Last time, we looked at the gospel of Jesus as the good news of the Kingdom of God. This Kingdom is the place where life is perfectly ordered and maintained by the will of God. More than being a well oiled spiritual machine, the Kingdom is at its core relational. God is ruler, yes, but He is first and foremost Father, as Jesus revealed Him to be. Previously, I gave the illustration of the Kingdom of God being like a medieval nation, with a king who rules over his subjects. But in the pages of Scripture we find another frequent metaphor for the realm of God’s ordered will—the “household” of God the Father (Eph. 2:19–22).
Just like a nation with citizens, the Kingdom of God can be seen as a family—a Father living with and providing for His children. In both instances, there is a deep center which resonates with our human experiences. It is the deeper center around which our worship, acts of service, our creeds, our education, and our churches all grow on top of. It is the identity center of the human being.
What is the identity center? Psychologist Jim Wilder discusses the neurological data behind the human identity center in his book, “Rare Leadership”. Basically, in the human brain there is a fast track and a slow track. The slow track is where cognitive reasoning happens, while the fast track thinks faster than you are consciously aware of. It’s closer to a reflex than what we commonly think of as thinking. For example, imagine you’re sitting in a classroom waiting for the teacher to come in. When she enters she walks to the chalkboard and writes her name and begins to discuss how the class will be conducted. Two things happened when your teacher walked in. You heard her voice, registered what she said, maybe you read her name on the chalkboard, etc. This all happens in the slow track. But, even before all that happened, you instinctively registered her appearance, and if you’d met her before you would have immediately recognized her face. This is happening in the fast track of the brain, which is informed more by habits, experiences, and relationships than by data and conscious cognitive processes.
Most of our decisions are not made, as we’d like to think, within our slow track brain. Actually, most of our decisions first flow out of the kind of person we think ourselves to be and the kind of person we admire and want to be like, within the fast track identity center of the brain. It is a natural human process, when faced with a problem, to ask oneself “what do my kind of people do when faced with a similar problem”. We do this instinctually even before rationally working through the problem, which occurs in the slow track. By this we understand that humans learn how to live and develop character, not primarily by the facts that we know, but by the kinds of people we watch and admire.
This is nothing new in the long history of analyzing human thought. You’ve heard it said before, “you’re the sum total of your five best friends”, but even more deeply this goes into the formation of our Christian character. When Jesus came proclaiming the good news of the Kingdom of God, he utilized a teaching method used during that time in second temple Judaism known as the Rabbinical teaching model. Our western ideas of mentor and apprenticeship are very similar.
Basically, in this model of teaching, the disciple would give up his old work and way of life and go to live with the Rabbi. He or she would follow the Rabbi wherever he went, listening to and memorizing what he said, but primarily watching how the Rabbi lived. They would carefully watch how he spoke, the prayers he would pray, how he ate, how he slept, how he interacted with certain members of society, etc. The disciple did not want to simply know what the Rabbi knew, they wanted to be the kind of person the Rabbi was.
In the Kingdom of God, which Jesus came to bring, we find ourselves in the first stage of the new creation. God is making all things new through Jesus, and that means He is transforming us into new creation beings. This doesn’t mean we’re gonna sprout angel wings or anything, but it does mean the Holy Spirit is working to transform us to look just like Jesus, in the image of God. This doesn’t just mean teaching us the new facts, it means changing the kinds of people we are to live in his Kingdom of God the way Jesus does—and that takes careful rewiring of the fast track of our brains. We’re not just meant to become obedient and know the right “Kingdom” thing to do, like W.W.J.D—we’re meant to naturally, instinctively let the life of the Kingdom flow out of us because that is where our identity is anchored.
A common lamment among evangelical pastors today is how, despite all their good teaching, people don’t seem to change. That’s because their gospel stops short and is not the holistic gospel of the Kingdom of God. I live in Chicago, a city surprisingly soaked in Christian teaching, with a church on nearly every block. I’ve met homeless men and women on the subway who can explain the gospel better than some preachers I’ve heard. But despite this saturation of gospel knowledge, Chicago still remains a hub of hate, crime, drug abuse, and racism. “How is it possible?” we ask ourselves. It’s because, despite all our professions of faith, all our education and teaching, we do not have good mentors. We do not see enough men and women living a life really anchored in the new life of the Kingdom, and where we do, we do not value them enough to emulate them.
A youth group or Christian school which has the best teaching will never turn its members into devoted Christ-followers, no matter how powerful and correct the teaching is, unless the youth pastor or teacher is someone the people can emulate. If you’re a talking head, you might be good for an information download or entertainment, but if your actual life is not on display your teaching will never convert to changed lives. We’ve become pretty good at the nuts and bolts of the slow track brain in mainline evangelicalism, but we’ve almost completely forgotten the fast track identity center. Even when we talk about discipleship in our churches, it very seldom converts to modeling ourselves after a godly mentor.
I know for myself, after attending church most of my life, nine times out of ten I won’t remember what the pastor said past lunch, but I will remember the way he said it. In my experience, my mentors have been people with incredible knowledge and a high regard for Scripture and sound theology, but it was the way they lived that sticks in my brain to such a degree that whenever I’m faced with a problem, the first thought I go to is “how would he have handled this?”.
The point is, the kind of people we associate ourselves with, the kind of people we want to be, are the exact people we will tend to become. The kind of person worth associating with and surrounding ourselves with are people who are living out of the new life of the Kingdom of God, driven by the Spirit of God to instinctively and habitually do the will of God. This is not a far-off impossibility for us, we use our fast track brain every second of the day, and it takes less than a month to develop lasting habits which affect the development of our character.
The question is, do we believe we can change and experience new identity and new life today? Do we value Jesus, who Himself is the Way, enough to imitate Him? This doesn’t only mean learning more about the person of Jesus, it also means watching and learning from someone who has already had his or her habits and identity transformed by the new life of the Kingdom of God. That is where transformation happens, rooting our identity in the people of God who draw their life from the Kingdom of God.
Eden and the Kingdom of God