Ep 80: Kingdom Dwellers – Release Control

Why do we find ourselves constantly taking control? We attempt to control situations, conversations, people, circumstances, and even the future. A deep disciple, a kingdom dweller, is characterized by releasing our control as we become increasingly “abandoned” to Jesus, yet so many of us find letting go incredibly difficult. Why?

The answer may be hard to hear and challenging, but necessary if we want to experience the freedom, rest, and peace that await us.

Let’s dig into this personal, somewhat surprising episode!

TRANSCRIPTION

Releasing Control

Season 4 is all about the Forgotten Kingdom.  The Kingdom of God is a primary theme of the New Testament and is woven throughout the Old Testament, yet as we’ve discovered, many people have different, if not conflicting, ideas about what the Kingdom is.

We should perhaps be concerned about that. If the Kingdom is Christianity 101 and we, as followers of Christ, are confused about it, we may be sending very mixed signals to those who don’t yet know Jesus.

Does the Kingdom refer to heaven? Or is it more about how we choose to live?  Is the kingdom the sum of everyone on the planet who is following Jesus – simply a spiritual reality? Or does it refer to God’s reign over the entire cosmos, and how Jesus is in the process of restoring and redeeming it in anticipation of one day handing it back over to His Father?

Why should we care?  Because our conscious or unconscious ideas about the Kingdom drive our conscious or unconscious ideas about our purpose.  What we assume about the Kingdom greatly influences our assumptions about who we are to be and what we are to be doing.

Our unconscious ideas about the kingdom influence how we view and deal with evil, how we approach brokenness, and even our sense of hope for repairing damaged marriages, families, and hearts.

It’s a big deal, and I hope you’re having thought-provoking, robust dialogue about the Kingdom in your families, churches, small groups, and Greenhouses.  As a worldwide body of people, we need to work this out together.

Hidden Qualities

As part of Season 4 and the Forgotten Kingdom, we’re sauntering through this little miniseries called “Kingdom Dwellers.”  What are some of the key characteristics of a deep disciple living in this kingdom?

If we’ve been in a church for any length of time, we know we should be more loving, kind, gentle, and self-controlled.  We should be meek, humble, merciful.

And if the point of deep discipleship is to become more like Jesus – if this whole journey is about our character formation, our heart formation – then we may also learn some qualities of a kingdom-dweller simply by… well…watching Jesus.  Not by only reading His words or those who wrote about Him, but by sitting back, placing ourselves into the Gospel narratives, and watching Him.

So, the characteristics we’re exploring here are based solely on observing Jesus.

How does He relate to people?  What sort of questions does He ask? What sort of questions does He answer?  Why are so many of His words cryptic and obscure?  How does He relate to people who desperately need Him?  How does He relate to people who desperately hate Him?

We’ve picked up on two characteristics so far: courageous curiosity and particularity.

A kingdom dweller is passionately and lovingly curious.  We ask questions, but not socially conventional or even socially acceptable questions.  Jesus is constantly inviting us into deeper and deeper levels of our soil, and so kingdom dwellers do the same. We practice being curious in our marriages, in our families, and our friendships.  And we might find ourselves becoming more attuned to the hearts of those around us.

If that is the case, we slow the heck down. Relentless work and busyness are anathema to courageous curiosity.  We may well be productive and efficient, but we certainly won’t be any more loving.

A kingdom-dweller is also particular – we notice the individual.  That doesn’t mean noticing someone out of the corner of your eye or noticing some sort of physical characteristic. It means we notice the heart, the soul, the inner life of an individual person.  Mary Magdalene, the woman at the well, Peter, Zacchaeus, and even Judas Iscariot.  Jesus noticed the individual’s heart, ideas, desires, and inner motivations.

Here again, we find productivity, systems, and efficiencies as potential enemies to particularity. If we start envisioning people as numbers or data rather than as unique image bearers with unique stories, we will miss this key characteristic of being a kingdom-dweller.

Traveling Companions

Which brings us to perhaps the most difficult quality of a kingdom-dweller so far – the willingness to release control.

Ouch.

I’ve been studying some difficult topics, such as loneliness, depression, and anxiety, for the podcast and our Greenhouse.  Many of these conditions have increased in the culture over the past several years, especially during and after COVID.

A few years ago, Dr. Len Lantz estimated that some 7 million people attending church suffer from clinical depression.

He also noted that:

49% of pastors report that they rarely or never speak about acute mental illness to their church in sermons or large groups.

23% of pastors have personally struggled with mental illness.[1]

I mentioned earlier that Mother Theresa considered loneliness the “leprosy” of our age.  The Christian Post reports that 31% of Americans sense loneliness every day.  “For U.S. adults who experienced loneliness at least once within the past week, more than 40% of that group said the feelings of loneliness ranged from intense to unbearable.”[2]

And anxiety continues to be a plague on our society.

According to Forbes, “Over 40 million adults (19.1% of the population) have an anxiety disorder in the U.S. According to the U.S. Census Bureau Household Pulse Survey, nearly one-third of adults (32.3%) reported anxiety and depression symptoms in 2023.[3]

We all face some anxiety in our lives, of course, but appropriate anxiety is different than an anxiety disorder – when our level of anxiety no longer aligns with the risk or problem we’re facing.  Instead of something that happens as a result of an event, anxiety becomes a static condition.

Here’s where this discussion gets interesting.

“Adam Young…describes anxiety as the experience we feel when our bodies have a deep reservoir of ‘unfelt emotions.’ Anxiety is often linked to experiences in the past where we’ve disallowed ourselves to feel and experience certain emotions such as grief, sadness, or anger. Because we’ve pushed those important emotions beneath the surface, anxiety is the feeling of not allowing ourselves to experience those core emotions.”[4]

Anxiety is the way our body responds when our heart isn’t allowed to express appropriate emotions related to parts of our story.  If we don’t express our anger, sadness, rage, grief, and loss, those emotions, in effect, eventually turn into anxiety – we begin to irrationally fear what may or may not happen in the future.

According to a friend of mine, what are the two primary ways we normally deal with unresolved losses, especially if we’re Christians?  Intellectualization and exerting…control.  We attempt to think our way out of it, or we attempt to control our way out of it.

Out of what?  Out of the inevitable pervasive sense of helplessness and powerlessness.

Suffering and Control

I’m finishing up a wonderful book called Hinds Feet on High Places by missionary Hannah Hurnard, written back in the 50’s.  It’s a lot like Pilgrim’s Progress – it’s an allegorical story of a traveler on a spiritual journey.

The main character is a maimed young woman named “Much Afraid.”  She encounters a shepherd who invites her on a journey to a kingdom called High Places, where her twisted feet will be straightened, her crooked mouth will be restored, and she’ll receive a new name.  With much fear and anxiety, she agrees to the journey.  But the shepherd soon introduces her to her two traveling companions for this long quest, and their names are Sorrow and Suffering.

When I got to that point in the book, I thought about putting it down and moving on to something else.  Like you, I’ve experienced suffering and sorrow.  Everyone has. But I didn’t really want to contemplate sorrow and suffering as my “traveling companions” on the path to deep discipleship.

Curt Thompson writes, “… beyond our awareness that all suffering shares some common attributes, most important is the reality that we all suffer, even if we are often extraordinarily unaware of it…the question is not if we each suffer. It is, rather, to what degree are we aware of it? And how are we in relationship with and responding to it?[5]

We’ve talked about the six stages of the spiritual journey here on Soil and Roots several times.

Stage 1 introduces people to God. Stage 2 is learning about Him, and Stage 3 is about entering a life of productive service, normally to the church.  For decades, I assumed that was the entire spiritual journey.

But Stage 4 is the Journey Inward, and it always involves hitting the Wall.  Some sort of crisis, theological problem, relationship fracture, or life circumstance causes us to question the doctrines, rituals, and practices that we thought were sustaining us up to that point.

When we hit the Wall (and we all hit the Wall at some point), we’re faced with some choices, even if we aren’t aware of it.  We can turn back to the safety and security of stages 1, 2, and 3.  Or we can avoid the Wall – we add various coping mechanisms to hide or numb the pain the Wall causes.  Or we can give up entirely, and we’re seeing this more and more in our society. People are just giving up on Jesus, the church, and the faith.

Or we can choose to press into the Wall. We enter into the pain, the suffering, the sorrow, and willingly experience it, with Jesus and a trusted friend or two.

In other words, we give up control. Instead of trying to hide from it, mask it, work harder to avoid it, or anesthetize it with all sorts of virtues and vices, we give in to experiencing the losses we’ve so desperately tried to ignore. In effect, we embrace our helplessness, our powerlessness, and our vain attempts to control the suffering and sorrow.

Control Freaks

This is NOT a very American, Western, or even modern thing to do.  In fact, we have become a people who will do just about anything to control and avoid our suffering.  We’ll go to extraordinary lengths NOT to head back into our stories and embrace the losses, the suffering, the sorrows. The shattered hopes. The dreams that never panned out.

The career we wanted that never materialized.  The flourishing marriage we thought we had, but that ended up in tatters or, perhaps worse, a relationship of convenience.  The friendships we thought would last forever are now dim memories.

Several years ago, I became close friends with a co-worker, but we lost touch after we went down different professional paths.  Last month, he passed away from cancer. I didn’t even know he had been sick.  My heart is having a hard time figuring out how to process and mourn that.

We suffer from unmet expectations of others, of ourselves, and, yes, even of God. It’s not polite to say in many churches, but let’s be painfully honest.  God disappoints us.  He frustrates us.  Sometimes He angers us.

We grasp for control of anything, everything, to avoid the pain of these losses.  We grasp for control so that we don’t experience and enter into suffering.

What does control look like? Oh, let me count the ways.

• We take control by working to earn people’s favor and applause. We try to control the narrative.
• By being heavily and visibly involved at church. We try to control our image.
• By manipulating our spouses and friends. We try to control our reputation.
• By giving our 10% and maybe a bit more. We try to control God’s financial favor.
• By hoarding our money and assets. We try to control the future.
• By going back to the narcissist and predatory personality over and over again, trying desperately to “reconcile for the sake of the kingdom.” We try to control someone unable to control themselves.
• By speaking with great authority and refusing to listen to others’ hearts. We try to control the conversation and, ultimately, our broken identity.
• By, ironically, allowing ourselves to be manipulated and twisted. We try to control others’ acceptance of us.
• By arranging our work, church, and activity schedules to make sure we don’t have time to rest, contemplate, dialogue, and be formed. We try to control our insecurities.

Why does this type of list come so easily for me?  Because I’ve tried to take control using all of them.

If you’re feeling courageous, sit down and take a few moments to write out the ways you attempt to take control of circumstances, people, and hearts to control your image, reputation, identity, avoidance of pain and suffering, and your heart.  The list tends to write itself.

Jesus as Freedom

What often strikes me about Jesus is how truly free He is.  He’s free from any perceived or real obligation to be like someone else.

His brothers get on His case for claiming to be the Messiah, and they ridicule Him.  Jesus doesn’t try to prove Himself and doesn’t mount an apologetics case. He isn’t bothered by their treatment. He doesn’t get defensive.  He’s going to do what He needs to do when it’s His time to do it.

He feels no obligation to answer questions asked of Him or to provide signs when demanded of Him.  When He says things people don’t like, He accepts that they don’t like it and moves on.  He doesn’t run after anyone, trying to cajole or persuade them to like Him.  He urges us to follow Him, but He doesn’t compel us. He invites us. If we don’t accept His invitation, He mourns that, but it doesn’t change His centeredness.

He gives this odd speech about how we need to eat His body and drink His blood.  If we just take ourselves out of churchy culture for a moment, the comments are just weird.  Why does He talk about himself like that?  Is it any wonder so many of His disciples gave up and left after a speech like that?  It’s like Jesus intended to thin the herd. It’s like He intended to see who was really with Him and His odd stories and teachings, and who was just along for the ride.

He wasn’t politically correct.  He didn’t sugarcoat.  He wasn’t a suck-up, didn’t try to assume power, and wasn’t trying to make His way to the top.  In fact, He was intent on making His way to the bottom.

It’s hard to see it in our age, but so much of what He said and did rocked the social and religious assumptions of His day.  And he seemed perfectly free and delighted to be that way.

Why?

Because he didn’t attempt to exert control.  He came to do the will of His Father and not His own, and He rested and trusted in that. Even when the outcome was the most intense suffering known to the universe.

Securely Attached

I find Jesus a mystifying and fascinating person.  Jesus was free to relate to people as He saw fit, free to invite them, free to express a dizzying array of emotions in public and private, free to speak to people in numerous ways, and free to accept that some would like Him and some would work to kill Him.  He didn’t cave to anyone’s agenda, anyone’s manipulations, or anyone’s expectations.  He was and is 100% Jesus.

Man, I would love that.  I have a vision of a “Brian” who is more like that.  Free to be myself in any conversation or exchange, regardless of how I’m perceived or liked.  Free to love, free to not always respond to social convention, free to not answer every question, free to walk away from manipulative people, free to challenge and provoke myself and others, even if it hurts a little bit.  That version of me seems so calm, so free, so peaceful.

How does one get from here to there?  How do we move forward from being people who use intellectualization and control to avoid anxiety, suffering, and pain?  How do we let go of our vain attempts to control situations, people, circumstances, and even God?

Well, I don’t think it’s as easy as repeating a few Bible verses over and over.

Dr. Thompson gives us a little insight into how we become freer to let go of control, and it has to do with our relational attachment to Jesus.

“If we are securely attached to Jesus, then ultimately, we live in a safe world.  This safety is predicated on being seen and soothed, the necessary hard deck on which we begin to form hope.  This safety makes us comfortable and confident in our own skin.  It means that we have been protected from forces outside us and from within that can do us harm – in the same way a child, when securely attached to their parents, lives in a safe home.”[6]

Ultimately, we continue to take control because, to be brutally honest,  our hearts don’t feel safe with Jesus.  We say we trust Him, but our hearts and our behaviors often disagree with our mouths.  Think about it – would we experience anxiety if we woke up every morning with our hearts resting in the experience that whatever happens that day is allowed or caused by Jesus, and so we are, ultimately, safe? Even if we suffer?

Thompson talks about the “4 S’s”: seen, soothed, safe, secure.  These are necessary to be securely attached in any relationship.

If we woke up every morning not just intellectually knowing we are seen, soothed, safe, and secure, but that our hearts constantly experienced those things, that that was our reality, why would there be any reason to be anxious, or to try to wrestle control away from God or anyone else?

Maybe you’re already there, but I get excited just anticipating the day when I’ll find myself resting in my security in Jesus all day and all night long. Not attempting to figure everything out, not attempting to plan every moment, to orchestrate conversations, to try to fix every problem or control every outcome.  Doesn’t that sound wonderful?

“Alright,” you say, “how do our hearts experience being seen, soothed, safe, and secure” in our journey with Jesus?

Fair question. Before we attempt to answer it, let’s take a quick look at a few obstacles to experiencing Jesus like this. What are some things that get in the way of us releasing control?

1. Many modern Christians’ hearts have been trained to “do,” and not to “be.”

We don’t want to admit it, but much of modern Christianity is actually a performance-based religion.  We’ve talked about ideas in the air and ideas in the soil a ton here, and this is another example of hidden assumptions, ideas, that seep in our hearts, our soils.

If we try to read the Bible in a year and we hit Leviticus and give up, how do we feel?  Probably guilty.  Why?  Is God not pursuing our hearts in a myriad of ways?  Is He up there with a ruler ready to slap our hands if we miss a few days of reading the Bible?

Because we’ve been trained, usually unconsciously, that God is only pleased with us if we successfully complete various Christian rituals.

We gotta get to church every week, without fail.  Why?  Cause the Bible says we shouldn’t give up meeting together.  That’s the performance bar.

If our hearts are heavy, or we’re spiritually tired, or we just need some time with family, is lightning going to strike us dead if we don’t show up once in a while?  Do we have to do a Bible study every semester? If doing the normal Christian things is turning into obligations that are beginning to be resented, does that make sense? Maybe our hearts are trying to tell us something.

What if God is more concerned about you and who you are versus what you’re doing?

So, to put it bluntly, we may struggle to experience the safety and security of our relationship with Jesus if our hearts, underneath all of the religiosity, genuinely believe God is only pleased with us if we do the current, fashionable Christian things.

Who can feel safe in that?  We’re always one mistake away from being kicked out of the in-crowd. That type of relationship isn’t even set up to create safety. It’s set up to create results.

2. A second reason our hearts may struggle to become securely attached to Jesus, to experience being seen, soothed, safe, and secure, is our stories.

We explored this back in Season 2.  If our primary relationships growing up weren’t secure, if our hearts weren’t able to rest in them, if our hearts weren’t able to be seen, soothed, safe, and secure, it’s totally understandable why we may struggle to experience safety in our relationship with God. If we’ve suffered betrayal or abandonment in our adult relationships, same thing.

Your heart may not have been formed around the idea that relationships can be safe, so it’s wary of placing that sort of trust in anyone, especially Someone we can’t see.

3. And the third reason experiencing safety in our relationship with Jesus may be difficult is that, candidly, our hearts may not believe Jesus can be trusted. They don’t believe He is safe for us.

I realize that’s not something we would admit in polite Christian company. If you try walking into many churches and announce that you trust God for your salvation, but not to actually take care of you, you may well be ushered to the door.

However, if we experience suffering, sorrow, loss, betrayal, or abandonment, our hearts may well question how a good God could allow such traumas.  And our questions may go back a very long time in our stories.  And theological answers may not help. In fact, in many cases, they don’t help.

If trust in anyone is ultimately felt – it’s experienced – and God has allowed things in our lives that are unjust, unfair, too much, or too confusing, I don’t think we should wonder why we may not be experiencing that trust in Him. Why we may not feel very connected to God, or experience security in Him. And so our hearts will try to take control to keep us from further pain and suffering.

The good news is we have tremendous precedent for being honest about where our hearts stand in relationship to God.  We are perfectly free to tell God that we don’t think He can be trusted.

Just ask Job. Or the book of Lamentations, or the Psalmists. Moses and Jeremiah.

If we read our Bibles closely, we’ll find some people told God exactly what they thought of Him, and it wasn’t always wrapped up in worship songs and pretty pictures.  They questioned His plans, His justice, His actions, and His words.

Last month, I wrote four laments. They’re between God and me, but they’re brutally honest.  And they don’t praise God for His goodness, that’s for sure.

And that brings us back to our question: how do we form a secure attachment with Jesus, so that we release control, release anxiety, and so that our hearts feel safe with Him, and experience safety in Him, no matter what comes along?

Rebuilding Trust

Welcome to deep discipleship. This stuff isn’t easy, and I’m not sure there are pat answers. There certainly isn’t a “7-Step Program to Experiencing Security in God,” despite the book titles you may see at your local Christian bookstore.

I’ll close by giving you three things to think about that have been helpful for me.  Just take a few moments to ponder them, to marinate on them, and to see how your heart responds.

Anxiety, depression, and our incessant need to take control are all related. If anxiety really is the body’s way of telling us the heart is desperate to express losses it suffered in our stories, Adam Young suggests we begin to bend our minds that way with curiosity and kindness. It’s a long, slow journey best taken with someone you trust. How might we identify the unresolved losses in our lives?  What should we be angry about, sad about, or mourn that we haven’t allowed ourselves up until now?

I know, good Christians aren’t supposed to express so-called negative emotions, but just go with me on this.

Anger is the right emotional response to injustice. Have you experienced injustice that you’ve never allowed yourself to be angry about?  Have you lost a dream, a relationship, a capability that you’ve not yet mourned?  Was your heart trained to believe you weren’t allowed to be angry or grieve?  Perhaps your heart is signaling its readiness to open up.

Once in a while, I speak with someone who is considering “deconstructing” from the faith. That word can mean a few things, but in this case, it’s someone who has hit the Wall in Stage 4 of our journey, and the Christian rituals and rhythms from the first few stages no longer sustain them. They’re certainly done with the institutional church, though they’re often done with God altogether.

Sometimes they’re afraid to tell God what they think of Him.  They’re afraid to tell Him He’s let them down. The suffering is too much.  That He hasn’t fulfilled His promises. That He’s not capable of conquering evil.  That they no longer trust Him to take care of themselves, much less anyone else.

My gentle encouragement is to tell Him.  Find a quiet time and room, and tell God exactly what you think of Him.  Write a few laments.  Yell and scream.  Throw your arms in the air and speak plainly and with as much conviction as you’re able.  Modern Christians tend to be far too careful and reserved.

God seems to deeply value authenticity.  He can handle our negative emotions.  He can handle our accusations, our charges, and our claims of injustice and unfairness.  In fact, He seems to invite it.

Perhaps one of the primary ways our hearts learn to experience safety in Christ is when we tell Him exactly what we think of Him, and then He still gently pursues us.  He still woos us.  He still offers to be with us, even when we’re uncharitable or unkind to Him.

Chances are, we’re not always going to get the answers we want or think we deserve.  But maybe there’s a deeper level of soil here.  Maybe it’s not so much about getting the answers, but rather getting Him.

Lastly, if we choose to head back into our stories and attempt to reconnect our hearts with unresolved losses, or if we’re ready to tell God what we truly think of Him, it’s always best to dive into these areas with a few people who have our backs. Maybe it’s a spouse or a dear friend.  God often invites us to experience His safety and security with other people.  Deep discipleship is not a journey of isolation, as much as some of us may try.

A Kingdom-Dweller is increasingly characterized by releasing control.  The need to be approved, to perform, to manipulate, to be seen a certain way, for security.  The need to lead, for position, to generate numbers or results.

Happily, letting go of control results in a decrease in anxiety, maybe even a decrease in depression, and some freedom.  Some peace.  Some rest.

How do we let go?  By authentically listening to our hearts, entering into and expressing our losses, laying aside our religious sayings, and just telling God what we think of Him and ourselves, even if we find Him unfair or unjust, or perhaps just not there at all.

We’ll do just about anything to avoid suffering and sorrow.  Yet entering into them is often the way to secure attachment, the safety, our heart’s desire.

I won’t spoil the ending of Hinds Feet on High Places, but I will share that the main character, Much Afraid, initially fears and distrusts her traveling companions, Suffering and Sorrow.  Though somewhere along the way, her heart begins to release control, she willingly accepts her losses, and she finds that her traveling companions are not to be feared, but rather to be valued, if not cherished.  And they eventually become friends.  And, through that journey, her heart experiences the safety and security in her Shepherd, the same safety we all long for.

[1] https://psychiatryresource.com/articles/stigma-and-7-million-depressed-christians

[2] https://www.christianpost.com/news/31-of-americans-experience-loneliness-daily-study-finds.html

[3] https://www.forbes.com/health/mind/anxiety-statistics/#:~:text=Nationally%3A%20Over%2040%20million%20adults,and%20depression%20symptoms%20in%202023.

[4] https://anasianamericanchristian.com/understand-and-deal-with-anxiety/#:~:text=Adam%20Young%2C%20a%20licensed%20clinical,to%20feel%20and%20experience%20certain

[5] Thompson, C. (2023). The Deepest Place: Suffering and the Formation of Hope, (p. 3). Zondervan Books.

[6] Thompson, C. (2023). The Deepest Place: Suffering and the Formation of Hope, (p. 32). Zondervan Books.