Living Fearless

Exchanging the Lies of the World for the Liberating Truth of God

Jamie Winship

• Publisher: Revell
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780800740290
• eBook ISBN: 9781493436378
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Mental Health & Wellbeing

Discover the secret to being fully alive, fully human, and fully free

After decades living and working in conflict zones, Jamie Winship discovered an important truth: all human conflict originates from fear, and fear originates from a false view of God, ourselves, and others. Until we exchange what's false for what's real, we will never experience the true freedom of our identity in Christ.

Unpacking the power of knowing your true identity in Christ, Winship will help you learn to

● tell yourself the truth
● change your mindset
● experience actual life transformation
● find radical courage in the face of all that life throws at you

With humor, clarity, and real-life practicality, Living Fearless is your invitation to listen closely to what God is trying to say to you about himself, about the person he created you to be, and about all the other people he created and loves.

If you want to discover the incredible difference abiding in Christ will make in your life and faith, get ready to do "a new thing" with God. Get ready to live fearless.

Part 1
Attention

What is mankind that you make so much of them,

that you give them so much attention . . . ?

JOB 7:17 NIV

The best way to capture moments is to pay attention.

JOHN KABAT-ZINN

The Death of a Conversation

I walked onstage in Salt Lake City and said “Good morning” to a crowd of three hundred or so. I received a somewhat tepid “Good morning” in return.

I followed my initial greeting by asking, “How are you doing?” and received an even weaker response with a few people mumbling “good” and one person shouting out “great.”

The entire interchange, based on a superficial cultural formula, was largely meaningless for most, if not all, in the room.

This often-used pattern of communication is called formulaic language formation, where I begin in a predictable manner and the audience responds in an appropriate yet predictable manner.

There are two theories of language formation: formulaic language formation and generative language formation. The first means that you use language formulas. Once you learn the language formulas, you don’t have to think and create anymore. We laugh at this observation because that’s what most of us do. We learn language formulas.

In the checkout line at a store, we’ve been taught to speak to the cashier and say, “Hey, how are you doing?” The cashier replies, “Fine, and you?” Sound familiar? This response is according to the cultural linguistic formula. It doesn’t matter what they say back because I’m just going to say, “Good,” pay the money, and leave. Neither of us actually cares what is really being communicated.

If you have been married a long time (I’ve been married thirty-six years), you can get into a formula where you know what each other is going to say. You almost don’t need words. “Hey, uh, yeah.” “Okay, great.” That is the entire conversation because you just kind of know how it’s going to go. You are conforming to worn-out language patterns.

It’s not a real and dynamic relationship when you do that to people. Formulaic relationships fail, tend to flounder. Formulaic religion dies, tends to fossilize.

Jesus never speaks in language formulas. Do you know why? Because every person Jesus interacts with is a unique and distinct identity of whom he is the Creator.

Generative language formation is how Jesus talks to people. In this formation, you create a new conversation every time you talk, and it can be a lot of work. It may take awhile to get used to this style of talking as it is certainly not the American formula of communication.

Conversation in a Ride Share

One morning I called a ride share company to go to the airport. I wanted to have a conversation with the driver, so I got in the front seat when the car arrived. The driver seemed surprised, as if that wasn’t the right formula for riding in a hired vehicle when you’re alone.

I had lived in the Arab world for years and years, and there, you always ride in the front seat with the taxi driver. If you get behind the driver, it means you don’t like him, so you always get in the front seat. And if you want him to know that you really want to talk to him, you grab his leg. But not with your left hand because that’s unclean, so you have to reach across and grab his leg with your right hand.

I jumped in the front seat of the ride share, said hello, and reached over to grab the guy’s leg. Startled, he jumped back against his door and said, “What are you doing?” Clearly this formula was the wrong method of communication for my Americanized driver.

“How are you doing?” I asked, attempting to recover from my mistake.

“You’re going to the airport?” he replied.

“Yeah.”

“Where are you going?” he asked.

“Salt Lake City.”

“Do they have good restaurants there?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. I don’t know if people fly to Salt Lake City to eat. It’s known for other stuff, not necessarily restaurants.”

We were engaged in a formulaic conversation with predictable questions and responses. But these formulas reveal nothing about a person’s sense of identity.

To become generative, I asked, “Besides driving folks around, what do you do?”

“I don’t do anything except drive folks around,” he said.

“Wow,” I responded.

He said, “My goal is to be on vacation as much time as I can.”

That’s noble, isn’t it? That’s a noble goal. Sociologists and anthropologists say that the two highest goals of people are to be immortal and permanently joyful.

If we could, that’s what we would do, isn’t it? But isn’t that life (immortality and joy) in the kingdom of God right now?

This guy assumed he wasn’t going to be immortal, but he was going to try to be permanently happy, so he was flying to Belize as often as he could. He’d save up money and fly to Belize.

“What do you do there?” I asked.

“My goal is to open up a barbecue restaurant in Belize.”

“That’s interesting,” I said. “Is that your identity?”

“I don’t know. I guess it is.”

“Running a restaurant’s not an identity; it’s a vocation. What is your identity? Who are you?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I never really thought about that.” He waited a moment, and then said, “I have a nephew who’s sixteen, and he doesn’t have an identity.”

My driver could see the lack of identity in another person but not in himself. Isn’t that interesting?

“He doesn’t have an identity,” he continued. “All he does is sit around and play video games. He has no sense of identity.”

I asked again, “What’s your identity?”

“I don’t know. Where does a person get an identity?”

“Where do you think?”

“Maybe from God?” he said.

“Yes, could be,” I said. “That’s a possibility.”

Does God talk to people? Does God talk to you? Does he say, “This is the identity I have for you”? Is that what God does? Because if God does that, that would be pretty amazing. If God talked to us and told us our identity, we would know what to do with our lives. We wouldn’t have to keep going back to him and asking, “What do we do?” We would know what to do because our identity and being inform our doing.

Simple, right?

My driver wondered if identity might be God-given.

“Well, does God give identity?” I asked.

I could tell he was thinking, and I had been waiting for this. “What’s your identity?” he asked.

When a person in a conversation such as this asks “What’s your identity?” it’s good to have an answer. Christians are good at talking about stuff that they don’t ever really experience. Sometimes this can be a form of lying.

“Well, my identity is militant peacemaker,” I said to the driver.

“Wow,” he said.

“I know what vocations enable and empower that identity, and I’ve known this since I was fourteen. Therefore, my vocation has been with the police department, something involved in militant peacemaking.”

That makes sense. I chose a vocation in the range of the identity of militant peacemaker. When I pick a vocation in that identity, I’m really, really good at it. It’s easy to think this way. Conversely, if I pick a vocation outside of that identity, I’m going to be unhappy and frustrated and I’m not going to be good at it. Every day, I’m going to know I’m not good at it, and it’s going to be bad. I can go to church and I can pray, but it’s not going to make it better because I was not made to do whatever it is I’m doing outside of my identity.

I told the driver I was a police officer, then I got promoted a lot, then I got recruited by the government, and then I went overseas. My militant peacemaking started small and kept expanding. Professionally, spiritually, up, up, up. The gates of hell could not stand against it.

The gates of hell cannot stand against us moving in our true identity. But if we take one step outside of that identity, we’re done, we’re finished. It’s over.

“If that’s true,” I said to my friend, “how dangerous is it to live a life with no sense of your identity? How dangerous?”

“You mean I would have an identity that leads to running a restaurant?” he asked.

“Yes, yes, that’s it.”

“And the restaurant would just be an extension of my identity?”

“Yes. That’s right.”

“I need to find my identity. Maybe I need to go to God and find my identity,” he said.

No formulaic language in this conversation. No prefabricated gospel presentation. Just simple, generative conversation focused on this amazing young man and who he truly is to God.

This is how Jesus talks to people.

In the entire conversation, I never said one thing about being a Christian. The conversation was about personal identity, not empty ideology.

When the guy dropped me off, he asked for my card. We’re going to meet so he can hear God tell him his identity. I didn’t suggest that, he did. That’s called sharing your faith. That’s how simple it is, but you cannot give away what you don’t have. You cannot give to another person something you yourself do not possess. The journey in discovering your true identity in the kingdom of God is an eternal journey. There is no end to the depths of who God made you to be.

Retreat? Never! Advance!

Recently, we did a men’s identity-exchange event in a Muslim country. The men were all high-identity, high-practice Muslims. They were not Muslims who are mad at Islam or Muslims who want to change religions. The participants at this event all loved being Muslim.

It was a three-day event walking the participants through the process of understanding their true identity found only in relationship to Christ. There were some cultural nuances, but basically it is the same process you’ll learn in this book.

Our main speaker was a Muslim PhD in Sharia law. The first thing he did when he stood up was to share his name and where he was from in the Muslim world.

Most of the men in the room knew who he was by his reputation as an expert in Sharia law and as a very outspoken Muslim leader. He gave his credentials, which is what you do in an Islamic context so people know who they’re listening to (formulaic). He then concluded his introduction with “And my highest qualification to speak to you these three days is that I am a follower of Jesus the Messiah.”

How generative is that statement? Talk about disruptive.

People started shouting.

I don’t know if you’ve ever seen Muslims in a room when they’re upset. They’re not internal processors. It’s all external.

Our team had been praying about doing this type of event for ten years. We’d been asking God, “How can we pull this off?”

The answer is all part of the process I’ll share with you in the pages of this book.

There are brilliant ideas within you. But how do you get those ideas to live? How do you get this word, this idea in your mind, to become flesh?

Jesus is the Word of God, the idea of God rescuing humanity by becoming flesh. Jesus is the Word that comes alive and walks among us.

Everyone has ideas that need to become flesh and live outside of us. Amazing ideas, things we’ve dreamed about, things we don’t even know we know yet but we’re going to start to know.

These Muslim men were people, and like people whose worldview is threatened or challenged, these men stood and screamed, “No! We cannot accept this.”

Fear shuts down creativity and the reception of new ideas.

After a few more words of introduction, the group calmed down a bit and the speaker continued: “We are going to go through the Bible together and discover, as Muslims, the true identity of the person of Christ.”

Again, the room erupted in protest. We had no Christians in the audience. None. All were Muslims. I and the six American guys I had invited to help facilitate the event were all back by the exit sign, prepared to flee if necessary.

Then the speaker began to teach.

Three hours in, the participants were still screaming and yelling, and the speaker was yelling back at them, so like a good moderator I interrupted. “Okay, let’s take a break. Let’s calm down and take a break.” This is going to be three long days, I thought.

One of the Muslim men became frustrated with me. “We don’t want a break,” he said. “We’re not Americans.”

Surprised, I wondered, What does that mean? Do you think Americans just come into a seminar or class and immediately wonder when the break will be?

Yes, I thought. That is what we do. That’s exactly what we do. What a perceptive observation. Why is it that we often look for the quick answer, the get-spiritual-quick scheme that will magically turn us into the person we think we are supposed to be?

At 12:30, I called out, “Lunch.”

Another of the Muslim participants responded, “This is our food. We must digest this important news.”

They wanted to understand what the teacher was saying because he was one of their people. They identified him as “one of us.” That’s how important perceptions about identity are. The speaker was one of them, and he was telling them that the only way to really live this life and the life to come is through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

The speaker had a very distinct strategy for how he worked his way through different, very controversial ideas.

He would first make an introductory statement such as, “According to the Al-Quran, the Bible cannot be corrupt.”

Everyone would scream in opposition, but the speaker would calmly work through the evidence and methodically prove the point. At the end of the hours-long session, after they’d all calmed down and he had worked his way through the topic, he would go around the room and ask each of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Abiding
• Part 1: Attention
• Part 2: Awareness
• Part 3: Annunciation
• Part 4: Action
• Notes
• About the Author
• Back Ads
• Back Cover