Turning the Page

Hi all, and welcome to all of our new subscribers this past week. Thanks for coming along as we explore deep discipleship.

For those of you who have been reading since the beginning, a special thank you! And thanks for all of the emails and messages. I’ve learned so much from this community, and it’s a joy to journey with you.

We have covered an enormous amount of ground over the past year and a half. We started off examining modern Christianity through the lens of genuine discipleship. Dallas Willard termed this age “The Great Omission,” and we spent several months assessing his description.

We then turned our attention to some of the current challenges in our spiritual formation journeys.

First, to become more like Jesus, we intentionally get to know two people: Jesus and ourselves. Unfortunately, we live in an age that, whether subtly or overtly, rejects this long-held theological premise of “double knowledge.” Few of us have belonged to communities that encourage us to explore our inner lives. In fact, that exploration is often labeled selfish. I call this “The Discipleship Dilemma.”

Second, we’ve explored what is perhaps the most central question in the life of a disciple: how does one person become more like another? If a disciple is an apprentice of Jesus for the purpose of becoming more like Him over time from the inside out, how does that work? How do we become people who increasingly think, act, relate, and love like Him?

In other words, how is character truly formed?

To answer that question, we looked at numerous examples of intentionally formative ecosystems (early childhood, college, marriage, the military, cults, the early church). We discovered that, in all cases, they share five common elements: time, habits, community, intimacy, and instruction.

Ironically, we don’t find all five of these present in most modern Western Christian communities, so many of us lack healthy, formative environments. The contemporary church leans heavily on instruction and usually neglects the other four. However, we aren’t brains on sticks. Our heads learn through instruction, though our hearts do not.

Our inner lives are formed (and malformed) primarily through relationships and experience. I call this lack of five-element ecosystems The Formation Gap.

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The Good Life We’ve Forgotten

Over the past few months, I’ve come to realize that, although we’ve done our level best to describe and dissect the challenges to our discipleship, I’m not sure we’ve painted a healthy picture of what a life with Jesus can be like.

Perhaps The Great Omission and the other challenges we’ve explored exist because we’ve lost the plot. Maybe we struggle to intentionally become more like Jesus because we don’t see how that type of life is any different from what we are currently experiencing.

We may not articulate it clearly, but we often carry a working image of a life with Jesus somewhere beneath the surface: try hard, stay faithful, manage your sin, believe the right things, endure.

And yet, when we slow down and actually watch Jesus, something doesn’t quite fit.

Jesus does not appear anxious. He is not hurried or defensive. He is not internally fragmented or bracing himself against the world.

He is astonishingly free.

Free to love people without needing their approval. Free to speak the truth without fear. Free to suffer without losing himself.

Jesus lives as someone who is profoundly, unshakably safe.

That life is not incidental. It is the life Jesus invites us into.

Over the past several years, I’ve come to realize that many of us have quietly lost a living vision of what I’ll call (among others) the Good Life—not heaven someday, but a present, relational life with God marked by inner rest, freedom, security, and love.

This loss of vision for a life with God is present among many who follow Jesus and among many who don’t.

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The Toddler Life

The New Testament has language for this kind of life. Jesus speaks of abiding. Paul speaks of being “rooted and grounded in love” and “being filled to all the fullness of God. Eternal life itself is defined not as something that happens after we die, but as knowing God—an intimate, experiential knowing, not merely intellectual agreement. It’s a day-in, day-out, two-way conversational, vulnerable experience with our Creator.

This kind of life has sometimes been called the with-God life. It has also been described—unhelpfully, at times—as mysticism. But stripped of baggage, it simply refers to a person whose inner world is steadily shaped by a lived relationship with God.

Someone who knows—deep down, in their body, their gut, their soul—that they are loved.

Ironically, the clearest picture I’ve found of this life does not come from theology books or monasteries. It comes from watching a toddler.

A child in a healthy home does not worry about tomorrow. She isn’t managing impressions or protecting an image. She is strikingly present—free to explore, free to delight, free to cry when she’s hurt, free to love without calculation.

That freedom doesn’t come from ignorance. It comes from relational security.

She knows someone has her back. It’s an unconscious reality - she doesn’t even think about it.

When we witness this kind of presence, something in us aches. We recognize it instantly—not as childishness, but as something deeply human that we’ve lost. And when Jesus tells us that the kingdom belongs to such as these, it begins to feel less like sentiment and more like a diagnosis.

So why does this life feel so unrealistic for us?

Part of the answer is obvious. We grow up. Life becomes complicated. We accumulate wounds, responsibilities, and disappointments. Trust becomes risky. Dependence feels naïve.

But there is a deeper obstacle—one that cuts closer to the heart.

The Good Life does not begin with doing. It starts with receiving.

And that sounds simple until we try it.

To receive love—real love, unconditional love—requires vulnerability. It requires loosening our grip on control, competence, and self-protection. It exposes the strategies we’ve developed to stay safe, impressive, and in charge. And most of us, if we’re honest, are not sure we want that.

We want transformation without exposure, intimacy without risk, and love without any surrender.

And so we settle. We trade the Good Life for a manageable one—one where we remain in control, even if it costs us joy, peace, and freedom. We quietly assume that Jesus’ promises are exaggerated, poetic, or reserved for a select few - perhaps the “super-Christians” we read about in books or supposedly see on TV.

But what if the life we secretly long for is the very life God is offering?

And what if the path home does not begin with trying harder—but with allowing ourselves, again and again, to be loved?

That is the question we’ll spend some time exploring.

Duc in altum.

Brian

Other Resources

We’re going to enter into an introspective, vulnerable series, so here are some other resources in case you want to dig in further. None of these are quick fixes—but all of them point toward depth.

• The Divine Conspiracy — Dallas Willard
  A foundational work on Jesus’ vision of the kingdom of God and what it means to live with God here and now—not merely for heaven later.

• Surrender to Love — David G. Benner
  A gentle but candid exploration of why receiving God’s love requires vulnerability—and why that vulnerability is often the very thing we resist most.

• Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership — Ruth Haley Barton
  Barton offers a vision of leadership rooted in interior freedom and intimacy with God.

• Life Together — Dietrich Bonhoeffer
  Bonhoeffer is very German and very blunt, but this is a classic for good reason. Bonhoeffer reminds us that formation happens in shared life, not isolation. I suspect he would resonate with our five key elements of formation.