Does God Really Care About Our Hearts?

Does God really care about our hearts? I find myself needing to return to that question over and over again. I know what my head says. I can rattle off the verses and even give personal examples of ways in which I've seen God care for me. But to actually put it into practice is something else entirely.

In my previous post, I mentioned this quote from Ruthless Trust: "You will trust [God] to the degree that you know you are loved by Him."

As I've been playing that thought over in my head and praying through it, I've come to realize that it cuts to the heart of this issue. There are areas where I can trust God easily, where I truly believe that He does care about my heart and then there are areas that I struggle even to pray about. I want to seize control and leave God out. The difference is my view of God's love. When I look at the areas where trust comes easy, I can clearly see His love. I don't doubt it for a second. And when I look at the areas where I struggle for control I find that something inside of me isn't at all certain of God's love. Thus the way this question plays out in my life is, "Does God care about all of my heart or just the parts I feel measure up?"

It's important to remember the role of the heart in Christianity and to do that we need to revisit the history of our race. Adam and Eve were not created as fallen creatures. They were whole and perfect until they chose sin over God. Now we are all fallen but that was not what we were meant to be. There is a core to who we are that God is desperate to restore to it's unfallen state. The core is our hearts. It is God's craftsmanship and He loves it passionately.

With all that in mind, I still find I struggle with knowing God's love. He may love that core of me but I'm a long way from being restored to what I should have been. And so the question becomes, does God love our hearts even in their fallen state? I believe He does. It is here we see the power of the cross. The moment we accept the free gift of salvation we are committed to our restoration through the blood of Christ. He has now begun the good work and He will be faithful to complete it. Sin was not the beginning of the story and, thank God, it does not have to be the end.

None of this is to say that God approves of or turns a blind eye to our sin. How could He? If He did then either it would not be sin or He would not be God. But it is to say that He sees through our sin and to the core of who we are. The goal is not to ignore or deny sin, it is to be pulled out of it and into a place where our sin is a distant and forgotten nightmare, cast as far as the east is from the west.

Holding strong to the belief that God truly cares about our hearts is essential to joy. If you do not believe God loves you then what do you have to be joyful about? The reason we can rejoice in the Lord always is because we know that He is faithful to pull us out of our sinful, fallen state and into Aslan's Country.

Even when it is difficult or even impossible to see it, God is passionately in love with us. He cares for every part of our hearts and because of that He is trustworthy. To know this is to glimpse as much of the love of God as we can in this life. To know this is an essential step to knowing life and joy to the fullest. Walking with God in a way that recognizes these truths is not easy to have or to hold onto but it is available. I'm beginning to find it in my life and I pray you do too.

Thoughts For This Week

These are a few of thoughts that God's brought to my mind for this week. I'm hoping to write about these at some point but for the moment I'm still in the process of thinking and praying through them.

1. I believe that in this world we are guilty of being discontented but at the same time are too easily satisfied. Contentment and satisfaction are not synonyms. Learning the difference is a key to finding life and to knowing true joy.

2. The more I pray about joy and examine it in my own life, the more I begin to realize that I treat joy as a guilty pleasure. How can we be, and what does it mean to be, joyful in a joyless and fallen world?

3. From Ruthless Trust, "You will trust [God] to the degree that you know you are loved by Him"

Busyness As a Substitute For Purpose

A couple of nights ago I was listening to the Ransomed Heart Podcast. One of the guys on the show, Craig McConnell, made the comment that he often times finds himself turning to busyness to make himself feel purposeful. Hearing that knocked me flat. It's so true and I don't think I've ever even considered it before.

I think this really ties in with a lot of the issues God's been speaking to me about, and I've been writing about, lately. If I don't trust God, if I don't having His joy, if I don't believe He has a purpose arranged for me, then I am invariably going to turn to other things to act as a cheap substitute for purpose.

This goes hand in hand with the post on purpose I made a couple weeks ago where I talked about how finding our purpose will require us to fight a multi-front battle with the enemy. If we do not trust God to lead us to our purpose, we will turn to busy distractions. If we feel overwhelmed by our purpose and decide it's our job to single-handedly right all wrongs, we'll collapse under the pressure and settle instead for busyness. Even if we know our purpose and are living in it, the lies of the enemy are constantly there telling us it's too hard, it's beyond us, that God isn't trustworthy. If we listen to them, even for a moment, it becomes so easy to abandon purpose and descend into distraction.

I don't want to live this way anymore. I don't want to waste a single second of my life hiding in distraction. God has so much more for me than that. Again I find myself asking, do I really trust God with my life and my purpose? Even when "no" seems to only possible answer to that question, God's grace is sufficent to pull us back out of busyness and into purpose if only we're willing to trust.

God's Plans For Us

It seems to me that a lot of Christians, including myself, often find themselves living under a cloud of guilt when it comes to the work Christ has for us. We seem to know that there's something we ought to do with our lives, after all the Bible makes it clear that God has plans for our lives, but what those plans might be remains elusive. Rick Warren's The Purpose Driven Life has remained a best seller for half a decade now precisely because of this issue. While I have no big issue with the book and feel there are many good things it, I do think it's safe to say that it hasn't been the final word on this issue. Many of us finished all forty days of the book and a week later felt just as confused, purposeless and guilty as we did before we began.

In finding our purpose, the devil is going to hit us with lie filled guilt trips from both sides of the issue. One moment he whispers "You're lazy, pathetically so. You're not anywhere close to where God wants you and you'll never find what He has for you." The next it's "You have nothing to offer. If you really believe this whole business of God having a plan for you, then you're kidding yourself. As a Christian you're a worthless failure." I mention these two lies here at the outset because I want to make it clear that if we're going to move past these lies and into freedom we're going to have fight a two front war with the enemy. We're going to have to break the agreements we've made with these lies if we are to have any hope of seeing the truth God has for us about our purpose.

Here's the good news: God does have a plan for all of us but guilt is not a part of it. Nor is that plan meant to be yet another thing to check off on the to do list. It's not meant to be something that wears us down and runs us dry. It's meant to be something that makes us come alive. We see the word plan and we immediately think endless duty. But what God wants is to make that plan come alive in us through the passions and desires He has given us.

I believe that to find our purpose and life we need to start living through our passions and desires. The obvious objection to that is that it sounds like a disaster waiting to happen. But our desire is not wrong, it's just fallen and Christ can redeem it, transform it. Once we've received Him our heart is no longer dreadfully wicked. He's removed it and replaced it with a heart of flesh. He gave us our passions and desires and He wants to use them for His kingdom and to make us come alive. (for more on this I strongly recommend Desire by John Eldredge).

Even after we realize what we're passionate about and how those passions lead us to our purpose, the devil does not quit. One of my big struggles in life is with being easily overwhelmed and that plays in big time here. Whatever work God has for me, I am just one small part of His plan but the devil wants to convince me that it's all riding on my back. His goal is to make me forget I live in a bigger story, that I'm only one small part of a part in the Body of Christ.

One example of how this plays out is in helping the needy. The devil will convince you that it's your job to go solve the entire issue of modern poverty but maybe all God has for you here is to help your struggling neighbor. But even if He does have a bigger role for you, we need to remember that He is in control. As the Sunday School song says, "He's got the whole world in His hands." Our purpose, great or small, is to be a part of His larger purpose. To get past this lie we're going to need to let go of pride and step into trust.

The other major trap we fall into is failing to see that God doesn't always have some big job for us to do. Sometimes He just wants us to rest in Him. That time of resting may be for a week, a year or it could even be that your purpose has shifted altogether and you're meant to spent the rest of your life resting in Him and loving Him. We tend to freak out when this happens and think we're doing something wrong. Using the example of helping the needy again, maybe you struggling neighbor has stopped struggling and God hasn't yet show you who He now wants you to help. That's ok. It's part of the Christian walk.

I believe that not only are these times of rest inevitable, they are essential to centering us once again on Christ. The work God has for us is important but at the center of the Christian life is passionate relationship with God. Everything else flows out of that, including our purpose. If we're not centered on that relationship whatever we're doing, no matter how needed, will start to become about us and not about God. Will give our hearts to the work rather than to the one who gave us the work.

Finally I would say that we need to be careful about being too anxious in finding our purpose. God has promised that He knows the plans He has for us but we're not going to get too far in finding them out for ourselves so long as we're nervously sitting around wondering if we're doing a good job of finding our purpose. I believe that if you really want to find what you're supposed to be doing your best bet is to go to the one who already knows what it is. Let Him speak to you, heal you, and lead you in whatever He has for you to do.

Trust Revisited

A few weeks back I wrote about trust. It's a topic God has been speaking to me a lot about lately and I wanted to revisit the issue now. No doubt this won't be the last time I'll be coming back to it. I don't claim to have anymore of a complete view of trust now than the last time I wrote on it. But I do want to share a little of what God has shared with me in the last few weeks.

I just finished reading Ruthless Trust by Brennan Manning. I love the view of trust found in combining it with a word like ruthless. It suggests that to get through this life, to really trust God in the face of all the pain, sorrow and fear we experience, is going to take a fierceness. We're going to need to approach trusting God savagely, giving no ground. Yet at the same time, the ultimate goal is to be able to rest in the hands of the Father. In a sense, we must fight the lies of the enemy so that we can stop fighting the beautiful truths of God.

One thing the book really exposed to me is just how backward we have our priorities when it comes to trust. Manning writes, "Ruthless trust ultimately comes down to this: faith in the person of Jesus and hope in his promise. In spite of all disconcerting appearances, we stare down death without nervousness and anticipate resurrection solely because Jesus has said, 'You have my word on it.'"

Like most Christians, I've had my doubts in my faith. But by and large I am able to say, without reservation, that I believe I will go to Heaven when I die because of what Jesus did on the cross. I am willing to trust my immortal soul on the belief that Jesus really did what the Gospel's say He did and that it was enough. I've staked everything on this and if it's wrong all I have is the vague hope I'll get lucky. But despite the high stakes, I feel very calm trusting in this. I believe it's true.

So if I'm willing to so calmly trust what will happen to me when I die, why is it so tough for me to believe that God is going to provide work for me next month? Why do I wake up in the morning knowing I have a meeting later in the day and feel I'm doomed to failure? Why do I spend so much time worrying about my basic, earthly needs?

It's all backwards and as I begin to realize that the freedom I feel is unbelievable. Everything I need for eternity has been taking care of on the cross. God handled sin like it was nothing. He pinned it to the ground and took away its power. If He could do that then of course I can trust Him with all this other, smaller stuff.

The objection that rises in me at this point is, "that's nice but what about all that pain? What about the bad things that really do happen?" Manning doesn't side step that question at all in the book. Large sections are devoted to exactly that problem. And as he handles it, he shows that trusting God does not mean trusting that nothing bad will happen. It means trusting Him to carry us through the bad things, to work all things together for good. It's trusting that He is good in a world that is fallen. It's trusting that if God allows evil in our lives, He is faithful to walk beside us through all of it. (Note: For more on the problem of evil I would strongly recommend The Problem of Pain by C.S. Lewis)

If trust is something you have a tough time with, read this book. It's powerful and life changing. And it doesn't hurt that Brennan Manning is an amazing writer. If you haven't encountered any of his stuff, this is a great place to start.

Trust: Our View and God's

I came across a great quote yesterday in George MacDonald's Diary of an Old Soul. It goes, "To trust is to step forward out of the night." It's the sort of quote that's easy to nod along to and take as a nice but meaningless platitude without really thinking about it. But if we're really honest, I'd say for most of us our view of trust, or at least the way we act it out, is exactly the opposite.

I'm reminded of the story of Peter walking on the water. From his perspective, following the voice of the master, trusting Jesus, was to step out of the safety of the boat and into the storm. That's the human view of trust. From Jesus's perspective Peter was stepping out of the storm and into peace. What Peter failed to see was that trust didn't mean stepping into the darkness of the storm, it meant stepping out of the night.

That's a tough one to swallow, or at least for me it can be. It doesn't make any sense. It goes against everything we think of as rational. And even here trust is required. Are we willing to step out of the benighted state of our limited reasoning and trust that from God's perspective things do make sense even when we can't see it?

Annie and I have been (imperfectly) living this out over the last month and a half. As many of you know, I'm self employed. June saw the end of a major project I've been working on for the last year as well as a few other billing reductions. Don't get me wrong, I'm very aware of how blessed we are. I know there are so many people in tougher positions than this. Way tougher. But with a new house and a baby on the way, that kind of uncertainty can be rough. At times it's felt like the boat is crumbling away beneath us and we're heading out into the storm whether we like it or not. Trusting is tough.

But here's the neat part. God is extremely faithful. Before we bought this house we prayed long and hard about it. One of the things God told me again and again was "there will always be enough." And there is. I don't know where all the work is coming from but right now I'm busier than I've been in quite a while. New projects keep popping up at various clients. Just this morning I had a meeting where I had three new mini projects handed to me. Now my problem is how to balance it all!

We saw the same thing happen two years ago before we got married. Our biggest contract went away virtually over night. I had no idea what I was going to do from one week to the next but each week for three months I always had enough work. It was awesome to watch then and it's just as awesome now.

Living on the edge, stepping out of the night, is a neat place to be. Work is just one example of how God is teaching me about what trust really means. Trust isn't a bad thing that forces us into unpleasant situations. It's an opportunity for our Father to show how much He loves us. It's a chance to fall into His arms. I can't claim that I love the uncertainity (would that my faith might someday be so great!) but I can tell you God is faithful. He's worth trusting