forces. They are strong and they dictate huge areas of our lives. And it is possible to be a good Christian and go to church services and sing the right songs and jump through the right hoops and never let Jesus heal your soul.
Perhaps you have been around Christian communities enough to want nothing to do with them, and one of the reasons is the talk all seems so shallow. Like no one is talking about what really matters. I think this is a direct effect of the state of the souls of many pastors and leaders. So many leaders in Christian communities are going so fast and producing so much and accomplishing so much that they become a shell of a person. There is no space to deal honestly with what’s going on deep inside them.
I have seen many leaders who wear their issues on their sleeve. They are raising money to build a bigger building, but the truth is they are still trying to earn their father’s approval. They never unplug their answering machine and take a Sabbath because they still believe their parents’ divorce was their fault. They live in reaction to everybody around them because no one ever taught them to have a spine. They are racked with guilt because they are not doing enough. They are trying to teach people about a way of life that isn’t true of their own life. On a regular basis when I’m with pastors, I’ll ask them if the message they are preaching is the dominant reality of their own life. You can’t believe how many will say that it isn’t.
So my question for leaders—and for Christians everywhere—is, are you smoking what you’re selling?
I cannot lead people somewhere I am not trying to go myself. I don’t have to have arrived, I don’t have to be perfect, but I do need to be on the path. And that’s why for so many the church experience has been so shallow—so many leaders have never descended into the depths of their own souls. They haven’t done the hard, difficult, gut-wrenching work of shining the bright lights on all of the years of baggage and destructive messages.
It is so hard to look deep inside yourself. My experience has been that very few people do the long, hard work of the soul. Maybe that’s why Jesus said the way is narrow.
I’m hoping that wherever you are on your journey, you are tracking with me. I beg you to get help wherever you need it. Go to a counselor. Make an appointment. Go on a retreat. Spend a couple of days in silence. Do whatever it takes.
If you’re barely holding on, come clean. Tell somebody. Tell everybody if you have to. Check yourself in somewhere. What is it ever going to mean for you to gain the whole world if you lose your soul in the process? (I feel like I’ve heard that before somewhere.10)
I say the system has to be changed. It has to be destroyed and replaced not with another system but with an entirely new way of life. I see it happening, and it gives me great hope. I see leaders getting help and refusing to stuff it anymore. I see communities embracing their brokenness and the brokenness of their leaders, and healing is taking place. I see honesty. I see people who want to be fully alive. I see people who want the life Jesus promises and who are willing to let go of ego and prestige and titles to get it.
I can’t begin to tell you how much better my life is today than it was several years ago. I continue to dig things up and process new insights and learn about my insides. The journey continues.
I’m learning that a lot of people give up. They settle. And they miss out. Anybody can quit. That’s easy.
I’m learning that very few people actually live from their heart. Very few live connected with their soul. And those few who do the difficult work, who stare their junk in the face, who get counsel, who let Jesus into all of the rooms in their soul that no one ever goes in, they make a difference. They are so different; they’re coming from such a different place that their voices inevitably get heard above the others. They are pursuing wholeness and shalom, and it’s contagious. They inspire me to keep going.
I was sitting in the storage room last week at Mars Hill. The room was filling up for the service at 11 A.M. And I couldn’t wait for it to start.
Because Jesus is healing my soul.
At the center of the Christian faith is this man named Jesus who actually lived. If there wasn’t a Bible, there are still lots of historians, some from the first century, who talked about this Jewish man who lived and had followers and died and then, according to his first followers, was alive again.
As his movement gathered steam, this Jewish man came to be talked about more and more as God, fully divine as well as fully human. As his followers talked about him and did what he said and told and retold his stories, the significance of his life began to take on all sorts of cosmic dimensions. They realized that something much bigger was going on here, involving them and the people around them and all of creation. Something involving God making peace with the world and creation being reclaimed and everything in heaven and earth being brought back into harmony with its Creator.
But before all the big language and grand claims, the story of Jesus was about a Jewish man, living in a Jewish region among Jewish people, calling people back to the way of the Jewish God.
When I first began to realize that Jesus was Jewish, I thought, No way; he was a Christian.
But as I have learned more about Jesus, the Jewish rabbi, I have come to better understand what it means to follow him. So in this section of the book, I want to take you deep into the first century world of Jesus.
Torah
Jesus grew up in Israel, in an orthodox Jewish region of Israel called Galilee. Now the Jewish people who lived in Galilee believed that at a specific moment in human history, God had spoken directly to their ancestors. They believed this happened soon after their people had been freed from slavery in Egypt and were traveling in the wilderness south of Israel. Their tradition said that while their ancestors were camped at the base of Mount Sinai, their leader, a man named Moses, went up the mountain and received words from God.
They believed not only that God had spoken to Moses but that God had actually given Moses a copy of what he said.
They believed that the first five books of the Bible—Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy—were a copy of what God had said.
They called these five books the Torah.
Torah can mean teachings or instructions or simply “way.”
They believed the Torah was the way, the truth, and the life.
They believed the best way to live was to live how the Torah said to live.
And so the central passion of the people of Jesus’s world was teaching, living, and obeying the Torah.
Now the question among the rabbis, the teachers, of Jesus’s day was, how young do you begin teaching the Bible, the Torah, to kids? One rabbi said, “Under the age of six we do not receive a child as a pupil; from six upwards accept him and stuff him [with Torah] like an ox.”1
Education wasn’t seen as a luxury or even as an option; education was the key to survival. The Torah was seen as so central to life that if you lost it, you lost everything. The first century Jewish historian Josephus said, “Above all else, we pride ourselves on the education of our children.”2
So around six years old many Jewish kids would have gone to school for the first time.3 It would probably have been held in the local synagogue and taught by the local rabbi. This first level of education was called Bet Sefer (which means “House of the Book”) and lasted until the student was about ten years old.
Sometimes the rabbi would take honey and place it on the students’ fingers and then have them taste the honey, reminding them that God’s words taste like honey on the tongue.