PART THREE: DISCOVERING OUR WEALTH
I counsel you to buy from me gold refined in the fire, so you can become rich; and white clothes to wear, so you can cover your shameful nakedness; and salve to put on your eyes, so you can see. Revelation 3:18
How do you describe redemption? Can you identify the steps you took when you came to Christ for salvation? Now I know that Christ draws us to himself as individuals, and we all have our own unique stories and challenges. Still, it is likely that your journey may have followed a basic pattern something like this:
When you recognized your fallenness and came to God the Father and his Son Jesus Christ to find real life, at some point you confessed and repented of your sins. Confession and repentance are our natural reactions when we recognize that we are in the presence of a holy God and we sense the responsibility we have for our own sins. The next thing you probably did was to reach out in faith and receive the forgiveness and cleansing that was made possible through the sacrifice of Christ’s physical body and his shed blood on the cross. The third phase of your redemption was when you realized that something deep inside you had changed: Your old self was pronounced dead at the scene, and your new self in Christ was born! You passed from death to life. Baptism demonstrates this truth.
To summarize, redemption is at work when (1) we confess and repent, (2) we receive Christ’s forgiveness, and (3) we exchange our death for his life.
I see this pattern in Jesus’ counsel to the Christians in Laodicea to buy from him gold, white clothes, and eye salve. Jesus uses these three commodities, that were so much a part of the life in their community, to contextualize the reality of redemption in words and symbols these people understood.
“Gold refined in the fire” is our confession and repentance that we are doing things wrong, that we are not in tune with his creation. “White clothes” show that we are forgiven for the wrong things we have done and our faulty mental models. “Eye salve” is having a redeemed vision so we can see God’s better substitute. Taken successively, they form a pattern we can follow in ministry. This pattern is what I call the redemptive method. Consistently engaging in this pattern will enable us to be genuinely productive over the long term.
As we work in God’s world, we will need to confess the specific unintended negative returns that our actions are causing and repent of the inadequate mental models that made us think our actions would work. We then can receive forgiveness for those wrong mental models, actions, and negative returns. Through that learning experience we can apprehend God’s better substitute and exchange what does not work for mental models and actions that will work in harmony with God’s created, living order.
Gold Refined in the Fire
Jesus counsels the Laodiceans, “Buy gold refined in the fire so you can become rich.” His warning shows that the mental models of the Christians in Laodicea needed to be refined. The Christians in Laodicea thought they had true riches already, but Jesus’ admonition shows that their dependence on resources for ministry was clearly tainted. Because they thought they could use their gold to do ministry, their wealth was as impure to them as alcohol is to the alcoholic.
When their ministry was based on a resource-dependent and simplistic “see-a-need-make-and-do-a-plan” works approach, a “take control” approach, it produced lukewarm results. Rather than making excuses for lukewarm results, they and we should be glad for unintended negative returns, because these returns force us to wake up and seek a better solution.
When we really believe that works does not work, and that applying the works method of problem solving to living systems and organisms yields death instead of life, then we are ready to begin to learn a new way of doing work in the world. But like the alcoholic, we must be diligent to combat our old thinking with the new so that we will consistently flag our wrong thinking, and so that when we approach a problem or a need, we will be on guard not to use the works method.
The same way men purify gold by a refining process, God wants to purify our approach to doing his work so that we learn to participate with him in a pure form of ministry that is in tune with how he works. Engaging in his continual refining process by constant identification of negative unintended returns and the mental models that caused them will help purify our motivations. This “burning off the dross” will yield lives characterized by constant prayer and healthy spiritual disciplines. Eventually, with practice, the works method will no longer make sense to us.
To me, pure, refined gold is envisioning the highest goals, true riches, the living “fruit that remains,” and not lowering those goals. Burning off the dross is confessing the things that did not meet our expectations and exploring why they did not work. Burning off the dross is seeing the unintended negative returns that resulted from our actions, taking responsibility for them, repenting of them, and seeking forgiveness.
Repent early and often! It is not a one-time event, but a lifestyle. As we confess what has gone wrong, we can go on to the next step—a joyful one—of receiving forgiveness!
White Clothes to Wear
Examples abound of anointed, gifted, spirit-filled Christian pastors and leaders who have fallen into sin. Sin happens. But grace also happens. In God’s grace, we can gain forgiveness from the penalty and results of personal sin. But we also need forgiveness for our ministry actions that result in unintended negative returns. We need safe environments to confess negative returns to each other, places to reflect together with others the wrong mental models that caused us to do them. Sometimes we need the loving input of other people to help us overcome our blind spots. Repentance from and forgiveness for our actions and thinking can be a healthy, corporate activity that Christians should practice more.
The white robes we receive from Christ show us that we, too, are given a second chance. When we are clothed with Christ, God sees his own white clothes on us. We are accepted. We can take confidence in God’s loving favor. We can stand up and walk. Clothed in white robes, we stand in a safe environment, free from accusation, comfortable in the presence of God. We can begin to have hope that we can operate in a higher level of ministry that does not produce dead works.
Even though a repentance-permeated lifestyle gradually purifies the thinking that drives our actions, temptation is never far from repentance, and that is why we need an honest, safe, but hard environment that will hold us accountable. It is entirely possible that we can soil our clothes again, or even be found naked. The particular temptation we might encounter as things begin to go better is that we can begin to think we no longer need to engage in ongoing repentance and confession. Therefore, even when good things begin to happen, we must remember it is not because we are so great that they happen; it is because we are forgiven. We have not earned it. We are not important people; we are just very forgiven people, standing empty, with nothing of any good to our credit. Our shameful nakedness is covered.
Only as we understand the need for and receive forgiveness for the results of not only our personal sin, but also our thinking and ministry actions that result in unintended negative returns, are we ready for the “eye salve” Jesus wants us to buy from him.
Salve to Put on Your Eyes
I remember reading in some systems thinking materials that our brains are capable of processing only seven variables at a time. Therefore, we employ various techniques to reduce complexity to something we can get our brains around. Unfortunately, when we reduce the complexity of the living system world around us to something we can process with our cognitive minds, we do not see things clearly. I have found that people of a more dominantly primary culture seem to employ a different thinking process that enables them to perceive complex reality with subconscious thinking. While our cognitive brain is limited by design, our subconscious brain is far better designed to work with complex, high-definition reality.
As secondary culture, post–Great Transition people, most of us Westerners have so lost touch with our inner abilities to apprehend complexity subconsciously that we interpret highly complex forms of reality—especially social reality—as chaos! However, when it comes to observing the physical part of God’s creation, we do a little better. Maybe that is because our own physical bodies are very familiar to us, or maybe because our subconscious brains are actively running our physical systems. Yet, while we tend to be able to recognize the complex reality of the physical world and comprehend the reality of its high-definition detail, we are, for some reason, more limited in our ability to perceive complex realities in the social realm, and we are extremely poor in processing complexity in spiritual reality.
This leads me to think that we Westerners have a learning disability. When, in the Great Transition, the cultures of the world moved from being dominantly primary to becoming dominantly secondary, the cultural norm changed from people having a high-definition perception of reality to a low-definition perception. It is as if the completely new secondary culture is a low-definition social system characterized at its essence by what humans can construct and by what can be easily perceived.
And this seems to be how we approach life today. Westerners want to see things done quickly. We don’t want to be encumbered with all the details. Give me a short list. Just tell me what you want me to do and I’ll do it.
Today we are in somewhat of a paradox. On the one hand, our digital age pushes us toward a new high-definition understanding of complexity, while on the other hand we live with the legacy of our recent past: low-definition, simplistic, Western problem-solving that makes us think we can do almost anything. We can put a man on the moon. Anything is possible. Just break the problem down into bits, and we can make it happen. We walk a fine line between the increasingly complex sciences and our popular, low-definition, reductionist, “break-it-into-parts” mental models.
We need a breakthrough in understanding that will help us once again see the high-definition reality in the living system world that God created. We have to overcome the many flawed mental models that keep us believing in low-definition simplistic reality and blind to its complex high-definition fulfilled counterpart.
If we insist on seeing God’s complex activity as chaotic, we will probably miss seeing what God is doing and how he is doing it. And, even more sobering, our reductionism gives us false vision, and we may be engaging in a heretical understanding of God and his activities.
When our ministry activities are not working as we expect they will, it may be because we cannot see the myriad, complex factors affecting them. Our thinking has to adapt to the fact that the situation is more complicated than we realize. We have to confess that the way we think is wrong and that we need to see reality in high definition.
Nevertheless, there is hope for secondary culture! With the redemptive treasure of eye salve that Jesus gives us, we can begin to see with new eyes and discern the living system. It is as if Jesus’ eye salve helps us regain the primary culture’s ability to see in high definition. He allows us the privilege of learning to see what is actually there. He is treating us more like friends than servants.
As we see the living system in high definition, we can begin to understand how the system itself gets things done, how things work. Knowing how the living system operates helps us see places where ministry activities are actually happening in that living system and how they are working in tune with it.
This understanding helps us identify additional and better ways of doing ministry that are more in tune with the living system. This will make our own ministry systems and organizations work properly. With the eye salve, we can learn to plan and design ministry approaches that do what really needs to be done in the context of the complex, living system.
(text excerpted from The Cat and the Toaster, pp. 129–162)
This condensed version is 