LIFE IS A MAZE(ing): Listen to Your Heart (?) Philippians 2:12-13 (2nd Service)
I can remember when I was freshman in college and went and purchased the album that song (Obsession) is off of. It was written by Martin Smith, but recorded by David Crowder. I remember lying in my bed in my dorm room at Colorado State, having my Discman next to me. I was listening to the song and thinking to myself, “My heart does burn. Jesus, I want you. Closer than my skin, yeah.” All that stuff Crowder’s singing, I want it. I was going onto high school campuses and telling people about Jesus; people that didn’t want to hear about it…it didn’t matter to me. My heart burned.
Around that same time, I started to want a Jeep CJ-7. My heart burned for that too. I went out and bought one, not knowing anything about car mechanics and having zero propensity for repairing anything. It was a 1985 CJ-7 and it didn’t have a hardtop (just a soft top) and soft doors. I remember driving away thinking, “This is my freedom.” I was on my way home—it was a 45 minute drive from where I purchased the car to my parent’s house—and one of those Colorado thunderstorms formed. I was in this Jeep with no top, living it up, when a thunderstorm of epic proportions came right over my head. It was a deluge! I remember getting absolutely destroyed by this thunderstorm, and people in cars next to me were absolutely laughing. It was coming down so hard I had to pull over and I had this thought almost immediately, “Not everything my heart wants is good! Not everything my heart wants is worth wanting!” because I wanted this….and maybe I shouldn’t have.
We’re in a series where we’re talking about discovering God’s will, and today I want to ask the complex question: Can you trust your heart? Before you answer that, can I tell you any simplistic answer to this question should be rejected. I think that Michael Scott and Dwight Schrute, from “The Office,” do a really good job at drawing out this tension — Michael: My heart says no. Dwight: Your heart is a wonderful thing, Michael, but it makes some terrible decisions……….Save your heart for love, and use your brain for business.
I was looking back through church history. One of my favorite theologians is Martin Luther, primarily because of his work on the book of Galatians, just breathtaking. He’s the father of the Protestant Reformation. I mean he nails his “95 Theses” to the Wittenberg door and launches the movement that most of us in this room are a part of today! And yet…..and yet, especially later on in his writings, he is a raving racist, hates the Jewish people. Was Martin Luther good or bad?
King David writes some breathtaking psalms. He’s a poet, man. O God, you are my God; earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water. (Ps. 63:1) Good or bad? Good. Psalms 40:8 — I delight to do your will, O my God; your law is within my heart. Good or bad? Good. David delighted also in Bathsheba; with a name like Bathsheba you know she was hot! David sees her bathing on the top of a building and says she looks good, calls for her, brings her over, sleeps with her, gets her pregnant. He knows she has a husband so that’s not good. He’s away at war, so David brings him back. He won’t sleep with her. Sends him back to war so that he’s killed. Good or bad? Bad! David — Good or bad? Uh-huh.
You? Me? Good or bad?
In a now infamous interview, the then sort of pedestrian Walter Isaacson—he’s come to be one of the best biographer’s of our day—was interviewing Woody Allen. Woody Allen said: “The heart wants what the heart wants.” How many of you have heard that? Yeah, that’s a famous line in our culture, but most people don’t realize what he was talking about. Isaacson was pressing him a little bit about the romantic love relationship that he (Allen) had with his partner’s adopted daughter Soon-Yi. What he said was, “The heart wants what the heart wants” and sometimes the heart wants to be romantically involved with your adopted daughter. That’s the genesis of that quote.
So many of us who follow the way of Jesus have been around church, we hear this and go yeah, exactly, that’s what the Prophet Jeremiah said in Jeremiah 17:9 — The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it? For most of us, that’s the end of our theology of our heart. It’s deceitful! It’s wicked! It’s bad! It’s wrong! We should reject our heart. There’s no way that our internal….that sort of internal voice, the spirit, the conglomeration of everything that’s inside of us, our heart….there’s no way that we should listen to that. What happens when your heart wants to be generous? What happens when your heart wants to do what’s right? What happens when your heart wants to follow Jesus? We just sang a bunch of songs about our hearts being drawn to God….what about then? Most of us, I think, have an overly simplified view of the heart—it’s either good or bad.
Whenever people point out this verse, I just want to remind them that the heart is deceitful above all things is not the end of Jeremiah’s diagnostic about our hearts. He continues to write about the heart. He goes on to prophesy about the New Covenant — For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people. (Jeremiah 31:33) If you read the same promise in the book of Ezekiel 36:26-27, what Ezekiel says is God is going to give you a new heart. If you are a follower of Christ, if the Spirit dwells in you, just lean in for a moment, you have a new heart. You do! You may have moved some old furniture into it, but you have a new heart. You’ve been renewed, you’ve been restored. So let me ask the question again–Should we trust our heart when it comes to decision making? Is the heart trustworthy? Well, it depends.
Let me sort of unpack with you what the Apostle Paul says. Turn to Philippians 2:12-13. Paul’s writing to a church that he helped plant at Philippi. Many of us have ingrained in us that our heart is wicked, our heart is evil all the time, which, I think, would suggest that we would have a propensity to use reverse psychology on ourselves. If it’s wicked and I know I shouldn’t want what I want, then I’ll not want what I want so that God will actually give it to me and then I’ll be okay. But, good news, you don’t have to do that, verse 12. Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, so now, not only as in my presence but much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you, {For it is GOD who works in you. For it is GOD. Who. Works. In. You.} both to will and to work for his good pleasure. Will you turn to the person next to you and say, “God is in work in you.” And then turn to the person on the other side and say, “God is in work in me.” Yeah, yeah, yeah, this is what the Apostle Paul is pointing out, that God is at work WITHIN, guiding us toward His will. God is on our side, working in us and working for us.
Jesus took the Spirit’s work inside of you so seriously that in John 16:7, he looked at his disciples and said, “Guys, I know you’ve grown fond of me. Guys, I know we’ve walked together for three years, but I’m going to leave and I’m going to go to my Father’s side and it’s better for you that I leave, because if I don’t leave, the Advocate, the Spirit, the One who’s at work within, won’t come.” Jesus thought it was so important—the work that the Spirit would do in your life, sitting right here in 2019, would be so powerful, that it would be even better than if He were here. Soak that in for a moment.
When you are seeking God’s will, you are not working in opposition to God. You’re not. You’re working in partnership with Him. Actually, your spiritual formation is a partnership, a divine partnership, between you and God. We’re called to cooperate with the Spirit’s work within us. Lest we think this is easy, that we sit back and enjoy the ride, the Apostle Paul writes in Galatians 5:17, to people who have a new heart, mind you — For the desires of the flesh{That’s the old furniture you moved into your new heart.} are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh, {This is all happening inside of you. This is why we can’t answer the question simplistically — Are we good or are we bad? We’re a battle zone!} for these are opposed to each other, to keep you from doing the things you want to do. Paul creates this anthem: Stay in step with the Spirit. Live in the Spirit. Paul’s suggesting that just because God is at work in you doesn’t mean the battle is over. Au contraire, the new heart is actually the invitation TO war, not the end of it. God’s at work within.
If this is the case….if there’s this against and this opposed , all happening within us…..sort of the picture of the angel and the devil on our shoulders, may not be all that far off, right? The question I think we should probably be asking is how do we partner with the work God wants to do in us? If the Spirit’s at work within me, how do I partner with what the Spirit wants to do, because I believe that God is the author of life and the giver of every good thing and He has good in store and I want to get on board with His agenda? That’s a great question, I’m glad you asked it, because Paul actually addresses that. Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, so now, not only as in my presence but much more in my absence… He’s writing to a church that he’s not physically present with, hence the letter, and he’s giving them some encouragement.
Paul, an apostle of Jesus, has this mind set. Obedience for disciples is not optional. It’s not advanced Christianity. It’s not for the super-spiritual elite. It’s for anybody who would say I want to live in the way of Jesus with the heart of Jesus. For those in the first century, they would have had this understanding that when you become an apprentice to somebody, whether it’s to a cobbler or to a blacksmith or to a rabbi, you had three goals: 1) To be with that person. 2) To become like them. In your character, to become like them. 3) To do what they did. With. Like. As. Before Paul talks about any of the internal workings of our soul and following the way of Jesus, here’s what he wants to say—Church, look up at me! Do you want it? Do you want His way? Do you want His way when it conflicts with your way?
It’s interesting, because despite what you may have heard, Christian spirituality is NOT about the crucifixion of desires. It’s about the focusing of desires. It’s about the alignment of desires. In fact, Buddhism is more about detachment from desires. Christianity is about the fulfillment of deepest desires. What Paul wants to do before he goes anywhere else is he wants to say before you follow your heart, before you trust your heart, test it! Test it! Do you really want the things of God? This is David’s prayer that we started our service with. This is Psalm 139:23-24 — Search me, God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me… David is suggesting that there are some desires in him that he might not even be aware of that would be pulling him away from the way of God. So he’s going, God, I’m positioning my life before you. You see me, you know me…..show me. Show me what’s there. I think we’re conditioned with evangelicalism that God’s going to show us a bunch of junk. He might show you some of that, but I want to suggest to you that if you don’t see any good, you aren’t listening well enough. If He doesn’t show you anything that’s beautiful, and true, and noteworthy, sit longer! Our conditioning is I’m Jeremiah 17:9—I’m wretched, I’m wicked—and what Jesus is over you is you’re Jeremiah 31:33, sit longer. Come on, church, sit longer.
David’s disposition is God, search me and know me, because I want to see if there’s any way that I’m off. I was reminded this week of Polonius’s line in Hamlet, where Polonius says, “To thine own self be true.” If you’re familiar at all with Shakespeare’s Hamlet,you know that Polonius is the moron. Polonius is the guy that’s the fool in the story. We may not want to be true to ourselves all the time. There may be times God wants to show us something good and beautiful, and there may be times God wants to show us something that’s off.
This morning, I want to give you some language to try and diagnose what’s going on in your heart. I want to give you some tools that may help you along the way, because there are times that our heart aligns with the kingdom and then there are times when it’s off. There are times when we operate out of our wounding. We operate out of our pain. We operate out of a twisted desire. The reality is those things are really important because as Thomas Merton said: “Life is shaped by the end you live for. You are made in the image of what you desire.” If you don’t like Thomas Merton, for whatever reason, all he’s doing is rephrasing Psalm 115:8, talking about those who make idols — Those who make them become like them; so do all who trust in them. Our affection determines our direction. That’s what they’re both saying.
So, what do we do? When we approach God, knowing that He’s working in us and having this sort of dance between there’s good and there’s bad in me, there’s beauty and there’s some things that are off in me, what do we do? Here’s some of the language people have used over the ages. They’ve used the language of ordered and disordered desires. You have both in you. The ordered desires are the things that are good and beautiful and true. They’re the things that point us out, that cause us to love, that cause us to be generous, to be sacrificial, to live what we have written on the wall—in the way of Jesus with the heart of Jesus. Those are ordered desires. They come in alignment with who God is and what God’s doing. You also have some disordered desires in your life. We can point those out a little bit easier sometimes. But those are the things that suck me into myself. They cause me to operate out of selfishness rather than selflessness. They don’t add vitality to life, in fact, they leach it away because they take me out of the way of love that I was designed to live in, that you were designed to live in. Ordered desires and disordered desires…..you have both.
You might be asking, where do these disordered desires come from? If we’re created by God (you were), designed by God (you are), where do these disordered desires come from? The Scriptures would say in Ephesians 2 that they come from three areas. They come from the world, the flesh, and the Devil. That’s its diagnostic of why your heart is under attack. The world. Have you noticed there are times when the world would propose a direction that’s just so commonplace that it becomes like the air that we breathe? Like greed or maybe lust. Fear. These are so common, they’re in our every morning newspaper. The world that we live in sort of tries to coerce us away from the way of Jesus. But there’s also something going on inside of us that can lead us away. Lest we think we’re completely evil or completely wrong, a lot of our flesh that pulls us away from God is birthed in wounds. It’s birthed in pain. It’s birthed in things that didn’t turn out the way that we wanted it to….we prayed for something else and something different happened and we started to carry this conviction—it might sound like this in the back of our head….we begin to believe that in order to be safe, I need to protect myself. We begin to believe that we need to pretend in order to be accepted. We begin to believe that in order to be loved, we’ve got to produce. These are our fleshy, distorted desires. Then you add into that the spiritual component of the fact that you have a very real enemy for your soul who would love to steal, kill, and destroy everything that God wants to do in your life. This is us! We are complex beings. We are complex creatures.
Before we just move on from that, an important pastoral word I want to give you is that those distorted desires didn’t come out of nowhere. Underneath every single distorted desire—hear me on this—is a God-given good desire. In fact, I’d be so bold as to say it like this: Genesis 1 precedes Genesis 3. Genesis 1: It is good precedes Genesis 3: It is broken. So it is good precedes it is broken. Chronologically AND anthropologically. In chronology and anthropology. It means it comes first. Goodness comes first in the story and goodness comes first in YOU! You’ve never met somebody who didn’t have goodness of the Imago Dei(image of God) imprinted on their soul. Every distorted desire is first a good desire and it’s a God desire. Sometimes it’s our wounding, and sometimes it’s our pain, and sometimes it’s our situation, and sometimes it’s the Devil, and sometimes it’s our flesh—-it gets twisted. But hear me on this, it’s good before it’s bad. I love the way James Bryan Smith put it: “We are made in God’s image, with original goodness, which cannot be marred by our sin. But we are also made in God’s likeness, which we can distort every time we choose to sin.”
Friends, I would love us—would you lean in for a moment?—to become the kind of church and the kind of followers of Jesus who, instead of starting our story of what God is up to in Genesis 3, start it in Genesis 1. After all, that’s where it starts! So let’s just start it there. Instead of starting with original sin, let’s start with original goodness and original blessing. That’s where the Scriptures start. I think this truth could fundamentally change the way that we view ourselves and the people around us. What happens if we refuse a complex understanding of our own soul? What happens if we think we’re all good? We might make some really terrible decisions. Your heart is a beautiful thing, but it makes some bad decisions. But what would happen if we thought that we were all bad? We would doubt the greatest light God is giving us.
So, if you’re looking for a practice this week, can I encourage you, do your best, as you have a decision to make and you have desires that swirl around in your soul, maybe take a step back from all those things and try to name what’s your deepest desire? Not your strongest desire. Not the one that’s on the surface. Not the one that’s manifesting. What’s your deepest desire? What’s underneath that anger? Is it justice? Is it respect? What’s underneath the lust? Is it longing for love? Is it longing for intimacy? Dig a little deeper. Do a little bit of work. You deserve it.
If testing the heart is about naming things that are swirling around inside of us, this next phase is about allowing God’s presence to reshape those desires. It’s allowing God’s presence to reshape those desires. Listen to the way Paul does this (Phil. 2:12) — Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, so now, not only as in my presence but much more in my absence, workoutyour own salvation {It’s interesting that Paul says work out your own. It’s not your job to work out someone else’s, work out your own and let the Spirit work out the other person’s.} with fear and trembling, {Please notice, he does not say work FOR your salvation. He says work OUT your salvation.} for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure. So, who’s working? You or God? YES! Yes! You are. And God is. We’ve become so afraid of a work’s based salvation that we’ve forgotten that the invitation to the spiritual life is actually a partnership between you and God. As Dallas Willard so poignantly puts it: “Grace is not opposed to effort, it is opposed to earning. Earning is an attitude. Effort is an action. Grace, you know, does not just have to do with forgiveness of sins alone.” Like, certainly grace is about forgiveness, but grace is about everyday empowering for you to work it out, because God is at work within.
He says we do this with fear and trembling. We’re not afraid of God. We know this from Romans 8:15 and 1 John 4. We do not have to fear God, but we do have this sense of holy reverence and sacredness and awe that the decisions we make actually matter. They matter. We not only test our heart, but we also trainour heart. We work it out. We can work it out because God is at work within. Paul’s encouraging the Philippian church to a participatory spiritual formation. We do our part and we trust that God does his. Actually, let me say it more specifically. We do our part, and then we get to experience, first hand, that God always does his. He always does his.
What’s our role in training our heart? What do we do? I’m going to do my best to keep this succinct. I’m going to give you my best summary of Saint Ignatius’s methodology for spiritual discernment. I think Saint Ignatius was one of the most brilliant writers the church has ever seen; when it comes to spiritual discernment, he was way ahead of his time. His thesis is you can do nothing to your own heart by willpower alone. When our desires are disordered, like we just talked about, it creates an environment inside of us that we naturally do not like. This is called desolation. Especially for those who follow the way of Jesus and have the spirit of God living inside of them, have you ever made a decision that you know was going against the way of God and it felt like someone was punching you in your soul? So desolation is the spiritual turbulence that’s really a loss of sense of connection with God.
I can remember when I was a high school pastor at a church in Aurora, and I started to sense that God was leading me to become a college pastor somewhere. I started to look on job boards. There was about a handful of jobs that seemed like they fit, both in job descriptions and theological convictions of the church. I put my resume in at each of those. I got a call back from a church in Memphis. I said to Kelly, my wife, “I got a call back from this church in Memphis.” She said to me, “I don’t want to live in Memphis.” I said to her, “But they have great barbecue.” I am digging deep for a reason and she’s like I’m not moving somewhere because of their food. I’m like dang it! Being the good husband I was, I decided to go to the interview. I got on this plan—I kid you not!—I had a little bit of a cold, but only the divine intervention of God could explain what happened next. The plane took off and my ears exploded and I could not hear a dang thing. They flew all these candidates into this hub in Dallas and they interviewed us there for a few hours then sent us home. I went to the wrong concourse because I couldn’t hear what they were saying. I showed up and I was dialed in; they must have thought I was the most attentive person in the world. I’m trying to read their lips. I didn’t even know if I was answering the questions they were asking. I told them that my ears had exploded and that I was Jonah running away from God. Got back on the plane, flew home, landed, was able to hear just fine. Kelly said to me, “How did the interview go?” I said, “I went deaf and I don’t think God’s leading us there.” That church called me back and said, “Hey, we know you couldn’t hear anything, but we really like what we heard. Would you be willing to come to Memphis to go through the second round?” I had this internal desolation in my soul. And I said, “Sure.” NO!
Then there are ordered desires that lead us to this other place. This place where….we might explain it like we just have a sense of peace. We underplay that, friends! If God is at work within, we should be attentive to those things. We shouldn’t write them off. The Spirit is at work. If you have a sense of peace that seems to align with the way of Jesus, why not assume it’s from Jesus? We have gotten so conditioned to assume that if we want something, God couldn’t want it for us. We immediately write those things off because they’re in line with our desires, even though God’s working on our desires to conform them to His, and sometimes they do and we go no, it couldn’t be God. He wants my life to be terrible. I know it’s God if I’m only doing something I don’t want to do.
Consolation and desolation. What do we do with that? In desolation, what do we do when we just have this oh God, I’m not sure what to do with this thing? I don’t have peace about this. It seems like I’m curving in on myself. What do we do with it? Here’s our practice: We bring the desire before God and ask him to work on it. This is the only place true transformation happens. We ask Him to work on it. When we bring our desires before God, we try first to test our heart—to distinguish between what our strongest desire is (that manifesting desire) and what our deepest desire is. Then we bring it all. We receive, openhandedly, the Spirit’s guidance and conviction. John 16:13-14 promises that the Spirit will convict in righteousness and sin and will lead you and guide you. Do you believe that? Third, we remind ourselves that willpower and law is inefficient, but the Spirit is power and life. Fourth, we refuse in moments of desolation to go back on decisions we made during times of consolation. When we make a decision when we have peace and we’re connected to God and feel like we’re hearing God’s voice, in moments of desolation we don’t go back on those decisions. Fifth, Ignatius would suggest that seeking out companionship and spiritual friendship is really important. Finally, he says then do the next right thing. I added ‘that has nothing to do with your decision.’ Whatever the next right thing is in front of you. Oftentimes, God will start to speak to that decision indirectly as you walk in His way with His heart. If that doesn’t work, repeat. I would add a side note: If you’re in a moment of desolation, try your hardest to resist making decisions. You wait on God. And you go through this process and ask that He’d speak.
If you’re in consolation, praise God! Here’s your process: 1) Tell God how you feel and thank him. 2) Store that moment away in your memory so you can return to it when things get tough. I hope you have a “consolation bank” in your heart and mind. 3) Use the energy you feel to further your deepest desires. 4) Let the surplus energy fuel the things you don’t like doing, and do them. Step into them. Enjoy seasons of consolation, you’re close to the heart of God.
Finally — For it is God who works in you, both to will (to want) and to work (to actually put your hand to the plow) for his good pleasure. Lean in for a moment, when you have tested your heart, and when you have trained your heart, you CAN and SHOULD trustyour heart. There’s this space of revelation inside of you, the Spirit is actually, really, truly speaking to you. That’s what the Scriptures say. Oftentimes, we are so lazy, spiritually, that we’re waiting for a word from the OUTSIDE, instead of fighting for a word on the INSIDE. And God says, “I’m at work….WITHIN!” When it comes to making decisions, our heart and our surrendered affections might very well be one of the greatest guiding lights we have. We’re just so conditioned to completely ignore it.
Here’s the deal, friends: Test your heart. Train your heart. Then….trust your heart. I mentioned this already, but we’re so conditioned to think if I want something, God couldn’t possibly want it for me. But what we fail to realize is that our desire for God doesn’t originate in us, it actually originates in God and God’s desire for us. He’s wired this into us. So the challenge is to learn to be attentive to what’s going on on the inside AND attentive to the heart of God. After all, I think Saint Augustine nailed it when he said, “Love God and do whatever you please; for the soul trained in love to God will do nothing to offend the One who is Beloved.”
If you think that God wants your life to be miserable, I have great news for you! This may be the best news you ever hear. YOU’RE WRONG!!! In fact, 1 Timothy 6:17 says — …..God, who richly provides us with everything to enjoy. What’s his desire? His desire is that we enjoy it ALL! Everything from food to taste buds, his design. Creation to vistas, his design. Friendship to love-making, his design. And his desire is that we would enjoy it all in its rightful place, surrendered, first and foremost, to him. It’s all his idea, and he wants to teach us how to enjoy it. Regardless of how much we try not to want, we are wanting people. It’s who we are. The question isn’t whether or not we want, the question is whether or not we want what’s good for us. Test it. Train it. And then, trust it. God longs not just for your obedience, he actually deeply wants your fulfillment.
It’s amazing, because on this Sunday we get the chance to celebrate the table. It’s on this table that we actually have a collision of desires. Think about this. Every time we come and we gather around these tables—that followers of Jesus have gathered around for two thousand years—we have a collision of desires taking place in one meal. We have God’s desire that he says is definitively, eternally for you. He wants you. The table reminds us not just that God loves you, but it reminds you that God likes you! So much that he wants to be with you. And he wants to be with you so much that he’d give his own body and own blood in order to make that happen. But the table is also a collision of his desire with our desire. When we take of this cup and eat of this bread and proclaim his death until he comes again, we align our hearts and say, “God, we want what you want.” We want your way, because we believe you’re good, and we believe you’re beautiful, and we believe you’re true. And when you want that, you aren’t wanting something that God doesn’t want for you. You are wanting something that God is working inside of you to want. When you come to the table this morning, come wanting. Come hungry. Come restless, knowing that our hearts only find their rest in Him. Come and be filled, by this God who says, “I want you and I invite you, want me.”
Jesus, we do. We come this morning, with all of our desires, we don’t put any of them aside. Except to surrender them down to you, but we own them, they’re ours. If they’re disordered, would you work them out? If they’re ordered, would you help us own them, celebrate them? As we come this morning, would we be reminded that your desire is for us, and if we desire you too, we’re aligning with what you’re working in us. So thank you, Spirit. Do your work, we pray. In Jesus’s name. Amen.
