IDENTITY #4: From Persona to Personhood

 

                                       (Mears State Park, Michigan)

In the absence of God,

 people are left alone to create their identities.

PERSONA 

"A persona, in the word everyday usage, is a social role or a character played by an actor. This is an Italian word that derives from the Latin for "mask" or "character", derived from the Etruscan word "phersu", with the same meaning. Popular etymology derives the word from Latin "per" meaning "through" and "sonare" meaning "to sound", meaning something in the vein of "that through which the actor speaks", i.e. a mask (early Greek actors wore masks)." (Wikipedia, "Persona")

AKA - the false self; "hypocrite" ("mask-wearer"); fake; phony

PERSON 

The real self; who you really are; the "true self," made in the image of God

Forty-three years ago I was sitting on the seat of a rusty tractor in the middle of a field, in a wildlife area, just north of Lansing, Michigan. I went there to pray. For several hours. That was one of the first times I did this kind of extended praying. It turned out to be the beginning of something new God was doing in me.

I was reading Psalm 139. I got to verses 23-24, which read:

Search me, O God, and know my heart;

test me and know my anxious thoughts.

See if there is any offensive way in me,

and lead me in the way everlasting.

The thought came that I should ask God to do this. To search me out. 

My heart was filled with restlessness. All the busy stuff I was doing only seemed to increase my inner agitation. So I said to God, "Do it." 

God told me, "John, I would love to. You need to spend much time with me, over a lifetime, so I can search you out, remove your anxious thoughts, and lead you in the way everlasting."

"John, you can take off the persona." 

Maintaining a persona is hard work. I did some acting in my college theater department, and it takes a lot out of a person. God told me, "John, I don't care for the mask; it is you that I love." So, before God, I allowed him to peel away the persona and get to me. This is a process, and continues to this day.

It was both hard and good to hear God say those words to me. It was hard, because my persona was something I was accustomed to. To remove the mask was to enter into new territory. It produced, initially, feelings of wanting to hide from God. 

It was also good. Looking into the face of my all-loving God, with hidden parts of me exposed, was fear-and-trembling good! It still feels unbelievable. God knows me, God searches me out, God sees to the root of my being, God knows my true heart. And God loves me? Unbelievable, yet true.

When we wear our persona-mask before people we lie to them. In our inner insecurity and unlovableness we posture before people. We brag. We create and display our persona on Facebook. We are pity-filled. We crave human approval, and fear disapproval. We want others to recognize our hotness. We want to be hotter than thou.

This gets subtle, as I know personally. At times my caring for others has been a mask that hides my need for them to approve of me. True personhood, on the other hand, cares and loves others, whether one benefits from this or not.

That... is freedom. To know God and be known by him. To love God and experience God's love towards us, personally. This is not some theoretical thing, but an experiential reality. In this regard experience, not theory, breeds conviction.

You are loved by God. Go to him.

Ask God to search out your heart, remove the persona, and transform you into the person he has created you to be. Which is: in his image.

Heaven, the Soul, and the Afterlife (Coming Fall 2024)

 

HEAVEN, THE SOUL, AND THE AFTERLIFE

RENEWAL SCHOOL OF MINISTRY

 

You may have heard it said that some people are so heavenly minded that they are no earthly good.  But turn this on its head and we see that some people are so earthly minded that they are no heavenly good. In this class we will focus on a Christian understanding of heavenly-mindedness, and hope in, life after death.

We will respond to questions like these.

What happens to us when we die?

What will the afterlife be like?

How does the Bible describe the afterlife?

Why is it important to understand that you have a soul?

How can we know that persons have souls?

Will we be with our loved ones in eternity?

What will we do for all eternity?

How does belief in everlasting life inform how we now live on earth?

This is a four-week class. Monday nights. 8-9 PM EST. Begins Monday, Sept. 16, 2024. (9/16, 9/23, 9/30, 10/7)

Class sessions will be both in person at Redeemer Church in Monroe, Michigan, and live-zoomed.

Registration begins in August. $10 for the four class sessions.

INSTRUCTOR: Rev. John Piippo, PhD

John Piippo has taught spiritual formation, prayer, and presence-driven leadership in seminaries, conferences and retreats, around the United States and the world. John has written six books: Leading the Presence-Driven Church, Praying: Reflections on 40 Years of Solitary Conversations with God, Deconstructing Progressive Christianity, 31 Letters to the Church on Discipleship, 31 Letters to the Church on Praying, and Encounters with God.

John currently is a Visiting Professor at Faith Bible Seminary (Chinese) in Flushing, NYC, and an Adjunct Professor at Payne Theological Seminary (A.M.E.) in Wilberforce, Ohio.

John was Adjunct Professor of Philosophy at Monroe County Community College for eighteen years (Logic, Philosophy of Religion, Western Philosophy)

John and Linda have been pastors at Redeemer Fellowship Church in Monroe, Michigan, since 1992. 

John has a PhD in Philosophical Theology from Northwestern University, and an M.Div. from Northern Seminary. 

John regularly blogs at johnpiippo.com.  

Character Matters

 

I am a case study in character formation. Because I have needed it so badly.

N.T. Wright, in After You Believe: Why Christian Character Matters, identifies four cardinal virtues that characterize actual followers of Jesus. They are: humility, charity, patience, and chastity. This "composite of virtues" is what True Humanity looks like. Jesus exemplifies such humanity. 

Jesus-followers are to look like Jesus, just as a disciple is to look like his mentor, as a student looks like his teacher.

Wright writes:

"It is thus more or less impossible to speak of God with any conviction or effect if those who profess to follow Jesus are not exemplifying humility, charity, patience, and chastity. These are not optional extras for the especially keen, but the very clothes which the royal priesthood must “put on” day by day. If the vocation of the royal priesthood is to reflect God to the world and the world back to God (the world, that is, as it was made to be and as, by God’s grace, it will be one day), that vocation must be sustained, and can only be sustained, by serious attention to “putting on” these virtues, not for the sake of a self-centered holiness or pride in one’s own moral achievement, but for the sake of revealing to the world who its true God really is." (p. 247)

Forget speaking of God to others if your heart is proud, miserly, irritable, and perverted. Obviously, Jesus hasn't made an impact on such a person's life, so why would anyone listen to them, about anything? 

Christian character matters, not as a means to gaining God's acceptance, but as marks of real, transforming Christianity.

The Jesus-follower who follows Jesus into his ever-presence will inexorably be morphed into a humble person who is free from the need for self-congratulation and self-adulation, into a loving person whose heart's modus operandi is dialed into the needs of others, into a person who can wait because their heart has great enduring staying power, and into a pure thing whose sexual desires have been freed from the objectification of others.

All of this is, contrary to our kingdom of darkness culture, counter-intuitive. Yet it is the road to freedom, and people truly free in Jesus possess these interior qualities.

Who I Am in Christ - Declarations

(On The Badger - Ludington to Manitowoc)

(I am reposting this for a friend.)

Print this out and carry it with you. 

WHO I AM IN CHRIST

I am accepted

John 1:12	I am God's child.
John 15:15	As a disciple, I am a friend of Jesus Christ.
Romans 5:1	I have been justified.
1 Corinthians 6:17	I am united with the Lord, and I am one with Him in spirit.
1 Corinthians 6:19-20	I have been bought with a price and I belong to God.
1 Corinthians 12:27	I am a member of Christ's body.
Ephesians 1:3-8	I have been chosen by God and adopted as His child.
Colossians 1:13-14	I have been redeemed and forgiven of all my sins.
Colossians 2:9-10	I am complete in Christ.
Hebrews 4:14-16	I have direct access to the throne of grace through Jesus Christ.
	I am secure...
Romans 8:1-2	I am free from condemnation.
Romans 8:28	I am assured that God works for my good in all circumstances.
Romans 8:31-39	I am free from any condemnation brought against me and I cannot be separated from the love of God.
2 Corinthians 1:21-22	I have been established, anointed and sealed by God.
Colossians 3:1-4	I am hidden with Christ in God.
Philippians 1:6	I am confident that God will complete the good work He started in me.
Philippians 3:20	I am a citizen of heaven.
2 Timothy 1:7	I have not been given a spirit of fear but of power, love and a sound mind.
1 John 5:18	I am born of God and the evil one cannot touch me.
	I am significant...
John 15:5	I am a branch of Jesus Christ, the true vine, and a channel of His life.
John 15:16	I have been chosen and appointed to bear fruit.
1 Corinthians 3:16	I am God's temple.
2 Corinthians 5:17-21	I am a minister of reconciliation for God.
Ephesians 2:6	I am seated with Jesus Christ in the heavenly realm.
Ephesians 2:10	I am God's workmanship.
Ephesians 3:12	I may approach God with freedom and confidence.
Philippians 4:13	I can do all things through Christ, who strengthens me

Speaking In New Jersey on Transformation into Christlikeness

 

Linda and I travel to Edison, New Jersey, on Friday. We will be speaking at Stelton Baptist Church.

SAT. NIGHT

“Your Identity: Finally Find Where You Belong”

 

SUNDAY MORNING

“How to Live a Spiritually Transformed Life”

 

SUNDAY EVENING

“How to Do what Jesus Did”

Yearn For the Ocean Before Building the Ship

 

(Battery Park, NYC, the Statue of Liberty in the distance)

"If you want to build a ship, don’t summon people to buy wood, prepare tools, distribute jobs, 

and organize the work, 

rather teach people the yearning 

for the wide, boundless ocean.” 

 (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)

As churches, what do we envision? Many attempt to build ships (the methods of ministry) before the people have acquired a yearning for the wide, boundless ocean ( = the vision of the God's kingdom). Dallas Willard, in The Divine Conspiracy, points out that Jesus' eyes envisioned a God-bathed, God-permeated world. Jesus craved to sail the high seas of His father's kingdom. The desire to bring others on this adventure drove all that he said and did. Given this desire, "ship-building" comes naturally.

The first task in spiritual formation is bringing people to that place of yearning for the beautiful kingdom of God. I've seen people transformed by the power of the Holy Spirit begin to catch Jesus' vision of the kingdom, only to be encouraged by the church “to buy wood, prepare tools and distribute jobs." Ship-building becomes more of an obligation than a delightful joy.

We must, within our churches, re-imagine what God's own life is like ("heaven"), and then bask in the reality of His vastness, goodness, justness, and love. We must recognize how indispensable this yearning, this ferocious desire to explore the vast, boundless ocean, is. Building the church without the peoples' deep longing for heaven on earth is wasted energy.

Anthropic Non-Progressivism

 

In technology, in medicine, in the sciences, humanity has progressed. For example, when I was in grad school at Northwestern University, I bought a refurbished IBM Selectric typewriter for $900. This thing was heavy enough to do serious medieval damage to anything it was launched at. My dissertation was 450 pages long. If I had to edit something on page 20, guess what I had to do. I typed and re-typed and re-typed my doctoral dissertation on this thing which, at the time, was state of the art.  Thankfully, at this moment, I am writing this post on my Asus laptop computer. 

That's technological progress. But humanity, as a whole, has not morally and spiritually progressed. I am calling this anthropic non-progressivism. Here's an example from Walter Rauschenbusch's Christianity and the Social Crisis. He writes,

"History is never antiquated, because humanity is always fundamentally the same. It is always hungry for bread, sweaty with labor, struggling to wrest from nature and hostile men enough to feed its children. The welfare of the mass is always at odds with the selfish force of the strong. The exodus of the Roman plebeians and the Pennsylvania coal strike, the agrarian agitation of the Gracchi and the rising of the Russian peasants—it is all the same tragic human life.

(Rauschenbusch, Christianity and the Social Crisis in the 21st Century: The Classic That Woke Up the Church, p. 1.) 

Identity - Who You Are, and Who You Are Not

(Green Lake, Wisconsin)

(Since 1977 I have taught spiritual formation and transformation at several seminaries, retreats, and conferences. This coming weekend I'll teach this material at Stelton Baptist Church in Edison, New Jersey. Then, in two weeks, I will again teach spiritual formation at Payne Theological Seminary (I've taught this class aet Payne since 2007). On August 5 I will be interviewed on spiritual formation by a Canadian podcast (The Witness).)

In my spiritual formation classes for pastors and Christian leaders I begin class by sending the students out to pray for an hour, using Psalm 23 as their meditative focus. My instruction is simply: when God speaks to you, write it down.

Upon returning from their hour with God, many of them will have heard God tell them, "I love you." Some have not heard those words in a long time. This is a powerful time of sharing.

This gets at the heart of who we are. Henri Nouwen wrote that he was "firmly convinced that the decisive moment of Jesus's public life was his baptism, when he heard the divine affirmation, "You are my Beloved on whom my favor rests." (Spiritual Direction, 28) 

When God tells someone "You are my beloved," or "I love you," the most intimate truth about that person is revealed. God loves you: this is the ultimate truth about you. Nouwen says "the ultimate spiritual temptation is to doubt this fundamental truth about ourselves and trust in alternative identities." (28)

Who are you? Nouwen counsels us not to define ourselves by the following alternative identities.

1. Do not define yourself as: "I am what I do." He writes: "When I do good things and have a little success in life, I feel good about myself. But when I fail, I start getting depressed." (Ib.) To define yourself by what you do is to live on a spiritual and emotional roller coaster that is a function of your accomplishments.

2. Do not define yourself as: "I am what other people say about me." "What people say about you has great power. When people speak well of you, you can walk around quite freely. But when somebody starts saying negative things about you, you might start feeling sad. When someone talks against you, it can cut deep into your heart. Why let what others say about you - good or ill - determine what you are?" (Ib., 29)

3. Do not define yourself as: "I am what I have." Don't let your things and your stuff determine your identity. Nouwen writes: "As soon as I lose any of it, if a family member dies, if my health goes, or if I lose my property, then I can slip into inner darkness." (Ib.)

Too much energy goes into defining ourselves by deciding "I am what I do," "I am what others say about me," or "I am what I have." Nouwen writes: "This whole zig-zag approach is wrong." You are not, fundamentally, what you do, what other people say about you, or what you have. You are someone who is greatly loved by God.

Today, God speaks to the deep waters of your heart and says, "You are my beloved son or daughter, and on you my favor rests." To hear that voice and trust in it is to reject the three alternative ways of self-definition and enter into freedom and joy.

**
Three of my books are:

Praying: Reflections on 40 Years of Solitary Conversations with God

Leading the Presence-Driven Church

Encounters with the Holy Spirit (co-edited with Janice Trigg)

Understanding Comes First

(Monroe County)

To answer before listening— that is folly and shame.

Proverbs 18:13

I wrote a letter to a young person whose marriage was struggling. There's a lot of fighting and yelling in this marriage. One of them keeps repeating past failures to the other,. The  other called me and asked "Why do they have to keep reminding me of mistakes I've made in the past!"

Here's the note I sent to them. 

Dear _________:

Understand ______. 

Understanding always comes before evaluation. 

Linda and I spend little time evaluating each other,

and tons of time understanding one another.

To understand is to love; to be understood is to be loved and to feel loved.

Understand why ______ feels a need to repeat things to you. It's probably because they feel you are not really listening, 
or because they cannot trust you. 

You do not need to defend yourself.

Work to understand why they feel the need to repeat things to you, 

and they will begin to feel understood, 

which is to feel loved.

Communicate with me as needed, and we'll talk on the phone again.

Blessings,

PJ

Making judgments without understanding is the cause of many relationship breakdowns. To judge without understanding is foolish. Here's the order of relational priority:

1. Understand.
2. Evaluate.

In knowledge and relationships understanding comes first. Which is a way of saying that love is greater than judgment.

(After sending that note I went looking for a book in my library - To Understand Each Other, by Paul Tournier. This is one of the books that shaped Linda and I in how we approach relationships and marriage. We used to give newly married couples a copy of it. For those who value depth and wisdom, Tournier's works are must reading.)

***

One of my books is Praying: Reflections on 40 Years of Solitary Conversations with God.

Spiritual Formation & Transformation: My Method

(Michigan beach, on Lake Michigan shoreline)

When I teach spiritual formation and transformation to seminary students, pastors, and churches, this is my method.

1. Assumption: God is the agent of personal/spiritual transformation.

2. Point People to God's Presence: Lecturing to people or assigning books to read won't transform the human heart. But God can. Therefore: I assign people to pray. I can point people to the presence of the One who does the transforming. 

3. Share With Others What God Is Doing In You: Transformation has a corporate dimension. This is realized as we return from our solitary prayer times with God and share with others what God has spoken to us. Here we arrive at the center of biblical koinonia ("fellowship") which is, literally, sharing what we have in common; viz., Christ in me, the hope of glory.

The method God has given me to do this is:

Give people Psalm 23 and send them out to pray for an hour. Or sometimes I send them out to pray for 30 minutes. For pastors I use 60 minutes; for non-pastors I use 30 minutes.

Here's the paper I give them. I read the instructions aloud. 

I use this document when teaching seminary classes and doing spiritual formation retreats for churches.

WARNING: If you are a pastor who wants to do this kind of thing with your people you must be engaging in it yourself. 

PRAYER EXERCISE – SPIRITUAL FORMATION

Dr. John Piippo

1. The purpose of this exercise is to enter into the presence of God for the sake of deepening your relationship with God alone. My assumption is that you need God. You need to spend much time in God’s presence. And that time is to be spent in a certain way.
2. Find a “lonely place apart.” When you get to that place, spend 60 minutes with God.
3. Take with you only Psalm 23 and your journal. You may also take a Bible with you. But I want you to use Psalm 23 as your focus of meditation.
4. Leave any cell phones, computers, books, shopping lists, and xerox machines behind. They will be waiting for you when you return from this time.
5. Use Psalm 23 for meditation.
6. Your purpose is not to exegete Psalm 23, but to be yourself exegeted by the Holy Spirit.
7. When God speaks to you, write it down in your spiritual journal. A spiritual journal is a record of the voice of God to you.
8. If your mind wanders, you may wish to write down where it wanders to. Your wandering mind is a barometer of your true spiritual condition. Your mind will never wander arbitrarily, but always to something like a burden or a hope.

Psalm 23

A psalm of David.

 ¹ The LORD is my shepherd, I shall not be in want.

 ² He makes me lie down in green pastures,
       he leads me beside quiet waters,
 ³ he restores my soul.
       He guides me in paths of righteousness for his name's sake.
 ⁴ Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
       I will fear no evil, for you are with me;
       your rod and your staff, they comfort me.
 ⁵ You prepare a table before me
       in the presence of my enemies.
       You anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows.

 ⁶ Surely goodness and love will follow me
       all the days of my life,
       and I will dwell in the house of the LORD forever.