If questions about sex lead to questions about God, it’s important that we know and follow Jesus as He really is. Rick Lawrence, author of “Editing Jesus”, joined Juli to discuss how many American Christians make Jesus into an image other than Himself.
Prefer to listen? You can also listen to the full conversation here.
Juli (00:00.908)
What we believe about sex will always come back to what we believe about God. That’s something I say a lot on this podcast. So what do you actually believe about God? How about Jesus? Well, welcome to Java with Juli, hosted by me, Juli Slattery. This podcast is listener supported. It’s an outreach of the ministry, Authentic Intimacy. And our mission is to help people make sense of God and sexuality.
Well, if what we believe about sex is ultimately tied to what we believe about God, then we’re in big trouble if we have the wrong concept of God. In a lot of ways, here in the Western Church, I think we’ve lost sight of the real Jesus. We can get comfortable smoothing the edges of his teachings and sometimes just skipping over aspects of our Lord that frankly just make us uncomfortable. And that’s why I was really excited to share today’s conversation with you.
My guest is Rick Lawrence. He’s a ministry leader, a speaker and author of over 40 books. He does a lot of training, coaching and equipping ministry leaders. And he’s joining me today to talk about his recent book called Editing Jesus, how we’ve lost sight of who Jesus is and why it’s so essential that we embrace all of him. I know you’re going to be challenged by Rick’s insight as I was. So let me dive right into my conversation with Rick Lawrence.
Juli
Well, Rick, I’m super excited to have this conversation with you about how we edit Jesus. Boy, that’s not a topic that most people, I’d say, are eager to because I think at a heart level, we kind of all know that we read the Bible, we read the life of Jesus with eyes that sort of soften what He says. And so, the book that you’ve written, boy, it really kind of confronts us with, I think, cultural ways that we misunderstand or choose to misread the scriptures. So I’m ready to dive in.
Rick (01:59.479)
That’s great. Well, it’s so good to be here, Juli.
Juli
Yeah. Well, let me just first ask you, Rick, like, where did you get to the place where you’re ready to write this book? Like, I’m sure, you know, as a 20-year-old, you weren’t like, let me talk about and write about how we edit Jesus. Like, it always comes out of our own journey. So share with me a little bit about that.
Rick
So sure, there’s a couple of key trajectories here in this. One started, probably 20 years ago now, 20, 25 years ago. I was invited to speak at a very large conference at Willow Creek. For 33 years, I was editor of a magazine called Group Magazine, which is for youth pastors. And so I was invited to speak to do a pre-conference session that was three hours long. And the organizers asked me to do something I’d never done before.
So I had been playing around with something that was just tugging at my heart. And I ended up calling it Jesus Centered Youth Ministry. And the premise was what if everything we did in ministry somehow directly tied back to making Jesus the center of everything, which sounds like what we already do in church, but it is not what we already do in church. So I did this three hour experiment with these youth pastors. And at the end of it, I had this line of youth pastors waiting to talk to me, all of them thinking that they had had this solo experience of being there in those three hours and they wanted to share it with me. And their common thing they wanted to tell me was, I don’t think I ever knew Jesus before this three hour time together. And these are professional youth pastors. And I said, I know exactly what you mean. So I got out of that and I was done with the pre-conference and it was perfect for me. could just go experience the whole conference, dip into all the workshops and the keynotes and I’m a hyper curious person. So that’s perfect for me.
Rick (03:48.438)
And at the end of that day, after doing all that, I was in the huge atrium at Willow Creek. I was, I, the best way to describe it is I just felt severely depressed and I had no idea why. I just felt so down and like I was hidden in a cloud. So I sat in this chair with all these thousands of people milling around and I said, Jesus, what is happening to me? And it’s one of those moments where I felt like I heard his voice speak clearly. And he said,
Rick, you’re ruined for everything but me now. You’re ruined for everything but me. And what he was saying is that all I was hearing throughout the day were the tips and techniques of ministry, the conventional way we approach the Christian life, which is try harder to get better. That’s how I condense it down. And that’s what I was hearing all day long, one way or another from friends of mine that I knew. It now had a deadening impact on my soul.
And so what he was saying is from now on that it’s gonna feel dead to you. So for 20 years now, I’ve only helped people to pursue the heart of Jesus in various settings. And then about three years ago, the new president of Youth for Christ, the youngest president in their history, I had a connection with him in the past and he invited me to come speak to all of Youth for Christ leaders across the country on an online forum.
And it was a Q &A format. And at the end of the Q &A, he said, Rick, what do you think is the greatest challenge facing the church today? And I paused for a second because there’s lots of obvious challenges facing the church. And then I said, editing Jesus. And he said, what do mean by that? And I took 10 minutes and described what I meant by that, which is that we have formed Jesus into the Jesus we want, not the Jesus who is.
I expanded on that. So Jake called me about 15 minutes after we were done and he said, my phone’s blowing up, my email’s blowing up. There’s so many of these people who want to know more about what you were talking about because it somehow resonated. It gave words to something that people had been feeling, but didn’t know how to describe. And so from that moment I said, okay, Jesus, is this the next thing you want me to go after?
Rick (06:11.128)
And then I, dove into the process for two years and out came “Editing Jesus”.
Juli
Wow. Yeah. And in this book, you have eight different ways that we edit Jesus. And as I read it, I resonated with all eight of them. And I also thought about my own life and ministry and additional ways that we’ve edited Jesus. Yeah, I don’t know about you, but I’ve been a Christian since I can remember. Like I was raised in a Christian home, raised in church. I’ve read the Bible…
Rick
Yeah.
Juli (06:44.312)
… from cover to cover, I don’t know how many times, but studied it. And yet still, as I read your words and as I reflected, I’m like, there’s so much of what Jesus said that I just skip over. Like we contextualize it. I think corporately, we sort of agree without saying it out loud. Like we’re not gonna drill into those parts, because they make us uncomfortable.
Rick
But know, in the book I call that jumping over mud puddles, which is if you think about when an adult comes up to a mud puddle, they jump over it. When a kid comes up to a mud puddle, they might jump into it. a mud puddle is anything in scripture that we think we already know that thing. So I don’t really need to slow down to understand it. I already know that. Or I don’t understand that. So I’m gonna jump over it. There’s many things Jesus said and did that you have never heard preached in a sermon because we don’t understand it. So we jump over it. And I believe it’s the mud puddles that are in, especially in the gospels, where we find the true heart of Jesus. If we will jump into the puddle instead of jump over it, we’ll discover his heart at a deeper way.
Juli
Yeah. And I would add a third reason, we don’t like it. it’s just, mean, it’s, you know, there’s sometimes I read things and I’m like, I really don’t like what it says. Like what Jesus is calling me to is too radical and it would be too disruptive to my life, to my family, to my marriage, to ministry. And everybody else seems to be okay with us sort of ignoring it. So I guess I’ll ignore it too.
Rick
That’s so good. Yeah, my favorite story in all of scripture is when Jesus encounters the Canaanite woman as he’s on his way through Samaritan land and she just wants her daughter healed and she’s crying out and the disciples are like, tell this woman to be quiet. And he turns and engages her and there’s no other way to accept this story except that Jesus says when she asks him to help her, I’ve come for the children of Israel, not for dogs like you.
Rick (08:57.798)
It’s the most uncomfortable thing Jesus ever said to anyone. And most people jump over that because they cannot equate what they know of Jesus to that moment. But to me, it is the brilliance and beauty of Jesus in that moment that he said that to that woman. Because the effect of it is she kind of juts her chin out, she plants her feet in front of him and says, yeah, but even the dogs get the scraps off the master’s table. This is the…I mean, Jesus takes incredible risks. He saw something in this woman and he said the very kind of dismissive comment she’s heard her whole life. And she rises to the occasion because she wants her daughter healed and she plants her flag in the ground. And Jesus says, this woman, this Samaritan woman has great faith. And that statement alone was shocking to his disciples and everyone else listening. But that story is a great example of stuff we, we just jump over because we don’t get it and we don’t want to get it because that’s not the Jesus we like or respect. But I do something called reverse engineering to Jesus where you start with Jesus and work your way back. So if everything he does is good and you accept that he is essentially good at everything he does and you work your way back from him, it starts to challenge so many aspects of your life.
Juli
Yeah, you gave a challenge in the book. You’re like, I challenge you to take one chapter in any gospel and read honestly and like ask the question, is this the Jesus that I worship? Yeah, which I did. And I’m like, okay, that’s a good challenge.
Rick (10:45.07)
Yes. It’s disruptive. When you actually slow down and pay attention to Him, it’s very disruptive. We don’t realize when we, one of the mud puddles is that we think we already know Jesus, especially if grown up in the church. That’s my story. I thought I knew Jesus and I really didn’t.
Juli
Yeah, yeah. Boy, there’s so much we could talk about here. I’d love to spend hours unpacking this with you, but I have to choose our conversations wisely for our time. I think one of the things that you write about in the book that I’d like to even jump off of and go a little bit further is like we soften the hard sayings of Jesus. Yes. Things like the idea of hell, that the people who reject him, there will be eternal punishment.
Like, nobody likes that. I mean, unless you’re thinking of a horrible, horrible person and you’re like, yeah, that person should be punished. But that makes us really uncomfortable to think that the average person who’s just trying to live life and do their best and rejects Jesus, or even the average, like, quote unquote, Christian who doesn’t take his word seriously, like their soul’s in jeopardy.
Rick
Yeah, yeah, I was just at a, I was speaking at a retreat over the weekend and one of the things I said at the start was the kingdom of God operates invitationally. Everything in the kingdom of God is an invitation. And the reason for that is that what Jesus wants most is an intimate relationship. So if you think about what intimacy requires in our everyday relationships, it never involves coercion, or force, there has to be freedom in order for intimacy to happen. It’s chosen vulnerability that creates intimacy. So if you think about that under the umbrella of hell, how could Jesus force people, no matter what they wanted, to be in relationship with him? And their only possibility of life is being grafted into him, being attached to him?
Rick (12:57.88)
He’s the vine where the branches. The only life we get is when we’re attached to him. What if people prefer to stay detached? Will he force it anyway? No, at a fundamental level, he can’t. C.S. Lewis’s book, The Great Divorce, is such a fantastic exploration of what we’re talking about with hell here, because he basically paints a picture of people who have the opportunity to live in heaven, and they actually experience what it’s like, and they still don’t want it. And he paints a great picture of how love requires that you give freedom to people to reject you. And in that rejection, you lose your life. And he won’t stop that from happening because if he did, he would violate the foundations of love.
Yeah. So I think if we went back, you know, several decades, you would hear pastors, evangelists kind of scare people into heaven by painting a picture of what hell is. What’s the difference between saying, if hell exists, I don’t want to go there. Therefore I’m going to pray this sinner’s prayer versus really understanding that Jesus is inviting us to something and rejecting it has eternal consequences.
Rick
Well, you probably can resonate with this because you’ve been doing this a long time, but sometimes we think that we have to do it right and get it right in order for Jesus to have space to work. But we do things wrong all the time. And Jesus is so kind and shrewd and pursuing that he takes garbage and he sometimes draws beauty out of it. He takes the garbage and makes it something beautiful.
So I’d say that first about that tactic, which to me is the totally wrong way to go about inviting somebody into a relationship. And yet Jesus somehow took whatever he could in that and changed people’s lives. So the difference though is that there’s something that I talk about a lot and it’s probably in every book I’ve written in the last 20 years. it’s every time I engage people, it’s called something I call the progression and it’s not a formula, it’s just a chain reaction.
Rick (15:12.45)
And the chain reaction starts with get to know Jesus well, because the more you know Him, the more you’ll love Him. The more you love Him, the more you’ll wanna follow Him. The more you follow Him, the more you become like Him. And the more you become like Him, the more you become yourself. Well, that chain reaction, it’s that last thing, a friend of mine shared this with me about 15, 20 years ago. It’s that last thing that really took me off guard, the more I become myself.
The whole chain reaction starts with get to know Jesus well. So as we get to know Jesus well, He infects us with His beauty, His otherness. We can call it mystery, but actually what happened to me as I followed that progression in my own life, I became eventually ruined for Him. It’s like what Paul said, I consider everything else garbage compared to knowing Jesus. This was Paul’s central thing when he said everything else is garbage compared to knowing Jesus, he was describing what his everyday life was like. And I really resonated with it, not because I should follow Jesus in an all in way. My heart became captured and ruined for him. When that happened, everything changed in my life. The fruit of my life changed everything did. So it’s really what I did this weekend on retreat is invite a bunch of young people. to consider the invitation Jesus was giving them, not based on what they should do, but because of how they were experiencing Him.
Juli
Right. No, I’m with you. I’ve gone through that transformation in my life too, where, you know, like you take a controversial topic like gender roles and I can read the Bible with the lens of, I want to see the scripture in Jesus the way I think is fair. Or I can read the scripture and be like, God, whatever you have for me is good.
Juli (17:14.262)
And instead of me bristling against what I don’t like, let me wrestle with what’s confusing to me. But wherever we land, I know you’re good and I’m going to receive that. like what Jesus says about marriage or the poor, or instead of reading it with this fear of you’re going to ask me to do something I don’t want to do, like getting to the place where we know Him and trust Him and love Him so much that no matter what He says, no matter how hard it is, we have faith that he is better. I just think very few of us know how to have that kind of intimacy with him. And actually a lot of our church structure and discipleship and teaching doesn’t even give the vision for that being where life is.
Rick
That is such a massive thing you just said. It is so true. At the start of this retreat I was telling you about, I asked the whole group, what is the Christian life about? And I said, it’s not a trick question. I don’t have the right answer sitting back here I’m just waiting for you to tell me your lame answers so that I can tell you the right answer. And I gave them options or they could come up with their own reason. And then we put it all on a whiteboard. And what was fascinating is that there were many different answers to that question, what is the Christian life about? But all of us then came to a common thread, which is something we’ve already talked about. The purpose of the Christian life according to Jesus is restored intimacy. That’s it. He wants restored intimacy. That’s his whole goal. So this idea we have in the church of what the Christian life is, now in our culture, I would say, in the American church, there are many, many people who are Christian in name only. And what I mean by that is they are Christian, but they are not following Jesus. Those are two different things. To follow Jesus means to be a disciple, which means that all he says and does and models is the standard of goodness. You could take, you know, I mean, all eight chapters, but you could take one that you just mentioned about his posture toward the poor.
Rick (19:31.468)
So you cannot come to know Jesus and not understand his passion for the poor. So what does that mean in my life? It means that if I denigrate the poor or I ignore the poor or I label the poor pejoratively, I am not living out the heart of Jesus in my life. So then what does that mean for me? So, I mean, in my life, I’ve had in the last five years, because my wife’s been involved in serving the poor, in a direct way in the last five years, it’s opened up so many personal relationships for me. And it’s changed me, and it’s also helped me to understand what is central to the heart of Jesus. So if we ignore things that are central to the heart of Jesus and say, that part of him I’m gonna put over here, then we’re no longer followers of Jesus or something else.
Juli
Mm-hmm.
Juli (20:30.414)
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Juli
There’s one area that I’ve been thinking a lot about and you kind of touch on it in your book, but not 100%. So my background is I’m a clinical psychologist and kind of have always come to topics with that lens. But there’s so much in our churches kind of bleeding in through culture that’s me centered. You know, I have to learn to love myself. You know, I have to take care of myself, self care, you know, all of it.
There’s so much self-focus, even, you know, what is God’s will for my life? What is God gonna do for me? And it’s so embedded in even the way we think about the scripture and how we think about God. But when we read the words of Jesus, it’s so contrary because His words are always about, like, deny yourself and lay yourself down and take up your cross and follow me. Like, lose your life in me.
And I’m not even sure how to get at that because again, it’s infiltrated into how we think about everything. And even I would say, you know, the vast majority of Christian trade books now kind of begin with the premise that life is about you and, you know, God wants to give you a better life. So I don’t know if you’ve thought about that one at all.
Rick
Yeah, I mean, I just listened to an interview with a writer for the Atlantic, Derek Thompson, who I have a lot of respect for. He’s an atheist, but he writes about spiritual religious themes in an honest way. And he was interviewed because he had a cover story for the Atlantic called the Anti-Social Century. And it was the premise was we have become addicted to me time as a culture.
Rick (22:51.926)
And what’s fascinating about, so I mentioned before the progression, it starts with get to know Jesus well, and then you love him, you follow him, you become like him, and then you become like yourself. This is the path to accentuated identity, is to lose your life, to find your life in Jesus. And I always thought when I was growing up, what a scary thought that was. It’s kind of a confusing thing that Jesus says, and scary because it says, you have to lose your life like, the seed has to go into the ground and die first before it blooms. And all we think about is the first part of that. what will it be to lose myself? And it feels like a fuzzing of who we are. But actually what Jesus is saying is to become your accentuated self, the brilliant shining version of who you’ve always meant to be. You lose your life in my life. And in return, I animate your life.
It’s like, Peter is the first person to publicly say, you’re the Messiah. And it’s when Jesus, the crowds had left and Jesus said, who do those people say that I am? And his disciples throw out some of the wrong answers that people said that he was. And then he asked them, who do you say that I am? And Peter, I just love him. He steps up and he says, you’re the Christ, the son of the living God. That is blasphemous if it’s not true. And he says it publicly.
And what does Jesus do in response? He says, well, you’re blessed Peter, because basically the Trinity showed you that, what you just said. And I’m gonna tell you who you are now. You’re the rock. Simon, your name is no longer Simon, it’s now Peter, which had never been used as a name before. Petros had never been used as a name. It was like calling you a cauliflower as your name.
Juli
Hopefully that doesn’t stick. That’s right. doesn’t. Yeah.
Rick (24:48.17)
But he called Peter a name that had never been used before to try to express Peter’s identity. So what he was doing over the course of his relationship with Peter was surfacing Peter’s real identity. And that’s what he does in us. It’s a much better version than sort of the me-centered way that we’ve adopted in our culture.
Juli
I agree with you. I think in my own journey, I’d say it was probably like 15 or 20 years ago, like that really starting to be a thought, like maybe my insecurities and my doubts will actually not be solved by looking inward, but by knowing God. truly that’s the journey that I’m on is, I don’t find freedom in dissecting myself and building myself up or loving myself, I found freedom in clinging to God and knowing Him and learning to hear what He says.
Rick
Yeah, do you know where self-awareness is really important though is it’s the start of vulnerability and openness to, it’s the start of saying, I’m self-aware of what’s happening under the hood. And because of that, I know that I need Jesus. That is the start of everything as far as vulnerability and openness to him is a sense of self-awareness of your own need. People that didn’t believe they needed Jesus, never ended up in relationship with him. It’s only the people that recognize their need that ended up in relationship with him, including all of his disciples. There’s very many examples of how each one of them essentially said, I need you. That was their qualification. So self-awareness, that is the one powerful impact of being self-aware of what’s going on under your hood is if you can acknowledge your need.
Juli (26:44.142)
No, I was just telling a friend yesterday that psychology, therapy, it’s super helpful in understanding what’s wrong with me and how I got there, but it doesn’t provide a lasting solution if it doesn’t bring you to Christ.
Rick
And his way of saying lasting solution is, am the way, the truth and the life. He’s not saying, I will point you to the way, I will point you to your life, I will point you to the truth. He said, no, I embody those things. When you attach yourself to me in intimacy and a relationship, you get the way, the truth and the life in your life. And it’s only through our attachment to him that we get those things.
He’s not ultimately a teacher pointing us to the right knowledge. He’s a vine inviting the branch to be grafted into him so that the branch gets the life of the vine. It’s all relational. And you and I have talked a little bit about that whole word intimacy. And when we really sink into that word, if you have an honest reckoning of what intimacy requires, and recognize this is what Jesus is after, it’s kind of shocking what he really wants. I and you, you and me, those are kinds of statements that he says, that’s what I want.
Juli
Yeah, which we talk often on this podcast about the metaphor of sexual intimacy and covenant of marriage as being the metaphor, one of the metaphors that Christ used to describe the intimacy that he calls us to. So, which creeps people out, but I think people that listen to this podcast are kind of used to that by now. But one thing I’d love to kind of apply what we’re talking to is
Juli (28:40.43)
You know, we talked a little bit about the me-centeredness. I think another piece of it is the goal being happiness. You know, so often in our ministry, we’re talking about hard things related to sexuality. Like, why would I stay in an unfulfilling marriage? Or why would a loving God say that I can’t be in relationship with this person who maybe it’s a same-sex desire?
I think this is sort of one of the places where the rubber meets the road, we read the words of Jesus and we know he’s good, but what he seems to be calling us to seems to be not life but death, and not good at all, but withholding.
Rick
Well, kind of, I think the subtext of what you’re saying is, does Jesus want us to be happy? And that’s a complicated question. I’ve had to wrestle this out in my own life because when, let me say it this way, when your whole life revolves around elevating Jesus, both personally and professionally, you are now in the crosshairs of God’s enemy because God’s enemy will not go after legalism in the church or principle-based faith where you’re trying harder to be better, he just lets that stuff go because it actually plays into his purposes. But if what you’re trying to do is elevate Jesus, he hates that. So I have to examine my own life and what it feels like to be kind of in a battle mentality because of some of this. I have to ask myself, am I happy or something else?
And my best answer to that is I’m something else. It’s deeper and more satisfying and more identity defining and more purposeful. And therefore, I guess what I’m saying is he wants me to live in joy is a circumstantial. There’s circumstantial things we ask Jesus for when we’re in trouble or we have a need.
Rick (30:51.584)
We want him to move in our circumstances. and he sometimes does and sometimes doesn’t. That’s just the truth. So my relationship with him has to supersede that. It has to supersede my circumstantial satisfaction. So what is that? And the best word I can find for that is joy, that there’s a sense of deep purposefulness and deep satisfaction that we’re called into, that is the result of being called into intimacy with him.
And sometimes that leads to happiness and sometimes it doesn’t. And it’s like Paul saying, I’ve learned how to live with a lot and I’ve learned how to live with nothing. Because again, I consider everything garbage in comparison to knowing Jesus. So Paul’s able to say that with an honest face because it’s true that he can live with nothing and in prison or he can live in a rich man’s home, and be content in both situations because Jesus supersedes all of it. So that’s not happiness, that’s something else.
Juli
And like we see James and the writer of Hebrews say that joy and suffering can coexist. I don’t think happiness and suffering can coexist, but joy and suffering can.
Rick
That what you just said is one of the most challenging things to say. I would say, especially to the evangelical world, is joy and suffering can coexist because it’s this, I know a person who was married to one of the leading evangelical seminaries. She was married to the president of one of the leading evangelical seminaries in the country.
Rick (32:44.718)
And after her husband passed away from cancer, she shocked everyone and crossed over and became Catholic. So when I asked her, why would you do this? She said, well, in my evangelical world, they had no place for the mystery of suffering. And the Catholic theology did. And I needed a place where my suffering was treated with respect and normalcy. That’s why I did it. It’s a powerful statement for us that what you just said, that joy and suffering can coexist at the same time and it’s okay. That there’s something okay about that. And it doesn’t mean that somehow I’m off the path when that is true.
Juli
Yeah, and I think along with that, I’ve been challenged sometimes to read and realize how little we talk and think about eternity. That when you read the words of Jesus, he keeps telling us like, it’s not just about this world. Store up yourself treasures in heaven. But how many of us think about heaven, prepare for heaven? Like how many sermons do we hear that shift our eyes to eternity?
instead of just, you know, I want Jesus to make my life good now. So I don’t know. I wonder if you’ve thought about that one too.
Rick
I had older pastor friend of mine once tell me, I wrote a book called Sifted, which was about, this is about 20 years ago now, which is about this encounter Jesus has with Peter right after the last supper. And he tells him that Satan’s demanded to sift him like wheat, but I’m gonna pray for you, Peter. And when you return, you’re going to strengthen your brothers. So glaring there in the middle of that statement is Satan’s demanded something and I didn’t say no.
Juli (34:30.03)
Mm.
Rick
The effect of what Jesus said to Peter. I didn’t say no. And so the whole book is an exploration of how can this be true that Jesus said this? What is the role of suffering in our relationship with him? And what is Jesus doing in the midst of our suffering? So the point of that is when you, if you’re honest, you have to grapple with your own suffering and not spin it or sideline it in some way.
It has to be encompassed in your relationship with Jesus. And you have to admit that there are many times where Jesus does not circumstantially move you out of your suffering, no matter how hard you pray or whatever. So what’s happening? he either not real or uncaring or is he brutal? And like that story I talked about before with the Canaanite woman, my answer to that is Jesus takes great risks because he’s not playing around here. We are actually broken. We are broken people outside of relationship with him. And in order to bring transformation, what he’s inviting us into is transformational experiences. And I’m doing research for a book right now. And one aspect of it is research around our resistance to discomfort. And so much of the research says the only way to grow, you cannot grow when you’re comfortable.
The only path toward growth is discomfort. So if we have an aversion to discomfort in our life, we will never grow. If we’re willing to accept discomfort, we will grow. And so think about how much love Jesus has for us. He wants us to grow because every living thing grows. So that means that there’s surgical circumstantial pain that we experience in life.
Rick (36:27.35)
And he has promised us is I’ll walk with you into that. You’ll get the benefit of my presence as you are there. I’ve been there too. So I will walk with you into that, but I’m not going to divert you from every circumstantial pain. I will help you to grow and transform and come into my likeness through those experiences.
Juli
Yeah, when you reframe it that way that we can’t grow when we’re comfortable, I can start to see how James would say, like, get excited when trials come because you’re growing. And it’s hard to think about it that way, but I think we need that word more often.
Rick
Yeah, because growth produces joy.
Juli
Mm-hmm. It produces maturity, patience, all of it. So as we wrap up, what would you say, what would be your encouragement to someone who’s like, okay, like, I’ve gotten comfortable with the scriptures, I am skipping over puddles. Like, I really want to know the real Jesus in a way that I don’t feel like I know him right now. Where do you start?
Rick
You start by slowing down. I know this experientially now from leading people for 20 years into this path, but I know it from my own path. You start by slowing down and you slow down around Jesus. The way I did this when I started on this path was I determined inside that as I read in the gospels about Jesus, I would stop and ask myself, do I understand what he said and did?
Rick (38:10.488)
Do I really understand his heart in this moment? I’m gonna pause long enough to contemplate how I’m experiencing his heart and how I would explain his heart in this moment until I have a sense of clarity around his heart. So it made me slow way down when I was reading scripture, because I was stopping all the time. But the question behind that is not what did Jesus do? But why did he do it? So I started just asking why questions over and over again. Why is Jesus saying and doing this? That transformed the way I experienced him and opened up his beauty to me, which in turn infected me with his presence and changed me. So that’s where I would say to start. When I said the start of the progression is get to know Jesus well, that’s all we really need to be concerned about. Get to know Jesus well. And that means slowing down and asking questions about his heart more than about what he did.
