Growing Good Hearts

“Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters.” (Colossians 3:23)

There’s quite a lot in this verse. When I first read this, I took it to mean that whatever work I am doing, whether it’s in my job or at home, I should give it 100 percent effort with 100 percent attention, and I found that to be quite off-putting if I’m honest! How about 80 percent, and I’ll also listen to a podcast?

Then later on my understanding of it shifted, and I thought the way to apply it would be that whatever I am doing I am bringing the Lord to mind, maybe saying a little prayer to remind me I’m doing it for him. Or even just saying, “this is for you, Lord!”

And then later, I even tied this into God’s divine providence by reminding myself that whatever was in front of me to do was actually provided by God, and I should give him thanks.

Now, all of these ways of understanding it are good and true, but I hadn’t noticed that the verse didn’t just contain something ‘to do’, it also contained a command of what ‘not to do’. We are not to do it for human masters.

I think it all comes back to the nature of God’s love. Jesus tells us that by his free choice, not determined by human action, God causes his sun to shine on both the righteous and the unrighteous.

God doesn’t love us or save us based on our performance. The good work that God does is not based on who deserves it or has earned it. He does it because that’s who he is, its his nature, and he does it for His glory.

So when we say we are not working for human masters, we are not saying we give them the middle finger. We do our best, but not for human approval, and not to reward some perceived good behaviour, and we stop withholding our love and charity to those we feel no longer deserve it.

We do good to become more like God, who is good for goodness sake. We are doing it for Him, and we are also doing it for our neighbour, but not based on their behaviour, but based on who we are becoming in Christ.

Jesus taught us to love our enemies, and not just love those who love us. Because, if we hate those who hate us, then we become just like them and hate grows in our hearts also. God wants something better for us. He wants love to grow there instead. So that is why we do good, not to repay something, but because God wants love to grow in our hearts.

We are all terrible at this, and me especially, but I am trying to learn to do good because its good. It can be very hard at times, when someone has offended or hurt us, to keep loving and serving them as best we can. I think we just have to try, little by little.

I think there can be incredible freedom in this, as we are no longer slaves to what others think of us, looking to God alone for approval, and the state of our hearts is no longer controlled by how others treat us, tossed around by our surroundings like a leaf in the wind. We begin to exchange our impulsive, reactive heart for a quiet heart that is responsive to the Lord.

No Morality Without God

Without the existence of God, there would be no possibility of the human race improving in morality over time.

If good and evil is just something human beings create in their minds, if morality is just subjective, then how can it improve over time, if there is no objective standard to compare it against?

If I paint a portrait of you, but I don’t know what you look like, how can I improve its accuracy over time and say, “now I have really done it!” if I still don’t know what you look like? Wouldn’t I just be making it up?

Deep down, we know that some things really are good and some things really are evil, and it’s not just something we’re making up. The conscience within us attests to this, when it holds us to a higher standard outside ourselves. Or why would we feel shame for our actions, if we can just decide what is good anyway?

Things like morality are not material things that we can hold in our hands, but they are without form or shape, they are intangibles, objects of the mind. And so if a morality exists that is universal to us all, then it must exist inside a mind that is beyond our own yet feeds us all.

It must be the very source of the truth and goodness within us, that we totally depend on for these things, as do the entire human race.

This mind must be the absolute ideal of moral perfection, if it contains the measuring stick itself that every intention and action must be judged in light of.

I’d call it the mind of God.

The World to Come

When you look at the world, other people, or even yourself, do you see things that shouldn’t be so? Do you see things that are wrong or immoral?

If you do, this implies there is a way things should be.

If you take this to its full extent, there is an ideal way the entire world and everyone in it should be. A pure, good, moral world, where there is no evil or suffering.

The Bible has a word for this ideal world, and it’s called “heaven.”

But when you look at the world, you see that in many ways it is far from this ideal world that you think it should be.

The Bible would call this “the fallen world”.

As human beings, do you think we could ever bring this heaven we long for into reality in its fullness?

But if this ideal world has never existed and never will exist, then why do we long for it, and why do we believe in our hearts that it should be so?

If something or some being could bring it about, what would that being have to be like?

Its power would be beyond that we could imagine.

Its authority over all of nature would have to be unequaled.

It would have to be motivated by love and justice to even want to bring it about.

And it would require unimaginable wisdom to know how it should all be done.

Such a being couldn’t exist within time and space itself, but would have to be outside them in order to mend them.

And it couldn’t be contaminated by the problems it seeks to correct, and so would have to be perfect itself.

Would it be okay to call this being “God?” And would we be forgiven in longing for this God to come and set the world right?

Surrender the Sword

Without Him, we can do nothing. (John 15:5)

For in Him, we live and move and have our being. (Acts 17:28)

This is something, if we want to, we learn in deepening levels throughout the course of our lives.

For most of us, we learn it best in those moments we feel we are facing insurmountable odds, when life has become too tall for us to climb over.

It’s in those moments that we most often

remember

to pray.

And like a young child wielding a sword too heavy for us to swing, we put it back in our Father’s hands.

Practical Providence

God is so fully and completely in control of our lives it goes so far that he even micromanages the number of hairs on our heads and appoints the times that each of them will fall.

Now that I have your attention, I want to share with you a deeply contemplative and deeply practical teaching on the providence of God. Now some of you won’t believe this and thats fine and I wish you well, but this is a teaching that really enriches my life and I wanted to share it.

I have come to believe that God directs and governs all things, down to the smallest details of our lives. This God, who in the beginning brought order out of chaos in his grand act of first creation, is still creating today, and is sustaining order in all things through his wise governance.

God doesn’t just create as a one-time event and then step back, only to intervene again once every few hundred years or so. God is the ground of everything. Without his life constantly filling all, all is death. When God steps back, everything turns to dust. When he loosens his grip, everything falls to pieces. He is the constant maintainer and administrator. He is the gardener of all that exists.

If this isn’t your God, you cannot say God is your provider. To provide for your every need takes nothing short of complete divine providence. Think of what had to happen in the course of human history to even put a sandwich in front of you. If he’s behind the sandwich coming to you, he’s behind everything. Think about it.

From his hand comes the good and the bad in our lives. As Job said, “shall we accept only good from God and not evil?” When we recognize this, we rightly recognize the good in our lives as blessing from God, and the bad in our lives as trials that work to form good within us. Whatever situation we find ourselves in, we can be content with the lot God has given us. “This person I find challenging has been put in my life by God! This line I’m having to wait in has been given to me by God!”

No longer focusing on how other people or our circumstances are harming us, but instead choosing to see God’s hand at work in all he sets before us, and surrendering ourselves to His will for our lives. As the Psalmist writes, “all the days ordained for me were written in your book, before one of them came to be.” Just take that sentence into your lives. Everything that happens to you today was first written in his book. Take a deep breath and relax! He is the author of your life! And He’s been doing this a long time.

We can be like Joseph, who chose to forgive his brothers who had sold him into slavery, because he chose to see what God was doing through these events, and not what his brothers had done. As he told them, “what you meant for evil, God meant for good.”

We learn to surrender and come into the rhythm of God’s plan, to slow down and align with his cosmic patience. Everything has been set in its proper order, as the author of Ecclesiastes tells us, “there is a time for everything.” Everything happens in its God-appointed time. There is a time to live and a time to die. A time to speak and a time to be silent.

We let go and let God. We trust in his timing in all things, and invite a new peace and freedom from anxiety into our lives.

There is a great resistance to this teaching for many, even though it pervades the Bible and the writings of the early church fathers. There is a fear this means that God causes evil or chooses not to save some people, or that we don’t really have free will. But none of this is true, because the Bible affirms that God is good, that he desires all to be saved, and that humans are given a choice and are responsible for their actions.

How these things hold together is a mystery to me, but I choose to hold them together in tension, rather than insist that reality conforms to what I can currently understand, because the Bible teaches both. God is seated on his throne, and our choices still matter.

Anchor

To say “I don’t worship the Bible, I worship Jesus” makes absolutely no sense at all! The Bible is the revealed word of God. No one has ever said “let’s worship a bunch of paper pages.” You follow the Bible BECAUSE you follow God. If the King sends you a letter of instructions and you don’t follow it, and then the King comes to visit you and asks you why, he’s going to think you’re a fool if you say to him, “I don’t follow a letter, I follow you!” How absurd that would be! For the Christian, our Bible is our anchor, because we know the words COME FROM God, and we follow God.

Intimacy with God

I wanted to write about intimacy with God and how I feel God is teaching it to me at the moment.

There are two areas that I’m focusing on:

1) God is willing to draw near to me
2) How I can draw near to God

The first is how God is willing to draw near to me. If I do something I shouldn’t have or I feel I am failing in some way, not quite living up to the life God has for me, I feel as though I can’t come to God, that I’m not worthy or that it makes me hypocritical to do wrong and then worship Him. This is how I often feel, but it is a misunderstanding on my end about how God views me. The thing is, I have never been perfect in this life, even when I’m outwardly doing the right things, there is a brokenness on the inside, a sickness in my heart. God has always known this, and it hasn’t stopped him from seeking a relationship with me and calling me into his presence. I act as if God is just looking at my outward behaviour, but the Bible says that God looks at the heart, and that its out of the heart that evil thoughts, words and actions come.

So God is looking at my heart, and there has always been a huge gulf between Himself and I, when it comes to holiness of heart, but it’s never stopped him. Jesus said, “I have not come to heal the healthy but the sick.” He is said to be “a friend of sinners.” Of course, God doesn’t want me to sin, to do things that hurt myself and others, he wants me to live my best life, but even when I’m not faithful he remains faithful. He is committed to me, through the good and the bad, the highs and the lows, He is the One Constant that does not change and his love endures forever.

The second thing is how I can draw near to God. The ways I often want to do this reveal my lack of understanding. I want God to give me a big sign that I cannot doubt. I want him to shout at me, so I cannot miss him. I want him to speak with a human voice and hug me in a human form. I want him to interact with me as a human does. And sometimes God will do this, he will shout, he will show a great sign, he will blow me over like a hurricane. This is where he sometimes begins, but it’s not where he wants to end. God comes down to my level, but what he really wants is to lift me up with him. It’s not enough for Him to change for my sake, but I must change for his sake. Jesus said that “blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.” God can shout, but if I can quieten my heart, I can hear his gentle whisper instead. Sometimes I cry out to God, I beg and plead with Him that he would speak to me, but in those moments I’m not realizing that the barrier is not on his end, it’s on mine. How God wants to connect is deeper than words, he wants a real “heart to heart.”

When Moses was about to part the Red Sea, so the Israelites could flee safely from their Egyptian captors, he cried out to God for help, but God told him to stop crying out to him, but to move the people forward, to raise his staff and stretch out his hand and the sea would be parted. Interestingly, in the verse preceding this, Moses tells the people the Lord will fight for them, and that they only need to be still.

It’s not enough for me to shout out to Him with my words, from a place of anxiety and frustration. Rather, I must still my heart, I must come to him, bowed low, in humility, in openness, in honesty, in quietness and trust. I must seek the obedience that comes not from merely outwardly keeping rules, but the obedience that arises from a place of humility, knowing how utterly incapable I am in my own strength, and how completely I need to depend upon him. I rest myself in his mercy, knowing that his love for me does not depend on my behaviour but on his own character. It’s just who he is, the beautiful merciful God who delights when his children come to him in humility. Then there is a new kind of obedience that comes from the peace of knowing I am loved, an obedience that comes easy, a yoke that is not heavy but light. It’s not the human-to-human relationship I always thought I wanted, but it’s something so much more. He speaks in a language I had not known before, but I discover it is the most beautiful. He says, “my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways.” And, “My peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.”

Why do we call God, “Father?”

Why do we call God, “Father?” One reason is there is a deep question within each of us: “who am I and where do I come from?” The atheist tells us we come from nothing, that we are a cosmic accident with no real origin.

Does that satisfy your question and your longing? It doesn’t mine. To say we come from nothing is to dismiss our deep question, to consider it meaningless. But something within us knows it is the most important question we will ever ask in life.

Who am I and where do I come from?

Life doesn’t come from non-life. The animate doesn’t come from the inanimate. The creation is never greater than its creator.

Who carved this that sits in my chair? Who painted this face and its expressions? Who sketched these dreams and brewed these feelings that bubble up in me?

There is a beauty in all life; the traces of the hidden Father. You feel it from time to time, that there is more to everything than they’ve been telling you.

There is a way to meet him, the One who knows you and seeks you back, but the very life you have wrapped around yourself all these years will strike out to stop you, if you take a single step in His direction.

But you must push forward. If you do not, you take the biggest risk of all, that you will never know the answer to your deepest question: “who am I and where do I come from?”

Unsolicited Advice

I try to make a point of not giving unsolicited advice or criticism. I try, but I probably fail every day, at least in my mind when I think of others. Even if I am well-meaning, it just comes across as self-righteous or ignorant.

We really only see a small sliver of another person’s soul or experience of life, so we really shouldn’t comment when we don’t know what we’re talking about.

I think a better way is to be available to someone as a friend, but not to be pushy or assume we know how they need to change. If someone asks us for advice, then sure, but most of the time people just want us to listen, not try to fix them.

Sometimes people are going through trials we have no idea about, and are learning lessons we’ve never learnt and growing in ways we’ve never grown. If on the outside they appear to be struggling and even failing at life, we shouldn’t be too quick to assume we’re doing better than them.

Taking the Humble Chair

It’s so easy to come to the Christian life with that same old worldly mindset we always had. Without even realizing it, we can view the Christian life as a ladder of progression we must climb to get on top. First, we enter the door as a nobody, and then perhaps we get noticed and are asked to lead a meeting one week. Then we find ourselves leading a team. Then teaching. Then mentoring. Then becoming an Elder. A pastor. A senior pastor. When we are noticed and esteemed and given positions of importance, we feel good about ourselves, as though we’ve achieved something in the Christian life. But if we are overlooked, forgotten, obscure, then we are a terrible failure.

At one time, a couple of his disciples were having an argument and they came to Jesus and asked him, “who will be greatest in the kingdom of heaven?” They wanted to know how they could progress and achieve some level of importance. But Jesus motions a child to come beside him, and he says to the disciples, “unless you become like one of these little children, you will not even ENTER the kingdom of heaven!” Unless you give up your status and become like a child, one who has the least status in society, you will not even enter.

And that’s how God works, we hear it again and again, those who try to raise themselves up get put down, but those who accept the lowly position, who take the humble chair, God raises them up in due time. It’s about obscurity. It’s not something we want, but it’s a great defense against pride, which is so dangerous for our spiritual life.

We learn in the story of David and Goliath, that God had David living in obscurity, the youngest brother, tending the sheep, unknown and unthanked. It was there, in the midst of obscurity, that God trained him for the future he had planned for him, where God himself would raise him up. It was in this place he learned to use his slingshot and to trust completely in the Lord, when facing predators like lions that were threatening his flock. Skills he would oneday use to defeat the mighty Goliath.

Jesus came washing feet, and when he died on the cross he submitted himself even unto death, as the Bible tells us. By worldly standards, he was no great success. He was ignored, criticized, hated, spat at, punished and murdered. He took this lowly position, but was raised to life three days later.

There is a scene from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade that always stuck in my memory. It’s at the end of the movie, and Indiana and an evil Nazi have both stumbled upon The Fountain of Youth, which would give the drinker everlasting life, but they needed to choose the right cup to drink from it. Now there were hundreds of cups, of all shapes and styles, some simple and some grand. And the Nazi chose the most extravagant cup, the cup of a king. So he takes the cup and scoops up the water and drinks it. And sure enough, his face melts off and it’s pretty gruesome. “You have chosen poorly!” Indiana remembered that Jesus was a carpenter, and so he chose the most humble and simple cup that looked to be crafted from wood, and it turned out that he chose well.

It’s not wrong to be a leader, but when we try to raise ourselves up it all goes wrong. But when God raises you up, it’s unstoppable, so it’s better we wait for that.

As the words of Jesus go:

“When someone invites you to a wedding feast, do not take the place of honor, for a person more distinguished than you may have been invited. If so, the host who invited both of you will come and say to you, ‘Give this person your seat.’ Then, humiliated, you will have to take the least important place. But when you are invited, take the lowest place, so that when your host comes, he will say to you, ‘Friend, move up to a better place.’ Then you will be honored in the presence of all the other guests.

For all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.” (Luke 14:8-11)