We’re well into Season 6 now, and we’ve entitled this season “The Object of Our Formation.”
If the point of discipleship is to become more like Jesus, if that is the primary reason we’ve been rescued, what exactly does that mean? Are our ideas of Jesus, our assumptions about Him, the same as Jesus the person?
How well do we know the object of our formation, so that we have a clear vision of who we’re supposed to become more like?
We started the season by laying some groundwork, talking about how important it is that our ideas, these often unconscious assumptions, of love and goodness match with God’s ideas. We defined love as this:
Seeking someone’s goodness according to God’s ideas.
In the last few episodes, we’ve been exploring our first characteristic of Jesus: his relational security.
Jesus was and is the most emotionally and relationally secure person who ever lived. If we have the opportunity to become more like Him, then arguably, we should find ourselves becoming more relationally secure.
Today, we continue to explore the characteristics of relational security and what it means for our four relationships: God, others, ourselves, and creation and culture.
Can we truly become more relationally secure like Jesus?
Introduction: The Beloved
Raymond Carver is best known as a short story writer, someone who played a major role in reviving the American short story form in the 1980s. But he was also a talented poet.
The final poem in his last published work is called “Late Fragment,” and it was written while he was dying of cancer. The poem goes like this:
And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.
As we discuss Jesus’s remarkable relational security, we’re talking about what it means to live in the reality of being beloved.
It’s a two-way relationship between us and God the Father in which we embrace our connection to him and our place in His family.
But as doctrinally correct and intellectually appealing as this might be, this truth may not have settled into our hearts. Some truths can’t just be learned. They must be experienced.
We’ve been exploring this reality of being human for a few years now here at Soil &Roots.
As Peggy Reynoso writes:
“When the intellect engages with a fact, the fact is stored as truth and belief results. In contrast, the heart believes only what it experiences…We’re created to establish belief through two pathways – cognitive and experiential…only when both pathways are engaged does belief become complete.”
Secure with God and Ourselves
Let’s start with what it means to experience relational security with God, our Father. We are, after all, His adopted sons and daughters.
Adoption is a beautiful relationship between human beings, too, but even so, it takes time and experience for the heart to catch up. Adopted children go through an adjustment period as they transition to their new life with their new family. They have to learn about expectations, routines, and whole new people. This adjustment period can take weeks, months, or even years.
According to Focus on the Family, it’s important for the adopting parents to be with their new child as much as possible, especially for the first few months. For an adopted daughter, they write,
These next three months will provide you with the best opportunities you’ll ever have for helping her develop the foundation for a secure and healthy attachment. Developmentally, this is when she will learn trust, self-worth, and self-efficacy.
I think this is a bit like our adjustment period when being adopted into God’s family. The transition can feel abrupt, especially in a modern church culture that puts far more emphasis on getting saved, converted, or praying the sinner’s prayer than on discipleship and a lifetime journey of apprenticing with Christ.
God does accomplish miraculous transformations in us, but usually not all at once. The heart often takes time and experiences as it learns to accept and embrace this new reality.
Let’s look back at what the adopted child needs in that adjustment period and apply it here.
She learns to trust in the reality that “My God will meet my needs.” She learns self-worth, that is, “God meets my needs, so I must be valuable to God.” Her heart embraces self-efficacy, which is “My cries matter to God because he hears and responds when I cry.”
These are not intellectual assertions. They are experienced realities along the lines of what we at Soil & Roots call ideas.
When the heart does not fully experience the resolution of these questions, it will continue in the adjustment period and struggle to fully inhabit the reality of being adopted and being beloved.
What does that lack of adjustment look like?
Well, we see it all the time, and we probably experience it ourselves.
People who profess to follow Jesus and intellectually know they are part of God’s family but act in ways that betray their beliefs. People whose hearts, if we are being honest, would say:
I don’t trust God to meet my needs because I’m not sure I’m valuable to him. I fear he doesn’t hear me and won’t respond when I cry out to him.
This sometimes manifests in fear, anxiety, loneliness, depression, anger, and a host of other difficult emotions that are felt by people around the world because, despite being adopted into a huge family, their hearts have yet the experience the fullness of that reality.
Secure with Ourselves
We are now drifting into what it means to experience security with ourselves.
Jesus is the most relationally and emotionally secure person who has ever lived. Even while on earth, he fully embodied his authentic, good identity. He has no false front or shadow self.
He is intimately close to his father, loving to his spiritual siblings, and confident in his authority and rights. He is content and satisfied with His relationship with Himself.
That’s what it looks like when someone is relationally secure.
For many of us, our default is to exist in a state of anxiety or stress, and every so often, we experience real serenity and peace. We might have a mountaintop experience or a meaningful time of worship and have a sense of completely trusting in God.
But our standard, our norm, is often something different. Those times of incredible security and unity with God stand out because they are rare. And even acknowledging that may cause us to feel some shame.
But what if they were the rule, not the exception? What would it look like for the truth of being beloved to be embodied in us, where we walked in this reality day by day? And so, times of anxiety or doubt were more the exception?
It would mean that we wake up resting in the confidence that whatever the day brings, it is caused or permitted by God. That we have discovered Paul’s secret, too, and can be content in all circumstances.
We wake up in this way because we live in the reality that God is good and that we are beloved by Him. We relate to ourselves in a healthy, wise manner because we experience our security in God.
Relational security with God would be our automatic state, so we would be at peace even when things around us aren’t peaceful.
How in the world do we get there?
Just one idea is telling and retelling our stories in a safe, secure environment. We learn ourselves and learn how our stories are being redeemed by Christ. As we relay our stories in trusted friendships, our hearts learn to embrace the truth about our histories, both moments of joy and moments of sorrow. The heart experiences the “withness” and acceptance of those who take the time to listen to us, even repeatedly.
Just taking this one step often helps us develop deeper security in our relationship with God, ourselves, and others.
Security with Others
We’ve discussed what it means to experience security in our relationships with God and with ourselves. Now, let’s explore what it means to be relationally secure with others.
To be secure in our relationship with others, we must first be secure in our relationship with God and ourselves. Jesus’s actions flowed from his relationship with the Father, not from hopes or fears about other people’s choices or perspectives. Jesus was not going to be a different person if the rich young ruler had decided to sell everything and follow him. He was the same regardless.
Our relationships work the same way.
Think about two young couples about to be married. One bride and groom have a firm sense of their own identity as individuals separate from each other—they know who they are, and they know who they are in Christ.
The other bride and groom are still “finding themselves,” and they hope that their new spouse will help them do that. They think their new spouse will “complete” them (a la Jerry McGuire), and their identity is dependent on being valued by this other person.
Heading into their marriages, which couple do you think is more prepared to stand the test of time? My guess is the first couple, the two already secure in their own identities.
Relational security with others means we don’t rely on another person to tell us who we are. We may invite them into a relationship, but if they don’t like us or treat us poorly, it doesn’t impact our sense of security. We can handle relational challenges with others because we are tied so securely to Jesus first.
In Episode 116, I quoted Lysa TerKeurst about the distinction between showing sacrificial love and allowing someone to harm you.
TerKeurst argues that healthy boundaries are actually God-honoring. We please him when we insist on relationships that honor love the way he created and intended it. Sometimes, seeking someone’s goodness means establishing boundaries or even stopping a relationship with them.
I’ve had to make these tough decisions a few times in my life. Sometimes, the best way to love someone is to stick it out through thick and thin. And sometimes, it’s best to quietly walk away.
This understanding of boundaries may sometimes buck up against our ideas of what it means to be Christian.
We Aren’t Doormats
In Isaiah, Jesus is portrayed as the lamb led to slaughter, the sheep that did not open its mouth. Combined with other verses, this can suggest to some that it’s downright un-Christian to ever protect yourself, stop giving, or say enough is enough in a relationship.
In 2023, artist Phil Wickham released a song called “The Jesus Way.” One of the verses goes like this:
If you curse me, then I will bless you
If you hurt me, I will forgive
And if you hate me, then I will love you
I choose the Jesus way
And another goes:
If you strike me, I will embrace you
And if you chain me, I’ll sing His praise
And if you kill me, my home is heaven
For I choose the Jesus way
Blessing those who curse us and forgiving those who hurt us are undoubtedly good responses.
However, an attitude that we can be hurt, hated, and struck and that our only response is to love, forgive, and embrace can lead to a kind of doormat Christianity that makes us think it’s OK to be abused at random. And that’s simply not God-honoring because it’s not how he intended our relationships to be.
Yes, Jesus went to the cross, though He didn’t permit people to kill Him before it was time, and He essentially orchestrated the events that led to His death. He never gave up His agency.
Was he silent as a sheep before its shearer all the time?
He called people “hypocrites,” “blind guides,” “blind fools,” “snakes,” “a brood of vipers,” “full of greed and self-indulgence,” and “like whitewashed tombs.” Not exactly a doormat.
At the time and place of his choosing, Jesus allowed himself to be captured, beaten, and crucified. But there were other times when his enemies wished to kill him, and he flat-out refused to let it happen. He stopped them. He walked away.
We can also act for the good of others without feeling obligated to let them harm us. We can insist on a God-honoring way of relating because it reflects principles of genuine love and goodness.
We should relate to others with kindness and compassion, patience, and long-suffering. But we can also be wise and careful, even shrewd and guarded where appropriate. That’s relational wisdom, and it’s embedded in the idea of relational security.
Listen to Me!
To be secure in our relationships with others, we also listen to them.
This is one of the primary characteristics of a deep disciple. We take the time to be truly present, and we give our attention and genuine interest. We seek to see others, to know them, to understand them. To hear their stories, as we long to have someone hear and understand our own stories.
This involves being vulnerable, which is why it’s so vital to have appropriate boundaries and safe, healthy relationships with those to whom we give access to our hearts.
We treat people as individuals, and we respond to them individually. This is the deep disciple trait of particularity that we have explored before and which Jesus was the master of. We see people as unique and worthy of being interacted with in a unique way.
We give generously because we know God will provide for our needs. We respond compassionately because we know God has compassion for us. We show patience and forgiveness because we know God is patient and forgiving toward us.
In short, we seek the goodness of others as God has defined it, which will look different depending on the person and the circumstance. We don’t feel obligated to relate to each person the same way, and that in and of itself is freeing.
Secure with Creation and Culture
What about being secure in our relationship with creation and culture?
To begin with, being secure means we act in a manner appropriate to the roles we have been given. We are sons and daughters of the king—royalty, with great power and authority. We are stewards, invited to cultivate, tend, and care for the earth. We are salt and light, bringing life and flavor and flourishing to a world in the grips of darkness and decay.
As I’ve said before, we live in a culture that values knowledge and intellectualism. We want information before we proceed and believe there is one right answer to most questions. As children of the Enlightenment, we know 2+2 is always 4 and look for a prescription to address any problem, a specific answer that we can directly apply.
So, we can be tempted to read the Scriptures prescriptively, too.
Dallas Willard, in his book The Scandal of the Kingdom, cautions against this kind of perspective.
Jesus’ teaching about life in the kingdom is the indispensable means for our coming to be able to live in the kingdom day by day, moment by moment, comfortably in the care of God and in obedience and service to him. We shut this down when we turn his teaching into legalism. If we don’t understand how he taught, legalism will run rampant because we will interpret what he was saying as laws.
Willard notes that this is a common mistake when looking at Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount and Sermon on the Plain. This mistake leads to people thinking they always have to give to anyone who asks them, and if someone takes their shirt they have to give their coat, and if anyone makes them go one mile, they always have to go two. But taking this teaching as a prescriptive command for all situations can be unrealistic, dangerous, or even in violation of other principles of love that God describes in other places.
Willard continues:
Sometimes the behaviors Jesus used in his teaching are misinterpreted as commands when they were only intended as examples to reverse a prevailing assumption. For example, when he said, “Give to everyone who asks of you, and do not refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you” (Matthew 5:42, paraphrased), he was not stating a general command for every situation. But some people have interpreted it that way.
In this case, the prevailing cultural assumption was that success meant being powerful and wealthy and that it was wise to hoard one’s wealth and only to give when one was legally obligated. The prevailing assumption was that wealth could save and it was OK to ignore the needs of the less fortunate, particularly if they did not share your religion, ethnicity, or nationality.
Jesus comes along with a principle of Kingdom living that turns this assumption on its head. In his upside-down Kingdom, wealth does not save—and, in fact, can make it harder to get into the kingdom. In his Kingdom, it’s better to give than receive. His Kingdom is marked by kindness, generosity, and trust. This was shocking to his audience, just as it flies in the face of many cultural assumptions today.
But we wade into dangerous waters when we take what Jesus intended as an example to reverse a prevailing assumption and apply it as a definitive instruction for every situation.
Instead, as Willard points out, we should ask: what is the principle Jesus wants us to learn? What prevailing assumption is he reversing? What is he illustrating about Kingdom life, and how might it help us in our relationship with creation and culture?
Right or Right Relationship
When we engage with culture, whether at an individual or institutional level, we need to wrestle with whether we are most focused on being right or being in right relationship.
When Jesus gave the Great Commission, it was in the context of making disciples through the close, long-term, intimate relationships required for true spiritual formation and learning all that Jesus commanded in order to help others to be adopted into the family and then help their hearts adjust to this new reality. All of this revolves around relationships.
Sometimes when we insist on being right, it can exact a high price. If we are more focused on being right than on being in right relationship, it can slam doors in people’s faces. It can close off potential friendships. It can harden hearts that might have been soft.
Peter writes that we are to “Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect.” It’s this gentleness and respect that can fall by the wayside if our primary goal is being right.
In an interview about his book Renovation of the Heart, Dallas Willard said, “What we need to push as Christians is to say, ‘Look, we’re not here to prove we’re right; we’re here to help people.’” Elsewhere, he stated, “One of the hardest things in the world is to be right and not hurt other people with it.”
Our approach to sharing our spiritual story can be just as important as the story itself. The meat of our message will not mean much if we destroy our relationships with the people who need to receive it. It will not matter how right we prove ourselves to be if we are the only ones left in the room.
How can we know when it’s time to draw a line in the sand and stand firm right now and when it’s time to focus on building relationships and setting an example for others to follow?
Well, asking the question is a good start. Finding deep disciples, stage 5 and 6 Christians, to emulate and ask for advice is helpful. Forming a community of fellow Jesus apprentices can also guide us. And we can pray and ask Jesus to direct us and then be sensitive to his leading, understanding that sometimes what Jesus invites us to do or not do may not be anything like what we were thinking.
Can we truly become more relationally secure in our relationships with God, others, ourselves, creation, and culture? Absolutely! It starts with experiencing being beloved in God’s family and then allowing that experience to radiate to the other three relationships. This is how we express goodness to ourselves and those around us. Those who accept God’s invitation to experience being beloved become world changers in the little kingdoms God has allowed us to steward.
