Have you found yourself coming to walk in the same paths as your parents without consciously choosing to do so?
My father has long treasured the book of Proverbs and has quoted his favorite verses as long as I can remember. As I recently made my way through Proverbs as part of my morning meditation and prayer routine, I found rich wisdom in it. It’s becoming one of my favorite books of the Bible.
The twenty-seventh chapter’s nineteenth verse has begun to put down particularly deep roots in me:
“As water reflects the face, so one’s life reflects the heart.”
What kind of heart are our lives reflecting?
The Bible refers to the heart a great deal. The word “heart” is referred to in the Bible, depending on the translation, easily over 500 times, according to Christian Bible Reference.
There are also many definitions of the heart as it is used in the Bible. I would suggest that it is a combination of one’s character, will, and emotions. It is the center of who we are.
Read the Bible carefully and you’ll see that the nature of people’s hearts is at the center of many stories.
When David reacts in anger to Nathan’s story of the rich man who has stolen and then cooked a poor family’s beloved lamb, it is David’s heart that is on display. When the story leads David to then confess his own sin of adultery with Bathsheba, it is David’s heart that has been moved. And the fact that his heart would respond to the crushing realization of what he had done in the context of God’s moral framework is one of the reasons we sympathize with David. Our hearts resonate with his heart.
As you read the Gospels, I believe you’ll find that Jesus is sympathetic or antagonistic to people depending on the orientation of their hearts.
People who are humble and who recognize their own failings or whose hearts are full of adoration for God receive his kind attention. On the other hand, Jesus jolted people who had allowed their hearts to become cold and selfish. People who had become bound up in preserving institutional power or in pursuing purity without being balanced by mercy find themselves exposed to Jesus’ anger and criticism.
Jesus models for us the hearts we should have – full of love but also tenacious and passionately committed to God’s will and kingdom and intentions for this world.
In his book Renovation of the Heart: Putting on the Character of Christ, Dallas Willard wrote a profound statement about Jesus:
“The revolution of Jesus is in the first place and continuously a revolution of the human heart or spirit. It did not and does not proceed by means of the formation of social institutions and laws, the outer forms of our existence, intending that these would then impose a good order of life upon people who come under their power. Rather, his is a revolution of character, which proceeds by changing people from the inside through ongoing personal relationship to God in Christ and to one another. It is one that changes their ideas, beliefs, feelings, and habits of choice, as well as their bodily tendencies and social relations. It penetrates to the deepest layers of their soul.”
Much of my life I have heard little of this from churches I have attended as there is a focuse on holding true to correct doctrines on grace, sin, the Trinity, and other topics. But there is little or no attention given to encouraging members to honestly and carefully examine the state of their hearts and to helping them deliberately open their hearts to transformation by God.
I am 100% convinced that a whole Christian faith must also be rooted in what Dallas Willard calls the revolution of the heart. A whole faith church would be intentional about this in its worship, instruction, and culture.
If Jesus is renovating, remaking, and revolutionizing our hearts, then our lives could not help but reflect that. And not just the lives we live in public, but all the spheres of our lives. At home. With our families. With our friends. On business trips. In our politics. On the Internet.
And, without doubt, in our relationship with the life of God’s earth.
How could it be otherwise?
How can one be loving, compassionate, patient, and possessing of self-control and yet deliberately and unnecessarily maim the land, water, and living things around us? How can one be fiercely, self-sacrificingly loyal to God’s desire for how all of life should be in this world and go along with systems and culture that methodically destroy what God has given us to carefully shepherd?
More than in any other area of our lives, we have put blinders on our hearts when it comes to our relationship with non-human life around us.
Our human tendency, of course, is to resort to rationalization when there is an aspect of our life in which we do not live by the values to which we say we are committed with our hearts and minds. This is easier to do when the mainstream culture and even the mainstream church culture around us accept and even promote those rationalizations.
But God wants our whole life, our whole heart.
And when you open yourself to God’s love and God’s spirit, your heart will begin to be remade and your life cannot help but show it.
Every corner of your life.
What kind of heart is your life reflecting?
What kind of heart is the corner of God’s living earth that you are impacting with your life reflecting?
