father consistently reinforced that in all sorts of ways – through his behaviors, his encouragement, his discipline, his affection, and just his presence. 

If you’re a woman who grew up in a home with an absent, uncaring, or even abusive father, your tendency will be to gravitate towards ideas in the air that provide you what your heart desires but didn’t get: love, acceptance, security, identity, value – but your heart struggles to understand which ideas are good and which are bad.  Your young heart wasn’t formed around ideas of light, so it struggles to distinguish between ideas of life and death.

You may search for love and acceptance from men who treat you the way your father did – it’s just what you know.  Or you may unconsciously assume that your desire for acceptance will come from whatever group, cause, or institution provides you with a place where you feel embraced. 

In more severe examples, your heart seeks comfort and escape in addiction, or it just shuts down altogether and goes into a sort of survival mode.   

Unfortunately, modern Christianity doesn’t really pay much attention to “story” unless we get caught in something really dramatic.  This is why video testimonies of people being saved from satanic cults, prison, or drug addiction get so many hits online, and they’re fantastic.

But if that isn’t our testimony, we assume our own story is uninteresting at best and boring at worst.  That’s patently untrue.  Your story is as fascinating, instructive, and powerful as anyone else’s. 

So “story” always sits in the background of our soils, and it’s a primary influence on many of our heart’s ideas – for better or for worse.   

It’s all connected because we are integrated people living in an integrated world.  That’s what makes Heartview so amazing – we don’t need to look that far to determine where we truly are in our discipleship journey.  We’re giving off signs of what we truly love all the time.  We just don’t normally stop to look unless something goes wrong.

Heartview Picture

The other visual resource you clicked on is called Heartview, which is a simplified diagram of what we just talked about.  So, let’s take a look at that one for a brief moment. 

Our core is our hearts or spirits. That’s in the center of the Heartview picture. Our hearts are filled with desires and ideas, and our beliefs interact with those desires and ideas in a complex, fluid environment. 

Our Eight Indicators flow from our hearts, and so you see those on the outer ring.    

The Heartview picture is helpful if we just want to focus on one person and how indicators, beliefs, desires, and ideas interact.

The Creation Picture also looks at us as individuals, but places us in the broader scene of creation, culture, and other people. 

Indicator Example

Let’s go back to the Creation Picture 2 and explore it further with a practical example.   

Two Heartview indicators that are particularly easy to observe and explore are how we use time and money. So let’s talk about money.

Years ago, I taught classes on budgeting and biblical stewardship.  The classes helped families understand the basics of income, expenses, and so on, and the goal was to finish the class with a working, practical budget for each family.

Almost 100% of the people who went through the class came out with a realistic budget. Most people earn enough money to pay for their expenses.  However, I quickly learned that more than 90% of people who left the class with a working budget didn’t implement it or didn’t stick with it for more than a month. 

Leaves and Branches

So, there’s the Heartview Indicator – money problems. Many people struggle to live within their means, to cut back, or to deny themselves certain things so that they stick to a healthy budget. This is an outward indicator of an interior condition.

I remember one Christian family who made enough money to live comfortably, but they continually outspent what they brought in.  So, there was constant stress and tension in the marriage.  In the Creation Picture, this was a branch or a leaf of their tree – the visible, outward indication of a root issue.

Beliefs

As we move down the Creation Picture from the visible indicators into the soil to the invisible parts of who we are, what do we come to first?  Beliefs.  So, what did this couple believe about money?

Here’s where it gets tricky.  They believed that God loves a cheerful giver, but they rarely gave because they continually overspent on other things.  They believed that if we seek first the Kingdom, God will provide everything else, but they lacked the will to put that into practice. They believed we can’t serve God and money, but their spending habits said otherwise.

They believed all the right things – or at least they said they did. So why didn’t their indicators line up with their beliefs about money? Because we have to dig deeper into the soil.  Their desires and ideas outweighed and overpowered their beliefs. 

Let’s get down to the bedrock. What did they most desire?

Love and Desire

After years of working with people in financial situations, I realized most people don’t really desire the “stuff.”  We desire what the stuff represents.  We desire comfort, security, connection, acceptance, and freedom.  Maybe wedesire status. Often, people use money to resolve anger, loneliness, or rage. 

And the couple I worked with overspent not because of really wanting things right now, but because of unmet desires or unresolved wounds from years ago. They were using money to attempt to heal and resolve difficult parts of their story. 

They were spending to try to compensate for hurts they didn’t even know they had, and they had no idea that’s what they were doing. 

This might look like the father who gives his kids everything because he was relationally disconnected from his father as a child.  It might be the mother who binge shops because her ideas of identity were corrupted when her parents didn’t rescue her from an abuser.  She’s enraged, and she soothes her rage by shopping to try to ease the pain.    

By the way, this is why many efforts to address Heartview indicators above the surface don’t really work.  Most budgeting classes don’t work, not because the teaching is poor, but because they don’t dig into the bedrock of our hearts: our ideas, stories, and desires.  We try to fix the Indicator above ground instead of addressing the root of the wound below ground.

The Bedrock of Belief?

Many Christians unconsciously assume that the bedrock of the human heart is belief. Some people assume that “we are what we believe.” If you take a careful look at discipleship courses, Sunday school classes, apologetics books, and a large portion of Christian literature produced today, you will find that the material is geared toward making an intellectual case for the objective realities of Christianity. It’s designed to intellectually persuade us that Christian beliefs are true.  And they are true.

Is there factual, historical evidence for the Resurrection? Yes. Is apologetics good and necessary? Should we be prepared to give an answer for the hope that is in us?  Absolutely, we should.  Why?  In some cases, some people’s hearts are ready to be intellectually persuaded to change their beliefs.  A clear, cogent, rational argument for the truth enters their minds, seeps down into their hearts, and changes their beliefs.  It’s a wonderful thing. 

But why doesn’t this happen every time we share objective truth?  If you’ve ever sat with a friend or family member and shared the Gospel, or a Christian worldview about a hot cultural topic, why don’t they immediately embrace the truth and change their beliefs?  If the core of who we are is our beliefs, why wouldn’t everyone change their minds when approached with solid, rational, cogent arguments for truth?

Because desire often overpowers belief.  What we love is the bedrock of our hearts, and what we believe doesn’t always line up with what we love.

Consider the rich young ruler.  He understood the law, and he had the right belief system.  But Jesus quickly and carefully explored the bedrock of his heart, what the young man desired.  And the man desired wealth, along with its security and status, more than he desired Jesus.  He loved his money more than he loved Jesus – more than he loved his own beliefs. We can’t serve God and money.  We can’t love both. 

So, if you ever get frustrated with a friend or family member, because you know what’s true and your friend just won’t embrace the truth, even though it’s right in front of them…remember.  We aren’t what we think; we aren’t even what we believe.  We are what we love.

But sometimes our friends will be the woman at the well.  Jesus related to her much the same way as the young ruler. He quickly bypassed social conventions and theological arguments and invited her to probe her own heart.  But unlike the young ruler, the woman at the well realized she was loving the wrong people – the wrong things.  She realized her heart was empty, thirsty, and wounded.  And then she realized that not only was this Jewish teacher, this man, speaking truth to her, but he had also purposefully gone out of His way, defying social convention and political acceptance, to meet her.  To relate to her.  To be with her.  To experience her.  And He was inviting her to experience Him.  And she did. 

What is a Belief?

When we look at our soil on the Creation Picture and what sits in there: our beliefs, our stories, our ideas, and desires, we may just stop to consider what we mean and assume by the word “belief.”  I think most people use the word to mean “something I intellectually agree to.” 

Here’s the problem with that. It’s possible to believe that the resurrection of Jesus happened and still not love Him.  It’s possible to believe that the Bible is the inerrant Word of God and not embrace it.  It’s possible to believe in the institution of marriage and not love your wife. 

Sometimes we do desire what we believe, and I suspect that’s what the Bible means by the word “belief.” When our beliefs, desires, and ideas are the same, we are integrated. The layers of our soil are all on the same page. That’s maturity. That’s growing in Christ. 

I think this is what Paul means in Romans when he wrote, “If we confess with our mouths that Jesus is Lord and believe in our hearts that God raised Him from the dead, we will be saved.” Believe in our hearts – our confession aligns with our desires.  We not only agree with Truth, but we also love Truth.  We desire Truth. 

Truth, after all, is a person. 

Freedom

I hope you find these two new visual aids and this bonus episode helpful.   We’re exploring deep discipleship and spiritual formation from an admittedly different angle, so a multi-media approach is sometimes helpful.  And if you’re in a Greenhouse, I hope you have some fabulous discussions about this with your group. 

If we’re courageously curious and start looking at these indicators in ourselves, others, and in Jesus, we are well on our way to exploring the deeper stages of discipleship. 

If we embrace the fact that our hearts bubble up our true desires and ideas, and that, if we engage in Heartview with God and a friend, we may uncover difficult but freeing insights into what’s going on in our souls. 

When we intentionally and willingly engage in this “double knowledge” – the pursuit of God’s heart and our own, we will inevitably find healing, freedom, power, and, most importantly, an increasing, sacrificial love that rests in Jesus. It flows up from our hearts, through our branches and leaves, and extends to ourselves and those around us, even, perhaps, to our enemies. 

Next episode, we’re going to jump back in and explore our 3^rd Heartview indicator, our health. How does our spiritual, physical, and emotional health point us back to the desires and ideas down in our hearts?

Thanks for listening!  Soil and Roots is a crowd-funded ministry, so if you’d like to support the podcast, Greenhouses, and our efforts to cultivate deep discipleship, you can join our community of donors at soilandroots.org.  You can give safely and securely with your debit or credit card, or ACH.  If you enjoy the podcast, please give it a great rating.  If you have questions or comments, shoot us an email at fish@soilandroots.org.  And we’ll see you next time. 

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[1] 2 Peter 1:4

[2] Reese R. & Loane R. (2012).  Deep Mentoring (p. 57). IVP Books.

[3] Reese R. & Loane R. (2012).  Deep Mentoring (p. 60). IVP Books.