Ep 141: The Most Important Thing About Us: Our Hidden Ideas About God (GH)

What if your view of God shapes everything? In this Greenhouse episode, Brian and Doc continue the conversation from Episode 140 on what God is really like and why our deepest ideas of God matter so much. Season 7, Deep Calls to Deep, is exploring how we become people of depth โ€” people who are increasingly attuned to God, others, themselves, and the world. The conversation begins with Richard Fosterโ€™s claim that the world does not need more talented or intelligent people as much as it needs deep people. But becoming deep is not always safe, comfortable, or tidy. The inward journey can involve pruning, tearing, fire, pain, and the slow process of being unmade and remade by Godโ€™s goodness. Brian and Doc then explore how our view of God becomes the root system beneath nearly every other view we hold. Our theology shapes our philosophy, our politics, our view of creation, our understanding of the sacred and secular, and even how we think about suffering, the church, and the Bible.

BY Brian Fisher

May 15, 2026

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Kingdom of God
Soil and Roots
Ep 141: The Most Important Thing About Us: Our Hidden Ideas About God (GH)
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Your View of God

Dr. Tim comes loaded with rich and probing questions about our ideas of God in this Greenhouse episode of the Soil & Roots podcast (expanding on Episode 140).

If what the world needs most is deep people, and those people are generally formed through suffering, how do we reconcile that with our desire to experience safety?

Since the Soil & Roots journey tends to approach discipleship anthropologically, does that align with the Bible and sound theology?  Can we understand spiritual formation through sources apart from the Bible?

How does our worldview (our beliefs) connect to our heartview (our unconscious ideas)?  And how does that impact our day-to-day interactions with God, ourselves, and others?

Itโ€™s become popular today to claim that โ€œJesus is enough.โ€ Is He really?

Tim flexes his PhD, while Brian just tries to keep up. ย Enjoy!

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Is God good

Doubting Godโ€™s Goodness (GH) | Ep 143

What do we do when we find ourselves doubting Godโ€™s goodness?

In this Greenhouse episode, Brian and Doc continue the conversation from Episode 142 by exploring one of the most difficult tensions in deep discipleship: how to affirm Godโ€™s goodness while honestly grieving the pain, injustice, and suffering of the world. Doc brings his own struggle into the conversation, naming the friction between experiencing Godโ€™s kindness in his own life and seeing deep suffering in the lives of others.

This episode is not a philosophical defense of Godโ€™s goodness. It is a conversation about lament, authenticity, doubt, secure attachment, and the kind of community where people can bring their rawest questions without being rushed, corrected, or shamed. Brian and Doc explore why modern church culture often struggles with lament, why easy answers can fail the heart, and why the deeper question beneath โ€œIs God good?โ€ may be a cry for withness.

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Ep 142: Is God Good? The Hidden Doubt Many of Us Carry

Is God good, and do our hearts actually experience Him that way?

In Episode 142, Brian continues Season 7, The Good Life, by exploring one of the most powerful hidden ideas many followers of Jesus carry: the suspicion that God may not actually be good. We may consciously affirm Godโ€™s goodness, love, mercy, and faithfulness, yet our lived experience can tell another story.

Drawing from the Soil & Roots distinction between beliefs and ideas, Brian explores how hidden assumptions about God are formed through suffering, disappointment, family systems, trauma, illness, and repeated experiences. The episode considers how distrust of Godโ€™s goodness often shows up through the Eight Indicators: control, anxiety, resentment toward reality, and difficulty receiving love.

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Ep 140: The Most Important Thing About Us: Our Hidden Ideas About God

What is God really like?

In Episode 140, Brian returns to one of the founding questions of Soil & Roots: what do we actually believe God is like? Not merely what do we say in our creeds, statements of faith, or Bible studies โ€” but what do our hearts assume about Him?

Drawing from A.W. Tozerโ€™s claim that our real idea of God may be buried beneath โ€œconventional religious notions,โ€ 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.

Season 7, Deep Calls to Deep, is exploring how we become people of depth. Brian argues that the journey into depth depends on four necessary conditions: self-awareness, story-sharing, suffering in community, and spiritual habits. The first condition, self-awareness, begins with the painful but essential work of uncovering our true ideas about God.

This episode walks through several common distorted images of God: God as the Great Taskmaster, God as the direct cause of suffering, God as a performance-based Father, and God as an angry judge waiting to condemn. These ideas may not match our stated beliefs, but they can quietly shape our emotions, behaviors, relationships, health, words, and spiritual lives.

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