Is God Partial?
Review
Soil & Roots focuses on a part of our discipleship path called the Inward Journey. You may recall a book called The Critical Journey, which theorizes that our lives with Jesus can be broken down into six stages.
The modern church focuses on the first three: Being introduced to God, learning about Him, and entering a productive Christian life. But as we’ve explored, most of our modern institutions are not equipped or perhaps not interested in guiding us into and through the later stages, the Inward Journey, the Outward Journey, and the Life of Love.
This lack of help and support in these later stages contributes to what Dallas Willard called The Great Omission – the fact that modern Christianity talks about making discipleship but struggles to do so. Willard argued that discipleship means apprenticing with Jesus – living with Him and experiencing Him at ever-deepening levels, which results in our inner character formation. It makes sense that if we aren’t aware of, or aren’t helped into, these later stages, we are missing out on some vital parts of this spiritual formation.
Soil & Roots focuses on stage 4, the Inward Journey, because it is here that we explore some of the mysteries of Jesus and ourselves. The human heart is often powered and governed by unconscious, hidden forces, including our ideas and desires. If left unexplored, the hidden parts of ourselves that are damaged or wounded become obstacles in our discipleship.
Not only do many of our Christian institutions not provide us support through the Inward Journey, but in many corners of Western Christianity, such an exploration is often ignored, rejected, or even condemned.
So, this is the role God has asked Soil & Roots to play – a gentle guide in and through the Inward Journey and on to the Outward Journey and the Life of Love. We focus on uncovering the hidden ideas and desires that form us with Jesus, while inviting Him to help us name and re-form those hidden parts that harm us.
Catching up on Season 7
In seasons 1-4, we examined the Great Omission and some of the resulting challenges that make discipleship difficult in our age. In season 5, we chatted with various experts on what we had explored so far.
In season 6, we explored Jesus from a few unique angles. After all, if we desire to become more like Him, if we hope to increasingly think, act, relate, and love as He does, we should get to know Him well. That season uncovered some surprises, because we learned a lot about Him by simply observing Him – by being with Him. Yes, we note the fruits of the spirit, but we also discovered Jesus is relationally shrewd, securely attached to His Father, incredibly relaxed, often paradoxical, and sometimes shockingly gentle.
Here in Season 7, which is entitled “Deep Calls to Deep,” we are answering the How question. How do we become deep people, deep disciples? How do we become people who increasingly think, act, relate, and love like Jesus?
And we’ve discovered that there isn’t some 5-step process or program that will lead us to that hope. Instead, we’ve uncovered four conditions that should be present that allow us to be increasingly formed like Him, all of which assume we are experiencing His delight, affection, and love at deeper levels.
The first condition is self-knowledge. This is obviously where we spend a lot of time here. To become more like Jesus, we must know both Him and ourselves.
The second condition is story-sharing. It should come as no surprise to anyone who reads the Bible that the history of our faith is steeped in storytelling. God knew what he was doing, because even modern neuroscience has shown that telling our stories and others’ stories has a profound impact on our inner formation.
The third condition is suffering in community. We live in a tragically lonely era, even if it is somewhat prosperous. We all suffer at times, but many of us suffer alone. That is almost always de-formative – it draws away from a flourishing life. But when we suffer with one another, it can often be transformative.
The last condition is spiritual habits, or practices. Human beings are creatures of extraordinary habits. We are deeply formed by rituals, and we all experience ritual virtually every moment of every day. Just consider how much smartphones have revolutionized our rituals.
Many of us practice some form of discipleship rituals: reading our Bibles, praying, and engaging in corporate worship. However, there is an unlimited number of spiritual practices that invite us into deeper experiences with Jesus, and to a large extent, modern Christianity doesn’t explore or test them as many previous generations did.
So, if we wish to become people of depth, people who are increasingly attuned to Jesus, others, ourselves, and even creation, we come together to instill these four conditions into our lives: self-knowledge, story-sharing, suffering in community, and spiritual habits.
Ideas of God
Although we are 13 episodes into the season, we are taking our time exploring the first condition – self-knowledge or self-awareness. And, in typical Soil & Roots fashion, we are exploring the hidden ideas that form us, the church, and the culture, starting with one of the most important things about us: our hidden ideas of God.
We are examining just a few common ideas of God, ones that show up in hearts and cultures if we are paying attention. In Episode 142, we explored a very popular and damaging idea of God that operates in many hearts, both of those who love Jesus and those who don’t. Despite our intellectual belief that God is good, many of us function from the idea that He isn’t always good. We explored that idea and how we might determine whether our hearts hold to it through a spiritual practice called Heartview. Heartview is the ongoing noticing of our heart’s indicators: our thought patterns, emotions, behaviors, relationships, health, words, and time and money.
Today we’re going to look at another very common hidden idea that form many people, even if they hold to a different intellectual belief, and that is that God is partial.
A Culture of Partiality
What do I mean when I say that God is partial?
Most of us would never affirm this as a theological belief. If someone asked whether God prefers important, successful, or spiritually mature people more than everyone else, we would certainly say no. We know that grace cannot be earned and that Jesus welcomed ordinary people. In fact, he has a soft spot for the weak and downtrodden.
But our intellectual beliefs do not always match the ideas that actually govern us.
Consider something as ordinary as air travel. First-class passengers enter the plane first, sit in wider seats, receive better food, and enjoy more customized service. Meanwhile, the rest of us shuffle toward the back in coach, squeeze ourselves into increasingly small spaces, and hope the person in front of us doesn’t recline.
Of course, the airline would say that first-class passengers simply purchased a more expensive ticket, and that is true. But our hearts don’t always process experiences as economic transactions. They absorb a deeper story: people with greater resources receive greater comfort, attention, and access.
And that story isn’t confined to airplanes.
We live in cultures saturated with partiality. There are insiders and outsiders, VIP entrances and waiting rooms, celebrity and obscurity, influence and irrelevance. People with money, beauty, intelligence, power, or the right connections generally receive better access and more attentive care. Some people seem to live in first class, while the rest of us sit in coach hoping for another bag of pretzels.
Now, you and I experience some normal partiality. We naturally relate to our spouses, children, and closest friends differently than we relate to strangers. We are finite people. We cannot know everyone equally or give everyone the same amount of time and attention.
But God isn’t finite.
Still, because partiality is woven so deeply into our experience, we may unconsciously assume that God operates the same way. We are creatures of transference. We carry our experiences with parents, pastors, teachers, coaches, employers, and institutions into our relationship with Him.
Some of us learned early that affection was tied to achievement. We received attention when we earned good grades, performed well in sports, behaved in church, or made the family look respectable. Others discovered that affection depended on remaining quiet, helpful, cheerful, or undemanding. The adults around us may never have said, “I will love you more if you perform.” They didn’t need to. Our hearts are remarkably good at drawing conclusions from repeated experience.
Those unconscious conclusions don’t simply disappear when we become adults or begin following Jesus. We may change the vocabulary while keeping the underlying arrangement. Good grades become Bible reading. Athletic success becomes ministry usefulness. Pleasing a parent becomes pleasing a pastor, a church, or an imagined version of God. The setting changes, but the heart is still trying to secure affection through performance.
If affection and access were scarce in the ecosystems that formed us, we may assume they are scarce with God as well. Surely some people sit closer to Him than we do. Perhaps He speaks more clearly to pastors, missionaries, theologians, or unusually disciplined people. Maybe God loves everyone in some broad theological sense, but surely He likes some people more than others.
And so we develop the idea of spiritual first class.
If we are productive, disciplined, gifted, or useful, perhaps we can move closer to the front. But if our lives are ordinary, our prayers inconsistent, or our hearts still deeply wounded, we quietly conclude that we belong somewhere near the back.
We would never put that in a doctrinal statement. But ideas do not need our intellectual permission to form us.
The deeper question, then, is not simply whether we believe that God loves everyone. It is whether we experience Him as genuinely available and delighted with ordinary people like us.
The Transactional God
This idea often becomes clearest when life doesn’t go as planned.
We’ve tried to be faithful. We’ve served, prayed, given, and attempted to make wise decisions. Then suffering comes anyway. Our health deteriorates. A relationship falls apart. A prayer goes unanswered. Or someone seemingly less deserving receives the very thing we’ve been asking God to provide.
And somewhere in our hearts, we say, “This isn’t fair. I did what I was supposed to do.”
That response may reveal more than disappointment. It may expose an agreement we assumed God had made with us: if we lived well, served faithfully, and avoided certain sins, He would provide what we consider a blessing, or perhaps a relatively pain-free life. We held up our end of the bargain, but God appears not to have held up His.
This is where the idea of partiality becomes particularly painful, because suffering rarely feels neutral. When someone else receives what we have prayed for, the contrast can feel personal. Their healing seems to say something about their standing with God, while our continued pain seems to say something about ours. We may know, intellectually, that suffering is part of the human condition. But in the hidden places of the heart, suffering can feel like rejection.
Of course, the Scriptures never promise that those closest to God will avoid grief, illness, disappointment, or loss. In fact, some of the people most deeply attuned to Him suffer profoundly. Yet many of us still operate with a quiet prosperity gospel of the heart. We may reject the televised version that promises private jets and enormous houses, while retaining a subtler bargain: if I am faithful enough, God will at least protect the things I cannot bear to lose.
Obedience and spiritual practices are good, of course. Jesus invites us to follow Him, develop habits with Him, and order our lives around His Kingdom. But there is a profound difference between practicing obedience as an expression of love and using obedience to acquire love. One is apprenticeship; the other is negotiation.
And negotiation can feel safer than intimacy because it gives us a measure of control. If I can determine what God wants and give it to Him, perhaps I can manage what He gives me in return. I don’t need to bring Him my anger, shame, woundedness, or deepest desires. I can simply behave, remain useful, and present an acceptable version of myself.
This is one reason the Inward Journey can feel so threatening. It disrupts the transaction. It invites us to stop managing our relationship with God and become honest about what is actually happening in our hearts.
And beneath all of that lies an uncomfortable question: If God’s love is, in fact, impartial and can’t be earned, controlled, or used as bargaining power, are we willing to receive it as a gift?
The God Who Sees the Whole Person
Why might receiving God’s love as a gift be so difficult?
In part, because a gift requires us to relinquish control. But it also requires us to be seen.
Most of us present an edited version of ourselves to the world. We reveal the parts we consider acceptable, useful, or mature while concealing those that carry shame, fear, envy, anger, or need. Psychologists sometimes call this hidden part of us the shadow self. It contains the realities we’ve buried because we fear they might cost us affection, belonging, or approval.
And we often bring this same edited version of ourselves to God.
If we operate from the idea that God is partial, this makes perfect sense. Surely He prefers the peaceful version of me to the angry one, the faithful version to the doubting one. Surely He draws closer when I’m disciplined, generous, and emotionally healthy—and pulls away when I’m anxious, jealous, exhausted, or ashamed.
So we tell Him what we think we should feel rather than what we actually feel. We confess the sins we’re comfortable naming while avoiding the wounds and desires beneath them. We may become fluent in the proper language of prayer without allowing God into the deepest places of our hearts.
But the hidden parts of us can’t be healed through concealment.
Neither can love be deeply received by an edited self. If I believe God loves only the version of me that is calm, useful, and spiritually presentable, then even His love may feel strangely distant. I can affirm that God loves “people like me” without experiencing that He loves the actual me—the tired me, the frightened me, the resentful me, the me who sometimes doesn’t know what he believes.
This is one of the great surprises of the Inward Journey. We assume that uncovering our shadow will cause God to withdraw, only to discover that He is already there. He has never been fooled by our edited version. The anger, envy, fear, shame, and woundedness we work so hard to hide are already fully visible to Him.
The question is not whether God can see us. The question is whether we are willing to be seen.
There’s a famous scene in Good Will Hunting in which Sean, the therapist played by Robin Williams, repeatedly tells Will, played by Matt Damon, “It’s not your fault.” At first, Will shrugs it off. Then he jokes. Then he becomes irritated. Eventually, he completely breaks down.
Why? Because being fully seen and still loved can feel almost unbearable, especially to a wounded heart.
Many of us insist that grace is at the center of Christianity. We sing about it, preach about it, defend it doctrinally, and celebrate it intellectually. But receiving unconditional love is another matter entirely. If God sees the whole person—not merely the spiritually presentable parts—and moves toward us in love anyway, then our systems of performance and self-protection begin to falter.
That kind of love is deeply comforting. It can also be a bit terrifying.
Spiritual Celebrity
Our idea that God may be partial does not only shape how we relate to Him. It also shapes how we view other people.
If we assume that God has a spiritual first class, we naturally try to figure out who is sitting there. We look for those who appear unusually gifted, successful, and influential, and assume their prominence is evidence of His special favor.
Western Christianity is particularly susceptible to this idea. We have our celebrities, platforms, conferences, bestselling books, and prominent churches. None of these things is inherently wrong. God certainly gives some people unusual gifts and public responsibilities.
But visibility is not the same as intimacy with God. And outward success is not necessarily evidence of inward formation.
Consider the average men’s retreat. I’ve attended quite a few over the years, and the featured speaker was always a professional athlete, a successful businessman, a megachurch pastor, or a politician. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with hearing from these people. But over time, the underlying message becomes clear and deeply formative: their success gives their faith greater credibility.
Imagine, instead, that the keynote speaker was an obscure follower of Jesus who had spent forty years quietly caring for his wife through chronic illness. He had never built a platform, written a book, led a large organization, or accumulated much money. But over the decades, he had become gentle, patient, peaceful, generous, and deeply attuned to Jesus.
Would we consider him equally qualified to teach us about discipleship?
Our answer may reveal whether we have confused prominence with formation.
The irony is that deep formation is often difficult to see from a distance. We can measure attendance, revenue, book sales, downloads, buildings, and social-media reach. We can’t easily measure whether someone is becoming less controlling, more peaceful, more generous, or more able to remain present to another person’s pain. Depth may be growing in ordinary relationships and hidden choices that will never appear on a conference biography.
This confusion also affects the people we value. We often invest time in those who can advance our careers, expand our influence, or improve our social standing, while giving far less of ourselves to those who cannot offer us anything in return. We may donate money to people experiencing poverty without becoming relationally available to them.
If we unconsciously assume that God ranks people according to usefulness, success, or influence, we should not be surprised when we do the same.
But Jesus consistently disrupts these rankings. He notices people others overlook and gives His time to those who cannot improve His status. He does not seem impressed by celebrity, wealth, power, or religious standing. Nor is He embarrassed by obscurity.
God gives different people different gifts, responsibilities, and degrees of influence. But these differences do not reflect differences in affection or access.
If they did, most of us would probably belong somewhere in the back. But if they do not, the whole idea of spiritual first class begins to collapse.
When Partiality Bubbles Up
How do we determine whether this idea is operating in our hearts?
As we discussed earlier, Heartview is the ongoing practice of noticing what our hearts reveal through our thoughts, emotions, behaviors, relationships, health, words, time, and money. Our intellectual beliefs tell us what we think we believe. These indicators often reveal the ideas from which we actually function.
One indicator may be spiritual elitism. We subtly assume that our church, denomination, tradition, or theological system possesses God’s special favor because we are the most accurate. My wife remembers a man approaching her after she left the denomination in which she grew up. He bemoaned her departure and invited her to return to the “one true church.”
This idea can also reveal itself through resentment. Perhaps we are walking through a dark night of the soul while someone around us receives the healing, opportunity, relationship, influence, or success we desperately want. We celebrate outwardly while becoming bitter inwardly. Beneath that resentment may be a painful conclusion: God chose them instead of me. Their blessing is evidence of His favor, while my suffering means I’ve been passed over.
We may also view health, wealth, or success as proof of God’s special approval. When life goes well, we assume we must be doing something right. When someone else suffers, we quietly wonder what they did wrong.
Partiality can also shape our relationships. We devote substantial time and attention to those who can advance our careers, expand our influence, or improve our social standing, while offering far less of ourselves to people who have nothing to give us in return. We may donate money to people in need without ever becoming relationally available to them.
In other words, we begin treating people as we assume God treats people.
Ouch.
Of course, noticing these indicators is not an invitation to condemn ourselves. Heartview is not intended to produce shame. It helps the unconscious become conscious, because an idea cannot be named and re-formed while it remains buried.
Bliss and depth are not the same thing. A deep disciple is becoming increasingly authentic, raw, and vulnerable with Jesus and trusted friends. That means allowing Him to show us what is growing beneath the surface—even when we don’t particularly like what we find.
No Back Row
If the idea that God is partial has taken root in us, how does it begin to change?
As is so often the case in the Inward Journey, transformation begins with authenticity. We don’t begin by trying harder to believe the correct thing. We begin by noticing what our hearts already believe and bringing it into the light with Jesus.
Perhaps we notice resentment toward someone whose life appears blessed while ours is falling apart. Maybe we recognize how desperately we want the approval of prominent people or how easily we overlook those who cannot help us. Perhaps we discover that we’ve spent years trying to become impressive enough to earn greater access to God.
Whatever the indicator may be, we can simply bring it to Him: “Jesus, I function from the idea that You like some people more than You like me. I believe they are closer to You. I believe I must become more disciplined, successful, useful, or spiritually mature before You will truly enjoy me.”
That may not sound like a proper prayer. But Jesus isn’t frightened by improper prayers.
We often assume we must correct the idea before bringing it to Him. Yet healing generally works in the opposite direction. We bring Him the idea as it actually exists, including the fear, anger, shame, or disappointment beneath it. Then, over time, we allow Him to show us what He is truly like.
This re-formation rarely happens through one dramatic moment. More often, it occurs through repeated experiences of telling the truth and discovering that Jesus has not moved away. It may also happen as trusted friends receive the parts of our stories we expected them to reject. We gradually learn, in our bodies and not merely in our theology, that honesty does not always lead to abandonment.
This is one reason deep discipleship requires more than information. A sermon can tell us that God is impartial, and the statement may be entirely true. But ideas formed through years of experience are generally re-formed through new experiences—with Jesus and within a trusted community. Over time, the heart begins to loosen its grip on the old arrangement.
And the Jesus we encounter in the Gospels seems remarkably uninterested in our rankings. He welcomes children, notices obscure people, touches those considered unclean, and shares meals with people who cannot improve His status. He repeatedly disappoints those who believe their religious performance has earned them special standing.
Jesus does not relate to everyone in precisely the same way. He knows each person’s story and responds to what is happening in their heart. But uniqueness is not partiality. Different gifts, responsibilities, personalities, and callings do not create different levels of human worth or divine affection.
There is no spiritual first class.
God does not always give us what we want, prevent our suffering, or respond to every person in the same way. But His attention is not scarce. His affection is not reserved for the impressive, productive, emotionally healthy, theologically accurate, or spiritually mature.
Perhaps the challenge is not convincing God to move toward us. Perhaps it is allowing ourselves to believe that He already has.
As David Benner wrote, “To be loved without condition, to be spoken to as one worthy of love before we have done anything at all—that is grace.”
That kind of love dismantles our systems of performance, comparison, and control. It frees us from fighting for the front row because, with God, there is no back row. There are simply ordinary, complicated, wounded, beloved people being invited to come closer.
So this week, pay attention to your indicators. Notice the resentment, anxiety, superiority, striving, or comparison that bubbles up. Ask Jesus what idea of Him may be beneath it. Then, if you are willing, tell Him the truth—not the correct answer, but the true answer—and allow Him to love you there.
Continue the Journey
