Testimonies

Alan Hlavka
Pastor, Good Shepherd Church
Boring, Oregon

My whole view of (and joy in) the Father has been radically deepened since my first exposure to David and his careful and insightful handling of the Scriptures. Honestly, I was stunned by what I heard. It was like I was seeing the Gospel in full color for first time.  It was rich. It was wonderful. It was wholesomely infectious.

Senior Pastor Gary Gaddini
Peninsula Covenant Church
Redwood City, CA

Our church utilized the Becoming Who God Intended curriculum and it was phenomenal!  The beauty of this material is its versatility.  We created a whole preaching series around this book.  All through the series, as a pastor, I was aware that our church was feeding on this daily in their quiet times.  As we preached through the concepts, our people met weekly in small groups and discussed its impact further through the small group curriculum.  Truly God used this series to set individuals as well as our church body free! I cannot recommend this highly enough!

Dale Swan
Senior Pastor, Founder, Northside Church
Sacramento, CA

As a church planter and a former student of Dr. Eckman, I thought there was no better foundation for a new church than the concepts addressed by Dr. Eckman.  People of our church realize that they can fully love and accept themselves because they are completely loved and accepted by God through their faith in Jesus Christ.  People began to understand their new identity in Christ, many for the first time in their lives, and began to make healthy changes in their lives and families.

Tom McEnroe
Assistant Pastor, Calvary Baptist Church
Los Gatos, CA

Dr. Eckman’s material…not only presents the God of Scripture in a relevant and practical way, is also helps people become free to experience God emotionally and in relationships with others.  The God of the Bible is alive and passionate, and this material helps people from both healthy and dysfunctional backgrounds to connect passionately with God.  I feel that no one else in the country is doing he is doing and heartily recommend this material to churches.

David Durey
Associate Pastor, New Hope Community Church
Portland, OR

It has been my privilege to teach Introduction to Christian Ministries at Warner Pacific College during the Fall semester.  I selected the book Becoming Who God Intended as one of my texts because I believed it would help my students establish the following foundational, inner life characteristics:  A closer relationship with God as their perfect heavenly Father, A heart of willing obedience; A deeper inner life; Security in God; A healthy self-image based on God's perspective rather than the world's.  Dr. Eckman's writings and have strengthened my life in these areas even after 20 years of full-time pastoral ministry. I want my college students to begin their vocational service with a strong secure sense of God's love and affirmation.

Charles Self
Education Pastor, Bethel Church
San Jose, CA

In our world of hyper-specialization and marketing madness, it is a delight to find a ministry devoted to meeting real human needs through excellent biblical and theological insights… It is a rare but wonderful moment when a ministry brings the truth of the Word and the vitality of the Holy Spirit together.  I have always hated the false dichotomies of passion vs. principle or emotion vs. intellect.  We serve a God of glory who is infinite and intimate, a Sovereign who became a Servant because He would rather die than live without us!  Dr. Eckman’s material embodies this message.

Roy Low, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, Western Seminary
Portland, OR

The material in Becoming Who God Intended has radically impacted my spiritual life… Because of my complete acceptance and identity in Christ, there is true freedom of an authentic, loving relationship with our Heavenly Father.  Not only do I know this in my mind, but I am now joyfully experiencing this in my heart.  As a professor of the Old Testament at Western Seminary and a pastor for many years, this biblical truth of a newfound identity in Christ has changed my teaching and pastoral ministry.  To help students realize and joyfully experience their complete acceptance and identity in Christ has become the core of my teaching ministry.

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From Chapter 5 of
Becoming Who God Intended
by Dr. David Eckman

Religion Turned Upside Down

One of Jesus’ great assaults against religion is the Sermon on the Mount. In that assault, He is going to show us:

1. what the emotions are really supposed to tell us

2. what’s really important is what’s inside, not what’s outside

3. what the new world is that we should embrace with our imagination

The practical value for you and me is that Jesus is going to give us a new way of living from the inside out.  He is going to break preconceptions that existed in His time and are present in our own. These misconceptions are:

1. emotions are insignificant

2. outward activity is more important than the inner life

3. the imagination is simply evil

With Christ, the imagination comes into its own.  The Sermon on the Mount is a turbocharger for the human imagination.  At the latter part of the sermon, Jesus will use the imagination to transform the heart.  To examine how He does that is like viewing the work of Michelangelo, or listening to the music of Bach, or watching the figure skating of Peggy Fleming.

To appreciate the force of the sermon, we have to imagine ourselves in the ancient world.  In the second year of Christ’s min­istry Judea, Galilee, and the regions about were under the control of the Roman Empire.  Puppet governors held sway under Roman despotism.  Taxes fluctuated from 18 to 30 percent depending on how greedy and how needy Rome felt.  The high priesthood in Jerusalem was held by those who were from a completely different family than Aaron’s (the family God chose); that family was thoroughly corrupt.

The most admired people in the nation were the Pharisees because they were religious enough not to knuckle under.  But they were more than religious enough to put endless rules on serving and worshiping God.  What they demanded as standard religious practice was so time-consuming and detailed that only the very well-off could practice Judaism.  Christ described the people as being overwhelmed with religious obligations and worn out by religious practice (Matthew 11:29-30).  He said that as they stumbled along with both arms filled with their religious burdens, they were set upon by religious and political wolves who threw them down and were chewing on them (Matthew 9:36).

Contrary and Confusing

As religiously polluted, politically oppressed, and spiritually bankrupt as the people were, how could Jesus cut through the confusion, pain, and mistaken teaching?

He simply turned their religious world upside down.  The culture assumed that blessings came from sincere effort and a strong will.  Godliness, in their thinking, was knowing the right information and doing the right things—much like evangelical culture today.  His opening poem turned the world on its head.

"Blessed are the ones who have no more energy, have given up on their own efforts, who are poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven."

"Blessed are the ones who are continually mourning, for they shall be comforted (Matthew 5:3-4)."

Christ’s poem is perversely contrary to what the religious expect, and it is concretely confusing: like being hit with a piece of concrete in the center of one’s religious assumptions.  He said that if you were poor in spirit or lacking religious energy or fanaticism, the kingdom was yours.  Those who were rich in spirit, or full of spirit, normally were religiously driven.  Even more amazing, if you were continually mourning, you would be comforted (by implication, by God).  In other words, the worse off you were emotionally, the better off you were spiritually.  He was using their emotional states to tell them something tremendously important: If you felt like giving up and felt lousy continually, you were blessed!

In a nutshell, Jesus was telling the people that the solution to life was not with them but with God.  The person who gave up on self-effort was the person God was looking for.  If you are one of those who believes you cannot live the Christian life or a truly moral life, Christ is telling you this is spiritually healthy thinking!

Jesus Creates a Crisis

The opening poem praising lack of religious initiative is followed by two snapshots of the disciples as salt and light.  Immediately after that, Christ emphasized that the real issues of life are decided deep in the heart.  This emphasis on the inner life and the crisis He then creates go on for close to 40 percent of the sermon.

Christ wanted the people to appreciate that the real challenge was in the inner life.  He turned His listeners’ religious world upside down and dumped them into a bucket of discomfort.  He took their collapsing and ineffective religious system and pushed it over a cliff.

The audience He was speaking to was already burdened and loaded down with guilt and a sense of spiritual failure.  Feeling deeply unclean, the people flocked to John’s baptism and repented at John’s message.  Wallowing in guilt, they wanted it washed away!  Jesus, instead of washing it away, plunged them into a volcano of condemnation.  They lived in a deeply legalistic and rule-bound culture, and instead of relieving their pain, Jesus increased it.  He shared His expectations: “Whoever then sets aside one of the least of these commandments…shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 5:19).  None of the expectations of the Law would be lowered or ignored.

For many who listened that was not a great surprise, but Jesus then delivered a shock.

"For I say to you, that unless your righteousness goes far beyond that of the scribes and Pharisees, you shall not enter the kingdom of heaven" (Matthew 5:20).

The scribes and Pharisees had a “patented path” to God’s kingdom. They were completely confident about their approach.  They felt God was in heaven with a special smile just for them.  They were the envy of the ordinary Judean and Galilean because they had the rules, the time, and the determination to live the life

They told everyone God wanted.  No one could do better than the Pharisees.  At least that’s what they said.

Immediately every stomach in the crowd knotted.  If the Pharisees weren’t cutting it, not a chance existed that anyone else could.  That started the descent into the pain of guilt that Jesus wanted.  From the statement about the Pharisees, Jesus proceeded to bludgeon everyone’s sense of religious security and well-being.  He took 11 common topics the Pharisees taught and the people attempted to practice, topics that reflected their universal beliefs about what a righteous person should do.  Christ was going to use the wrecking ball of His righteousness to demolish the flimsy house of religious prejudices and self-serving practices.

The Deeper Issues

To see what Jesus did to the unexpecting people who were listening to Him, let’s take a few examples.  The common belief was, as it is today, that murder was an act that put somebody beyond God’s mercy and was absolutely condemned.  All murderers go to hell.  Christ took that belief and showed that deeper issues were behind that and needed to be addressed.

"You have heard that the ancients were told, 'You shall not commit murder,' and 'Whoever commits murder shall appear before the court.'"

"But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother shall be guilty before the court; and whoever shall say to his brother, 'Raca,' shall be guilty before the supreme court; and whoever shall say, 'You fool,' shall be guilty enough for the burning hell" (Matthew 5:21-22).

Murder, according to Christ, was only a symptom for despising and hating a brother within the heart.  The outward act is the fruit of the inward condition, and that condition was enough to send a person to hell!  Immediately, into the listeners’ minds must have punched the thought, If that’s true, then a lot of us here are destined for hellfire.  Like a fog rolling in, guilt began to take over the hearers’ hearts:  We have to be better than the Pharisees, and He’s saying we’re no better than murderers!

Another example of Christ taking an outward act and con­necting it to an inward condition occurred a few verses later.  The Old Testament Law demanded death for adultery.  Adultery in some of the villages was still punished by stoning, though within the cities Roman law forbade execution.  Christ went directly to the heart condition behind adultery and made no distinction between the act and the desire driving it.

"You have heard that it was said, 'Never commit adultery,' but I say to you, that everyone who continually looks on a woman to lust for her has committed adultery with her already in his heart" (Matthew 5:27-28).

Guilt exploded through the hearts of the men.  Their worlds of fantasy—for some, entire universes of illicit lust—were called what they really were: adultery.  (Some may say that sexual fantasy harms no one, but it offends God, corrupts the person, and immeasurably degrades women.)  The crowd further thought, We have to be better than the Pharisees, and He’s saying we’re on the same level as adulterers and murderers!

Remember when you first heard or read the Sermon on the Mount, and the anxious thoughts it created?  Endless repetitions of its contents and the endless shortcomings of our lives have blunted its knife edge.  But for the audience in front of Christ, it struck like a newly sharpened sickle cutting through grass.  Everyone listening was succumbing to creeping despair.  Insight occurs when we’re startled out of prejudices we are barely aware of, and Christ’s surgically sharp words cut open hearts and showed the decay.

Each topic Christ addressed—anger and hate, contentions with a brother, lust, stumbling, divorce and marriage, oaths, revenge, dealing with enemies, alms and fasting, prayer, and judgmentalism—was taken back to the condition of the heart that erupted into the acts.

Jesus Points to the Imagination

As the thousands listened, they murmured to one another, “It’s impossible!” “We can’t ever become what He asks.” “We’ll have to become new persons.” “This is depressing.” “I can’t stand all the guilt I’m feeling.” “I’ll have to become somebody else than who I am to do these things!”

Jesus had them where He wanted them: despairing and guilty.  Now they were ready for a series of answers.  What the crowd’s failing really was, was not their guilt or their shame, but their lack of imagination.  They could not imagine they could really become what Christ was asking.  He challenged them with His comments on being poor in spirit;  He struck them with guilt; and now He was going to deliver them through their imagination.

Neither will, nor memory, nor reason could deliver them. The will cannot dismiss depression, bid guilt be gone, and tell despair to disappear.  Will is driven by the emotions, but will cannot bid them to change.  It would be easier for the will to command Mount Everest to move than to tell anxiety and guilt to cease.  Nor can memory help at all.  All memory can do is record the history of failure—and record the attempts of the heart to avoid seeing the pervasive lust, hatred, and anger inhabiting the soul.  And reason can only deduce that what was true in the past will be true in the future.  It can only plot the decline into degeneracy, not stop it.  It cannot order the approaching tides of the ocean to retreat; nor can it order the heart to become white as snow.

The only force able to place Jesus’ listeners into the real world was the imagination.  With 16 illustrations He would take them into a new world, with a new picture of their hearts, and with a new Father God.  They did not need character, or will, or deep minds, or memories of a history of righteousness.  What they needed was a willingness to see reality the way Jesus saw it.

A New Heart Is Needed

Jesus started with the inner life, for that was where the pain of guilt was.  He used three pictures for His listeners’ imagination: those of a treasure, a lamp, and a master. He first showed them how to recreate the heart...


Taken from Becoming What God Intended.
Copyright (c) 2005 by Dr. David Eckman.
Published by Harvest House Publishers, Eugene, OR.
Used by Permission.

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