david v. Smith

Theodyssey Group, San Jose, California

ArchitextureA Conversation About

excurSionS 1.0/ pieces of me..........................9To what extent does God want to trans-form me?

2.0/ forminG percepTions......25How perceptions are influenced and formed.

3.0/ How i GoT To be me.............39The influences that shaped how i do life.

4.0/ can God use me?.................53broken people reaching a broken world.

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about architexture

t’s spelled like that on purpose. Architexture. It’s about design, structure, and texture, all in one. It describes the fabric of our being —what it means to be a person.

What is a person? We stumble around with words like body, soul, and spirit. Theologians argue about whether we have two parts or three, as if we’re counting cow stom-achs. Psychologists are constantly shuffling the deck and dealing out new possibilities.

Just how much of our lives does God want to transform? While it sounds like a question theo-logians e-mail each other in the middle of the night, the implications are huge. When Jesus tells us that we are to love God with all of our heart, mind, soul and strength—that is, with the entirety of our being—what does that mean? What part of us is supposed to respond to God? What part of us does he want to remake?

God doesn’t leave us guessing.

The Bible provides a detailed understanding of personhood. When Jesus calls us to follow him, he invites us to more than just “believe.” He has more in mind than simple conformity or obedi-ence.

Jesus invites us to become a new creation.

God meets us wherever we are—even in the midst of disorder and dysfunction—and begins a dramatic remodeling process from the inside out.

Exploring personhood Insights from modern psychology explain our life development process and the framework of our inner person, which gives us clarity about what change will mean.

In past centuries, Irish Protestants refused to eat pota-toes because they weren’t mentioned in the Bible. Many starved to death. Today, some Christ-followers refuse to acknowledge the mechanics of shame, cognitive develop-ment, or the subconscious mind, because those words are not found the in the Bible. (Yet they eat sushi and listen to iPods®, which are not listed in Strong’s Concordance.)

We’ll sort out the rubbish from the riches, and bring important insights to bear on how we can partner with Jesus to become all that he has designed us to be.

Exaudi, deus. vae peccatis hominum! et homo dicit haec, et misereris eius, quoniam tu fecisti eum et peccatum non fecisti in eo. quis me commemorat peccatum infan-tiae meae, quoniam nemo mundus a peccato coram te, nec infans, cuius est unius diei vita su per terram? quis me commemorat? an quilibet tantillus nunc pa vulus, in quo video quod non memini de me? quide go tunc peccabam? an quis uberibus inhiabam plo-

rans? nam si nunc faciam, non quidem uberibus, sed escae cong ru-enti annis meis ita inhians, de-ridebor atque reprehendar iustissime. tunc ergo repre-hendenda faciebam, sed quia repre-hendentem in-tellegere non poteram, nec mos repre-

hendi me nec ratio sinebat. nam extirpamus et eicimus ista crescentes, nec vidi quemquam scientem, cum aliquid purgat, bona proicere. an pro tempore etiam illa bona erant, flendo petere etiam quod noxie

Pieces of Me

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eople are complex. It took thirteen years and $3 billion to map the genetic blueprint of a human being. Completed in

2003, the Human Genome Project has charted the location of the thirty thousand or more genes that combine in different

ways to make us . . . us.

Translation: We know how we’re wired. And we’re just beginning to understand what we can do with what we’re learning.

The last page of Wired magazine typically ends with a final page feature called, “Found: Artifacts from the Future.” It captures a slice of life from decades down the road. One issue ran a picture of business types standing in a line at a glass-walled terminal marked “Transporter 3.” With brief-cases slung over their shoulders, they stare at their tickets as they wait to board.

In the foreground is a digital touchscreen, where someone with an elec-tronic pen in hand is selecting option boxes. At the top is the company logo, Allsafe, with the tag line beneath it: “Your Matter . . . Matters.™”

It’s a kiosk to buy Matter-Transport Insurance, to protect against the pos-sibility that your genes get separated during dematerialization and trans-port. It could ruin your day if one body part ended up in Billings and the others in Baltimore.

Options under “policy details” include various amounts of available cov-erage:

Payout of $10.25 million in the event of:• Identity theft or identity duplication• Mistaken arrival point (within 1 kilometer of target site)

Double payout in the event of:• Loss or incorrect positioning of limb or organ• DNA meshes with fellow traveler (human)• All forms of reversible misassemblage

Who knows? Maybe one day we’ll be beaming our DNA to Maui and Mazatlan, and skipping the red-eye.

I hope we still get peanuts.

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Excursion 1.0

What transformation meansThere’s a lot more to us than just DNA.

We have a complex mix of internal faculties and capacities that we regu-larly experience—which we even name—yet, we can’t see or touch. They don’t show up on an MRI or a CAT scan, yet they are what makes us distinctively us. Faculties such as our conscience, will, thoughts, and emo-tions. They’re the core pieces of us.

Had we been created in a sin-free world, we would have rolled off the assembly line in mint condition. Perfect. Sin, of course, eliminated that possibil-ity.

However, when we begin to live in authentic relationship with God, he does more than forgive sin; he begins a process of restoring us according to the original blueprint. Not at the level of genes and chromosomes. Rather, he begins reconfiguring our inner person according to his own image.

How does that happen? What does it involve? How deep does it go? What should we expect?

For many, this means readjusting previ-ous expectations.

“Isn’t being a Christian simply about having faith in Jesus?”

“I stopped doing bad things, and I started doing good things. What else is there?”

“I thought that following God was about believing and obeying?”

Transformation is about God regenerating our inner person according to the image of Christ.

The scope of personal transformationJust as a tree is anchored and nourished through an intricate network of tangled roots, each of us consists of a complex matrix of thoughts, feel-ings, impulses, motivations, memories, and more.

Both the Old and New Testaments acknowledge a wide variety of these “roots”—capacities and faculties of personhood that make us who we are.

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As we come to understand these inner dimensions, we get a glimpse into how profound and pervasive the work of Christ is intended to be in our lives.

Jesus had a comprehensive view of what the change process involves. When asked to interpret the meaning of the Old Testament Law, he responded with a summary of what it means to have a relationship with God:

He answered, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’; and, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’”1

In other words, love God with the entirety of your being—your whole per-son. The life of Christ is to pervade all the various faculties and capacities of our personhood.

The writer of Proverbs provides us with similar wisdom about the cen-trality of the heart, which in the Hebrew understanding encompasses our entire inner life.

Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it.2

Scripture seems to be inviting us beyond the arena of behavior and con-formity to consider the inner dimensions of the heart.

The Bible’s understanding of personhoodAlthough the Bible is not a psychology handbook, it does speak authori-tatively about the nonmaterial nature of human beings.

The most frequent Old Testament word referring to the inner workings of a person is leb or lebab,3 meaning “heart,” which occurs at least 850 times in the Old Testament.4

In the Hebrew mind there is no distinction between the physical and the interior functions of a human being. The heart, which is a tangible, physi-cal organ, is regarded not only as the center of a person’s body and the source of its vitality, but also the center of conscious reason and the inner life.

In the New Testament, the Greek word kardia, “heart,” occurs at least 210 times. The New Testament sees the heart figuratively as the center of a person, including the emotional and spiritual life.

Let’s explore what the Bible says about the “heart.” This is dimension of our lives that God wants to transform within us.