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Happy June, everybody, and welcome to our new subscribers this week. Thanks for joining the Soil & Roots community as we explore God, ourselves, and the deeper life that so many of us sense is possible but struggle to find.

Last week, we launched the Soil & Roots Spiritual Formation Survey. After five years of exploring deep discipleship, we're discovering something surprising about our audience. Before we share what we're learning, we'd love to hear from you.

If you haven’t yet taken 2-3 minutes to complete it anonymously, please consider doing so today. We’d love to hear your heart and thoughts.

To the many of you who have already responded, thank you! As we had hoped, you have been authentic and open-hearted with your comments and questions.

It’s been a wonderful encouragement to our team to hear from you.

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Because our column here (and the Soil & Roots podcast) is not time-sensitive op-eds but rather a slow, progressive, guided journey into deep discipleship, I sometimes provide short overviews of what we’ve covered so far to provide context. (Try Episode 133 of the podcast if you prefer audio.)

Here are some of the salient bullet points. Skip below if you don’t need this.

Many sincere people carry a quiet question they rarely say out loud: If following Jesus is supposed to transform us, why do so many of us still feel stuck? Have I become less angry, controlling, and anxious, and more selfless, free, and generous?
We attend church, listen to sermons, read books, and consume more spiritual content than any generation in history. Yet many of us continue to experience a nagging sense of disconnection from God, others, and even ourselves. We know more, but we don’t always seem to be changing.
Dallas Willard referred to this dilemma as “The Great Omission.” Despite Jesus’ command to make disciples, modern Christianity often struggles to help people become the kind of persons Jesus envisioned.
At Soil & Roots, we define a disciple as someone who apprentices with Jesus for the purpose of becoming more like Him from the inside out over time.
This raises an important question: How does one person become more like another? How does genuine inner transformation actually happen? As we explore that question, we discover that many of our assumptions about God, ourselves, and the nature of spiritual growth may not be what we think they are.
First, we cannot grow to become more like Jesus unless we get to know two people really well: Him and ourselves. While modern Christianity appropriately emphasizes the former, it all but ignores the latter. I call this “the Discipleship Dilemma”: genuine spiritual formation requires a deep, intimate knowledge of God and of the self, yet our current institutions provide virtually no help or guidance for the journey inward (and, in some cases, rail against it).
Second, we’ve discovered that human beings have intentionally architected formative ecosystems for as long as we’ve been around, and they are worth examining. Pick any group that exists for healthy inner character formation (marriage, early childhood, college, the military, professional sports teams, or the early church), and we’ll find five key elements in common with all of them: extended time, intentional habits, authentic community, trusted intimacy, and transformative instruction.
One place we rarely find all five elements today is the modern church. You and I live in the Formation Gap - our hearts long to become more like Jesus, but we often lack the elements to help us do so.
We’ve wrestled with several reasons for this, and concluded that most churches do not consider themselves character-forming ecosystems (and most individuals don’t either). They function from a reduced and flawed anthropological idea: that we are brains on sticks. We live in an age that assumes propagating correct information is the highest good, leading to the rise of the Christian celebrity teacher and the glut of ubiquitous Jesus-related information in both physical and digital forms.

However, information and transformation are not the same thing.

In fact, the human person is a wonderful and complex creature, consisting of both visible and invisible, conscious and unconscious forces and elements. The head, for example, learns through instruction. The heart, however, is formed through experience and relationships. To be discipled, to be transformed from the inside out, requires a more holistic, community-centric path that considers the entire person and particularly considers the heart, the core of a human being. And since God spills a lot of ink in His first book and a lot of beauty in His second to capture our hearts, we might accept His invitation to spend some time with Him there.
There are at least two powerful, typically hidden and unconscious forces in our hearts that govern how we view the world and operate in it: ideas and desires. We haven’t poked around our desires yet, but ideas are “assumptions, conclusions, and principles in which our hearts are rooted, but of which we are generally unaware.” Ideas aren’t so much intellectual agreements as they are experienced realities.
To become more like Jesus, to become love, even these unconscious forces are to be reformed and transformed. But to uncover these ideas is to take a sometimes difficult, painful, and sobering trip to the very center of ourselves - the place where God most wants to heal and dwell. And that trip is best taken with God and a few trusted, long-term friends.
One powerful tool for uncovering these hidden ideas is called Heartview. Our hearts bubble up their ideas whether we want them to or not, and they show up in our thought patterns, emotions, health, relationships, words, behaviors, and how we use time and money. If we courageously and authentically pay attention to these Eight Indicators with God and a trusted friend, we are well on our way to becoming deep disciples.

My 12th-grade English teacher used to tell us to keep things “trite, pithy, and succinct.” There you go.

If you’ve been reading this column for any length of time, you’ve probably noticed I’ve slowed down the pace. That’s because we are working through one of the most central and vital aspects of our humanity: our ideas of God.

Notice I didn’t write, “our beliefs about God.” My social media feeds are flooded with hundreds of voices telling me what I should believe, as are most of the books on my crowded and groaning bookshelves.

In today’s hyper-rational cultures, “beliefs” normally refer to our intellectual agreements, those truth claims with which we mentally assent. Examinining and wrestling with our beliefs is a worthwhile pursuit.

Ideas are those experienced realities that often sit hidden and uncovered in our hearts. Sometimes they align with our beliefs, but often they don’t.

We looked at two common, powerful, potentially damaging ideas of God already: that God isn’t always good and that He is partial. We may insist that we intellectually believe God is both fully good and radically impartial, yet operate from ideas contrary to our beliefs. It happens all the time.

If we find ourselves anxious about the future or attempting to control a person or situation to protect ourselves, we are functioning from the idea that God isn’t always good. If we were, we would experience greater inner trust and rest, because even in suffering, uncertainty, and loss, we remain secure in God's goodness and care.

When a leader claims to have heard from God about a project or initiative, and we suppress our own concerns because we assume God speaks more clearly to them than to us, we are operating from the idea that God is partial. We may never say it out loud, but we assume the leader has access to a special relationship, special guidance, or special favor that the rest of us do not. I'm pretty sure that's the definition of partiality.

We’re going to start peeling back the layers of another common, potentially harmful idea of God that I find lurking in all sorts of places: the idea that God doesn’t like us.

Before we go further, I should explain what I mean by “like.”

I’m not using the word in a casual sense, as though God merely finds us pleasant or agreeable. By “like,” I mean that God genuinely enjoys being with us. He takes delight in us. He welcomes our presence and desires our company. He is not merely tolerating us until we become better people.

Most of us have experienced relationships in which we were accepted but not particularly enjoyed. The question before us is whether God relates to us that way.

Handsome Kyle, one of my co-hosts on the Soil & Roots podcast, expressed this idea so poignantly.

“For most of my life, I unconsciously assumed that God didn’t care for me that much. I didn’t particularly like myself, so why should God? I assumed that He grudgingly accepted me because of what Jesus did, but wasn’t excited about it. I sat in church for decades, hearing about God’s unconditional love and mentally agreeing with it. But inside, I functioned from the idea that God basically disliked me.”

His comments compel a reasonable question: How does a person hear about God’s love for decades, and yet still function from the idea that God doesn’t like them?

The more I chat with people, the more convinced I am that many, whether they follow Jesus or not, operate from this lived reality.

David Benner provides a simple test to help us uncover this idea of God.

“Imagine God thinking about you. What do you assume God feels when you come to mind? When I ask people to do this, a surprising number of people say that the first thing they assume God feels is disappointment. Others assume that God feels anger. In both cases, these people are convinced that it is their sin that first catches God’s attention. I think they are wrong - and I think the consequences of such a few of God are enormous.”

To venture further into this idea is to invite potential theological rebuke, because we have to deal with Benner’s assertion that “people are convinced it is their sin that first catches God’s attention.”

Whether someone follows Jesus or not, I suspect he is correct. Many function from the idea that God first and foremost sees us through the lens of our harmful thoughts and behaviors.

Why would that be, when both of His books (the Bible and creation) are littered with His longings, overtures, and extraordinary attempts to be with us?

My theory is that one of the primary drivers of this idea is the West’s “reductionist Gospel.” That’s a fancy term that means the Good News we’re teaching has been boiled down to this: “We screwed up, God sent Jesus to save us, accept Him into your heart so you can be rescued from sin and go to heaven someday.”

Variations of this reduction have been baked into every crevice and corner of modern evangelicalism for the past century or so, and it has become part of the underlying fabric of modern Christianity. From tele-evangelists to memes, from Sunday sermons to podcasts, from Christian movies to worship music, the message is the same: we are sinners and need Jesus so that we can come back to God. If we’ve been around Christianity for any length of time, we don’t think or question this idea. It’s the air we breathe.

The problem is that this version of the Gospel, while containing essential truths, is incomplete. If those who follow Jesus or are interested in doing so are steeped in a story that focuses almost exclusively on the sin/not-sin dynamic of the human condition, we shouldn’t have to guess why people aren’t sure God likes them very much.

“Sure, God loves me and has accepted me into His family. But would He drop everything to spend a Sunday afternoon watching football with me? Probably not. I’m constantly doing things He doesn’t approve of.”

I recently suggested to a friend that he ask Jesus this question: “Jesus, what do you like most about me?” My friend couldn’t utter the prayer. He couldn’t comprehend why Jesus would bother to answer it.

Most of us don’t doubt that God would forgive us. We doubt that He would enjoy us.

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We understand why those of us in and around Christianity hear so much about sin. The forgiveness of sins is central to the faith, and our leaders rightly want us to stop harming ourselves and others.

But what if the question isn’t whether sin matters? Of course it does.

The question is whether sin is the first and fullest thing God sees when He looks at us.

What if there is a deeper reality than sin management? What if the inner change we desire that leads to human flourishing (and less harm) is rooted not only in the forgiveness of sins, but also in experiencing the fact that God genuinely desires to be with us?

The message of His first book is that God passionately desires to be with us, and in the most intimate way possible. He is willing to go to extraordinary lengths to prove it. Does that sound like someone who merely tolerates us?

Surely we can’t ignore some of God’s characteristics, such as His holiness and justice. Yet do we spend enough time and energy exploring God’s joy, delight, approval, affirmation, and fatherliness? To say that God likes us is not to deny His holiness or overlook our rebellion.

It is to suggest that God does not simply endure His children. He delights in us. He welcomes us and desires communion with us.

If we operate under the idea that God is perpetually disappointed in us, whatever sin management we attempt will be frustrated in any case. As Benner notes:

“The motive for any obedience you might offer will be fear rather than love, and there will be little genuine surrender. Surrender involves relaxing, and you must feel safe before you can relax.”

Since we see the best picture of who God is in Jesus, it may be worth asking if He seemed to like the people He encountered. Did he immediately reject, disdain, or look down on anyone who didn’t seem to “get it?”

On the contrary, Jesus enjoyed being with all sorts of people, even those who screwed up, argued, didn’t understand Him, and were put off by Him. He wanted to be with men, women, and children, from different classes, races, religious perspectives, and life circumstances.

He intentionally sought out the woman at the well. He told the coniving Zacchaeus to open up his house and throw a party. He liked a good surprise. He joked around, handed out some nicknames, welcomed their questions, fed them, cared for them, encouraged them, and served them.

I'm not attempting to throw any theological darts at the reality of sin and its destructive effects on our relationship with God. But if sin management is the heart of the message, we are missing the heart of God. The grand narrative of both of God’s books is His passionate desire to be with us, to welcome us as His children and friends.

If we choose otherwise, so be it, but that certainly isn’t His preference.

He Likes Me, He Really, Really Likes Me

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