The heart of the matter is the heart (continuing Feb 18th's post)

In his prayer to the Ephesians Paul prays that they be given a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him, enlightening the eyes of their heart (Ephesians 1:17,18). The last phrase is a literal translation of Greek, which also follows the word order. The implication (missed in many translations) is that a spirit of wisdom and revelation is the vehicle by which the eyes of the heart are enlightened. This is important because to know Him is to know that He is Love (1 John 4:8). In particular the enlightening of the eyes of the heart includes the revelation of His unconditional extravagant healing love for me and for you. Without this ongoing progressive revelation we will not be able to bear some of the other aspects of the enlightening of our hearts (John 16:12). God's primary goal in the enlightening the eyes of our heart is for us to have an ever deepening heart connection with Him.

It takes two to make and maintain a heart connection in any relationship. In the cross God has done everything necessary, from His side, to make it possible for us to have a heart connection with Him. From our side there are many blocks (or it would already have happened), and we need both a revelation of His heart for us, and a spirit of wisdom to get past the rationalization to even see, let alone dismantle, these blocks.

In this post we will be examining the blocks that prevent a heart connection with Him, and we will be saying more about the Love that enlightens the heart. In subsequent posts we will be considering our response to the enlightening of our hearts and the results of the enlightening of the heart.

The Greek lexicon defines heart (as used in this context) as the centre and seat of spiritual life, the fountain and seat of the thoughts, passions, desires, appetites, affections, purposes and endeavours. That the eyes of the heart need to be enlightened is clear from Matthew 5:18 where Jesus tells us that out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony and slander.

As part of my journey to faith I went through a broken marriage where I initially placed 100% of the blame for what went wrong, on my former wife. At the time I had no doubt about this, and I had murder in my heart. The scarey thing is that I am not at all sure that I would not have followed through, if I had thought I could have gotten away with it! Sometime later the Lord opened my eyes as to my own part in it all, and I came under heavy conviction of sin, selfishness and pride. I saw that I had been blind to my own substantial faults.

After I was saved I came across a verse in Jeremiah 17:9 which says that the heart is deceitful above all and desperately wicked. It was a major step in my acknowledging that the Bible is the Word of God. This book knows us, this book knows me. This revelation would have been devastating had I not known I was loved and forgiven. Gently He started to show me my almost limitless capacity for self deception and rationalization. I started to know something of the depth of the depravity of my heart. I have gotten into trouble for sharing this even with other Christians. As a result of this I have come to the conclusion that many Christians don't even have a clue how easily their hearts deceive them, and just how much our thoughts, passions, desires, appetites, affections, purposes and endeavours need to be enlightened.

As I said, this revelation of the deceitfulness of my heart would have been devestating were it not for the spirit of revelation of the Father’s Heart. With the enlightening of the eyes of my heart came the understanding of how much He loves me (and you). When Paul was enlightened he could say “The Son of God love me, and gave Himself to be the atoning sacrifice for my sin" (Galatians 2:20). When, through this spirit of revelation I see the cost of the sacrifice and the personal nature of it (for me!), I also see that God loves me in spite of the state of my heart. For me this is the saving grace.

This revelation of His love is so much more than a rational understanding of the fact that He loves us, it is to know His love in the three ways that I discussed in the previous post. That is that the revelation of His love comes, yes through an intellectual understanding that He does, but it also comes by the Spirit (who testifies with our spirit that we are the children of God Romans 8:16) and by experience, as the love of God is poured out in our hearts (Romans 5: 5). This tangible revelation of His Love is meant to comfort our hearts, to strengthen our hearts, to bring peace and security, and to equip us to be all that we can be in Him. The heart of the matter, is the heart!

Knowing and experiencing the unconditional love of the Father enables me to get honest with myself, and creates a safe place with Him where He can enlighten the eyes of my heart without destroying me. In the safety of His unconditional love I can increasingly bear the truth about my incompleteness and know that just as a loving earthly parent loves his or her child even when they have done wrong, so He continue to love me even in my imperfections. In the security of this love I can allow Him to deal with what needs to be dealt with in my life, and so be transformed by the enlightening of my heart. Truly the heart of the matter, is the heart

Needed: a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him

The Apostle Paul in his letter to the Ephesians (perhaps the most mature Church in the New Testament) prays that God would give them a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him. That he would think this was necessary for the mature church speaks volumes of how much it is needed today. But exactly what is he praying for?

In the secular West our view of what we know is primarily about logic and reason. Certainly reason is important since we are told to love the Lord with all our mind, but it is not the totality of how we know. In fact there is a “trinity” of ways we know. So yes, we know by reason, but we also know also by intuition and experience. Perhaps we learn to trust only by experience.

Regarding intuition, Einstein tells of how he discovered the theory of relativity laying on a grassy grassy bank gazing at a sunbeam through half closed eyes and wondering what it would be like to ride on a beam of light, when the theory of relativity came to him intuitively. He goes on to say that he then went to his laboratory and proved it. Notice the relationship here between the rational and the intuitive. On the one hand, it was not by a series of logical steps that he arrived at his conclusion, on the other he needed the logical steps in order to prove his theory. What I am trying to say here, is that the three ways of knowing are not independent, they intricately interconnected, they are a trinity.

By analogy we know a person by words, by that persons' spirit (the intuitive aspect), and what we experience of him or her at a sensory level. Knowing their words is obvious, the spirit perhaps less so. A person with a spirit of negativity is perhaps the easiest to discern. It is, for example, easy to spot a spirit of bitterness, or anger, or greed, or arrogance. Less obvious perhaps is a gentle spirit, a spirit of humility or of trustworthiness. We are talking here about the character (good or bad) of the person we are encountering, and we often discern these things first through our feelings, our senses.

The Scriptures tell us that the mature have their senses exercised to discern between good and evil (Hebrews 5:14). That they do need to be exercised is clear. It is not innate, it is something we learn, something we grow into. We can start with noticing the tension in the air that we feel when someone is angry or someone is trying to manipulate us. Jesus often sensed what was happening in the natural. He was given words of wisdom and words of knowledge (1 Corinthians 12:8). We too can access these things, and many times they come through our senses, by what we feel.

Applying all this to what Paul is praying, we see we need to know God in this way, through His Word (the Bible), through His Spirit (manifesting His character through His faithfulness, mercy justice etc., etc.) and through encounter where, for example, we feel the love of God poured out into our hearts by the same Spirit (Romans 5:5). We all need more and more of this. It is in and through such encounters that we loose the orphan spirit that permeates so much of our culture. To use a secular turn of phrase, we need to have our love deficit cancelled by allowing God to fill up our “love tanks.”

Without such encounters we will likely continue to seek love or fulfillment in all the wrong places, through our various addictions be it substance abuse or perfectionism or Workaholism etc. And this is where the spirit of wisdom comes in. We need the spirit of wisdom to unveil our wrong beliefs. I remember a friend (who has given me permission to share his journey) who was convinced that he was a looser. It was what he experienced and continued to experience though self fulfilling prophecy with his confidence level at zero. During one of our sessions the Lord gave him a word of wisdom for himself. He suddenly blurted out “This belief is evil isn't it?” It was the last thing on my mind, but I immediately knew it was true and of the Lord, and this revelation allowed him to repent of believing it, and to start to recover a sense of worth and confidence in his (awesome actually) abilities.

So then we need a spirit of revelation to know Him, and how much He loves us, and we also need the spirit of wisdom to know what of our ungodly beliefs are currently keeping us from a deeper relationship with Him. We need to pray this prayer (I do) for ourselves and those we love.

The testing of your faith: A perspective on trials

James in his epistle has a perspective on trials that we don't immediately see in the natural. He tells us that trials are there to test (and hence strengthen) our faith. To James' Jewish Christian audience, this would be a familiar theme from the old Testament. For example God tested Abraham concerning his son (Genesis 22:1), and the Israelites were tested in the wilderness (Deuteronomy 8:2).

The stated purpose of the long drawn out wilderness experience the Deuteronomy passage refers to, was to humble and test the Israelites so as to know what was in their hearts. Most of us do not know our hearts (Jeremiah 17:9), but our hearts are revealed many times in our response to the trials of life. Israel had blown it at the beginning of the 40 year period of their wanderings. These wanderings would not have been necessary if they had responded to their challenges with faith. We too can save ourselves long drawn out wilderness experiences if we learn to respond to our circumstances in faith. In the end the Lord will have His way with us anyway, and it is surely better to quickly submit rather than to be humbled and then finally, in the end, to come kicking and screaming into acceptance.

I don't pretend that is it easy, in the midst of the trial, our focus tends to be on the trial itself, and the pain we are suffering. Because this is so, we may not immediately recognize that our faith is being tested, nor the value of such testing. When we see that our faith is being tested, and that God has purpose in allowing it, the Christian can perhaps see more clearly that he or she is in fact given a choice.

For many years in my own life all I could see or feel was the pain of my trials. I did not see my circumstances as an opportunity to put my faith in Him, rather I tried to work it all out in my own strength and wisdom. In fact things had to get very much worse before I finally got a hold of the truth being discussed here. Only then did I start to respond in faith to the trials and tribulations that He had allowed. With 20/20 hindsight I am also painfully aware that, like unbelieving Israel, my own unbelief resulted in my family being dragged through the wilderness with me. And I can now say clearly from the School of hard knocks that we need to enter this process of becoming whole (for that is what it is) not only for our own sake, but also for our families and those over whom we have influence.

What I am trying to say here, is that unless or until we start to understand that the trials we encounter are in fact testing our faith, we are unlikely to choose to respond to them in trust and faith, and so by His grace learn to rise above them. We do need His help for this (I do). Someone put it this way. “We need to learn to stop fighting the people and circumstances that God allows in our lives with the purpose of making us more like Him.”

In all kinds of trial, count it all joy

One thing that many people do not seem to understand is that the deeper the trail the greater the potential to enter into the reality of the peace and joy promised to the Christian. It is in the deepest trials that the promises of the Bible are the most relevant and the most empowering. We are told for example “You will keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on thee (Isaiah 26:3).” We are also promised joy. Here in this command from James we are commanded to rejoice (count it all joy) but joy is also part of the fruit of the Spirit. We are not just talking about a superficial happiness here. In the context of various trials (the very same phrase used in James) Peter speaks of a joy that is too great to be expressed in words. The various translations have it as joy unspeakable, glorious joy or joy so great it is inexpressible (1 Peter 1:6-8). But how are we to experience this, and why is it that the potential for these positive things increases with the difficulty of the trial?

Here is one of the many upside down principles of the Kingdom. When the trial is small we can simply suck it up, we can tell ourselves to get a life. The secular self help literature does this in spades. We are told not to sweat the small stuff, and that it is all small stuff. But it is not small stuff if you lose a child, or if you are abused, and to pretend that this is small stuff is to live outside of reality. Secular self help also tells us that life is a gentle teacher, but it many times it feels more like the school of hard knocks. In particular as the pain and/or difficulties of our circumstances grow, it becomes increasingly difficult if not impossible to rejoice. At this stage the advice given here can be completely incomprehensible. They will think you are mad if you suggest it.

But the person of faith knows that the increasing pain and difficulties bring us to a crossroads, to a choice. Will we choose to trust? Will we choose, in the words of Paul, to believe that somehow (we may not know how) God is actively at work for our good in the trial (Romans 8:28). Will we accept, in the words of Peter, that the testing of our faith is precious, and that it will produce praise honour and glory at the revelation of Christ?

In the midst of my own fiery trial, the Lord put a devotional book into my hand. The title is revealing. It is called “I can't, God can. I think I'll let him.” This is akin to the first couple of steps of any twelve step program. We start by admitting we are powerlessness to rejoice in our suffering, to admit that without His help we cannot do it. The point is that when we fully surrender and cooperate with Him, He makes up for what we cannot do. He even changes our desires (Philippians 2:12,13). It's about coming to the end of ourselves and then choosing to believe.

This is where the depth of the trial is helpful. When the trial gets deep enough, and goes on for long enough we come to the place where we start to understand that with us it is impossible. We start to see the inadequacy of the power of positive thinking alone to bring us out of the desolate pits into which we have fallen. We become desperate, desperate enough to fully surrender, to put our faith money where our mouth is. When we do we find that "underneath are the everlasting arms" (Deuteronomy 33:27). This builds our faith so that surrender in the next trial is not quite so difficult. So then it is the depth of our trials that increasingly bring us out of our denial and more and more fully into the embrace of God.

Nobody is saying this is easy, nor that it is instantaneous. We may not be there yet, the trials may not yet have gone deep enough or lasted long enough for us to fully surrender. We may still think we can do it without Him. We need help even here, and we need help as we choose to count it all joy in the midst of it all. Without Him it is impossible, but with Him all things are possible. It is a process, and the book of James tells us many of the Scriptural ingredients that we need to take note of, if we are going to keep moving forward to appropriate the promised fruit of our faith and obedience.

Deep calls to deep

I had trouble understanding this phrase when I first encountered it. The context, in Psalm 42, is of discouragement and of the Psalmist thirst for God. Most of my life was lived at a level that can only be called shallow. It was all about me, my wants my needs my goals my ambitions. To a lesser extent this was true even after I became a Christian. But I was not satisfied, I had no peace, I knew there had to be something more and I wanted it, no matter what the cost.

Oh I knew a lot about God, I knew a lot about the Bible and I could debate this issue or that issue with the best of them, but there was something missing. I tried harder, trying to find (or perhaps loose) myself in ministry. I was driven (rather than lead) to find my destiny, and all the while deep was calling to deep. But I was not listening, not until my world fell apart with my now ex wife taking the four children and leaving. It was not my choice, but now out of the ashes of my life I was finally still long enough to start to hear the unfathomable depth of God calling out to the unfathomable depth in my soul.

Does it sound like I am bragging, saying that I am a deep person? If so let me tell you that there is an unfathomable depth within your soul too. And I know this because you are a reflection of His depth. This is just part of what it means for you and I to be made in the image of God. But is also means you and I are significant, we are valuable, precious in His sight, and we are made for better things than for selfishness. We are made for greatness.

Mike Bickle talks about seven longings of the human heart, the longing for the assurance that we are loved by God, the longing to be fascinated, the longing to be beautiful, the longing to be great, the longing for intimacy without shame, the longing to be wholehearted and passionate, and the longing to make a deep and lasting impact. Does any of this ring a bell with you? Perhaps you had (some of) these longings, but the school of hard knocks left you disillusioned. I see that school as a crossroads, I can be disillusioned or I can return to the Shepherd and Guardian of my soul. We all can. Deep is calling to deep. Can you hear it, can you feel it? It is a He, be still and know that He is God.

Guilt deficit

I have heard people say that if God is just he will weigh my good deeds against my bad. Well God is just, but does justice really work that way? “Yes mi lord, it's true that I stole $10,000, but I am good to my mother, and I help little old ladies across the street!” What would the Judge say? “Guilty, five years.” Now God has a record of all the bad things we ever did, as well as of all the good things we should have done, but didn't do. I think of this as a guilt deficit and I certainly have one, how about you?

If I am overdrawn at the bank, the only one who can help me is somebody in credit. In the end there is only one who is in credit with respect to guilt, Jesus Christ the righteous. Now the Bible tell us that the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life. ” What I am trying to say is that the only way to overcome our guilt deficit is to receive the righteousness of Jesus Christ as a gift. When we do we are told “Your sins and iniquities I will remember no more,” and “As far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us.” Have you received His gift?

Confess your fault to one another and pray for one another that you may be healed.

For the longest time I could not decide if my natural openness was a gift, or a curse. I thought it might be a curse, because many times when I had shared openly and honestly, then I would feel judged and the confessions might even come back as an accusation. There were also times when I was shamed. “You did what?” On such occasions it did not feel like a gift. More recently though I am seeing more and more that openness, honesty and a willingness to be vulnerable before others, as a gift. I need to explain.

The verse quoted at the top is one of the most powerful principles and promises of the Scriptures. Probably because of this, it is also one of the most difficult to put into practice. Part of the reason for this is the power guilt and shame holds over us. “What will people think?” “Will they still speak to me?” “Will they reject me?” And from my own experience I can tell you that there are times when that fear is fully justified.

What is needed is a safe place. The meeting surrounding twelve step programs are usually such places, and when the higher power is the Judeo-Christian God, then all the resources and promises of heaven are at one's disposal. Twelve step programs are powerful not just for alcoholics and drug addicts, but for the rest of the word who suffer and are limited by our responses to our hurts, habits and hangups. In other words all of us (unless, of course, we are in denial!). I have found the local Celebrate Recovery (CR) group (can be googled) to be a safe place, and somewhere where the above principle and promise is being played out.

There are a number of things that are essential here. The first is encapsulated in a CR saying “You are only as sick as your secrets.” David in the psalms declares “When I kept silent about my sin, my body wasted away through my groaning all day long.” He was declaring what many of us know, that spiritual sickness can manifest itself in the body. Doctors call such ailments psychosomatic.

The second point is that confession needs to be mutual, one to another. When we have confessed we are probably at our most vulnerable, and at that point there is nothing worse than being greeted by silence. What happens when we open up to one another and receive the same back, is that we discover that we are not alone after all. It is not just me who has this problem, and a problem shared is a problem in the process of being solved.

The third thing to say is that prayer changes things, and healing often it does not occur without it (especially when the pain is deep). The title quotation is from James 5:16, but it is only the first part on the verse. The second part, in one translation, reads “The insistent prayer of a righteous person is powerfully effective.” When we have confessed our sins to God and each other, He sees us as righteous, so we then qualify for the promise, which is then received by faith.

The last thing to say is that it works. It has worked for me. I have been on this journey for many years during which I have seen much healing, but it is only since joining CR over a year ago, I have come to the place where I can honestly say and mean “I am in a good place.” I am not saying that life is without problems, but I am in a good place, I am at peace and have much joy. Hallelujah Amen.