Becoming the Beloved

How to Integrate our Beliefs and Ideas

Welcome to June, everyone, and to all of our new subscribers. I’m so glad you’ve joined us as we explore what it means to become deep disciples.

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I Don’t Know Much About Gardening

I’ve received several emails and messages over the past month or so from people who have subscribed to Soil & Roots, thinking it’s an agricultural column. Well…

My wife, Jessica, is an avid horticulturist. On a lark, a few weeks ago, I counted the number of plants and flowers she is nurturing inside our home. The answer is 80.

Suffice it to say our home doesn’t suffer from oxygen deprivation.

Alas, this is not a gardening column. The name “Soil & Roots” is a metaphor; it is all about cultivating deep people, not flowers or crops. “Roots” refers to our hearts, and “soil” refers to the ideas in which our hearts are planted. It relates to our journey of discipleship, or spiritual formation.

The Mission

Soil & Roots is committed to bringing people together to explore and work out what Dallas Willard called “The Great Omission.” Modern Christianity talks about making disciples but struggles to do so. This worldwide condition is resolved by intentionally and communally becoming people of depth, individuals who are increasingly attuned to God, others, themselves, and creation and culture.

We experience The Great Omission both internally and externally. We may quietly sense it within us as a disconnection, a wondering about why we can’t grasp the abundant life or perfect peace. Perhaps we suffer from constant anxiety or a lagging loneliness, even when we are among family and friends. Though Paul wants us to be “filled up with all the fullness of God,” we aren’t sure what that means, though we suspect we’re missing something important.

Externally, the consequences are also severe: disunity, pain, undue suffering, and a lack of transformation of systemic injustices and corrupt institutions.

I’ve submitted that The Great Omission is propelled further in our current age by three primary problems: the Discipleship Dilemma, the Formation Gap, and the Forgotten Kingdom. We’re in the midst of examining the Formation Gap, and within that, we’re focusing on the second key element: habits.

What sort of activities and behaviors do deep people practice?

The Primacy of Ideas

We have been discussing the habit of uncovering ideas about God, others, ourselves, and creation and culture.

Ideas are a really, really big deal, but they receive almost no attention in modern Christianity (or most any other arena for that matter).

Ideas are assumptions, principles, and conclusions in which our hearts are rooted, but of which we are generally unaware. They aren’t so much intellectual conclusions as they are experienced realities.

We are rarely conscious of them, yet they govern how we operate in the world. And if we are to be slowly transformed so that we think, act, relate, and love more like Jesus, uncovering our hidden ideas about God, others, ourselves, and creation is essential.

Some of you have asked excellent questions about ideas and their role in our spiritual formation, so let me tackle it from another angle.

The Head and Heart

Let’s start with the Judith Hougen quote I referenced before (from her book Transformed into Fire)

When the intellect engages with a fact, the fact is stored as truth and belief results. In contrast, the heart believes only when it experiences…We’re created to establish belief through two pathways—cognitive and experiential…only when both pathways are engaged does belief become complete.

Soil & Roots is primarily concerned with how the heart experiences truth. This is different than most faith institutions, which are mainly concerned with codifying and promoting a specific set of intellectual belief statements.

Don’t get me wrong - sound doctrine is essential and is, hopefully, life-giving. It is, however, incomplete, unless our hearts experience those same truths.

For example, Hougen writes:

…all kinds of people - conservatives, liberals, young, old, strutting in suits, lounging in jeans - enter and exit churches every week. They carry Bibles, commentaries, notebooks. The faithful come and go, pondering Sunday sermons or Sunday dinner. Yet, if all these people were polled, the vast majority of them would likely agree with this statement: I know that God loves me, but I rarely or never experience his love.

Our brains understand that God loves us; however, our hearts are rooted in other ideas about God. Our experience of God doesn’t line up with our intellectual beliefs. We are, therefore, “dis-integrated.” And that is not Jesus’ desire for us.

Using the Indicators

Our actual ideas of God are of prime importance. Our ideas about our other three relationships (other people, ourselves, creation) flow from our buried assumptions about God. This is true whether we believe in Him or not.

The trick is uncovering our genuine ideas about all four of these relationships.

I’ve briefly introduced one set of shovels we can use to go digging for ideas. I call them the Eight Indicators: our thought patterns, behaviors, emotions, health, relationships, words, and how we use time and money. These are useful to uncover ideas in ourselves, others, and even God.

A fascinating experiment is to read the Gospels and look for Jesus’ Eight Indicators. Yes, let’s read His words, but also look curiously at His behaviors, His relationships, how He used time and money, and why and how He expressed His emotions. We can learn an extraordinary amount about the heart of the person of Jesus this way.

I’ve provided several examples of how we mine for ideas about God and ourselves over the past few posts, and I’ll add one more today.

But It Sounds Evangelical…

I spent about a decade building and running what became a significant Christian ministry. With over 150 employees and offices located in different parts of the country, the job demands were substantial. At times, I would be physically, emotionally, spiritually, and relationally exhausted.

I intellectually believed that God loved me, although I made an offhand comment more than once that revealed the idea in my heart, which was materially different from my intellectual belief.

“God put me on the earth for this mission. I’ll rest when I’m dead.”

That comment might sound “evangelical,” dedicated, and loyal, but it pointed to an inner disintegration.

Had I taken the time to examine my indicator (my words) and followed them down the mineshaft into my heart, I would have discovered that my heart was experiencing God as a holy taskmaster. He didn’t value me because of who I am, but because of what I did. I was trying to perform to win His approval and affection. My heart didn’t experience God’s delight in me (Zeph 3:17). I’m not sure that ever crossed my mind. God was my employer, not a doting father.

I strongly suspect this idea about God is pervasive in modern Christianity, and it’s spiritually deadly. I wonder how many people function from other hidden assumptions about God - that He is a harsh judge, a prying spinster, a reluctant boss, a distant grandfather, a punitive instructor, or a temperamental tyrant.

We won’t really know unless we begin to pay attention to our heart’s indicators.

The Beloved

In addition to uncovering the hidden ideas in our hearts, this inner transformation toward true integration, wholeness, the abundant life, perfect peace, or experiencing God’s fullness centers around experiencing God’s true ideas. Judith Hougen, Henri Nouwen, and other writers describe it as experiencing life as the Beloved.

It’s not enough to intellectually know it - our hearts long to experience the reality of living in God’s love. This doesn’t simply refer to an emotional worship experience or a mountaintop retreat—it is a reality lived out day by day in the mundane.

Nouwen writes:

Becoming the Beloved means letting the truth of our Belovedness become enfleshed in everything we think, say, or do. It entails a long and painful process of appropriation, or better, incarnation. As long as “being the beloved” is litte more than a beautiful thought or a lofty idea that hangs above my life to keep me from becoming depressed, northing really changes. What is requires it become the Beloved in the commonplaces of my daily existence and, bit by bit, to close the gap that exists between what I know myself to be and the countless specifics of everyday life. Becoming the Beloved is pulling the truth revealed to me from above down into my ordinariness of what I am, in fact, thinking of, talking about and doing from hour to hour.

I’m just beginning to touch the surface of what this means in my own life, as my “taskmaster” ideas start to fade into the reality of God’s true ideas. That God delights in us. He shouts for joy over us. His love calms us. He not only loves us; He likes us.

Duc in altum—
Brian
Soil & Roots

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