Recovering Faithful Participation in a Therapeutic Age – Series Page
Phase Two: How We Learned to Read Scripture This Way
From Optimization to Participation
This is where my previous reflection matters. God’s covenant begins with God’s faithfulness: “I will be your God, and you will be my people.”
Your covenant identity comes before what church you attend. Understand, through Christ, God’s New Covenant extends His Old Covenant in creating a people who respond to His faithfulness through our participation. That’s a very different perspective from personal optimization.
Optimization asks: How can I become better? Participation asks: How can I faithfully live within the life God has already given us?
Optimization is quantifiable and measurable. Participation often isn’t.
I can measure how many chapters of the Bible I read. I can count how much time I spend praying. I can track my habits, establish goals, and evaluate progress.
But… How do I measure patience? How do I quantify faithfulness? What equation calculates the value of forgiving someone who can’t repay me? What measures my growth when I quietly sit beside someone who is suffering? How do I put a number on learning to love someone I would rather avoid?
The things Scripture repeatedly describes as marks of mature Christian life don’t cooperate with our modern desire to measure things. They don’t fit neatly into a spiritual spreadsheet. I don’t believe that’s a flaw in Scripture. Those blanks may well have been left blank on purpose to keep us from trying to figure out the mechanics of how it all works. Looking at my decades of pastoral ministry before retiring, maybe our measuring stick is the flaw.
What Kind of Growth?
Perhaps nowhere is this clearer than in our obsession with the word growth.
Growth is good. Healthy things grow. But unhealthy things grow too.
Cancer grows. Parasites grow. Unhealthy things grow by breaking free from healthy limits. Cancer cells multiply without stopping because they ignore normal body rules. Invasive weeds choke out healthy plants. Unchecked wildfires spread fast when dry wood and wind overpower normal weather limits.
So rather than asking if we’re growing, a better question is: What kind of life produces growth?
A Christian can become more knowledgeable without becoming more loving. A church can become more efficient without becoming more faithful. A ministry can become more influential without becoming more Christlike. An individual can become increasingly disciplined while remaining profoundly self-centred.
I measured much of my life by growth. Now that I’m older now, and reflecting as a Pastor From the Pasture, I recognize that on its own, growth tells us very little. The biblical writers seem much more interested in the kind of people we’re becoming: love, patience, gentleness, faithfulness, hospitality, forgiveness, self-giving, and bearing one another’s burdens. As a basis of measurement, these aren’t very impressive and easily overlooked by church growth metrics. They don’t increase our platform or scale especially well. But they sound a lot like the life Scripture describes.
Jesus Wasn’t Interested in Optimization
This is where Jesus complicates our modern perceptions. If Jesus came to teach us how to maximize our potential, He wasn’t very good at it. He spent roughly thirty years living a largely hidden life before beginning His public ministry. Even during those three years, He repeatedly stepped away from the crowds.
Jesus ate meals, walked dusty roads and attended weddings. He slept, prayed, talked with individuals, and touched people others avoided. He spent time with people who offered little obvious strategic value. Then, when His influence seemed to be on a roll, Jesus started talking about a cross.
Viewing all this through the lens of optimization doesn’t look very impressive. It looks remarkably ordinary. But that’s probably the point.
Jesus wasn’t building a personal brand. He wasn’t maximizing reach or developing a scalable discipleship platform. He lived faithfully within the life His Father gave Him, and He invited others to follow.
Not optimize… follow.
A Yoke Before It Was a Burden
There’s one passage I have carried with me throughout much of my pastoral life. Jesus says:
“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.”
I’ve heard those words countless times. They’re words I’ve preached and prayed, and after all these years, they still bring tears to my eyes – partly because I’ve spent so much of my pastoral life wanting to offer people welcome relief. But as I get older (not yet ancient), I want to better understand what Jesus’ words sounded like to the people who first heard them.
In the world behind words, it’s easy for us to overlook the depth of ground a metaphor held in first-century culture. The yoke wasn’t just a neat farm illustration about carrying a heavy load. Within Jewish religious language, “yoke” was a symbol for a Rabbi’s way of teaching. It described taking upon oneself a teacher’s instruction and way of life.
That changes the image entirely. Jesus doesn’t simply say, “Let me remove every burden from your life.” He says: “Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.”
To me, that sounds like an invitation to learn a way of life from a Teacher. That’s also why this passage becomes even more meaningful when we understand the biblical idea of nephesh (soul). In Western thought, the soul is like a spiritual lock box hidden inside our consciousness. In the Hebrew mind, it’s the living, desiring, embodied self – all that makes you, you.
Jesus isn’t offering a technique for managing our emotions. He’s inviting our whole, embodied life into a different way of living.
Faithful Participation or Anxious Striving?
Faithful participation isn’t unsettled striving, nor is it passive resignation.
Unsettled striving says: Everything depends upon me. Passive resignation says: Nothing depends upon me. Faithful participation says: God is faithful, so I’m free to participate faithfully in what’s mine to do.
Consider a farmer. A farmer doesn’t create the life inside a seed, but neither does he/she sit in the barn waiting for magic. The farmer has real work to do: plant, water, tend, wait, participate, and trust.
The relationship between God and humanity is a covenantal partnership. Directly or indirectly, God chooses to work through our participation. I don’t have to create the way, manufacture life, determine the outcome, or set the pace. I simply get to learn, follow, and participate.
When we follow Jesus, we’re no longer the destination or the project. We’re simply a people learning to inhabit the life of God.
What Do We Get to Do?
For many of us, the Bible can feel like a book of do’s and don’ts. Certainly Scripture contains commands. But what if our view of obedience is too narrow?
What if obedience is less about compliance with rules and more about our response to the character and faithfulness of God? Instead of framing commands as obstacles, we can view them as invitations – opportunities to act with love, extend forgiveness, bear burdens, share meals, practice patience, live generously, and participate in God’s reconciling work.
None of this attempts to earn our place in God’s covenant. At the Cross, Jesus already secured our place. We choose to obey not to earn God’s love, because we already have it.
God is faithful. Therefore, we respond.
The Security and the Shadow
Throughout my ministry, I wanted to bring people welcome relief. But now I wonder whether I sometimes understood relief too narrowly – imagining that good pastoral care meant giving people principles and action steps to manage the burdens of life more successfully.
Jesus doesn’t promise a manageable life; He offers Himself. The Good Shepherd doesn’t hand us a better system for carrying the flock; He calls us to walk with Him.
This is why the spiritual hustle is so exhausting. There’s always another goal to achieve, another weakness to overcome, another level of maturity to reach, and another version of ourselves waiting to be unlocked. Even our faith can feel like a performance review. Somewhere in all that noise, the Shepherd disappears from view.
The ultimate comfort of the Gospel is that God’s covenant doesn’t rest on our performance, our consistency, or our spiritual hustle. It’s guaranteed entirely by His faithfulness. Yet there’s a quiet tragedy we often overlook.
While human unfaithfulness can never dismantle God’s fidelity, it can – and often does – sabotage our daily experience of it. When we convert faith into a high-maintenance enterprise of self-optimization and religious performance, we end up building systems that choke out the very grace we long to taste. Nothing can diminish or even break God’s faithfulness, but the human hands through which His goodness is meant to be tangibly felt in the world become too busy managing their own agendas. Re-framing our participation isn’t about trying harder to earn God’s favor; it is about clearing away the noise so that His quiet, enduring rest can finally be lived and felt again.
The Ancient Seed
To step into this rest, we need to look closely at the lenses we bring to Scripture. Modern self-optimization doesn’t reject Scripture; it embraces it, but then translates ancient wisdom into contemporary self-help tools.
Rather than attempting to make Scripture “relevant” or forcing an ancient text to answer our modern questions about personal achievement, we need to listen to its voice within its own ancient world. One approach asks: How can I make this ancient text useful today? The other asks: Having listened carefully to this ancient voice, what might it now say to us?
The ancient seed already carries its own life. Our task isn’t to make it more efficient or force it to grow faster. Our task is to relearn how to tend the soil without assuming we control the harvest. As I read those words back to myself, they sound remarkably pious in print. I admit the muscle memory of performance dies hard. Even in my senior years, the natural human desire to see tangible results still pulls on the strings of my heart. It’s a daily discipline to set down the demand for visible results and simply rest in the quiet work of tending the soil.
Following Jesus has never been about becoming the best possible version of ourselves. It’s always been about learning to live faithfully within the life God has already given us.
Here Comes the Hard Part
It’s natural to find comfort in believing that if we simply practice the right things, follow the right principles, and make the right choices, life will eventually cooperate. That script gives us a sense of control and something to measure.
However, eventually every self-improvement project encounters something it can’t optimize – a ground-level reality I call “friction.”
Suffering. Loss. Illness. Death. Unanswered prayer. The failure of our best-laid plans.
You can optimize your schedule, your habits, and your ministry. But you can’t optimize death, another person’s choices, or God’s silence.
Eventually, the machinery stops. And when it does, we discover whether we were actually learning to participate in the life of the Shepherd or simply learning to manage ourselves more effectively.
Which leads to the hard question: What happens when God doesn’t follow the script?
That’s where we’re headed next time.