Who do you think you are?
You know some people who don't seem to know who they are or what they stand for. No matter where they look, they can't find themselves. No one admires these people.
If you get the message of Roots Season, you will know who you are. It will be perfectly clear that you have personal roots in something ancient and good—the story that God has been working out through the centuries.
Once you get your mind around that story and picture your destiny in it, you will never again wonder if your life amounts to anything. Your identity will be secure, and your purpose in life will be clear. You will be a productive, positive person, and the world will be better because you are here.
We call ourselves People of the Future (POTF)—and it's true, we are looking forward to the Messianic Era when Jesus returns to create and rule utopia. But POTF also take the past and the present seriously. In fact, we can only be authentic POTF today if we value our Roots deep in the past.
Side effects of knowing who you are
Confidence—up; Anxiety—down
Dignity—up; Shame—down
Accomplishment—up; Stress—down
Significance and Sense of well-being—way up
The good news of Roots Season is that we don't have to spend a lot of time, money, and emotional energy convincing ourselves and others that we are somebody. Our value is not an achievement. It's a gift we receive if we know who we really are—fruitful branches on the Abraham family tree. We are part of an amazing, positive plan that is way bigger than we are.
This gift doesn't come to us automatically at birth, but we can opt into it if we choose to claim Abraham as our spiritual forefather and get adopted as one of his descendants. It's a great way to live—rooted, secure, positive, productive.
Rootedness saves us time and energy
Roots have to be nourished, and we keep our Abrahamic roots healthy with the greatest labor-saving device of the 21st century—the Bible. It saves us a ton of work by telling us who we are and how we fit within the huge story of human history.
Of course, no book/tool/device does any good unless we use it for what it was made for. The Bible was not made to serve as a rule book, a set of stories for Sunday school, or a complicated web of theological ideas to debate. Using it for secondary purposes like that is like using our phone as a mirror or a hammer. It never works well.
According to the Bible Project,* a respected, crowd-funded producer of Bible education materials, the Bible is "a unified story that leads to Jesus." SYNC adds that the story points to Jesus as the Future-bringer, the Messiah who will determine the future. He already is bringing some of the future into the present through his recruits, his POTF.
Nothing cuts stress like having the future flowing into us through the Spirit of Jesus. If that is working, everything else will take care of itself.
How rootedness produces fruitful stress
Roots help us relax in a good way, but they also stimulate us to live fruitful lives. We don't boast that we have it made with God because we have spiritual roots in Abraham. We don’t say, "God likes us! Let's take it easy until he comes back to make everything perfect."
Instead we say, "We have roots! We can produce fruit now, so let's produce a great crop of blessings for the whole world."And it doesn't feel like work. No fruit tree strains to produce fruit; that's just what it does, as long as it stays rooted in good, well-watered soil. The roots get nutrients for the branches, and the branches know what to do with them.
God prompts POTF to be fruitful in that way. Fruitful living comes naturally once the Spirit of the Future is flowing into us. Through this Spirit, the Holy Spirit, we receive and display the features of the future, like love, joy, and peace, so that others can taste them and benefit from them.
We are somebodies! We are signs of a glorious future! But we don't brag about it. We relax while we make our positive contribution to the world, bringing a little of the future to the people in our own little worlds.
Getting real about the present
As you get into the idea of Roots Season, you gradually realize who Jesus really is—the Messiah—the person who grafts us into the Abraham tree. He makes us part of the fulfillment of the promise God made to Abraham, that every family on earth would be blessed through him.
This realization about our connection to Abraham is a gift we receive from God and spread to others, the gift of spiritual Roots. We are POTF, and our Roots give us what it takes to bear fruit of the future.
God is on a POTF campaign in the here and now, and that campaign will succeed. The world will be connected, healed, and blessed, exactly according to plan. That is our guaranteed future. That is reality.
That is the future we SYNC with. Our lives overflow with future blessings—love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (Gal. 5.22-23)
Some will join us as fruitful branches on the Abraham family tree. If others attack us, so be it. We still will continue to bless them because we believe in a future when God will reward us. Our sacrifices in the present are ways of investing in our future.
Ready to invest? Where could you ever make a safer investment than aligning yourself with Jesus, getting in SYNC with the Messianic future? What could make you a more significant person than that?