Seek: Principles for Living an Abundant Life

By Erin Conner M.Ed.

Jesus claimed, “I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.” (John 10:10 ESV) Seek provides readers with a critical exploration of Christianity and of biblical principles that lead to a great life. Through intelligent, authentically written chapters, Conner uses a logical tone and an artistic style to show us the power of God’s Word in our lives.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Aug 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9781973671091

Erin Conner M.Ed.

Erin Conner is a teacher, a writer, and the owner of Telos Educational Services, a company that offers academic coaching to students. She is also the founder of Telos Educational Ministries, a non-profit organization based in New England that helps people fulfill their potential in Christ.

Book preview

Copyright © 2019 Erin Conner, M.Ed.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This book is a work of non-fiction. Unless otherwise noted, the author and the publisher make no explicit guarantees as to the accuracy of the information contained in this book and in some cases, names of people and places have been altered to protect their privacy.

WestBow Press

A Division of Thomas Nelson & Zondervan

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.westbowpress.com

1 [phone]

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Unless noted otherwise, all Scripture quotations are taken from The Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Scripture quotations marked ESV taken from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version® (ESV®), Copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked KJV are taken from the King James Version.

Scripture quotations marked NLT are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, Copyright © 1996, 2004, 2015 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-9736-7108-4 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-9736-7109-1 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019910924

WestBow Press rev. date: 08/12/2019

To seek God does not narrow one’s life, rather it brings it to the level of highest possible fulfillment. -A.W. Tozer

ACKNOWLEDGEM

ENTS:

Thank you to all the teachers who were willing to be instruments of instruction in my life, but especially to Keith Cutshall, John Ortberg, Randy Goldenberg, and Beth Moore. Your words transformed me and my understanding of God. I know the words were His, but I needed the way you each taught them to be able to hear them.

Thank you to my husband for loving me the way only you can. This adventure is made for us. You’re my love.

Thank you to my parents, Linda and Frank Mele, whose love and prayers supported the writing of this book.

Thank you to my friend and editor, Jennifer Mermod, for her help with this book.

Thank you to Kim Eshelman, who lovingly walked beside me, as I learned many of these lessons.

DEDICA

TION:

for Ethan, Gia, and Jace— you are my greatest gifts from God.

Let these truths form the foundation of your lives.

CONTENTS

Preface: The Counter Argument

The Introduction

PART 1: THE GIVER OF ABUNDANT LIFE

Chapter 1:    The Bible Chapter - The Greatest Text

Chapter 2:    The God Chapter - The Most Importan Idea

Chapter 3:    The Jesus Chapter - The Three Questions of Christ

Chapter 4:    The Holy Spirit Chapter - The Source of Empowerment

PART 2: PRINCIPLES FOR LIVING AN ABUNDANT LIFE

Chapter 5:    The Thoughts Principle - Our Thoughts Create Our Reality

Chapter 6:    The Giving Principle - We Can’t Give What We Don’t Possess

Chapter 7:    The Freedom Principle - We Are Made to be Free from All That Imprisons

Chapter 8:    The Purpose Principle - We Are Created to Fulfill our Telos

The Conclusion

Endnotes

PREFACE:

THE COUNTER ARGUMENT

God is for people who cannot find meaning or motivation in this life, so they live for the idea of an after-life. God is for people who were not well-loved by their parents, so they find comfort in the idea of a Heavenly Father. God is for people who are not strong, so they use God as an illusionary crutch to hold them up in this life. Am I right?

If I decide to explore religion— whose version of God should I search? Which one of the monotheistic religions is right? How could I be so arrogant as to say that I know the correct version of God, while billions of other people in the world are wrong? I know what happens when people claim to hear the voice of God: they kill in name of faith; they fly planes into buildings; they fight with perfect strangers; they protest in hate; they make the world a worse place. I want no part in this kind of thing.

Why do people pray to Jesus and not to God? Some Muslims don’t believe Jesus even called himself the Son of God. Did he? Could God be human and divine simultaneously? Raising from the dead sounds like a zombie story. Am I right?

I’m a good person, and it doesn’t seem reasonable that I would suffer through this life and the next just because I don’t know who God is. How can I be expected to know what God wants from me? Does God want me to be perfect? Does he want me to be close-minded? Does he want me to be a person void of personality or passion? I don’t qualify, if this is the case.

Some people have never heard about Christianity. The Bible has not been translated into all the world’s 6,000 some languages. Are you telling me that people who never heard about Jesus will not go to heaven? What about all the people who lived before Jesus’ life? They don’t get into heaven because Jesus didn’t exist yet? Does heaven even exist or is this another comforting illusion? Making a claim because we don’t have evidence to refute it, is a logical fallacy: argumentum ad ignorantiam.

In a free society, we have a right to do what we want and to seek what we want provided it doesn’t harm someone else. Whatever I believe to be true about God doesn’t harm anyone else because whatever I believe about God is my own personal idea. Am I right?

Well, dear reader—I don’t know if you have entertained any of these thoughts, but I want to tell you upfront that I have. I also want to tell you upfront why I’m writing this book. The reason is two-fold:

Twenty years ago, I had a deep nagging feeling— both intellectual and emotional— that these spiritual questions needed to be explored, and not only did they need to be explored, but that I, Erin, needed to do the research to answer them for myself and not just accept what someone else told me as truth. I wanted to look at primary source documents, not simply other people’s interpretation of them. I had a feeling that there had to be more to life than what I was experiencing and that these questions had the potential to provide life-giving answers.

Here we are twenty years later, and I have that same deep, nagging feeling again. This time the feeling isn’t a prompting to seek truth; this time the feeling is to share what I’ve found. I believe in my heart of hearts that many people desire to know God, and that a culture of lies stands in the way.

I’m writing this book to share with you a summary of critical findings, even though I know that you must go on your own journey to find your own answers, just like I did. I’m praying that what I share in this book provides a spark for you to embark or to go deeper on your own journey. In the last two decades, I’ve read the world’s religious texts, done religious things, visited different places of worship and religious visitor’s centers; I’ve studied the monotheistic religions, asked a lot of questions, and interviewed more people than I can count about their spirituality. Why?

I was seeking truth. I was seeking authenticity. I was looking for answers about faith using reason. I wanted to know if faith was anti-intellectual, as mainstream culture claims. I wanted to know if Truth exists or if people just socially construct it. I wanted to know if there is a God, and if God is knowable. I was willing to accept whatever answers I found.

I’m not an expert on religious things. I didn’t go to seminary or divinity school. I still have a lot to learn. However, through my seeking, I have discovered some principles that changed the trajectory of my life—ones that I believe hold the power to change yours too.

I have a secondary reason for writing this book: a fundamental claim upon which this book is written. My claim is this: people are not fulfilled. Even the most successful of us. The strongest of us. The people who are self-made. The highly educated. The people who follow the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.¹ The people who volunteer and do charity work. The people who have all the stuff. We live lives of silent disappointment, and when our lives quiet down—when we are not distracted by our busyness-, we are not fulfilled. We experience an emptiness or gnawing feeling inside. For some of us, it is frantic—a deep anxiety that we don’t know how to direct. For some of us it is heavy—a deep sadness that we don’t know how to lose. Many of us spend a lot of energy overcoming these feelings to be productive, but we still have our break downs: we can’t sleep; we can’t focus; we grind our teeth; we consume too much; we have emotional outbursts; we suffer from pain that seems to have no known source. We don’t live up to our own standards. Or worse yet, we do live up to our own standards, and we still are not satisfied. We still are searching, still seeking— and the things we already have achieved and acquired are never enough. Most of us are simply surviving life. We are not thriving. If we are thriving in one aspect of our lives, then other aspects of our lives are dying. We are living in a deep state of longing that avoidance, medication, self-help, organic food, and endless doctor visits can’t quite fix. We are not enjoying all that we have.

And there is another way: the way that gives real life. Real empowerment. Real freedom. Real purpose. Real joy. Not just the illusion of these things.

In the truth of this reality, I write this book.

THE INTRODUCTION

I have come that they may have life and have it abundantly. -Jesus (John 10:10 ESV)

Some religious people claim that the benefit of knowing God is gaining eternal life. This claim suggests that people reap the benefit of knowing God in the next life, not this one. Eternal or everlasting life is, indeed, a gift from God according to the Bible. It just isn’t the entire gift. When Jesus said, I have come that they may have life and have it abundantly, the word he used for life isn’t the word that means age-long or forever. The word he used, as written in Greek, was zoe which means both present (physical) and future (spiritual) existence.¹ This word zoe is different from other words for life, such as bios or psyche. The implication is quite significant: it implies the quality of our life, not just the length of it. Subsequently, we can translate the phrase have it abundantly to mean a rich, satisfying, and fulfilling life not later, but now. An example of imagery that the Bible uses for abundance is an overflowing cup²— a vessel that is receiving more than it can hold, receiving more than we could ask or imagine. You see, Jesus is not talking about simply giving us the gift of life after this one. He is talking about giving us a certain kind of life— the highest quality of life possible. He is telling us that if we want to live our best life, we need to know the Giver of life and the principles upon which life is designed to work.

PART I

The Giver of Abundant Life

Chapter 1

THE BIBLE CHAPTER

The Greatest Text

All scripture is God-breathed… (2 Timothy 3:16 NIV)

Every culture on the globe has used storytelling as a way to teach important lessons to its people. In fact, storytelling separates us from other species. Oh, yes, other species have tools and emotions and memory, but they do not have codified writings for future generations to explore long after they were written. Writing is sacred for this reason. Writing sets us apart. It is powerful beyond measure. Consequently, most of us have at least one text that we’ve fallen in love with during our lifetime— one so compelling that it makes us feel fully alive.

I have a beautiful cousin, Ashley. She’s bright-eyed, smart, and strong. Just picture the most kind, loving brown eyes you could ever imagine. Yes, that’s her. I was in middle-school, lying in bed, the night the phone rang. A wedge of light burst through the crack in my doorway, as my mom turned on the lights to answer the late-night call. I remember looking at the red digital numbers on my alarm clock shining through the darkness, as I held my breath waiting to hear who had called so late and why. It was my aunt- my mother’s sister. She called to tell us that the doctors discovered that Ashley was deaf. This phone call started a journey full of decisions, obstacles, and unbreakable love for our family. So, when my aunt first watched Children of a Lesser God, a 1986 film about the challenges of a young deaf woman, we all had to watch it. This movie captured the heart of my family because it revealed a truth that we needed to see. Seeing a personal truth in someone else’s life is a powerful experience. It makes us feel more alive and less alone in a giant world.

When we explore texts, we not only learn about life and ourselves, but also about the author and about the power of language. A great text has depth and meaning hidden within that can be exposed from each careful reading. If we look at a text deeply enough and for long enough, and with a teacher who is skilled enough, we discover the power of the word choice, the power of the order of the words, and the beauty of the progression of ideas. We discover the art of the form and function of the text. Authors like Shakespeare, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Elie Wiesel, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Toni Morrison have a way of teaching us something new with each reading because their texts are so sophisticated; they are so beautifully and artistically crafted. Your list of favorite writers may be different from mine, but the point is the same: discovering a book’s power and intricacies through deep study is a beautiful adventure. Those of us who don’t like books may not have this type of experience from reading, but more than likely we do have this experience from exploring photography, nature, music, theatre, dance, sports or some other form of expression in creation that was made for us to enjoy.

When I first started reading the Bible, I didn’t think it was going to be a beautiful adventure. I thought it was a historical text worth studying because it was old and because it held significance in a Judeo-Christian culture. I thought it was my obligation to read as an educated person. This was my perspective. I did not believe it was a holy text. Holy means set apart from all else. No one indoctrinated me to believe the Bible was holy. I was not sent to Catholic school or Christian college. I was not raised in such a way to trust people, let alone to trust an invisible God.

But twenty years of studying, analyzing, and researching the Bible has led me to believe, beyond the shadow of a reasonable doubt, that it is the single greatest text ever written, and that it holds more power than any of us can comprehend. If you think I’m being dramatic, that’s fine. I have an Italian heritage, and we tend to say things a little over the top. But I assure you, what leads me to make this claim isn’t my ethnicity, it is the authenticity of the text.

Great texts are timeless. Their themes are applicable to all people, throughout all of time, at any given location on the planet. A great text has something to teach humanity about ourselves and our world that makes it worth studying. Many great texts have been written since people began codifying and capturing truths about our human experience, but the Bible is different for four distinct reasons.

1. The Compilation of the Bible

The Bible was written by 40 different authors from at least 20 different socio-economic backgrounds, living in 10 different countries spanning 6,000 miles written in 3 different languages and took around 1,600 years to write. The words that you see in the Bible were originally written with 10 media including rock, papyrus, chisel, clay, leather, and pen. The Bible contains 66 different books broken down into 1,189 chapters, which is a bit confusing because they are not really chapters of an informational or of a fictional text, as we are accustomed. Instead the Bible is a collection of different literary forms— poetry, prose, narratives, songs, histories, and letters that encompasses a cast of 2,930 different characters with 1,551 different geographical settings.¹ So, the Bible isn’t a novel, and it isn’t an informational text. Its compilation is different from any other book.

When I first started reading the Bible, from the perspective of an unchurched person, I thought to myself, isn’t this book supposed to be a bunch of parables or directions that tell me how to live? From the perspective of an English major, I thought to myself, why are the stories written so poorly? Many of the stories are missing major plot events, significant character development, meaningful transitions, and seemingly important details. Many Bible stories don’t tend to constitute what literary experts say is great writing.

An interesting thing happened to me as I brought these concerns to God in prayer. I asked God why he didn’t have them written better. (Some of you may be thinking this isn’t how you are supposed to talk to God, but honesty has always worked for me.) God responded to my prayer. I didn’t hear a voice from the clouds. I encountered Living Proof Ministries; I encountered a teacher who changed the way I erroneously viewed reading the Bible: Beth Moore. Beth Moore’s ministry and bible studies changed everything for me. Moore has this amazing ability to read black ink on a white page and turn it into the most colorful scene of motion you can imagine. Through her modeling of reading and loving scripture, she helped me learn to do the same. What her Bible studies did for my understanding of the Bible is significant: they showed me, in part, why certain things are missing from the Bible. What’s missing from the text, God intentionally left out to create room for an active and personal discovery of knowledge, instead of a passive receiving of information. The Bible is written in such a way as to invite interaction. I’ve read many interactive books in my lifetime as an educator, and none has the power to engage readers the way the Word of God does. God is the best story-teller. He is the greatest rhetorician. He knows how to tell a story to not only inspire someone, but to authentically change someone from the inside out. He knows how to use words to get us to ask the questions we need to ask ourselves and to ask him, so our knowledge becomes wisdom— so that we can apply it in our lives. His storytelling is transformative. The Bible, or God’s Word, is God’s words on the page. It’s also God’s way to communicate with us through the page. He communicates things his way, which is superior to man’s way. And He is inviting us to see for ourselves. The Bible is full of hidden treasures that we will only discover when we honestly seek God in and through the pages.

Is there another book like it? The answer is quite simply, no. If we start to compare it to ancient texts, we won’t find anything as complete. If we start to compare it to modern anthologies, we can’t without making a faulty comparison. Modern anthologies don’t tell a plan for humanity with immeasurable amounts of qualitative, life-changing themes through every genre of writing about a single character from different perspectives following many first-hand accounts.

The fact that the individual writings of the Bible were written in different languages from different geographic locations over such a large span of time by different authors is astounding. More astounding is the fact that all were compiled in one book to tell a single redemption story about the purpose of humanity. People argue that the early church created a flawed Bible by choosing which ancient texts to include and which ones not to include in it. L.M. McDonald, former professor of New Testament studies and former president of Acadia Divinity College writes, "The church did not create the canon, it did not determine which books would be called Scripture, the inspired Word of God. Instead, the church recognized, or discovered, which books have been inspired from their inception."² Just because the early Christian church chose the canon of the New Testament does not mean God had nothing to do with its writing or their choosing.

Authorship of the Bible

Humans wrote down the words that are recorded in the Bible. In a literal sense, then, Moses, Solomon, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Paul are examples of authors of the Bible. However, Christians believe there is something more to it. These writers, the people who physically wrote down the words that are now printed in the Holy Bible, were being used as instruments by God to write those words down. The authors of the different texts in the Bible could not have known the extent to which the words they wrote would affect history. They were simply being obedient to the promptings they had to write. Their writing is an act of faith and cooperation with God. They did not know all the details about who was going to read it, why it was being written down, and how it was going to reach people 2,000 years later in parts of the world that they didn’t even know existed. They did not know, but God did. So, for believers, it is a bit misleading to say that humans authored the Bible, as if God didn’t give them the inspiration of every word to write, along with the mind and ability to write it (even when chained to a prison wall or while exiled on an island in the scorching sun). It is misleading to say men wrote the Bible, as if God didn’t make a way for the writing to be preserved, to be found, and to be published; as if God didn’t influence the minds of the people who were prayerfully involved in every step of this text’s existence and didn’t orchestrate events in history to allow this book to withstand time; as if God didn’t then allow for parts of it to be translated into 3,312 different languages.³ Look, this is astounding. No other book in recorded history has suffered more opposition. Putting this book in a category with any other book written by mere men is difficult to do considering that …after thousands of years of opposition, the Bible has not only survived, it has triumphed over emperors, kings, and dictators who sought to silence its message of salvation.⁴

There are truths about God revealed in the fact that he chose to tell his story to us through mere men: first, it shows that God places an immense amount of trust in our hands. Secondly, it shows that God is not formulaic and does not fit into man-made categories because he is neither the author or the narrator, and yet is both at the same time. As a result, it shows that there can be a paradoxical nature to spiritual truths: something that seems self-contradictory, but when investigated, proves to be true. In this case, the paradox is that God is the author of the Bible, but men wrote it.

Audience of the Bible

Writing experts claim that good writing needs to have a specific audience, otherwise it may be too vague and may lack the persuasive elements necessary to inspire people to respond to the text’s message. So, who is the intended audience of the Bible? Was it written for people back then or for people now? For followers of the Way or for non-believers? (Christianity was called The Way before being called Christianity because Jesus referred to himself as the Way, the Truth, and the Life.⁵) Religious experts or common man? The educated or uneducated? The rich or poor? Single or married? The intellectually-driven or the emotionally driven?

Well, the answer is another paradox. The audience is very specific, while simultaneously not being specific at all. The audience is each individual person who picks up the Bible to read it from the time it was first written to the end of this age. We can say it is for every human on the planet ever. Not very specific, is it? Yet, at the same time, each different book of the Bible was written for a very specific audience: for example, the letter than constitutes the book of Corinthians was written for the church of Corinth in the 1st century A.D. and the book of Exodus was written for the people of Israel around the 13th century B.C.

The Bible is for everyone. No specific group of people, or audience, has an upper hand in accessing truth. God makes his truths accessible to anyone who wants them. People with post-secondary education degrees do not have an upper-hand over people who don’t. God is the creator of all people and no one is more valuable than anyone else. The culture we live in does not communicate this truth, but it is true. We are God’s beloved creation. He wrote the Bible for all of us. He wrote the Bible for you.

Maybe you think you have something in your life that doesn’t qualify you to read the Bible.