Catching onto the Roots Rhythm
Note: this page assumes you already saw the "5G Flow" of the Roots Rhythm
The rhythm of Roots Season is the rhythm of belonging to something bigger and better than ourselves. That something is ancient, good, and pure. It is the best cause we could ever sign up for. It is the ultimate global movement, the "Campaign" that God started himself through someone who trusted him--Abraham.
Roots Season is the time to re-SYNC with the campaign if you are already a team member or to join the team if you are not. In either case, Catch onto the Roots Rhythm (see list below) and start moving with it. The God of Abraham will be your God. You will be blessed, and you will be a blessing.
Catching onto the Roots Rhythm - getting the idea and the feel of it
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The Big Idea of the Roots Rhythm for Roots Season
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Our goal during Roots Season
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One key story in the Bible that sets the Roots Rhythm
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Seven "Roots Verses" that give you a feel for the Roots Rhythm
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Whole Bible - the Roots Rhythm as the main thread of the whole biblical story
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Whole idea of SYNC - the Lord's Prayer
FAQs
1. How is this any different than any other campaign or strategy for a better world?
2. How do I know if I am already on the campaign team or not? If I wanted to join, how would I do it?
3. "Blessing the world" is a lot for God to ask of us, isn't it? Won't this turn into a colossal chore?
4. What if the world doesn't want to be blessed the way God's campaigners want to bless it?
Security, significance and Roots Season (March 2 - April 9)
Like all the other SYNC seasons, Roots Season links us back to something huge God has done. To "SYNC" with that God-thing means to align ourselves with God's intentions when he did it.
In this case the God-thing is the promise of God to Abraham that all families on earth would be blessed through him and his descendants. Roots Season celebrates that game-changing act of God, and for two very good reasons. It tells us that God is embarking on a campaign for everyone's good, and that his campaign strategy is the "Abraham Strategy," creating his campaign team through Abraham. If we go along with the strategy, the world becomes a better place, and we find all the security, significance, value, and companionship we will ever need.
The promise to Abraham also tips us off to a key feature of the entire story of the world. The Bible tells the story in a counter-intuitive way. Every one of God's game-changers comes as a surprise, just as a great novelist keeps surprising us with twists and turns in the plot.
God chooses to use one particular group or nation to bring his blessing to all the rest. The "logical" nation to choose would have been a heavyweight nation, a super-power of that era. It could use its immense resources for God's campaign, and soon the whole world would know about it.
But God does a surprising thing. He chooses an individual not a nation. And that is not the end of the surprises. That individual, Abraham, is fairly wealthy and well-connected, but God uproots him from his homeland and transplants him, forcing him to start from scratch in a land where he owns nothing and has no political or ethnic connections.
Abraham and his wife Sarah have no children and are already past child-bearing age. In fact, they are so far past it that Sarah pushes Abraham to father a child by her servant, Hagar, so he could have a biological heir. He does that, but then God gets more specific about his promise, telling him that his family through Sarah is the family that will bless every other family on the planet!
The next year Sarah miraculously has a son, but the biggest surprise does not come till that son is an adolescent. God tells Abraham to kill his son as a human sacrifice! It is a riveting story. (Genesis 22:1-19. Spoiler alert: the son survives.)
We should be able to see the moral of the story: "Never, never, never refuse to do something God's way just because you can't see how he could possibly make it fit into his campaign for good. He will unforgettably surprise you."
The Abraham story shows us that God can make something out of nothing. That gives us amazing security. It means that life isn't about what I can do for God and his campaign, how much blessing I can deliver. It's about what he can do through me if I trust him to include me in the campaign and if I keep listening to his instructions about my particular role. That trust is what we call "SYNCing with the Roots Rhythm," or "SYNCing with God's Abraham Strategy."
So the theme of Roots Season is, "Embrace the promise that started God's connect-heal-bless campaign! Find your security and significance there!"
Look what you are getting in on. Look at the significance of the physical descendants of Abraham and Sarah--the Jews. Ask why they are less than 0.2% of the world's population but have won more than 20% of the Nobel Prizes, possibly the closest thing we have to a global measure of blessings to the world. That is 100 times more prizes than expected for an ethnic group of their size. Is that a fluke or is something else going on here?
Look at the significance of the spiritual descendants of Abraham--the followers of Jesus the Messiah, whether Jewish or Christian. Ask what they have done to spread education, to preserve languages, to wipe out barbaric abuse of women in India, disease in Africa, corruption and degradation everywhere. We sadly agree that the descendants of Abraham have also done a lot of harm, but only when they lost sight of the Abraham story and got out of SYNC with the Roots Rhythm. Let us pay better attention to the rhythm than they did.
Roots Season is the second of seven seasons in the SYNC annual cycle. In the first season, humanity fell under a curse. In Roots Season, God begins the campaign that runs through the next five seasons and climaxes with campaign victory in the final season, removing the curse.
Members of his campaign team are the "curse-busters." God reconnects them to himself, puts some of his love and power into them through Jesus the Messiah, and gives them their campaign assignments from day to day and week to week. Through his power working in them God gradually breaks the world's curse and replaces it with blessing.
That curse-busting process is the story of the world, and that is where the line in this web site's header comes from. When we SYNC with Jesus as the campaign leader, we are "moving with the rhythm of the story of the world."
FAQs about the Roots Rhythm
1. How is this any different than any other campaign or strategy for a better world?
Unlike other good causes we might join, this campaign was never a human brainchild, and it does not work like human campaigns. They try to leverage power and get control. God's strategy is to bless. In fact, it is to create a whole campaign team of "blessers"--the physical and spiritual "descendants" of Abraham.
The blessers are not just do-gooders bringing a free meal or naive optimists telling others to look on the bright side of things and be tougher during the hard times. The blessers' mission is to connect, heal, and bless the world, breaking whatever curse people feel they are under. That should make Abraham's descendants the natural allies of everyone on the planet. They are aiming to bless everybody without concentrating power in their own hands.
And anybody can join them. In fact, they are actively recruiting new members. New members can enjoy all the security and significance that goes along with being a blesser on God's ancient team.
2. How do I know if I am already on the campaign team or not? If I wanted to join, how would I do it?
The simplest way to tell if you are already on the campaign team is to ask yourself where you get your security and significance. If it has anything to do with God's Abraham Strategy (see above) and you getting adopted through Jesus into the team carrying out the strategy, you are in.
If not, or if you aren't sure what any of that means, read the "Who Are We?" story called "Uprooted" (2 min.) and ask whether you see yourself as part of that story. The "Reflections" at the end of the story include five ways to tell whether you are on the campaign team or not. You might realize you already are a working member of the team but you have never thought about it that way.
If you are not on the campaign team but want to be, the way to join is basically to respond to the "Who Are We?" story by saying, "I'm in," the same way you might say, "I'm in" when someone asked you whether you wanted to go along on a trip or take part in a business deal. Obviously you have to understand the trip or the business deal. Otherwise it doesn't mean anything to say, "I'm in," and you will opt out pretty quickly.
In this case, your "I'm in," means, "OK, God of Abraham. Please sign me up. I see what you are doing, and I like it. I want to belong to your campaign team and share in its purpose of bringing your blessing to the world. I'm not saying I'm qualified, but I am saying I believe Jesus Christ died to get me onto his campaign team, and I'm saying yes to that. I will honor Jesus as the campaign leader, and I will be a team player. I will read the Bible with other team members so I understand the campaign better, and I will listen to the Spirit of Jesus for my personal assignments."
Unlike your physical DNA, fixed permanently at birth, your spiritual DNA can change, and it does when you join the campaign team. The transformed inner DNA is a gift that comes to you through the Spirit of Jesus as you SYNC with the good intentions God had for everyone when he made the promise to bless all through Abraham.
You are a different person because you belong to this team. This is where the idea of being "born again" comes from. The old you was not on the team. The new you is a campaign insider, belonging as completely as if you were born into it. Spiritually speaking, you were.
3. "Blessing the world" is a lot for God to ask of us, isn't it? Won't this turn into a colossal chore?
It can feel like one but it won't if we realize that the whole Abraham Strategy goes back to a promise not a command. God does not command Abraham to have enough descendants to bless the whole world. Abraham can't do that, and he knows he can't. God promises Abraham, an old man with a barren wife, that he will have enough descendants to bless the whole world.
God's command to us is not, "Bless the world." The command is, "Trust me." And "trust me" never turns into a chore. It does get very risky, as it did for Abraham, but then God keeps his promise and we end up more grateful than we were before we took the risk.
Like Abraham, we don't have what it takes to keep God's promises for him. He has to keep them himself. When he keeps them through us as the spiritual descendants of Abraham, we are in on it but it isn't really us who are doing it. God is making it happen, which means we can relax and just do whatever he decides to do through us.
Our duty as team members is not to do everything we can think of that could help heal, bless, and connect the world. That is Burnout Boulevard, not Duty Drive. Our duty is to keep reading the Bible, keep listening to the Spirit, and keep doing the things God puts in our mind to do.
He knows exactly what we can handle. He never gives 18 assignments to the person who is built to handle 4, or even to the person who is built for 17. If we ever bite off more than we can chew, it's because we were not listening to his voice carefully enough.
If you are not used to listening for your assignments in God's campaign, check out Just Do It Groups. Those groups are a way to get a couple of family or friends cheering you on as you get better at listening to God's personal instructions for you.
4. What if the world doesn't want to be blessed the way God's campaigners want to bless it?
It helps to think of God's campaign as an awareness campaign or a public health campaign. It is not a military campaign that depends on violence to force a desired result.
An awareness campaign lets people know they have an option they didn't know they had, and it tries to persuade them to take advantage of the option for their own good and the good of the community, but it does not punish them if they don't. The county health department tells people where they can get vaccinated, but it does not go house to house with a military escort, forcing every person into it. God's campaign is like that, persuasive not coercive.
People with good intentions become truly dangerous when they believe they are supposed to enforce their good intentions on others. This is true whether the groups are religious people, right-wing fascists, or left-wing revolutionaries.
They want to bless the world, but they want to do it by getting more power into their own hands. They trust themselves. "Our plan will work. In the end, we will make the world such a wonderful place that everyone will thank us, that is, everyone we have not had to suppress or eliminate in order to make the world wonderful."
In the case of our campaign team, Abraham's descendants, God prevents this by giving us not a command to bless but a promise that the world will be blessed through us. That means we do not have to force things, which means we do not have to seek more power. We can afford to bless others gently as God instructs us even if that looks like a lame approach, too weak to change anything.
Jesus shows us how it is done--accept death for the campaign rather than kill to impose blessing on your own terms. Leave it to God to redeem the situation when it seems too late. That is exactly what God did when, in the nick of time, he saved Abraham's son from being sacrificed. He did it again when he raised Jesus, God the Son, from the grave.
The risen Jesus did not then go on to force his blessings down the throats of the people who had killed him. Instead he sent his campaign team out into the world "like sheep among wolves" (Matthew 10.16). The whole New Testament is full of instructions to God's campaign workers to prepare them for fierce, even deadly, opposition while they are trying to connect, heal, and bless in the name of Jesus. The New Testament gives no guidance at all about seeking or using earthly power to force blessings on anyone. That is not how the campaign works.