I have been
thinking a lot about the heart lately. Not the four-chambered muscle working
around the clock to keep us alive, but the heart in the biblical sense, as the
seat of our emotions and desires. Our truest selves. The youest you.
The
Bible has a lot to say about the heart. A search through scripture shows that
our hearts can be divided or made of stone, and need replacing; our hearts can
be wise, and they can be stolen by one glance of the eyes; our hearts can be
filled with pride; they can be glad and they can be broken; our hearts can leap
for joy or lament, and they can writhe in agony, and they can fail; our hearts
can be confident and steadfast, brave like a lion’s; they can harden, they can
open, they can condemn us.
There
is much more. The heart, it seems, is boundless in its ability to shape our
actions and attitude for good or for evil. In James, we read that the cause of
quarreling and fighting is the war of our passions within us (4:10), that is,
in our hearts. James says, “Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your
hearts, you double-minded” (4:8). Besides being especially timely advice for
those of us living through a pandemic, this verse speaks to the beginning of
the cure of this heart sickness. But before any of us head to the doctor, we
have to come to terms with how sick we really are.
As
the prayer goes in the Puritan prayer book The
Valley of Vision, “My heart is an unexhausted fountain of sin, a river of
corruption since childhood days, flowing on in every pattern of behavior.”
Harsh, but not wrong, if we’re being honest. Even the good things that our
hearts desire we manage to turn into sin. But the writer doesn’t leave us
hopeless: “Thy grace has given me faith in the cross by which thou hast
reconciled thyself to me and me to thee, drawing me by thy great love,
reckoning me as innocent in Christ though guilty in myself.” Neither does James
leave us bereft as sinners and double-minded: “But he gives more grace.” That
one little sentence is a sermon in itself!
Then
in the following chapter James says, “Establish your hearts.” I pondered for a
while what that could mean, but the best clue comes from many other
translations that use the word “strengthen” in place of establish. That makes
sense to me, because physical fitness is something I understand and work hard
at. After years of soreness and sweat and blood and broken bones, I’ve seen
some small measure of progress. Progress has been halting and slow and
frustrating, but I’m stronger than I was before. I may not be finished with the
journey, but I’m further along than I was when I started.
Likewise,
strengthening our hearts can be hard work. Another Puritan prayer says,
“...that with self-loathing, deep contrition, earnest heart searching I may come
to thee, cast myself on thee, trust in thee, cry to thee, be delivered by thee”
While I have come to enjoy the hard-earned pain of a good workout, earnest heart searching is still not my favorite thing. I don’t like the things I find in my heart, the sin and fear and unbelief and discontentment. But God gives more grace. He loves me when I am unlovable. And that is where true strength of the heart is found.
1
Thes. 3:11-13 says, “Now may our God and Father himself, and
our Lord Jesus, direct our way to you, and may the Lord make you increase and
abound in love for one another and for all, as we do for you, so that he may
establish your hearts blameless in holiness before our God and Father, at the
coming of our Lord Jesus with all his saints.” So while there’s legitimate
heart work for me to do, the strength of my heart ultimately doesn’t rest on my
hard work but on the mighty power of our God and Father himself. Hallelujah.
The weight lifting off my shoulders when I read this is like setting a fully
loaded barbell back on the rack.
Psalm 73:23-26 sings out:
“Nevertheless, I am
continually with you;
you hold my right hand.
You guide me with your counsel,
and afterward you will receive me to glory.
Whom have I in heaven but you?
And there is nothing on earth that I desire
besides you.
My flesh and my heart may fail,
but God is the strength of my heart and my
portion forever.”
In
her book Even Better Than Eden, Nancy
Guthrie talks about an emptiness and a longing in our hearts that we try to
fill with anything that we think will make us happy, fulfilled, and satisfied.
We see this longing in Eve when she ate the fruit. We see this in the children
of Israel when they had all their needs met in the wilderness and yet still
complained they were hungry. They weren’t truly hungry, they simply wanted
something other than what God had given them. And God, Guthrie writes, allowed
them to feel that hunger and that emptiness. “Why? So that their hunger pangs,
their discontentment, would cause them to consider carefully what would deeply
satisfy them, what would fill them up. … Have you ever thought about the
emptiness you feel in this light? Do you think, perhaps, that God has let you
hunger for whatever it is you are so hungry for so that you might become more
desperate for him, more convinced that he is the source of what will fill you
up? Do you think he might want to retrain your appetites, redirecting them away
from this world, this life, even this age, so that your anticipation of the age
to come might begin to shape your perspective on whatever it is you lack?”
I
love the garden/wilderness imagery of the Bible that Guthrie explores here, the
perfection and fullness and life of the garden that was lost, the wilderness
that we wander through now, and the promise of the remade garden to come. Just
like the wandering children, we complain and mess up and become confused and
worship idols and turn from what we know is true and forget what God has done
for us. We want more and more of all the wrong things because our hearts are full
of misdirected passions. But God can give us new hearts, hearts that desire
what he desires, hearts that want to be filled up with more of him, the only
one who truly satisfies, who strengthens, who establishes.
The
Puritan prayer called The Broken Heart pulls together all those strands of our sinful
hearts and the wilderness and God’s grace, so we’ll end here:
“Give me perpetual
broken-heartedness,
Keep
me always clinging to thy cross,
Flood
me every moment with descending grace,
Open
to me the springs of divine knowledge,
sparkling like crystal,
flowing clear and unsullied
through my wilderness of life.”
Written By: Jess Upshaw Glass