Ep 140: The Most Important Thing About Us?

What if the most important thing about us is not what we say we believe about God, but the hidden ideas of God that actually govern our inner lives?

In this episode, Brian returns to one of Soil & Roots’ founding questions: What do we really believe God is like? Drawing from A.W. Tozer’s claim that our actual ideas of God may be buried beneath “conventional religious notions,” this episode explores why deep discipleship requires more than correct doctrine or Bible knowledge. It requires the uncovering of our hidden, often unconscious, ideas about God.

Brian walks through several common distorted ideas of God, including God as the Great Taskmaster, God as the cause of suffering, God as a performance-based Father, and God as an angry judge. These ideas may not match our creedal statements, but they can quietly shape our emotions, behaviors, relationships, and spiritual lives.

Listen or watch on Spotify, YouTube, or your favorite platform. 

 

TRANSCRIPTION

The Most Important Thing About Us

Hello and welcome to the Soil & Roots podcast, where we dig beneath the surface to uncover the hidden ideas that form us, the church, and the culture.

I’m Brian Fisher, and this is Episode 140: The Most Important Thing About Us?

It’s the 7^th episode of Season 7 of the Soil & Roots podcast.  The name, Soil & Roots, points to the reality and power of ideas.  Our hearts are our roots, and the soil is the ideas in which our hearts are planted.

This season is called Deep Calls to Deep.  We are exploring how we become people of depth.

The Desperate Need for Deep People

We agree with pastor and thinker Richard Foster when he said that what the world needs most isn’t more talented people or intelligent people – what the world needs most is deep people. What the world needs most is deep disciples, people who are increasingly attuned to God, others, and themselves.

Just stop and think about that for a second – the world needs people more attuned, more dialed in, more listeners. That may or may not be the same thing as biblical scholars. In fact, the most intelligent among us often struggle to become people of depth. 

A deep person is on an intentional journey to become more like Jesus from the inside out, and it shows.  They are very self-aware yet exude self-giving love.  They are securely attached to God, all the way to their bones.  They express emotions, ranging from righteous anger to extraordinary compassion.  They are radically generous with their time and resources.  They are rested, perhaps even slow!  They aren’t trying to perform, and they aren’t people pleasers.  Instead, they seem to live in the experience of God’s delight and engage in a routine, two-way conversational relationship with Him. They have learned to recognize His voice.

Becoming this type of person is the point of the discipleship journey, slow and messy as that is.  It is the process of being conformed to His image.

Deep people know their Bible, but they don’t treat it as the fourth person of the Trinity.  They are concerned about doctrine, but not as much as they are about loving their neighbor. 

They are known by various labels: deep disciples, Stage 6 Christians, Christian mystics, but chances are, they don’t care much for labels. 

They live and embody the Good Life, a life of ongoing, experiential relationship with God. 

And, apparently, they are in the minority, even though the Good Life is what the Bible invites us all into.  Somewhere around 3% of people with some affiliation with Jesus live in this kind of existence. But that’s why Soil & Roots exists – to spread the word and to invite as many people as we can into this with-God life.

The S&R Difference

Soil & Roots is, at its core, a discipleship ministry.  That word, discipleship, however, has become so overused in modernity that it has lost much of its meaning. Plus, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of discipleship organizations, so what makes this one any different?

We explore the journey of becoming more like Jesus, not only theologically but also philosophically and anthropologically, and this makes a huge difference in our spiritual journeys – it helps us live a life of depth.

Why are philosophy and anthropology so important?

Philosophy is the study of life’s biggest questions (what is true and real), and anthropology is the study of what it means to be human. 

If you’ve been with us for any length of time, you know that we spend a ton of time on the concept of ideas (that’s the philosophy) and on answering the question, “How does one person become more like another?” (that’s the anthropology).

Why? Because spiritual formation is an anthropological transformation – the ongoing formation of our entire being. It isn’t just the intake of information – it is the renewal and reforming of all 8 of our indicators: our thoughts, emotions, health, behaviors, words, relationships, and how we use time and money. 

Becoming more like Jesus involves the ongoing transformation of our inner lives, and that means even the transformation of our operating systems – the hidden, unconscious parts of who we are. And that includes things like our ideas and desires.

Remember, we wish to love more like Jesus involuntarily – that is becomes our natural default way of living. That means both our conscious and unconscious dimensions are discipled! 

Whoa, that’s deep. 

Ps 51 says that God desires us to know truth in our innermost being, that in our hidden parts He will make us know wisdom.

Soil & Roots strips away our surface veneers and goes hunting for our often-buried ideas about God, church, tradition, culture, and the Bible so that we might live vulnerably and authentically with God and each other, trusting that that is a crucial step in the journey to increasingly think, act, relate, and love more like Jesus over time. That means we wrestle with a lot of questions here, questions we don’t often ask in other places.  

The Worldview Tree

Like many of you, I’ve studied Christian worldview over the years. A worldview is the set of beliefs by which we see and operate in the world. 

One helpful instructor told us to imagine our worldviews like a large tree. Yes, here comes yet another nature-related metaphor at Soil & Roots.

The roots of our worldview tree are our theology – our beliefs about God.  Every single adult on the planet functions primarily from a theology, whether they believe in a god or not.  Every political, social, cultural, or personal view we hold can be traced back to its roots – our theology.

The trunk of our tree is our philosophy – how we view truth, where we find meaning.  Our philosophy is built on our theology. 

All our other views regarding life, faith, and culture flow from those two things.  The branches of our worldview tree include politics, sociology, biology, and psychology. 

In other words, your beliefs and opinions about pretty much anything in life are the natural outgrowth of your beliefs about what is true and your beliefs about God. 

If your friend is talking about immigration, abortion, the role of government, the environment, social justice, equality, and so on – every one of those views is tied back to an understanding of the divine, whether we are conscious of it or not.

Uh-Oh

Ok, but what have we discovered about our beliefs? 

In today’s ethos, “beliefs” typically refer to our intellectual agreements.  But we have discovered together that our hearts often operate on unconscious assumptions that don’t align with our intellectual beliefs!

So, to simply examine our intellectual beliefs about God doesn’t quite get us there.  Our heads learn through instruction; our hearts are formed through relationships and experience. Our heads hold our beliefs; our hearts hold our ideas.

And remember, these ideas are not so much firm intellectual statements as they are experienced realities.  In other words, our ideas of God are more about how we do or do not experience Him.  

And that’s what makes Soil & Roots so unique – we are not as concerned with our intellectual beliefs about God, ourselves, others, and creation as we are about our ideas of those relationships.  We are focused on discipling the inner life, our operations systems, our hidden parts.

To become more like Jesus, therefore, must involve the uncovering of our true ideas about God – our true “theology” if you will. 

The Center of the Center

And that means we are now venturing into what may be the most important, transformative episodes of the Soil & Roots journey so far. 

Let’s go back to what is one of the founding quotations on which Soil & Roots is built, and it’s from the American theologian, A.W. Tozer:

“That our idea of God corresponds as nearly as possible to the true being of God is of immense importance to us. Compared with our actual thoughts about Him, our creedal statements are of little consequence. Our real idea of God may lie buried under the rubbish of conventional religious notions and may require an intelligent and vigorous search before it is finally unearthed and exposed for what it is. Only after an ordeal of painful self-probing are we likely to discover what we actually believe about God.”

Sound familiar? Uncovering our true ideas about God underneath our creedal statements.

At the beginning of this season, I introduced four conditions necessary for our journey into depth.  They answer the question How do we become deep disciples?  They aren’t next steps or things we can just check off a to-do list.  They are conditions that we cultivate together that allow for the transformation of our ideas, our true theologies, our roots.

The necessary conditions are self-awareness, story-sharing, suffering in community, and spiritual habits.  Yes, they all begin with the letter s, but that wasn’t on purpose. I don’t try to force alliteration.  

Self-Awareness

You are most likely not surprised that self-awareness is the first condition for our inner formation, because we spent an entire season (Season 2) exploring the Discipleship Dilemma. I made the case back then that we live in a culture that functions from the bad idea that self-exploration is fruitless or selfish.  If you want a refresher, you can review that season – episodes 14-25.

I can’t tell you how many times I find this idea floating around modern Christianity, either explicitly or implicitly.  If you’ve ever heard the phrase, “Just fix your eyes on Jesus,” that’s often found in a context that discourages us from interior contemplation. 

The point is, we cannot become deep disciples without uncovering our true ideas about God, and we live in a culture (particularly within the church) that frowns upon this type of inner work. 

How many of us have ever been part of a small group study or Sunday school on the importance of the inward journey? 

But if Tozer is right, that our IDEAS of God are of the most vital importance to us, and that, in his words, involves a journey of painful self-probing to uncover them, shouldn’t that exploration be front and center in our discipleship journey?

So, over the next few episodes, we’re going to explore some very common ideas of God that many, many people unconsciously hold to that aren’t actually God’s ideas. Our true ideas of God are the most important aspect of our self-knowledge. 

Examples

Let me give a couple of examples to whet your appetite.

1. A few years ago, I was speaking with a guy from Houston who is a self-professed disciple-maker. He had a small non-profit and spent his time discipling people, at least as he defined it.

The more time I spent with him, however, the more I realized he was an angry person.  Oh, he hid it carefully, but at one point, I became so concerned that I simply asked him if he enjoyed his work.

“Enjoy it?” he replied. “Who cares? This is what God has called me to do, and so I do it.”

I’ve heard this type of sentiment dozens of times, normally from men and normally expressed with some bravado.

One of his ideas of God is the Great Taskmaster.  God has work for us to do; He calls us to do it, and we’re going to do it no matter what.  God doesn’t really care about our internal well-being or whether we enjoy Him or our work – our job is to get done what God wants us to get done.

Is that who God is?  In other words, does God view Himself as the Great Taskmaster? Ordering us around while not caring whether we have a sense of joy or peace about what He has called us to do, or how we feel about it?

2. Here’s another example. Last year, a couple in the neighborhood experienced a horrible, nightmarish scenario – their young son drowned in a nearby lake. He survived, but as you can imagine, the first few weeks were touch-and-go.  Some well-meaning Christians organized a prayer rally for him and his family, and so I attended.

The woman who organized the event started off our time together, and she prayed, “God, we know you are sovereign.  We know that what happened to this little boy is in your plan.  Though you caused it, you work all things together for good, and we trust you.”

I cringed and almost verbally cried out. The boy’s father was present at the prayer meeting – did she just claim that God drowned his little boy? In fact, she did.  That is her idea of God.

Her view of God’s sovereignty was that everything that happens in life, including evil, accidents, pain, and suffering, is explicitly caused by God.  He divinely orchestrates everything that happens.  Ironically, the woman also apparently believes in the power of prayer, which makes no sense given her conception of God. 

Is God divinely causing all things to happen all the time? Is our reality simply His personal playground?

I hear this idea from well-meaning people all the time.  But is this God’s idea about Himself?  Does God reveal Himself as dictating all things in our lives: what we will eat, wear, do, and think? Does he directly cause drownings, holocausts, betrayal, and harm?

3. Here’s another one. Just last week, a friend of mine told me about a couple who had just joined his small group.  The wife grew up in church and did all the usual things: attending services, going on mission trips, volunteering, and taking part in Bible studies.

Yet as she shared part of her story, it became clear that her ideas of God bear little resemblance to the reality of God. She grew up in a “Christian” home where her dad continually used Jesus as a means of discipline.  If she misbehaved, Jesus didn’t like her much that day.  When she behaved well, Jesus smiled at her.  Her idea of being accepted as a daughter of Jesus is, to this day, based on how well she behaves. 

She is just now, as a wife and mother, realizing her ideas of God are deeply flawed and harmful. Her heart views God as only accepting her when she performs according to expectations.  Otherwise, she is facing an eternity without Him.   This is her inner reality, even though she clearly intellectually affirms that God loves us while we were yet sinners!

4. One more example. I have a friend who left organized religion because she was hurt by it in her past. When I asked her about her experience with God, she said she would not be part of a God who “arbitrarily sends people to Hell.”

She saw some kind of Gospel presentation as a teenager that portrayed God as angry and unpredictable—seemingly taking joy in separating Himself from us. 

Like me, you may have seen these types of fear-based plays and presentations.  We can discuss God’s holiness, justice, and judgment, but are my friend’s ideas of God accurate?  Is God gleefully waiting to push a button underneath our feet so that we are sent to hell?

That one is more popular than you might think.  The 80’s were a strange time for Western evangelism. 

Just Read Your Bible

I hope these examples provide some background for Tozer’s assertion that our ideas of God are one of the most important things about us. We’re going to dig deeper in the coming episodes.

As we finish today, I just want to share one more provocative thought about modern Christianity’s normal response to our unhealthy ideas about God.  What do you think is the customary answer to someone who finds themselves struggling with their ideas of God? Let’s say they have begun the inward journey and uncovered some of their hidden ideas, such as the ones I just mentioned. If they shared that in the usual Christian environment, what would someone’s answer to their confusion be?

“Just read your Bible.”

That seems to be the solution to everything.  Feel depressed? Read your Bible.  Need to fix your marriage? Read your Bible. Need a job?  Read your Bible.

I’m going to step on some toes here, but this is as good a time as any to remind us that not only do we function unconsciously from ideas about God, but we also operate from unconscious ideas about the Bible.  I alluded to one earlier when I implied that some consider the Bible the fourth person of the Trinity – meaning it’s fairly common today for people to worship their Bibles.

We should keep in mind that some people read the Bible, only to conclude they want nothing to do with God.  Others conclude that they like Jesus, but they don’t care for the God of the Old Testament. 

People who are angry with God often find justification for their anger in the Bible, maybe some who struggle with the presence and power of evil in the world. 

People use the Bible to justify all manner of nonsense.  Even people who study and pore over their Bibles come away with wrong ideas about God – just consider some of the Pharisees with whom Jesus argued.

Might reading our Bibles uncover and help heal our corrupt ideas about God? It might, particularly if we don’t just read it but study it.  Must it uncover and help heal our corrupt ideas?

No.  We all carry conscious and unconscious ideas about the Bible, including what it is, how it is to be read and interpreted, and what its role is in our lives. Those ideas impact our experience with it.

As theologian N.T. Wright noted, “Anyone who has worked within biblical scholarship knows, or ought to know, that we biblical scholars come to the text with just as many interpretative strategies and expectations as anyone else, and that integrity consists not of having no presuppositions but of being aware of what one’s presuppositions are and of the obligation to listen to and interact with those who have different ones.”

In other words, our quest for self-knowledge in our discipleship journey should even include uncovering our ideas about the Bible. Wright refers to them as presuppositions. 

Don’t get me wrong, I love the Bible, and I’m in it every day, as you might be. And the Bible can be highly formative.  But it is a book, not a person.  The discipleship journey is not about becoming more like the Bible but being formed more into the image of the One who authored it.

As Jesus said in the Gospel of John, “You search the scriptures because you think that, in them, you have eternal life. It is these that testify about me, but you are unwilling to come to me, so that you may have life.”

The Good Life you and I are seeking is described in the Bible, but it is not the Bible.  The Good Life is a person who continually invites us to experience Him as we dive into His depths.

Thanks for being with me today.  We’re in for a really important and intimate mini-series, and I’m glad you are with me.