Put on your imagination hats for a moment. You’re a sixteen year-old, second generation Jewish refugee living in Syria. As far back as you can remember, you grew up as a social outcast, bullied under the oppressive ruling regime. Life gets on as well as can be expected for you and your family. Then, all of a sudden, the war you always heard about is in your backyard and the next morning, the Babylonians are gone, and a new occupying Persian army is here. You expect the Persians to be just like the rest, like every other big, pagan government you’ve heard your grandparents grumble about. But, to you and everyone else’s surprise, they’re not half as bad as the Babylonians. In fact, they have close to the same values as you, they respect your religion—they’re even monotheistic! You get tax breaks, representation, even your chance at a Persian citizenship.
But, within a year of sudden relief and prosperity, you’re sitting at the dinner table with your family and your dad apprehensively speaks up. He updates the family about a new legislation passed by the Persian king, that anyone of Jewish origin who wants to can move back down to the mother-land—back to Jerusalem. Jerusalem, you think to yourself, what’s in Jerusalem? My whole life is here! No one lives in Jerusalem except highway robbers and jackals. You’re very upset. Your dad tells the family that the neighbors are already packing up everything and headed down with the first group in the morning, and so are half the kids you know from Synagogue. It looks to you and your siblings that mom and dad have already discussed it, since mom looks as decided as dad. This is just they’re way of telling you, “we’re moving”.
Flash forward a couple years, and you’re working day-shifts on the busted, old heap of clay bricks which once had been Jerusalem’s outer wall. You’re getting heckled by your new pagan neighbors, who aren’t quite as tolerant of Jews as the Persians. You’re living in a tent city, and eating cold meals day in and day out. All that talk of revival and restoration feels stale in your mind as you pack another brick in the wall and mop your forehead.
You hear one of your comrades telling his friend there’s another itinerant preacher of some kind in the city—but you don’t care, you’ve heard it all before. You’re aware of a cynical streak spreading in your personality, but people kind of like your sarcastic humor, so why not poke a little fun at all this God-talk? Idealism doesn’t fill your belly, and your family needs food. You bet within a year you’ll be working a retail job again back in a prosperous Persian city on the Euphrates. But for now, your family’s going to hear the preacher tonight, and you have to go as their dutiful child.
That night you and your family follow a murmuring crowd of your equally hungry neighbors to the temple square. You’re told this is the same place king Solomon once worshiped, but there’s very little magic surrounding that name after all the scandals about his wives. Just another monument to hypocrisy and wishful thinking, you think to yourself as you pass under the gate. You expect to have heard impassioned preaching by now, but a different more troubling noise meets your ears. People are weeping.
Your family steps into the square and all murmuring stops. A heavy atmosphere of solemnity falls over you. Everyone’s hunched over, on their knees. Your first thought is, ‘what happened?’, your second thought is, ‘where’s the preacher?’. You look closely, and suddenly you see him, on the platform but facing away from the crowd, facing the altar, which would strike you as being a little old fashioned if you were not stunned by what he was saying. In a voice split with tears and an unsettling level of desperation, he’s confessing for all the people. You hear him croaking out,
“Now, our God, what shall we say after this? For we have forsaken Your commandments, which You have commanded by Your servants the prophets, saying, ‘The land which you are entering to possess is an unclean land with the uncleanness of the peoples of the lands, with their abominations which have filled it from end to end and with their impurity. So now do not give your daughters to their sons nor take their daughters to your sons, and never seek their peace or their prosperity, that you may be strong and eat the good things of the land and leave it as an inheritance to your sons forever.’ After all that has come upon us for our evil deeds and our great guilt, since You our God have requited us less than our iniquities deserve, and have given us an escaped remnant as this” (Ezra 9:10-13).
Your dad falls to his knees, pressing his forehead to the pavement, and you and your family follow suit. You listen to Ezra’s words, but you don’t know how to feel. You’ve heard of passion with legends like Moses and Elijah, but you could never really make it real to your imagination until now. Part of you wants to be offended at this new preacher, coming to stir up all this dormant sadness and trauma. At least the other preachers are encouraging. But you can’t help but feel guilty for letting yourself think this way. You feel like you’re the only one standing in this sea of repentance, even though you’re still physically on your knees. The sound of your father sobbing next to you brings you around, and you let yourself consider why Ezra is so heart-broken.
Your stomach growls, but there’s a deeper hunger there, you’ve felt it since your family was under Babylonian marshal law, and it didn’t go away with the prosperity under the Persians. It’s a hunger in your soul, a hunger you can hear in Ezra’s desperate voice, a hunger you can feel around your body through the sobs and moans of the people. A thought like a whisper enters your head as the tears begin to build—“you’ll always be an exile until you live with God”.
Holy Desperation
As evangelicals, we love a good revival story. It’s become epithetic of our historical faith and has defined whole periods of our history. Today you’ll find whole ailes of Christian literature on “revival”, and in most cases it’s not just Christian thrill-seeking; there is a genuine desire for revival along the major Christian lines in the west. But there is a key ingredient missing in almost all cases of modern revivalism. Pure, raw desperation.
An equally potent inversion of the biblical idiom, “Godliness with contentment is great gain” (1 Tim 6:6), is “worldliness with contentment is total ruin”. Like we discussed a little in the last chapter, the mainline western church has been saturated with the spirit of the time to the point where there’s little to salvage. Christian culture looks markedly similar to contemporary society in the west, and this includes its growing discontent with materialism. We’re feeling the squeeze of a secular salvation narrative that is crumbling around our feet, and those who aren’t aware of it yet are waking up to the reality of today’s cultural crisis.
A desperation for meaning and a lack of direction are felt in every quarter. The same churches we built in the 1970s to the early 2000s are going the way of the shopping mall in America, because they’re built on the same grounds of catering to contented, self-determining, secular people. However, contented secular people are becoming a rarer breed. Society on mas has become anxious, depressed, and desperate—even within the church. The church doesn’t need a revival, it needs a complete renovation.
At the time of the Persian takeover of the ancient near east in 539BC, the Jewish people had never seen more freedom and privilege under any other ruling empire. Still, despite all their new wealth and fruitful opportunities, thousands chose to follow Zerubabel, Nehemiah, and Ezra back to the ruined city of their ancestors. This hardly makes sense to practical western thinking, but the feeling I’m sure is something we can relate to today. It stems from something I call, “holy desperation”.
A holy discontent is one thing, but what I’m talking about is something different. I’m not referring only to our sense of instability in secular society, our unsatisfied-ness with the way we do worship and outreach, etc. I’m referring to something on a deeper level. It’s the place we have to begin on a personal and corporate level if true and lasting life is going to return to the church in the west. It’s not an intellectual ascent, it’s not an emotional frenzy, it’s not a zealous revolution. It’s messy, it’s ugly, it’s bitter-tasting, but it’s absolutely essential. It is the place God calls us to start, with a humble and a contrite heart (Is. 66:2).
Change Begins with Intention
Dallas Willard, the late professor and former director of the School of Philosophy at the University of Southern California, has an acronym he liked to use when teaching spiritual formation. “VIM”, as he says, “is a derivative of the Latin term “vis.” meaning direction, strength, force, vigor, power, energy, or virtue; and sometimes meaning sense, import, nature, or essence. Spiritual formation in Christlikeness is all of this to human existence.”. The acronym stands for: Vison, Intention, and Means. This can hardly be considered a master formula for spiritual formation, but it is a very helpful model to see what a fully rounded spiritual formation looks like.
Vision is where most Christians like to stay. It’s the realm of picture-thinking, imagining, self-convincing, and mental-modeling. For example, after an average church service, you might come away with a clearer vision of some principle, conviction, or idea that had previously been hazy in your mind. But vision is not an end in itself. The goal of the church service is not to help the congregation model in their heads an abstract idea of what Christian faith looks like, but to teach them what they ought to do. Vision is meant to lead to intention, which then must have a means to accomplish its goal—and these three things must continue to work interconnectedly, not in stages like a rocket. If one is missing, nothing will actually happen.
We use VIM in almost any decision-making process, and spiritual formation into Christlikeness is no different. For example, in making the decision to get married, you have an image, a vision of marriage you’ve inherited from your parents, relatives, friends, and popular culture. It can be a totally neutral picture, with marriage nowhere in the foreseeable future. Then, you meet someone, and after a period of dating the vision begins to form into a kind of determination. You begin to think you like the idea of being married to this individual.
However, you make a fatal blunder, one which has led to plenty of drama in other dating relationships. Dating goes from weeks, to months, to years. Now it’s been four years and you still haven’t spoken to her father or looked into buying a ring. You tell yourself you want to marry her, but your actions betray the truth. Whether it’s the free time, the financial freedom, or the fear of commitment, for whatever reason you weighed in your heart that not marrying would be better than marrying. One day you have a heated discussion with your significant other, at the end of which she says, “If you actually wanted to propose you would have done it already!” She’s spot on. You’re all vision and no actual intention. To intend something is to take the necessary steps to making it happen.
But that discussion sets you straight. You speak to her father, you pick up another shift, you buy the ring and before long you’re engaged. However, the means comes when you take intentional action to sustain what you have intended. A healthy marriage takes real, consistent maintenance in order to make it function the way it is meant to, in mutual love and service. These three practices go on in a perpetual cycle: holding your vision, which sustains your intention, which leads to your taking means.
When it comes to a return to the way Christ laid out for us, we must begin by evaluating our current vision of what the way of Christ really looks like. If what we are imagining the way of Christ to look like now is different than it really is, then pushing harder into that vision and propagating it is not going to help anything—in fact it will only serve to damage the body of Christ. In order to recover, the image would have to be transformed and renovated before it could lead to any meaningful intention. So the question is, where does the current vision of the way of Christ in mainline Christianity fall short of the way our Lord taught?
Blindness and New Sight
It can be hard to get a bead on what the human being is and what it needs. That’s due to the fact we ourselves are human beings, and part of being human is inventing our own internal realities. It’s not just a philosophical fancy that humans tend to invent their own lenses on reality, we can’t help but do it. It’s become popular in secular modernity to take this idea and make it the bedrock of truth—the whole humanist bent on the idea that reality can be anything I want, leading to the post-modernist conception that reality is only a subconscious illusion of the individual—a helpful device for the secular salvation narrative which has everyone scrambling to define themselves. It’s the cultural narrative which says, as a popular virtual reality headset marketing campaign has said, “reality is yours to defy”.
However, this illusory death-grip humans feel they have on reality in modernity is easily and frequently broken. Something as simple and devastating as cancer, life under a mountain of debt, or the loss of a loved one, or as we’re seeing today a virus which modern medicine struggles to combat, can shake even the most entrenched secularized mind into facing what we typically call, “the hard truth”. There is a profound gap between who we see ourselves as valuable, creative, significant creatures and the world we find ourselves in. The lament of contemporary songwriters, scholars, and philosophers for the last hundred years has been that we are creatures who need meaning, and who are exiled to a meaningless world.
But, as Jesus pointed out frequently during His ministry, the problem is seldom our environment or our circumstances but our eyes. As humans, we are born into a condition much like blindness. From day one, the entire landscape of reality, our own inner experiences and our experience of the world, is darkened and mysterious. This is not the kind of darkness which can be expelled by, why early modern thinkers called enlightenment or what later scientific minds called discovery. In both cases, these modes of creating light failed because they depended on a human mind which cannot see. The result was a subjective twilight of knowledge, where absolutes became a matter of opinion and, in the end, ended up with the tacit relativism we know commonly in the west, where anyone’s “truth” is as good as the next. So long as your “truth” doesn’t interfere with anyone’s quest for self-actualization, you won’t find much resistance in the secular sphere. We live (or walk) in this darkness, not always because we prefer darkness, but because we ourselves are completely incapable of making light. So we make up invisible worlds, we invent models of reality which can come very near to the truth, but in the end are only sculptures, replicas, clever interpretations of a reality too broad and complex to synthesize. However, if we had the light, if the eyes of our minds were suddenly healed, all this speculation about models of reality would evaporate and we could take it in at a glance. Humanity starting from itself can never come to the point of seeing the truth. They must receive their sight from God.
This is a huge theme in the gospel of John. In John 8, for example, Jesus stands in the temple courts and calls out to the crowd, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.” (John 8:12). This falls near the parallel themes in John of knowing the voice of the good Shepherd and trusting the testimony which Jesus gives, but in this case we see that Jesus Himself is the light of life (1:4–9, 8:12, 9:5). He is not proposing another model of reality or a different perspective on reality, He is saying that, unless you see through Him you will never be able to see. We already cannot trust our senses. We knew long before modern psychology that human beings are prone to self-deception in order to retain their preferred view of reality. Shutting our eyes tighter will not change the reality that surrounds us—the only option is to allow our eyes to be opened to the only reality there is: the reality of the Kingdom of God and that which opposes it.
The Kingdom of God is not a state of mind, not a unique philosophical theory or mental perspective, it is the reality in which God is interacting with the world of human beings. It is where the “good infection” has taken hold and is beginning the process of transformation—and this, at the end of the day, is salvation in the Kingdom of God, complete transformation into Christ-likeness (2 Cor. 3:18; Rom. 8:29; Eph. 4:15; 2 Pet. 3:18).
In our churches today, many live in the vague hope that if they keep coming to church, one day God will zap them with all the transformative effects that life in the Kingdom of God brings. They may profess all the right doctrines, go on mission-trips, tithe a tenth of their income, and follow all the prescribed righteousnesses of modern contemporary Christianity. However, anyone can do all these things and still not actually intend to follow Jesus.
Bringing this back into our discussion about VIM, to intend to see through Jesus like a corrective contact lens—basically, to follow Jesus—we must first take a good, long look at our inner selves free of all the dubious models and imaginings of our darkened, sinful minds (Prov. 20:27; Matt. 23: 27–28; 2 Cor. 4:16). We must really come to believe that, until all our vision and life comes from God, we will never see or live a satisfactory kind of life.
We must intend to live with God, which means we must take the necessary steps to make ourselves the kinds of people who draw life from God the way He intended us to do from the beginning. On paper, this process is very simple. God already wants to do this work in you, but if you do not draw near to Him nothing will change. We must take practical measures to close the distance between us and God which has been created by our personal false models of reality and identity. These steps are, practically, any action which eliminates any desires, commitments, thoughts, behaviors or anything that stands between you and God.
In short, if anything is nearer to you than God in thought, word, or deed, that thing must be redefined in your thinking—you must reform your thinking around it. This is the principle at the root of, what has historically been called, the spiritual disciplines. You may be familiar with a few of them: meditation, prayer, fasting, study, simplicity, solitude, submission, service etc. (list borrowed from Richard Foster). Each of these practices have been proven over centuries of Christian tradition effectively eliminating the kinds of obstacles we commonly experience in life which separate us from drawing our life directly from Jesus. However, this is not a book on the spiritual disciplines, and much wiser men and women than myself have written on this topic. A couple good starter books on this topic would be Richard Foster’s Celebration of Discipline and Dallas Willard’s The Spirit of the Disciples.
Of course, the spiritual disciplines are not an end in themselves the same way medicine is not an end in itself. They are meant to make us into the kinds of people who delight in the Lord, who come to Jesus for light and life, and who take their refuge in the Lord (John 6; Ps. 37, 73). We do not merit anything through practicing the disciplines, we only make room in our inner selves for God to take precedence. Until this happens, little to nothing of our Christian experience will ever reflect anything like what we read in Scripture or Church history. Drawing God’s kind of life into ourselves is the oxygen of the Kingdom of God, something I will discuss in more detail later in this book. However, these actions based on a definite intention to grow in Christ-likeness will not come about naturally in us until our vision of reality is restored in Christ. For now, whether we like it or not, we are often more spiritually paralyzed by the secular gospel than we realize.
A Spiritual Blood-Clot
The vision of the way of Christ is the only vision of life that sees reality correctly; unbent and unaugmented. It sees Christ as He is, directly in the center, with all the world, the flesh, and the devil being only peripheral realities. It’s a simple case of true north; whether you’re in Greenland or Australia, you only have to face it and to stop with the delusional idea that wherever your face turns is your own personal north. It may sound like a simple idea, but it is far from easy to implement and we must be realistic about the challenges.
Even still, the vision of the way of Christ is not an unreachable ideal. It is a vision untold thousands of Christians have had in the past—it’s the vision our Lord had throughout His entire earthly ministry, when He set the example for living life seriously and unapologetically lived in the will of the Father—in the Kingdom of God. Very basically, the vision of the way of Christ is living life in sync with the vision of the Father. It will not dawn on you in a moment, it takes careful, determined, intentional action to cooperate with the Holy Spirit in reshaping your thinking, attitudes, desires, and consequently your behavior.
To those looking from the outside in, the way of Christ makes no sense. Paul discusses this theme many times in the epistles. The Christian who sees through Christ thinks, desires, says, and does things that flow contrary to the thoughts, desires, speech, and actions of people who only see the world their presented with. Christ’s way is a way of experiencing life detached from this typical human framework of life which attempts to bridge the inconsolable void in the individual soul.
The beloved Psalm 73 is a great example of this—and incidentally a good example of Christ’s way of thinking being rooted in a more ancient vein than first century Judaism. The Psalm begins in a very troubled tone. The Psalmist laments that he had “almost stumbled” (v. 2). His stumbling, he goes on, came from seeing all the injustice and unfairness in the world. It is the common lament of those who walk in darkness as Jesus said. They see evil, unjust, unkind, unsympathetic, selfish people getting health and wealth they never deserved. They do every kind of injustice, they turn a blind eye to suffering, they indulge themselves without a single thought for those in need. The question is, how can this much good happen to such evil people?
The Psalm shifts in vv. 16–17: “But when I thought how to understand this, it seemed to me a wearisome task, until I went into the sanctuary of God; then I discerned their end.” The Psalmist realizes he had been judging the situation on his own sight, on his own merits—he could not see the reality which God saw until he came to the place where heaven and earth meet. Once he lays down His own ways of seeing and submits to God’s ways, he is granted a look at the reality. In God’s Kingdom they are all more impoverished, sick, and dying than anyone they are oppressing. This backwards and upside-down view is ubiquitous throughout Scripture, and is often frustrating to readers—I know it has often been frustrating to me—but it is the only way to arrive at reality. The way of Jesus is, in fact, coming to the sanctuary, the place where heaven meets earth—Jesus Christ, the narrow way through which we must pass to enter the Kingdom of God (Matt. 7:13).
The typical framework of human life is an artificial supplement for the reality Christ brings in the Kingdom, which offers the only salvation which means anything. As we have already addressed, the salvation of secularism is bankrupt from the start. It promised actualization, a granting of real personhood which can never be achieved autonomously in isolation. Most, if not all, secular philosophies, popular psychology, and world religions hold something in common which the way of Christ does not. They seek to be independent and self-sustaining, looking inward for life and light (energy, meaning, and understanding), whereas the way of Christ is quintessentially dependent, looking upward. The common human frameworks get it right in that there is a deep and primal error in the human soul which needs to be fixed, but where they fail is in thinking the human being, whether individual or collective, can fix it. Whether it be through personal enlightenment, the nervana narrative, medication, or psycho analysis, we supplement our faulty worldviews with any means necessary to get us close to something like deliverance. But, as is becoming common knowledge, every human effort falls short of the deeper hunger. The humiliated secular mind quickly has to find rationalizations for why these quick-fixes fail so that we don’t descend deeper into despair and existential dread—which in today’s western secular environment is the prevailing mood.
The way of Christ knows there is nothing we can do in our own power to heal our souls, and must appeal to higher power—we must see and enter the Kingdom of God. It knows that the error in human souls is less of a stab wound than it is like a blood-clot. We were made to function a certain way, with greater power than we now have, but it’s as if our hearts are functioning at 30%. Worse than that, it’s as if our arteries have all been severed, and our heart is a dead and stagnant organ. It needs to be reconnected, to pulse with warm, living blood in order to live again. The way of Christ affirms we need a divine tether, a lifeline to heaven in order to heal us, grow us, and perfect us, as Jesus explains through the parable of the vine in John 15. The way of Christ is abiding in Him, literally living in His life. We need to be attached to something rooted, something living, something grounded. The branches move with the vine, our life is synonymous with it, and as our Lord Himself said, “…apart from Me you can do nothing.” (John 15:5).
Looking at the way of Christ from any perspective except from within it will lead to a delusion view of reality, and consequently to a never-ending cycle of delusional visions, intentions, and means. To all human frameworks the way of Christ does not make sense, and we shouldn’t expect it to. They see all the vineer, all the gilded and ridiculous outer-workings, but they cannot see the inside until they themselves are inside.
In C.S. Lewis’ short anecdote, “Meditation in a Toolshed”, he talks about this exact phenomenon. He describes being in his garden shed on a sunny day. Through a hole in the ceiling, a solid shaft of light broke through the darkness of the shed. Looking directly at the ray of light was not very informative, it seemed only to make the darkness around it more pronounced. But when he stepped into the light and looked up to its source, he suddenly found himself transposed into another world. He could no longer see the shed around him, but above him he could see treetops, white clouds, and stark blue sky. The light ceased to be the object, it became the medium of his sight. The way of Christ is like that. We don’t only look at it from the outside, we don’t only study it or try to discern what the outside world might look like, we have to step completely into it, to become immersed in it.
There’s lots of names for this immersive experience of the ‘outside world’, of living in the narrow vision of God’s will. Some have loosely called it your “faith-walk”, or “incarnational-living”, but to Jesus and the New Testament authors, this is known as the Kingdom of God. It’s a term we’ve mythologized and hijacked for various purposes throughout contemporary Christian history, but it is the beating heart of the gospel.
To any modern person today the words “kingdom” and “heaven” have little immediate meaning to our context. We don’t live in a monarchy, our contemporary mental image of heaven is more informed by pop-culture than by anything substantial. However, it wasn’t until I began to have a clear vision of the biblical Kingdom of God that I began to see along the sunbeam, so to speak, and that is why I’ve committed to writing this book. My sincere desire for you and anyone else who picks up this book is to come away with such a clear and potent vision of the biblical Kingdom of God and its implications that your desperation for it is set ablaze. After all, this is the good news Christ and the Apostles preached—not simply a way out of hell, not simply a way to good life, and not simply a way to get right with God—it is the only way to live and function the way mankind was created to—in sync with the heart of God.
