Lost in Translation
Why the Good Life With God Keeps Getting Misread
Hey everyone, and welcome to our newest subscribers! Glad to have you along as we explore deep discipleship.
The Good (but Rare) Life
We have spent the last year and a half here on Substack exploring The Great Omission and how to resolve it. Though modern Christianity talks about making genuine disciples, it struggles to do so.
At present, we are turning our gaze in a slightly different direction to do a gut check: is the kind of discipleship life promised in the New Testament what we are actually living?
Over the last few posts, we’ve been wrestling with what is known as the Good Life, or the with-God life, or Christian mysticism. It is a life characterized by inner stability, an intimate, deep, consistent sense of God’s presence, a reduction in anger, an increase in love, and a two-way conversational prayer life. Obedience is not a chore - it is the unconscious, natural way to operate because we are so securely attached to the Creator.
Anxiety is rare, and fear is fleeting. Why should we feel that way when we exist in the safety of God’s care? Peace and joy are the norm, even when our circumstances suggest otherwise.
The mystic life isn’t so much about theological accuracy (though that’s important) as it is about an experienced reality. It isn’t as much about being right as it is about being loved and giving that love away. It’s about becoming love.
And yet, when we look around—at ourselves, our churches, and the emotional tone of our everyday discipleship—it can feel like we are reading about someone else’s religion. As we noted, very few people who follow Jesus claim this type of life.
That is why I keep returning to one unsettling question: How do we discover the Good Life?
If you are anything like me, you have probably wondered whether depth like this happens only to a select few: the mystics, the saints, the “super-Christians.” The people who have read all the books and prayed all the prayers and somehow found the trap door into God’s presence.
But I do not think that is what is going on. I think we have been living with a foggy idea of what normal Christianity is supposed to be.
And I think some of that fog is intentional.
Life in Three Acts
I’ve been studying, researching, and writing on the Great Omission for about four years. This year, I have reframed the discipleship journey in a simple three-stage arc:
The Good Life
The Great Omission
The Journey into Depth
The Good Life is the kind of life Jesus lived, and the kind of life the New Testament seems to assume is available for anyone who follows Him. It is the with-God life: a life shaped by experiential union with God that produces inner transformation and outward love.
The Great Omission is what tends to get in the way of that life. It is the discipleship crisis of our era—Christianity that can transmit information but fails to produce transformation reliably. It’s churches that grow crowds without effectively forming people. It’s communities that do “Christian things” without producing the interior life Jesus describes as normal.
And the Journey into Depth is the “how” question. If the Good Life is real, and if the Great Omission is real, then how do we jump the tracks we’re on and find our way home?
But here is where the conversation gets complicated.
Yes. And Also… No.
When we talk about why so few people seem to experience the Good Life, the most obvious answer is sin.
A typical evangelical Western Christian would be quick to say, “Of course, people are not living in deep relational attachment to God. Sin separates us from God.”
That makes sense on the surface. It is tidy and familiar. It fits the way many of us were taught to narrate our spiritual struggles: “God offers life, but sin gets in the way, so repent harder, try again, repeat.” But there is a problem.
Apprentices of Jesus are no longer separated.
Yes, we still sin. But the cross is not a partial repair job. We are restored to a right relationship with God. We are reconciled. We are welcomed. We are held. We belong.
And the people we call Christian mystics—the ones who seem to live with a steady, lived intimacy with God—are not sinless people. They are simply sinners who increasingly live in a reality where sin has less and less appeal.
We are not mainly talking about isolated acts of disobedience. We are talking about something more atmospheric than that.
We are talking about ideas.
Air Pollution
I am suggesting that, instead of treating the Good Life as expected and normative, we treat it as obscure or unavailable—and that the Great Omission is a primary reason why.
If we are not making genuine disciples, we are not experiencing the Good Life. If our discipleship culture cannot reliably form people into lived intimacy with God, then the with-God life will naturally begin to feel like something mythical or exaggerated.
And that creates a strange feedback loop:
We lose a clear vision of the Good Life.
We lower our expectations.
We reduce discipleship to information and behavior management.
We grow increasingly unformed and anxious.
And then we assume the Good Life is rare because “that is just how it is.”
But what if the Good Life is not rare because God is withholding it?
What if it is rare because we live within a set of powerful cultural and church assumptions that keep it cloudy and seemingly unattainable?
In other words, the air we breathe might be polluted.
A Quick Review of the Great Omission
Over the years, we have explored several diseased ideas that keep us from experiencing the Good Life. Here are three of the most important.
1) We Avoid Knowing Ourselves
To journey into the Good Life, we must not only know Jesus more intimately—we must also know ourselves more intimately. This is the concept of double knowledge: knowledge of God and knowledge of self.
But because most of us are not trained to value self-knowledge, we get stuck in what I call the Discipleship Dilemma. We can accumulate theological language while remaining strangely unfamiliar with our own hearts.
And what makes this especially frustrating is that many Christian leaders actively warn against self-knowledge, as if the heart is irrelevant or dangerous territory. That drives me crazy.
Self-knowledge is not narcissism. Self-knowledge is not the same as self-denial, or self-worship, or selfishness. The fact is, intimacy cannot be cultivated between two people if either or both don’t know themselves well. If we want the Good Life, we must know both Jesus and ourselves.
2) We Are Not Being Formed in the Right Ecosystems
Human beings are best formed by intentionally joining certain types of communities.
If we want to become more like Jesus, that happens most reliably in ecosystems that feature five elements:
Time. Habits. Community. Intimacy. Instruction.
Most people do not have access to those ecosystems. And so we live in what I call the Formation Gap: we may desperately want inner formation, but don’t have access to communities set up to support that journey.
We live in communities that can educate us but not necessarily form us. We live in churches that may inspire us but not necessarily transform us.
3) We Do Not Know Our Purpose
Many followers of Jesus don’t fully grasp the good news Jesus announced. We live in an age where “the gospel” has often been reduced to justification by faith:
“We are bad. Jesus died for us. Accept Him so we can go to heaven someday.”
But there is virtually no interaction between a forgiveness-only gospel and the with-God life. If my primary aim is to be forgiven and secure my afterlife, then deep intimacy with God in the present becomes optional. The Good Life becomes a “later” thing.
But the Gospel of the Kingdom (the good news Jesus proclaimed) announces that He came to take back all His stuff and invites us to join Him by embracing a new way to be human.
Without that vision, we will not seek the Good Life. There is no reason to.
Do vs. Be
Also, a common modern trap is to assume that discipleship is mostly about instruction: learn the commandments, apply them, obey them. Across the globe, various movements extol a command-first approach to apprenticing with Jesus. That makes sense, considering obeying commands is front and center in the Great Commission.
But the Good Life is not simply obeying God’s commands. The Good Life is becoming the kind of person who naturally lives them out because intimacy has reshaped your desires.
We are not human doings. We are human beings.
The goal is not strained obedience. The goal is a heart that has been so formed by love that obedience becomes the normal outflow of who you are. And that kind of heart formation cannot be reduced to instruction alone. That’s not how humans are formed.
Where This Is Headed
If the Good Life is real, and if we are not experiencing it, then we have to stop defaulting to simplistic explanations. Yes, sin matters. But a deeper question is: What ideas have formed our hearts into a version of Christianity where intimacy with God feels rare?
In the next article, we will push into what may be the most important question you and I can ask: What are our real ideas about God?
If we are struggling to experience the Good Life, might it be that our unconscious, powerful ideas about God differ from who He really is? After all, if the first step into the Good Life is vulnerability, perhaps our hearts struggle to surrender if their unspoken assumptions about God don’t actually align with Him.
That is a very different discussion from our intellectual beliefs or statements of faith.
Because if our real ideas about God are distorted, surrender will feel dangerous. And if surrender feels dangerous, the Good Life will always remain just out of reach.
Duc In Altum!
Brian
Other Resources
Books
Jonathan Edwards and the Good Life — Owen Strachan & Doug Sweeney
Among the commonly accepted Christian mystics, Edwards is often included. That’s surprising considering he is probably most famous for the sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” But as Strachan and Sweeney illustrate, Edwards was anything but angry. Rather, he lived a life of uncommon happiness and pleasure, grounded in an experiential relationship with a delighted God.
Podcast
If you’d like to get caught up on the basics of the Good Life, check out this recent episode of the Soil & Roots podcast.