Synergy

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One of my favorite verses is Luke 2:52: "And Jesus increased in wisdom and stature and in favor with God and man." I love it because it shows that Jesus was growing in more than one way all the time.

We all know how to grow in wisdom, read a book, take a course, study something! Favor with God, obviously, means to grow spiritually. How do we grow spiritually? We seek God. We pray, read our Bibles, worship, fellowship, tithe, serve, etc.... To me, being in favor with others speaks to our emotional and social well-being, which Daniel Goleman refers to as emotional intelligence, or EQ. This is a little trickier because some of us have closed down our hearts or developed what the Bible describes as "hearts of stone." 

In Jeremiah 17:9-10, we are told, "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; who can know it?" This verse highlights that the human heart is inherently prone to deception, corruption, and self-deception, often leading people astray from God's truth, even when they claim to follow Him. While our hearts are deceptive, God promises in the same passage to search them to understand our true intentions and actions, giving each person what they deserve. In Ezekiel 36:26, God promises that He will give us a new heart and put a new spirit in us; He will remove our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. So even though EQ is difficult, ot is possible.

Did you see it? Did you notice the key? A new heart is tied to a new spirit. One results in the other, but since the Renaissance, Western culture has been reductionistic. We break things down into the smallest components, but the Luke and Ezekiel verses imply something else; they are connected. Growth in one area affects the growth and health of other areas. These four areas are listed together for a reason.  From systems theory, we know that everything is interconnected and that all these areas affect one another. Many times, this effect can be synergistic.

Let me give you an example of synergy. When I was young, I was briefly on the UCLA crew team. I rowed in the back of the boat and had to row through my teammates' choppy water, but the boat had a coxswain who would call out the beat of our strokes, and when all 8 women rowed together, we sailed across the water. If someone was off, they would catch an oar in the gut, which we called a crab. When we were together, though the whole was greater than the sum of its parts, it was synergy, and that was the name of our boat.

Recently, God has been convicting me of the second area - the physical. Now, when you get older, things start to break down. We get tired and realize some areas may never improve, but we ignore our physical temples; we separate them from the other 3 areas. There are some obvious reasons not to do that.
    Our bodies are the temple of the Holy Spirit
    Our bodies hold the physical and emotional memories of trauma, but there is even more than that.....

The story of Jesus is all about the physical. His miraculous physical birth, His journeys by foot and donkey through the land of Judea and Israel. His physical death, His physical resurrection, but we have reduced our salvation to His death on a cross. It was His life that taught us and His resurrection to life that saved us.

In Celebration of Discipline, Richard Foster describes twelve spiritual disciplines:
The inward disciplines
    meditation, prayer, fasting, and study
The outward disciplines
    simplicity, solitude, submission, and service
The corporate disciplines
    confession, worship, guidance, and celebration

Some of these are decidedly physical disciplines that require our actions, our bodies, our lives. They cannot be accomplished by thinking about them. They require heart, soul, mind, and body to work together. We need to stop reducing them to parts just like we need to stop breaking up Jesus's story into parts. To experience the synergy, we need to know ALL of Jesus and give our ALL to Him


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