Too Good to Be True
Why the Present Life Jesus Promised Is So Hard to Receive
Hi everyone, and welcome to our newest subscribers!
If you’ve just joined us, you may be surprised to discover this column isn’t about agriculture, though we often lean on nature-based metaphors. Instead, we explore what it means to become a person of depth; someone who is increasingly attuned to God, others, and themselves.
“Roots” refers to our hearts, and the “soil” refers to the ideas and desires in which our hearts are planted.
Let’s dig in.
The Good Life
In the last article, I tried to recover something we’ve largely lost: a living vision of what life with Jesus is actually meant to be like. Some have called it “the Good Life.” That term doesn’t refer to a life of ease, prosperity, and comfort. Nor does it refer to heaven someday, or moral improvement, or religious competence.
Instead, it refers to a present, relational life marked by inner freedom, security, rest, love, and a two-way, conversational prayer life—the life Jesus himself lived and invites us into. It’s grounded in a guttural sense that God not only loves us, He likes us. We come to “know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge.”
It’s what Dallas Willard referred to as “the with-God life.”
That vision matters more than we often realize. Because without it, discipleship quietly collapses into management: managing harmful behaviors, managing appearances, managing beliefs, managing exhaustion. We try hard, stay faithful, and endure—often without expecting much internal change along the way.
But a life characterized by “being filled with the fullness of God,” perfect peace, self-giving love, relational security, and the capacity to handle crisis seems reserved for a select few who, apparently, must spend weeks on end in silent prayer.
Still, if we are quiet enough, we often find our hearts longing for this type of inner life. And at some point, we have to ask a more personal and unsettling question:
If this type of life is real, why do so few of us actually experience it?
The Problem Beneath the Problem
For a long time, I assumed the primary obstacles to spiritual depth were external: culture, technology, bad theology, and institutional church models that emphasize information over formation. Those forces matter. They shape us more than we realize.
But over time, I’ve become convinced they are not the deepest problem. Even when people are offered a compelling vision of life with God—even when they believe it intellectually—many of us still resist moving toward it, which suggests something closer to home is at work.
The real obstacle is not effort or sincerity.
It is our struggle with vulnerability.
Modern Christianity still carries an unspoken assumption: if we believe the right things, transformation should follow. Or perhaps we assume the Holy Spirit is transforming us and doesn’t need us in the process.
But that isn’t how formation actually works.
We can believe sincerely and still be anxious. We can know Scripture well and still not do the things we know we should do. We can serve faithfully and still feel internally disconnected from God, others, and ourselves. We can spend our lives in church and still not experience God’s delight, pleasure, acceptance, and freedom.
That’s because we are not primarily formed by what we think. We are formed by what we love, desire, trust, and experience.
In other words, formation is not only theological—it is anthropological.
And that means the entry point into this Good Life is not doing more. It is by receiving differently.
The Costly Simplicity of Being Loved
Some quotations are worth repeating. Psychologist David Benner wrote something that continues to unsettle me:
“Genuine transformation requires vulnerability. It is not the fact of being loved unconditionally that is life-changing. It is the risky experience of allowing myself to be loved unconditionally.”
Most Christians would say they believe God loves them. Far fewer are willing to let that love reach the deeper, defended places of the heart.
Because to receive love vulnerably means loosening our grip on control. It means feeling pain we’ve learned to manage or numb. It means facing the shame we’ve learned to cover. It means trusting a God whose character (if we’re really honest with ourselves) we may only partially trust.
And that kind of exposure feels dangerous—especially for those of us who have learned to survive by being competent, capable, and in control.
Why Depth Feels Threatening
The Good Life does not simply add peace or joy to our existing lives.
It rearranges us and exposes the strategies we’ve developed to stay safe:
Self-reliance
Emotional distance
Over-functioning
Spiritual performance
Those strategies may limit joy—but they also protect us from pain.
So when God invites us into intimacy, rest, and union, something in us hesitates, not because we don’t want God but because we don’t want exposure. We feel safe with our control, distancing, business, and dependency on performance.
And so we quietly settle for something manageable—something respectable—even if it costs us joy, peace, and freedom - the Good Life.
Deep Calls to Deep
There is a line in the Psalms that captures this tension perfectly:
Deep calls to deep
at the roar of your waterfalls;
all your waves and breakers
have swept over me.
This is not gentle language. It is immersive - the language of being overtaken by something larger than ourselves.
And that call does not merely invite us to believe differently—but to be differently, from the inside out.
The trouble is, depth does not negotiate with our defenses! It seeks to overwhelm them, which is why many of us admire the Good Life from a distance while quietly standing on the shore.
Before We Go Any Further
If we are going candidly explore the Good Life, the with-God life, we should name this resistance.
Why does receiving God’s unconditional love feel unsafe?
Why does surrender feel like loss instead of freedom?
Why do we pull back when God moves toward us?
Those questions take us beneath surface theology and into the operating system of the heart. And that is where we’re headed next.
For now, I’ll leave you with this question: If the Good Life is real, why do we resist it?
Duc in altum.
Brian
Other Resources
If you read this column regularly, you’ll discover I sometimes “cheat” and mention the same resource more than once. Guilty as charged.
Surrender to Love — David G. Benner
This is the clearest and most direct exploration of the central claim behind this article: that transformation does not occur because we are loved, but because we allow ourselves to be loved vulnerably. It is the first and ongoing step in our journey into depth.
Benner gently exposes why surrender feels threatening and why many of us unconsciously resist intimacy with God—even as we long for it.
The Soul of Shame — Curt Thompson
Thompson brings neuroscience, attachment theory, and Christian theology together (in a newer science called “neurotheology”) to explain why vulnerability feels unsafe for so many of us. His work helps us understand how shame, fear, and self-protection shape the “operating system” of the heart—and why love must be received in relationship to heal us.
This is an especially helpful resource for those of us who want to understand why belief alone doesn’t lead to inner freedom and greater external love.
He stresses safe, relational communities - something for which Soil & Roots strongly advocates.
The Divine Conspiracy — Dallas Willard
Willard’s classic work remains one of the clearest articulations of the with-God life as the normative Christian life. While not explicitly focused on vulnerability, it provides the theological and spiritual vision underlying this entire conversation: that Jesus offers a present, embodied life in the Kingdom of God—one marked by peace, trust, and relational intimacy. Many readers have discovered, through Willard, just how far their expectations for Christian life have quietly drifted.