Deeper Change Than We Can Imagine!

Father has had me re-reading Emotionally Healthy Spirituality and Renovation of the Heart in Daily Practice of late and has added a book on parenting that I recommend highly, Loving Our Kids on Purpose by Danny Silk. All of these books in one way or another deal with issues of the heart, so it was no surprise to me this morning that God went after mine again as I was praying for some of those I love.

Now that I know (and remember most of the time) that God loves me, likes me, treasures me and is never disappointed in me, I find myself more willing to yield to His gentle but persistent probing! So as I was attempting to pray for one close to me, I stopped when He probed my motives as I was praying. I was shocked to see how mixed my motives were as I prayed! (I know this is never true for you, of course!). Father showed me that I was praying partially out of true love for this person, but I was also equally praying for relief from the anxiety I was feeling. Indeed, if I looked carefully (which He helped me to do!) I found that I was actually praying not from a place of full identification of the other person's needs and concerns but more from my own need to have my worries about this person relieved!

Now believe it or not I was encouraged by this revelation. First because there was a time that I wouldn't have noticed such a subtle mixture of motives even if God had shouted it to me! Second, I was encouraged because I now know that when God reveals, God heals! And sure enough, as I stopped and looked within and allowed Holy Spirit to lead me, I was able to find a place of compassion and petition that was much more oriented towards the one for whom I was praying. Furthermore, I am, of course, going to be more aware of this in the future! God is so very, very good! Finally, I was encouraged because I know that in revealing this to me, God is answering my frequent prayer to teach me to pray in a way that leads to clear and wonderful answers.

Ah, dear ones! God is always after the heart! And much of what "church" in all of its forms seems to focus on is behavior, activity, etc. I wrote my personal story above to give yet one more example as to what this might look like. Discipleship is all about heart and far more about getting heaven into us than getting us into heaven. Why is it so important for us to get this? Consider the following thoughts about this from Renovation of the Heart in Daily Practice, chapter 57, that I read this morning (not surprisingly, before I started my prayer time!).

A fundamental mistake of the conservative side of the Western Church is that its basic goal is to get people into heaven rather than to get heaven into people. This creates groups of people who may be ready to die but clearly are not ready to live. They rarely can get along with one another, much less with those "outside." Often their most intimate relations are tangles of reciprocal harm, coldness and resentment -- righteous meanness. They have become "Christian" without being Christlike.

The way to get as many people into heaven as you can is to get heaven into as many people as you can -- that is, to follow the path of genuine spiritual transformation or full-throttle discipleship to Jesus Christ. When we are counting results, we need to remember the many people (surrounded by churches) who will not be in heaven because they have never, to their knowledge, seen the reality of Christ in a living human being. These lives of the "converted" testify against the reality of "the life that is life indeed" (1 Timothy 6:19, paraphrased).

Ouch! Dallas Willard nails it one more time. But again, please read this from the perspective of God's love for you as well as His never-ending commitment to capture your heart with His grace and power!

Tom, one of Abba's little boys