Soil and Roots

What do you really believe about God?

In Episode 138, Brian continues Season 7, Deep Calls to Deep, by returning to one of Soil & Roots' central ideas: our lives are not shaped primarily by what we say we believe, but by the ideas our hearts actually assume.

Ideas are the unconscious assumptions, conclusions, and experienced realities that our hearts are rooted in. They sit beneath our belief systems and quietly shape how we relate to God, ourselves, others, and the world. We may intellectually believe that God is good, loving, safe, and trustworthy — while our hearts live as if He is distant, disappointed, unsafe, or unreliable.

This matters because Season 7 is exploring the journey into depth. If the first step toward the Good Life is receiving God’s love with vulnerability, then our true ideas about God become essential. How can we surrender to love if our hearts do not trust the One offering it?

Drawing from A.W. Tozer, Dallas Willard, Jonathan Edwards, Heartview, the Great Omission, and the Soil & Roots framework of ideas, Brian explores how our bodies, emotions, relationships, words, thoughts, health, time, and money reveal what our hearts really believe about God.

This episode asks a deeply practical question: if your anxiety, your relationships, your body, and your habits could speak, what would they reveal about your idea of God?

The with-God life begins as we allow Jesus to uncover and heal the hidden ideas that keep us guarded

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Why do we resist the very love that could heal us?

In this Greenhouse episode, Brian, Handsome Kyle, and Doc continue the conversation from Episode 136 on receiving God’s love, vulnerability, and the Good Life. Season 7, Deep Calls to Deep, is exploring how we become people of depth — people increasingly formed by the love of God from the inside out.

The conversation begins by revisiting the Good Life, the with-God life, Christian mysticism, and the surprising reality that many people who identify as Christians do not experience deep, daily, relational intimacy with God. If Jesus invites us into abiding peace, secure attachment, love that surpasses knowledge, and a conversational life with the Father, why does that life feel so rare?

Brian, Handsome Kyle, and Doc then move into four obstacles to receiving God’s love with vulnerability: our need for control, our avoidance of pain, our sense of shame and unworthiness, and our mistrust of God’s character. These are not merely intellectual disagreements. They are often unconscious ideas rooted in our stories, wounds, relationships, fears, and experiences.

The episode also explores the phrase “I’m fine” as one of the great enemies of depth. Many of us have learned to hide pain, avoid need, manage appearances, and present ourselves as okay even when we are not. But the Good Life requires vulnerability. It requires surrender. It requires allowing ourselves to be loved where we are actually hurting.

Using personal stories, the Prodigal Son, contemplative prayer, C.S. Lewis, David Benner, and the Soil & Roots framework of ideas, this episode invites us to ask a deeper question: what keeps me from receiving the prodigal love of the Father?

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Why is receiving God’s love so hard?

In Episode 136, Brian continues Season 7, Deep Calls to Deep, by exploring one of the central questions of the journey into depth: if God is constantly inviting us into the Good Life, why do so few of us actually experience it?

This episode suggests that the doorway into the with-God life is not more striving, better behavior, or additional information. It is vulnerability. Drawing from David Benner, Dallas Willard, the six core ideas, and the Soil & Roots framework of unconscious formation, Brian argues that genuine transformation begins when we allow ourselves to be loved unconditionally by God.

But receiving God’s love is not as easy as it sounds. Brian names four obstacles that often keep us guarded: our need for control, our avoidance of pain, our sense of unworthiness, and our mistrust of God’s character. These obstacles are not merely intellectual doubts. They are rooted in the deeper ideas of our hearts — our unconscious assumptions about power, anthropology, value, and identity.

The Prodigal Son becomes the episode’s central case study. The younger son leaves home, seeks control, avoids pain, distorts his value, and rejects his identity as a son. But suffering awakens him. When he returns, the father runs to him, embraces him, interrupts his speech, restores him, and throws a party.

The most astonishing part is that the son receives it.

This is the beginning of the Good Life: not earning love, explaining ourselves, managing sin, or proving our worth, but vulnerably receiving the prodigal love of the Father.

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What is the Good Life with God?

In this first Greenhouse episode of Season 7, Brian, Handsome Kyle, and Doc continue the conversation from Episode 134, Rediscovering the Good Life. Season 7 is called Deep Calls to Deep, and it asks the central Soil & Roots question: how do we actually become people of depth?

This episode begins by clarifying what the Good Life is — and what it is not. The Good Life is not ease, prosperity, success, comfort, or a pain-free existence. It is not “your best life now” in the shallow sense. Instead, the Good Life is the with-God life: a daily, relational, embodied experience of God’s presence, love, delight, and nearness, even when life is difficult.

Brian, Handsome Kyle, and Doc wrestle with whether this kind of life is actually meant to be normal for people who follow Jesus, or whether it is only for “super-Christians” and famous mystics. They explore Dallas Willard, Christian mysticism, John 17:3, Ephesians 3, the love that surpasses knowledge, and what it means to know God in a deeply experiential way.

The conversation also names why the Good Life often feels elusive. Many of us were formed to think the Christian life is mostly about being saved, going to heaven, knowing the right information, or avoiding sin. But the New Testament describes something deeper: a life grounded in receiving the love of the Father as a daily experience.

The Good Life with God is not a circumstance. It is a withness. It is being rooted in love, held by God, and slowly formed into people who can love like Jesus.

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What kind of life did Jesus actually invite us into?

Episode 134 launches Season 7 of Soil & Roots, Deep Calls to Deep, by asking a simple but unsettling question: how do we become people of depth? Before exploring the path, Brian begins with the destination — the Good Life, or what Dallas Willard called the with-God life.

The with-God life is not merely being saved, learning more theology, attending church, or trying harder to behave. It is a daily, embodied, relational reality with God. It is a life marked by deep security, inner freedom, conversational intimacy with God, and love that flows from the inside out.

Brian explores why many followers of Jesus quietly assume this kind of life is unrealistic, reserved for spiritual elites, or simply not meant for them. Drawing from Scripture, Christian mysticism, Dallas Willard, David Benner, and everyday experience, he reframes discipleship not as more effort or better techniques, but as the risky and transformative work of receiving God’s love.

This episode also introduces the three-part map for the Soil & Roots journey: the Good Life, the Great Omission, and the Journey into Depth. The Good Life is the life Jesus lived and invites us into. The Great Omission explains why many of us are not experiencing it. The Journey into Depth explores how we become people who are increasingly attuned to God, others, ourselves, and the world.

Season 7 begins here: not with striving, but with receiving the love that makes us deep.

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What is deep discipleship?

In the Season 6 finale of Soil & Roots, Brian takes a sweeping journey through the core themes we’ve explored over the past three years: The Great Omission, the tension between the head and the heart, the hidden power of ideas, and the invitation to become deep people shaped by divine love.

If you are new to Soil & Roots, this may be one of the best episodes to start with. If you have been with us from the beginning, this episode connects and clarifies the major themes we’ve been wrestling with since Episode 1.

Brian revisits Dallas Willard’s concern that modern Christianity often makes converts, educates people, builds institutions, and engages people in service, but struggles to help people become genuine disciples — people who are being transformed from the inside out to think, act, relate, and love more like Jesus.

This episode also returns to the Soil & Roots framework of ideas: the hidden assumptions and experienced realities in our hearts that often govern us more deeply than our stated beliefs. True formation is not merely learning more information. The head learns through instruction, but the heart is formed through relationship and experience.

Brian then revisits the three primary problems: the Discipleship Dilemma, the Formation Gap, and the Forgotten Kingdom — or story, community, and purpose. Deep discipleship requires self-knowledge, formative community, and a recovered vision of the Kingdom of God.

The episode closes Season 6 by returning to the central question: if we are becoming like Jesus, what is He like? He is secure, beloved, mysterious, relationally shrewd, gentle, just, relaxed, and rooted in the love of the Father.

Deep discipleship begins not with striving, performance, or religious busyness, but with receiving the love that surpasses knowledge.

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How do young adults become like Jesus in a distracted, anxious, hyperconnected world?

In this bonus episode near the close of Season 6, Brian invites his two young adult sons, Caleb and Zach, into a conversation about spiritual formation across generations. Both grew up in church, but both describe a deeper awakening in young adulthood — through hardship, relationships, service, community, and the slow realization that following Jesus had to become their own journey.

Caleb and Zach share honestly about growing up in a Christian home, wrestling with shallow faith, experiencing crisis and renewal, and learning what it means to follow Jesus as young men. They talk about Jesus as comforter, His mysterious and indirect ways, God’s delight, church involvement, worship, service, small groups, and the joy of discovering that God not only loves them, but likes them and wants them involved in His Kingdom.

The conversation also explores what younger generations are facing: social media, identity confusion, institutional skepticism, shallow content, and the difference between information and real discipleship. Brian, Caleb, and Zach discuss why spiritual formation cannot happen through short videos, religious checklists, or church attendance alone. The heart is formed through time, habit, community, intimacy, instruction, experience, and relationship.

This is a warm, personal, and hopeful conversation about fathers and sons, church and culture, young adults and discipleship, and what it means to become more like Jesus in our age.

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What are you still clutching?

In this Greenhouse episode, Brian, Handsome Kyle, and Doc continue the conversation from Episode 130 on being rested and relaxed like Jesus. If Jesus is remarkably calm, present, unhurried, and at ease with the Father, then what does that reveal about the kind of people we are becoming?

The conversation begins with a simple image: a raccoon trapped because it will not release the shiny object in its paw. At any moment, it could let go and be free. But it keeps clutching what it thinks it needs. Brian, Handsome Kyle, and Doc use that picture to explore surrender, control, performance, anxiety, and the things our hearts refuse to release.

This episode asks why surrender to God is so difficult, especially in a culture built around productivity, achievement, rebellion, performance, and self-protection. In many church settings, surrender is treated as a one-time conversion moment rather than an ongoing way of life. But the relaxed life of Jesus is formed through daily, experiential surrender.

Brian, Handsome Kyle, and Doc discuss trust, rest, chronic illness, performance-driven faith, David Benner, Dallas Willard, Christian busyness, intimate community, and the difference between obedience as compliance and obedience as the natural fruit of experiencing Jesus’ love.

Surrender is not giving up to a cruel power. It is relaxing into the love of the Father. It is loosening our grip, receiving Jesus’ delight, and learning to rest in the present with God.

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What does it mean to be relaxed like Jesus?

In Episode 130, Brian continues Season 6, The Object of Our Formation, by exploring one of Jesus’ most surprising characteristics: He is deeply relaxed. Dallas Willard once described Jesus with one word: relaxed. He is not rushed, frantic, controlling, anxious, or hurried. Even in storms, conflict, pressure, confrontation, and suffering, Jesus remains remarkably present and at ease with the Father.

This episode gathers the Season 6 portrait of Jesus so far. Jesus is emotionally secure. He lives as the Beloved. He is mysterious, relationally shrewd, discerning, just, and gentle. And beneath all of that is a settled inner life. Jesus is at home with Himself because He is at home with His Father.

Brian explores what it means for deep disciples to become relaxed from the inside out. This is not emotional numbness, passivity, or pretending life is easy. Jesus feels grief, anger, distress, joy, and compassion. But He does not live in the past, trying to rewrite what happened. He does not live in the future, trying to control what has not yet come. He lives in the present with God.

The episode explores surrender, presence, control, anxiety, the Critical Journey, the life of love, and the practice of presencing. A relaxed person loosens their grip. They stop trying to control the past and future and learn to receive the present as a gift.

To become relaxed like Jesus is to become increasingly rested, present, surrendered, and at peace — even when life is not.

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Would Jesus talk to you the way you talk to yourself?

In this Greenhouse episode, Brian and Doc continue the conversation from Episode 128 on the gentleness of Jesus by focusing on one often-neglected area: self-gentleness. Most of us would never speak to a friend, spouse, child, or fellow disciple the way we speak to ourselves. Yet our inner talk tracks run all day, quietly shaping how we relate to God, others, creation, culture, and our own souls.

The conversation begins with the four relationships Soil & Roots often explores: God, self, others, and creation/culture. If gentleness is power restrained, then self-gentleness means restraining the power we have to curse, demean, shame, or tear down our own hearts.

Brian and Doc discuss metacognition, the uniquely human ability to think about what we think about. What do you say to yourself when you fail? When you forget something? When you sin? When you disappoint someone? Do those words sound like Jesus?

This episode also explores why many followers of Jesus struggle to be gentle with themselves. Brian and Doc discuss the reductionist gospel, sin management, shame, self-knowledge, self-acceptance, and the difference between seeing sin as a relational problem and treating it as a valuation problem. We are not worthless people God grudgingly tolerates. We are image-bearers, sons and daughters, beloved by God, and invited into transformation.

Self-gentleness is not arrogance, denial, or self-worship. It is learning to treat your own heart in a way that reflects the gentleness, compassion, and delight of Jesus.

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Web: ⁠⁠https://soilandroots.org⁠⁠ 

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