Kingdom leaders are responsible for helping their listenership evolve out of a performative transaction with God, and into a love relationship with Him based on heartfelt worship, gut-level prayer, emotional vulnerability, His personal voice in the verse, and all the nuances of an intimate love relationship. Unfortunately, many churches in the West program their members and attendees to be performative with God, because those churches and their pastors are themselves performative. This creates a generational spiritual dysfunction whereby the Old Covenant performance-based system stays alive and keeps passing on from leader to follower, leader to follower, leader to follower, ad infinitum.
    Jesus tried to stop the performative, transactional, religious hamster-wheel with His first coming. Through the story of Mary and Martha in Luke 10, Jesus intentionally held up two covenantal systems: one based on legalistic transactions mediated by human effort, the other based on personal relationship mediated by voice-to-voice, heart-to-heart intimacy. Martha was performative towards Jesus, captive to the legalistic tyranny of religious must-dos. Mary was relational towards Jesus; she wanted heart-level intimacy, calm conversation with Him, resting in His presence, hearing His voice, learning to be vulnerable with Him. The issue was never service versus prayer, or practical activity versus intimate activity, or horizontal engagement versus vertical engagement. The issue was chronology and motive.
    Jesus said only one thing is supremely, utterly, incomparably first, and that is intimacy with Himself. The practical duties Martha was obsessing over were important, of course, but they were not supremely, utterly, incomparably first. They were supposed to be the joyful fruit of a right root system.
    But Martha was not serving as an act of joyful fruit, she was serving to escape her emotional world. Jesus said Martha was merimnao and thorybazo, literally "having anxiety" and "disturbed", not about one thing but "many things" (Lk 10:41). Spiritual leaders, selah this. It is often a person's unprocessed, unhealed emotional world that underpins legalistic, performative approaches to God. Genuine intimacy with Him would require opening those distressed hotspots to Him, feeling them afresh, grieving them to Him, processing them with Him, and welcoming His precious inner healing in all its forms. The alternative is to keep suppressing them, escaping them, staying on the surface, and relating to God through an Old Covenant-style performance, whereby endless rules and rituals are obsessively kept for an aloof God atop a quaking mountain.
    Spiritual leaders, selah what Jesus said to Martha. He did not tell her to simply do one more Tanakh study. He did not quote a scripture. He did not speak to her intellect. He did not prophesy to her. As the One who came to heal the brokenhearted, to comfort those who mourn, to provide for those grieve, to give an anointing of joy to those in mourning, to give a disposition of worship to those in despair (Isa 61:1-3, Lk 4:17-21), Jesus spoke to Martha's emotional world. He said only the voice-to-voice, heart-to-heart intimacy with Himself could heal every place inside, and for this reason it was supremely, utterly, incomparably needful. Spiritual leaders, are you vision-casting Mary or Martha? What are you saying to Martha? Are you enabling and worsening her bondage by exploiting her religious hyperactivity to keep your machine running, or are you slowing down, pausing, and ministering to her merimnao and thorybazo inner world?