Laying Down Our Thoughts: The Hidden Cost

Philippians 3:9-10 is my life today.

That is where I have to begin, before I say anything else, because the post that follows cannot be heard as theory. It is the testimony of a man whose life was rebuilt by the truths he is about to share.

The previous post named five practices that mark a body listening together to its Head: Scripture first, body together, testing always, time given, and self laid down. Four of those are practical and can be learned in time. The fifth — laying down our own thoughts — is the one that exposes us. It is also the one without which the other four collapse.

This is the post about that fifth practice. And it cannot be taught honestly without me telling you how I came to learn it.

The affair I did not see.

Before I lost everything, I did not believe I had a pride problem. I would have told you I was a man of God. I had the training. I had been ordained. I held a Master's degree. I had founded a church plant that had grown into a discipleship training center. By every visible measure, the Lord was using me.

What I did not see — and what the Lord eventually had to show me — was that I had been carrying on an affair with my own ego. The ministry had become a place where I was the center. The vision was mine. The decisions were mine. The voice that mattered most when the body gathered was mine. I had forgotten — somewhere along the way and without ever naming it — that I was not God.

By the time I noticed what had happened, the ministry was no longer Christ-centered. It had become man-centered. And the man it centered on was me. My pride was costing me more than the ministry. I resigned in December of 2009.

Haiti.

Within a month I was in Haiti.

The earthquake hit on January 12, 2010. I was a licensed therapist as well as a pastor, so I went to serve. For nine months I counseled survivors who had pulled the bodies of their families from concrete with their bare hands. I counseled the volunteers who were doing that work and could not sleep at night. I was useful. The Lord was kind to me even there. But I was still running.

I came home in September of 2010 with no home, no money, no marriage, no ministry — and a conversion van.

The van.

I lived in that van for the next twelve months. I applied for food stamps. I filed for Social Security. I wintered in a Michigan winter in a van.

I was alone.

I want to say something the reader may not expect. To this day, I long for the year in the van. Not for the loss. Not for the hunger. Not for the cold. For the closeness. For the simplicity of having nothing but Him. The wilderness is where the Lord finally had me alone — and I am eternally grateful for it.

I cannot fully tell you how Christ met me in that van. I can only tell you that He did. Through events. Through people. Through small kindnesses I did not deserve and could not have arranged. With all the pride still in me, He continued to love me. Somehow He kept reaching — not to scold me, not to shame me — to let me know that He was not done with me.

And then one morning, I do not remember much else about it, but it was a morning — something happened. My Greek knowledge of God became an intimate relationship with a living Hebrew God.

The God I had studied in seminary became the God I now knew. The doctrines I had mastered became the Person I now belonged to. The careful theology that had filled my head was now alive in my chest. I had known about Him. Now I knew Him.

That is what the wilderness was for. That is what the loss accomplished. He loved me to take me to a place where I could remember that I was not God — so He could use me again.

Paul knew this.

I did not invent this pattern. It is the pattern Paul walked. Listen to his words:

"...whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For His sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in Him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ — the righteousness from God that depends on faith — that I may know Him and the power of His resurrection, and may share His sufferings, becoming like Him in His death." — Philippians 3:7-10

Paul was the man who had everything. Pharisee of Pharisees. Hebrew of Hebrews. Educated under Gamaliel. Blameless under the Law. And he counted all of it as rubbish for one thing only:

That I may know Him.

The Greek word is gnōnai — but Paul was writing in the Hebrew mind. He did not mean facts about God. He meant the covenant knowing the Hebrew Scriptures call yada — knowing in relationship, in walking with, in being known by Him. Paul lost everything he had to gain Christ in that way. So did I — though my losses were not Paul's, and my call is not Paul's.

The shape, however, is the same. That I may know Him.

Why this matters for the body.

Now hear what this means for the church.

A body cannot listen to a Head it only knows about. As long as the members of a church know God only through Greek knowing — through doctrines, through information, through mental assent — they will keep clutching their own thoughts. Their thoughts are all they have. They have not yet met the Person whose voice would silence their own.

Lay down our thoughts? To whom? If we have only studied God, we have no Person to surrender to. We have only a topic we have mastered. And we will not surrender what we believe to a topic. We will only surrender it to a Person we know.

This is why the American church has so much difficulty with the surrender Post 6 described. We have catechized our people in information about God. We have not, by and large, led them into Hebrew knowing of God. So when the body gathers to listen, every member clutches their own thoughts — because their thoughts are the only spiritual substance they actually possess.

Until we become so intimately surrendered to the living God that we understand Philippians 3:9-10, 

we can never truly be His church.

That sentence is not a slogan. It is a structural truth. The church is called the body of Christ because that is what it is — His body, in living union with the Head. A body in living union with its head obeys without strain. A body that has lost union with its head cannot obey, no matter how good its intentions. The body of Christ is made of people who know Him in Paul's sense, in Hebrew sense, in the sense the van taught me. There is no other body of Christ.

The daily death.

I want to be careful here, because I do not want any reader to think I am calling them into something I have finished. Philippians 3:9-10 is my life today. Not because I arrived there in 2011 and have stayed. Because the Lord, by His grace, keeps drawing me deeper. Every day there is more of me to lay down. Every day His Hebrew knowing of me is more substantial than my Greek knowing of Him used to be. "Take up your cross daily and follow Me" (Luke 9:23).

The wilderness was an event. The surrender is a rhythm.

And every member of the body must walk in this rhythm — daily, gently, lifelong — 

for the body to function as Scripture describes.

Where this leaves us.

We have come a long way. We have asked who is actually running the church. We have looked at Christ as Head. We have named the two American models honestly. We have recovered the Hebrew mindset of God's people. We have walked through Acts 2. We have seen what listening together looks like. Now we have stood before the cost: that every member of the body must lay down their own thoughts — and indeed, whatever else the Lord asks of them — and learn to know Him as Paul knew Him."  

One post remains. In it, we will look at what this body could be — and how a hungry believer can begin walking in this way today, even before the rest of the church catches up.