Seven Arrows Book Pdf

[Imke]

Matt Rogers is the teaching pastor at The Church at Cherrydale in Greenville, SC. His church has developed an interesting way to help their people read and understand Scripture within their small groups. I asked Matt if he would share about their tool and how it lines up with their discipleship objectives.

There is often a vast disconnect between the awareness of the need for disciple-making and practical tools that actually aid in this work. Three factors are essential: Scripture, relationships, and time. Discipleship happens when the life-changing truth of Scripture is infused into genuine relationships over an extended period of time.

Our desire was to create a simple, reproducible strategy that would facilitate this process. This led us to develop a simply strategy for small clusters (2-3 people) to meet together regularly and talk about the Scriptures and apply them to their lives.

The seven arrows of Bible reading were an attempt at developing a tool for proper hermeneutics to power these relationships. We did not want our people to simply talk about the Bible. We wanted them to understand the Bible and know how to apply it to their lives. Each cluster would read a predetermined passage of Scripture and discuss it using these seven arrows.

Next, the clusters sought to discern authorial intent for the passage by asking what it meant to its original audience. Since a text of Scripture can never mean what it never meant, it is necessary to begin by discerning what the text meant. Often this may require the clusters to consult other study tools or cross-reference other Biblical texts to arrive at the meaning of the text.

From there we wanted our clusters to apply the Scripture to their relationships with others. Ideally, they would discuss how the text shaped both how they related to other believers and how they lived on mission in the world.

To further encourage and aid our people, we gave them bookmarks with the seven arrows on them. These arrows have proven to be a unique tool in our disciple-making toolbox that the Lord is using to call and build faithful and fruitful followers of Jesus.

Trevin Wax is vice president of research and resource development at the North American Mission Board and a visiting professor at Cedarville University. A former missionary to Romania, Trevin is a regular columnist at The Gospel Coalition and has contributed to The Washington Post, Religion News Service, World, and Christianity Today. He has taught courses on mission and ministry at Wheaton College and has lectured on Christianity and culture at Oxford University. He is a founding editor of The Gospel Project, has served as publisher for the Christian Standard Bible, and is currently a fellow for The Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics. He is the author of multiple books, including The Thrill of Orthodoxy, The Multi-Directional Leader, Rethink Your Self, This Is Our Time, and Gospel Centered Teaching. His podcast is Reconstructing Faith. He and his wife, Corina, have three children. You can follow him on Twitter or Facebook, or receive his columns via email.

These notes are an adaptation of a profound Native American teaching which has served me wonderfully most of my adult life. It is, in my view, the best and most beautifully condensed wisdom I have encountered.

This is how the teaching goes: there are two types of suffering: avoidable and unavoidable. Often the best we can do with unavoidable suffering is to sit with it and allow ourselves to feel it fully in the knowledge that all things pass. We can however do something about our avoidable suffering, a good deal of which is characterised by seven dark arrows (to be explained soon). If we find a dark (or poisonous) arrow sticking in us then the chances are that we are suffering right now or that we are setting up the basis for future suffering for ourselves, for other people, or both. So, we need to pull it out and break it! This requires an act of will and can feel very unfamiliar. If we are not prepared to make the act of will that is required by the teaching then what follows is worse than empty words.

Once we have pulled out and broken any dark arrow that is poisoning us then the next stage is to pick up one or more of the seven light arrows (to be explained after the dark arrows). This is how we heal the wound.

As we do the work of identifying dark arrows, choosing by an act of will to rid ourselves of them and to pick up the light arrows, then the seven rainbow arrows arrive gracefully. We cannot attain the rainbow arrows by trying to grab them directly. The only way to attract the rainbow arrows is to do the work with the dark and light arrows, and this begins by understanding (and breaking!) the dark arrows:

Each dark arrow is described in turn below. Described also is its contrary manifestation (opposite) which is no less poisonous. The trick is to learn to transcend the particular thought form represented by the arrow- that is to transcend both the dark arrow and its contrary manifestation. (Opposites keep us entrenched in the same thought form). Some of the ways we can do this (tricks) are also outlined.

Perhaps the most poisonous and least obvious of all the dark arrows. This is where we have become attached to suffering itself and our own particular brand of it. Though we are not usually aware of it at first (or only dimly) we have become masochistically prone to being victim and to setting up situations which reproduce the types of suffering that have become so familiar to us. We do this because we prefer to stay in the familiar, however painful that may be, than risk the unfamiliar which feels deeply terrifying. We prefer known misery to the anticipated misery (which often never manifests) of entering the unknown.

Tricks for transcendence: Stay alert for this arrow which often seems counter-intuitive initially and can infuriate us when it is pointed out to us (why on earth would I choose to suffer!). We need to guard against our infuriation blinding us to the truth. Once we have spotted the arrow we need to learn from the lessons we have been given and ACT by following through a conscious choice to move away from familiar avoidable sources of suffering.

Tricks: valuing interdependence and a restoring of our ability to choose. Dependencies are often a way of escaping underlying feelings that we mistakenly think are unendurable. The various stages in the process of addiction (craving and our battle with it, giving in and getting high, coming down and withdrawal, self disgust and disappointment followed by shaky resolutions giving way to craving) can keep us so preoccupied that we manage to successfully avoid our underlying feelings. We need to break the cycle by allowing ourselves to experience the underlying feelings. This can put us back at cause rather than effect.

When we judge others or ourselves (most usually both if one tendency is present). It is different from appraisal, which is a necessary part of the way in which we need to make sense of the world. Judgements are distinguished from appraisal by their causticity, which seeks to undermine its target (either directly or in the mind).

Tricks: We have the goal without hooking all our self-esteem to it. We have a hope or a wish for someone else (or ourselves) without making our love or acceptance of them dependent on their realising that, and we let them make their own decisions and learn from their own mistakes (if indeed they are mistakes).

So, the teaching continues: if we find ourselves suffering first check through to see if we have a dark arrow sticking in us. We need to be honest! If we really cant find a dark arrow then it may well be that our suffering is not open to influence and the best we can do is sit with it in the knowledge that all things pass. Some suffering is part of the human condition. But if we find a poisonous arrow then the next stage is:

We already picked up this arrow when we become aware that there was a dark arrow (or cluster of them!) sticking in us. We need to get as familiar as we can with the arrow and understand the circumstances in which it sticks in us, where or who we learnt it from, its history, its ruses and its particular poison; and generally we need to cultivate an overall awareness of ourselves. Meditation is helpful here.

Here we find something, anything, however small, to appreciate about ourselves. We look especially for our qualities, and we need to be mindful here of the judgement arrow: we are never any good quality all of the time. One appreciation we can also make here is that we have got to this stage of the teaching and already spotted and identified the dark arrow, or we can scan through the last 24 hours and recall one (or several) actions we have taken that we can appreciate. Good practice here is also to note carefully and allow ourselves to let in appreciative comments others have made of us. Can we allow that their appreciation may be right and not necessarily deluded, manipulative, naive, unthinking, or foolish? Perhaps the other person may be seeing us more accurately than we see ourselves.

This is more encompassing than Self Appreciation and includes our limitations as well as our good qualities. Acceptance means more than just acknowledging or admitting, it has a component of positive approval of ourselves as a whole. It does not mean we cannot improve who we are and indeed it embraces the paradox that we cannot change ourselves at all without first accepting who we are.

This is about actively allowing and pursuing pleasure in our lives. This includes basic activities such as eating- are we really letting in how good each bite of this meal tastes? It also includes the individual pursuits that we enjoy and we need to allow ourselves time to pursue them. And it means allowing in full the pleasure of our sexuality both when we are with someone else and when we are self pleasuring alone. We need to open up our heart area fully to the sensation of pleasure filling us up and breathe it in consciously. In general we need to guard against the shame our culture so often attaches to pleasure, particularly sexual pleasure.

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