AW Preface

Preface

The Origin Story

Full Chapter

For as long as I can remember, I have been a follower, or at least a big fan, of Jesus. I grew up attending Sunday services where the version of God I was handed was defined by kindness and love. I had a father who liked me a lot, which made it easy to believe my Father in the skies liked me too. My early decision to be baptized was a choice of honor rather than fear. I was moving toward a teacher I genuinely admired.

Throughout my life, Jesus has remained my primary anchor. I have found that his teachings, practices, and overall wisdom make life better. More importantly, they make me better at life. But my relationship with the Bible, a collection of Jewish and Christian texts I now call the "Legacy Library," has been a more complex pilgrimage. It has involved seasons of deconstruction, intense research, and a constant search for conceptual clarity.

For example, many people believe the only reason these texts are credible is because they were "divinely inspired." I grew up with this view. But I have realized that accepting the Bible as the "Word of God" is not a prerequisite to accessing it and finding it useful. In fact, identifying the library as "divinely inspired" often presents a hurdle that hurts its credibility and access. The reality is that there were followers of Jesus for centuries before there was ever a Bible. While I have no desire to make a claim or convince anyone about whether the Bible or any other religious text is or is not the "Word of God," I do hope to approach it and talk about it in a way that makes it more credible and accessible to more people. I believe the Legacy Library is deeply credible and hugely helpful regardless of who or what inspired it.

My personal engagement with these texts began in a small way during my junior year of high school. I had transferred into a new English class in the middle of a semester. On my first day, the teacher announced that every class would begin with twenty minutes of silent reading. I had not brought a book, so I grabbed a copy of the Bible from a shelf in the classroom library. I had listened to plenty of teachings about the Bible, but this was the first time I started reading it for myself. I made this my daily routine. By the end of the semester, I had finished the book of Genesis and decided to jump ahead to the accounts of Jesus.

At seventeen years old, I had sat through enough sermons to know that the New Testament contains four books that tell the story of the life of Jesus: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. When I finished reading the account attributed to Matthew, I was incredibly excited. I felt I had read the full story of Jesus as I knew it. Since there were three more books to go, I assumed they must be about the rest of his life that I did not know yet. I expected a sequel.

I was surprised when I opened the account attributed to Mark and found the same story starting over from the beginning. I eventually realized that these were four versions of the same account of the life of Jesus. This was a simple, funny discovery at the time, but it pointed to a deeper reality. We all have access to these texts. In an age of podcasts and digital tools, the "Legacy Library" is available for any of us to read and investigate for ourselves.

My interest in these ancient documents eventually led me to a history major and a religious studies minor in college. I wanted to do a deep dive into the historical and cultural roots of my faith. The most transformative experience of my academic career was a class called "Jesus and the Gospels." It was taught by Professor Daniel Falk, who served on the team that translated the Dead Sea Scrolls. That class gave me the tools to look at the life of Jesus with the eyes of an archaeologist.

By the time I reached my mid-thirties, I had spent decades immersed in religious structures. I sat through a sermon every Sunday. Once podcasts became available, I added several more teachings to my weekly rhythm. Eventually, I made it a priority to read the entire library from start to finish.

The catalyst for this specific program arrived when I began to look at all of this information through the eyes of my children. At the time, my kids were three and four years old. I wanted to introduce them to the person of Jesus. At home, I started telling them Jesus stories regularly. I would share stories about how he acted, what he taught, and the parables he told. I liked that Jesus was becoming a part of their daily life, but I was coming up with these lessons on the fly. I was excited for them to finally get more focused teaching at our Sunday gathering through an expert curriculum designed for young children.

I noticed a strange pattern when I dropped them off at their “Sunday School” classes. I was hoping they would encounter the heart of Jesus. Instead, they were often taught out-of-context stories from the Hebrew Bible. They were learning about Noah’s Ark or Jonah and the whale. While these stories have their place in the library, they felt remarkably inappropriate for a preschooler. To make them "kid-friendly," the teachers had to change the stories entirely. They turned complex narratives of catastrophe into cartoon petting zoos.

I felt a profound disconnect. I was sitting in the adult service listening to a talk on the deep history of the Old Testament. My kids were coloring pictures of a boat. All of us were missing Jesus.

I also began to question the functional design of the Sunday service itself. The original Greek word used to describe the first church was ekklesia. Those original communities did not have the Bible or podcasts. Yet, those gatherings were focused on connection and community in a way that modern services often miss. I found myself sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with people for an hour without ever meeting them. We were there to listen to a 45-minute live speech with no opportunity for Q&A. Because I like alliteration so much, a phrase started brewing in my head to describe the experience: "Superfluous Sunday Service." It felt like a missed opportunity for actual community.

I realized we were operating under a flawed paradigm. As I mentioned before, many Christians, especially pastors, believe that the Bible is the "divinely inspired Word of God." This paradigm presents a problem that is subtle and hard to notice. The accidental belief that comes with this version of the library is that since it is all equally inspired, it must all be equally important. This leads into the "flat" approach to the text. It opens the door for a pastor to spend a sermon or a series on a disconnected assortment of verses from the book of Leviticus or Numbers while ignoring the urgent instructions of Jesus.

But if everything is important, then nothing is important.

We cannot get everything right. And we do not have to. We simply have to get the right things right. This program aims to focus our attention on those few essential "right things." As we saturate our minds with these principles and concepts, the direction of our lives will follow. This realization brought me back to the core question regarding the main thing Jesus was actually teaching.

Life is increasingly complicated. The speed of modern life has created a massive gap between what our hearts crave and what we actually experience. Most of us feel this gap, even if we do not have the words to describe it. I had spent years doing deep dives into other areas of my life. I studied finances until I understood budgeting and saving. I achieved a sense of financial freedom. I spent a long time learning about food and nutrition. I finally feel like I am getting that right. I even spent two years traveling full-time with my wife and kids. We were on an intentional home hunt, determined to find the most human friendly environment for our family to flourish. I am happy to report that we found the best home base for our household.

But none of those achievements addressed the struggle at the center of this program. I was still dealing with a deep sense of "wrongness" in my heart and head. I resonated with an ancient conflict that Paul, one of the first followers of Jesus, described with brutal honesty. He wrote: "I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do... For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out." Paul saw Jesus' way as the design to end that war. I was determined to test it myself. I still yelled at my kids. I still felt the familiar sting of regret. No matter how much progress I made in my bank account or my health, a nagging internal dissatisfaction remained.

This program moves beyond the search for an eternal destination in the clouds. It focuses on fulfilling our firmly established destiny. The word "destiny" means "that which has been firmly established." For a human being, our destiny is our deep design. It is the blueprint for wholeness found in our DNA and our biology. We were designed for a state I call Human Wholeness. This is the condition of living in alignment with our original design in a world that is radically misaligned.

The reason Jesus is a worthwhile teacher to investigate is because he speaks exactly to this internal struggle. He diagnoses the problem of the human heart with surgical precision and presents a path toward the life we were meant to live.

The author of one of the four accounts of Jesus’ life, Matthew, tells us that Jesus came to help our hearts and modify our minds so that we could finally access our destiny of human wholeness. But that wasn’t the version of Jesus I was experiencing on Sundays. I was becoming an expert in religious trivia, but I still sucked at dying. I was getting a lot of things right. I was memorizing verses and attending services. I was "fed" with information. But I was getting the wrong things right. I was struggling to be the husband, father, and neighbor I wanted to be. I was still reacting out of anger. I was still tripping over the planks in my own eye. I realized that knowing everything about the Bible is not the same thing as following the way of Jesus.

Following Jesus is about learning how to die to our own selfish impulses. The musician Jon Foreman has a song titled "Learning How to Die." That phrase perfectly captures the journey of following Jesus. I realized that after 1,500 sermons, I was still failing the course.

I decided to stop trying to master 66 books and start trying to master the main things. I needed to focus on Jesus. My first step was to start listening to Jesus' famous "Sermon on the Mount" daily while simultaneously listening to the commentary that my favorite Bible teachers, BibleProject, put together about it. Saturating myself with Jesus through the Sermon on the Mount was exactly what I needed to get the project moving. Eventually, I brought this idea to a men’s group I was attending. They were about to take a break for the summer, but I asked them to keep meeting for a few more weeks to work on a thought experiment. I wanted to see if we could agree on the most important things to get right in the Jesus movement. This process gave me the momentum I needed. During those weeks, one specific word emerged as the crucial key to the whole project: agape.

Agape is a Greek word that was basically invented by Jesus' first followers to describe the kind of love they witnessed in Jesus. Using the typical words for "love" just didn't work for what they were trying to communicate about the Jesus way. So they found an obscure word that had enough context to be in the "love" family, but rare enough that it would feel unique. And in so doing, they redefined the word "agape" to mean the Jesus way. In the same way that we use the French word 'ballet' to distinguish a high-stakes, rigorous discipline from casual movement, the first followers of Jesus adopted this rare word to describe a specific way of living. Agape meant the disciplined practice of valuing others above ourselves; the voluntary decision to absorb the cost of someone else's good; the courageous choice to override our own self-interest for the good of another person. When we pursue it, we repair ruptures in our world. A “pursuit without want” that outlasts us, producing eternal fruit.

The Agape Way is an invitation to investigate the ancient wisdom of Jesus from any perspective. My focus on his teachings is driven by a simple, practical observation: Jesus makes life better and he makes me better at life. I have found that learning from and following Jesus makes me a better husband, a better father, and a better neighbor. He is the key to the “right things to get right” because his model of agape fulfills the deepest design for human wholeness I have encountered.

The invitation of the Agape Way program is an invitation for everyone, regardless of religious perspective. We will look at the Legacy Library for credibility through its fruit, not because of a specific theological title. We will look to Jesus for credibility through his fruit, not because of a claim of divinity. At the end of his famous Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says that a good tree will bear good fruit. He explicitly tells us to test the tree. This 12-week program is your opportunity to test the Jesus tree. My aim as I built this program was to create a curriculum that was accessible for me, my family, and everybody. The skeptic, the selective reader, or the seeker. I personally navigate between all three of these all the time, and I suspect my children will too. Whoever you are, you are free to come and take what proves useful and leave the rest. At a minimum, Jesus will be at least as useful to your life as Aristotle or Buddha. At best, he might be the absolute greatest teacher to ever exist: the good tree that produces the best kind of fruit in your life.

Jesus explicitly told his followers to test the tree by looking at the fruit it produces. This 12-week program is your opportunity to do exactly that. I set out to build a curriculum that was accessible to the skeptic, the selective reader, and the seeker. You are free to take what proves useful and leave the rest. At a minimum, Jesus will be at least as useful to your life as Aristotle or Buddha. At best, he may be the absolute greatest teacher to ever exist: the good tree that produces the highest quality of fruit in your life.

History offers several examples of people who approached him this way. Mahatma Gandhi was a Hindu lawyer who led India’s struggle for independence through nonviolent resistance. He found that the Sermon on the Mount "went straight to my heart" and "left a deep impression," using those teachings as a manual for social change. Leo Tolstoy was a Russian novelist who rejected church dogma, yet he became convinced that reflecting on the words of Jesus "at once unlocked the whole meaning of the Bible" and showed a path out of the cycle of violence. Even Albert Einstein, a Jewish scientist who did not believe in a personal God, was "enthralled by the luminous figure of the Nazarene." He insisted that "no one can read the Gospels without feeling the actual presence of Jesus" and spoke of a "purified" version of Christianity that could cure the social ills of humanity. These three did not treat Jesus as useful because they first agreed on his divinity. They treated him as credible because, when tested, his teaching bore real fruit in the hardest arenas of human life.

Wherever you find yourself on the map, you are welcome here. From skeptic to seeker, from Jewish to Christian, from Hindu to Buddhist, from agnostic to atheist, from scientist to philosopher, from convinced to curious, this program is designed for all-access. You do not have to agree with every claim in the Legacy Library to benefit from its best insights. You simply have to be willing to sit with the raw and real Jesus and let his words collide with your actual life. In that shared space, across differences of culture and creed, this curriculum rests on a simple conviction: Jesus has pearls to offer every pilgrim.

We cannot get everything right. And we do not have to. We simply have to get the right things right. This program aims to focus our attention on those few essential "right things." As we saturate our minds with these principles and concepts, the direction of our lives will follow.

I set out to create a guide for me and my family that was simple, practical, and focused. I wanted something my kids could grow up with that would help them navigate a confusing world. I wanted to leverage my own research and academic background to give me and my family a clear map for our own pilgrimage.

As I built this program, I applied a strict test to every principle I selected. I call it the concentric circle test. If a concept was truly central to the Jesus movement, I believed I should be able to find it in six distinct layers of the Legacy Library:

• It should be rooted in the ancient Jewish tradition (his Prelude).

• It should be visible in the core prayer Jesus taught (his Prayer).

• It should be explicitly preached in the Sermon on the Mount (his Preaching).

• It should be illustrated in one of his stories (his Parables).

• It should be modeled in the way he actually lived (his Practices).

• It should be echoed in the lives of his first followers (his Pioneers).

This program is the result of that search. It is a 12-week cycle designed to help us get a little better at dying to ourselves and a lot better at contributing to a better world.

My hope is that this map makes your own journey a little easier and your fruit a lot sweeter. Let's begin looking at the right things.