Discipling By Jesus

Bridging the gap between Intimacy and Impact with Incarnation, aka "procreation"

Philippians 3:10-12

What is it that truly troubles our heart?
Is this disturbance actually from God, to provoke us to flee religious compliance and carnal indulgence in favor of ecstatic union with the Trinity?

John 14

How do we sustainably enter into God's rest?  Is it by only doing what we see God doing?

Hebrews 4

What if the real war is not between "biblical" and "secular" culture, but "left-brain" WEIRD versus "right-brain" Traditional -- with neither actually on God's side?

Healing from “Childhood Emotional Neglect” (CEN)

Childhood Emotional Neglect (as a child or teen) results in emotional disconnect and lack of emotional intelligence.

In a marriage, one or both spouses may need healing from CEN
Spouses who need healing will often exhibit these 10 characteristics…

1. Misread each other's feelings.
2. Avoid discussing difficult topics to avoid conflict.
3. Be unable to argue productively.
4. Focus on logistics rather than feelings.
5. Not confide in each other.
6. React inappropriately if the other confides.
7. Not feel like a team.
8. Feel alone even with their spouse.
9. Have difficulty finding topics to discuss.
10. Feel awkward experiencing positive emotions like love, or only feel them during sex.

When children are emotionally neglected:
Children raised with emotional neglect:

1. Don't know how to express their emotions and don’t feel comfortable expressing their emotions (because they were not asked questions such as “How are you?,” “Are you sad?,” etc.).
2. Don't learn how to recognize and discuss emotions (others or their own)
3. Hide their emotions and may not be aware of them.
4. Do not understand themselves or their own needs or feelings (or others).

Are we lying to ourselves?
Will listening better to our Others help us find the truth?

* I Told Me So: Self-Deception and the Christian Life
* Living Fearless - Jamie Winship

Coming up on Feb 14: VaLENTine Men's Study

How do we prove to the world that we don't need the same things they want?

Warning: spoiler alert for Crazy Rich Asians.

See also 12/2 Tri-Quatrain: Choose to Lose

What if the true opposition to the gospel is hidden inside our own implicit assumptions about reality?

1. Identifying and confronting our emotional distress is essential for identifying our lack of alignment with the Father’s will.
2. For you, I believe that taking up *your* cross would require you to actively pursue becoming aware of and confronting the roots of your emotional distress, because you have become addicted to a superficial yielding that does not result in emotional catharsis or true intimacy.

I need to go now and do the exact same thing with MY wife (confront the roots of MY emotional distress).

Four Stages of Engagement.

1. Try to fix your problem 
2. Step back and let you fix it yourself
3. Incarnate into the tension beneath the problem
4. Demonstrate Christ's new victory

Does Jesus -- unlike Pharisees and philosophers -- require His disciples to sacrifice our "digital abstraction of self" in order to confront the emotional distress that lurks beneath?

Your impression is essentially correct, though perhaps not _quite_ as bad as you probably think...  

During most of the gospels, the disciples wanted a king who would destroy their enemies rather than a savior who would destroy their sin.

My Christ-less failure mode is trying to destroy your sin instead of [before] confronting my own.

Luke 9:18-26

• 22 And he said, “The Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests and the teachers of the law, and he must be killed and on the third day be raised to life.”
• 23 Then he said to them all: “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me.

Is a relationship with God about obeying His will or enjoying His presence?

Or something else entirely?

Should our highest value be allowing God to rewrite our values?

Can externalizing our eternal values enable us to maintain integrity while being fully emotional present for others?

What does it mean to love our community the way Christ does his friends?

• The Opposite Of Addiction Is Not Sobriety – It Is Human Connection

• Anthem: Follow The Way Of Christ (Becoming “Foot-Washers”)

• John 15:13: Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.
•  Matthew 16:23: Jesus turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; you do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns.”
• Matthew 5:11: Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me.

What is needed to keep growing us all closer to Jesus?

• Our strategy (ultimate goal) is to love (hesed) the Lord our God with all our heart, all our soul, all our mind, and all our strength (particularly via loving our families as our selves).
• Our tactics include various spiritual disciplines (tools and tasks).
• Operational Discipleship is ensuring we accomplish the right objectives (management), which is what aligns tasks (execution) with goals (leadership). 

The paradigmatic verse for this is Luke 9:23, where we escape the cultural identity of Christendom by:

1. Denying the current version of our Self (personal, relational, societal)
2. Taking up our cross daily (the very thing our homeostatic self doesn't want us to see, much less do)
3. Following Jesus (after the cross as our new self, not just before it as our old self)

References:

• Speck to Beam to Cross: Responsive Discipleship
• From Christendom to Christ: Religion vs Relationship
• My Thick Geas: Growing Closer to Christ / Through His Cross
• Discipling By Jesus

What does Christ think about good and evil?

Is anyone more evil than "you"?

https://biblehub.com/luke/11-13.htm

"Productive Vulnerability" as the narrative protocol to both unmask our own self-deception and reveal the power of Christ.

This is the redemptive alternative to either withdrawal or control
(as a way to cope with the dysphoria from encountering our mutual brokenness).
Withdrawal and control can be effective in reducing short-term pain,
but fail to confront the underlying brokenness
and are thus toxic to the authenticity required for healthy long-term relationships.

See also: Faith in two syllables 

• Axiom 1.  We are all broken
• Axiom 2. Christ is the cure

Childing -> Adulting -> Christing (like Jesus)

Is working through "brokenness" (versus information or skill) our greatest challenge?

Ernie struggles with broken audio to explain the joy of sharing/healing our brokenness (aka sin) with Jesus.

Poetry reading: 8/8 Tri-Limerick: Don’t Look Down

https://2transform.us/dbj/

What happens when the law meant to unite us ends up diving us?

Is God calling us to shift from Jehu to Elisha?

# Ernie

1. Not wanting to incarnate into other peoples dysfunction
2. Do I want to heal people from their brokenness so that I can identify with them? VS
3. Am I willing to identify with people in their brokenness so that God can heal us

# Robby

1. Jesus, how do I grow closer to You in such a way that Your Spirit most deeply shapes what I want and what I pursue?
2. A common tension -- between pursuing the mission and caring for the members -- reflects the feelings among my own family that I “don’t care about them.”
3. The most important question for me is “What does Jesus want?”
   1. My focus tends to then be on how *I* can pursue what *I* imagine He wants.
   2. However this overlooks the reality that the first thing He wants from me is intimacy with me.

# Reframing Offense

"Being versus Feeling Annoyed"

1. Objective analysis (of their wrong)
2. Self-awareness (of my "blaming" thought cycles)
3. Emotional introspection (of the anger/frustration behind those cycles)
4. Humble recognition (that my issues intersect with theirs)
5. Conscious identification (that we both need the same grace)

How do we balance the tension between:

• Performance: getting the job done
• Conformance: getting along

Precisely by confronting those areas where we are unable to hold that tension,
in order to experience Christ's transformation

https://biblehub.com/luke/9-23.htm