A Deep Heart

   The heart is where we do life.  That's the best way I've heard the heart described, and it is an echo of Proverbs 4:23: "Above all, guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life".  The heart is the source of life, and as the same preacher who gave me that description of the heart said repeatedly, "You're life is going how your heart is going."
   How your heart is going...that's a good turn of phrase.  How is your heart going?  Many times you could probably say right away how it's going, especially if it's not going well.  A Broken Heart is probably one of the more common phrases ever coined for the heart, and this I guess because it happens so often.  We are pretty much born with broken hearts; that is the legacy of the Fall of Adam & Eve.  Thank God the second Adam came to mend that heart.
   But even a Believer will deal with heart problems.  Jesus came to make our spirits perfect, not our hearts.  The trick to living a Godly life is to get the heart in line with the spirit.  Obviously this doesn't always happen, and so many times our answer to how our heart is going is a pitiful one.  Most of the time, though, we don't really know how our heart is going.  David didn't, and that's why he said,

"Search me, O God, and know my heart!  Try me and know my thoughts!  And see if there be any grievous way in me, and lead me in the way of everlasting!" (Psalm 139:23-24)

David wasn't really sure what was in his heart, but he didn't want anything there that would get between him and God.  He wanted God to reveal his heart to him so that he could deal with it and continue "in the way of everlasting".
   This is a difficulty of the heart, that it is the source of the direction of our life, but yet many times we're not even sure what's in there.  And when you don't know what's in your heart, you're going to understand the circumstances of your life even less.  This is a problem, because often we go looking to solve the problems of our lives, and wind up dealing with symptoms (problems in life) rather than dealing with the causes (problems in the heart).
   We're not the only ones trying to get something from our own hearts, though.  If the heart is where we live life from, then the heart is necessarily important to people in our lives.  People are going to be looking for something in our hearts, as surely as we're going to be looking for something in theirs.  We're constantly looking for love, encouragement, empathy, joy, peace, answers, or anything we either want or expect to find.  And when we go looking in the hearts of others, we're either going to find something good, something bad, or nothing at all.  If we find nothing, it will never be because there is nothing there.  Rather, we will find nothing in a hard heart, because a hard heart will be unwilling to give us anything.
   We need to have healed, whole, and deep hearts as much for ourselves as for others.  Call it a mystery of God, but for some reason He finds it fit to use us in the lives of others, and if our hearts aren't deep, we're of little use.  If we don't have deep hearts, then people will come to us to drink and walk away thirsty.  In fact, if we don't have deep hearts we may very well find that people stop coming to us at all.
   But if we do have deep hearts, much will be given and much will be required.  We'll have people at our doorstep looking to receive what the Father has put in us.  Lives around us will be changed because our life will be going a good way.  When we let the Lord in, let him set up a home in our hearts, clean and uncluttered and pure, we become that vessel of love, encouragement, empathy, joy, peace, and answers that people are looking for.  We do the Lord's good work when we have a deep heart.
  

What Does God Owe Us?

   A friend of my wife's expressed a view that I don't think is all that uncommon among Christians.  The context is a difficulty in her life, and the pain that has come from it.  She is in a place where she believes that if God does not intervene and prevent a tragedy, then He tacitly approves it.  In her case, she seems to believe that God explicitly approved the tragedy because He didn't intervene.  Her words, in summary: "It's like God is sitting at His desk up there, and things come across, and He either approves or rejects them."
   My wife finds this view shocking, and for good reason.  The implication is not just that God allows bad things to happen, which is true, but that His inaction in preventing them is evidence of His de facto approval of them.  This perspective is not really any different than believing that God makes bad things happen, because if you believe that all of these bad things come by him for approval (i.e. no intervention) or rejection (i.e. intervention), then you believe that He essentially causes them to occur.
   I can't really blame my wife's friend for feeling this way.  She is hurt and she doesn't understand, and the thing she wants to understand is incredibly difficult (if not impossible) to understand anyway, even on a good day.  I've been asking myself questions she has probably asked, such as: Why do bad things happen to Believers?  Why does God intervene in some instances, but not others?  And when He doesn't intervene, does that somehow imply His approval?
   As Believers, we feel we should be protected against the bad things.  There's a belief within us that, now that we're saved, God is on our side and now we'll get His blessings.  With this belief there's a narrow vision of what His blessings are, usually restricted to A) delivery of the good things, and B) deliverance from the bad things.  While there is no doubt that these are blessings, a simplified set of expectations like this has the danger of breeding in us a sense of entitlement.  We feel entitled because we know that God can bless us in this way. But feeling entitled to God's blessings is dangerous.  We feel entitled to the blessings of God when we fail to consider or realize that, in reality, God doesn't owe us anything.
   Now, this is where I've butted up against my own understanding of who God is.  Not that I'm stuck, or that I have doubts about His goodness, but I'm reaching the limits of what I grasp about Him.  The fact is, He doesn't owe us anything, whether we're Believers or not.  In fact, if we assumed He did owe us something after we believed, then grace would cease to be grace, because it would become wages.  As Paul says in Romans 4:4,

"Now to the one who works, his wages are not counted as a gift but as his due."

That is, grace is a gift, not a wage, because we can't and don't work for it.  And the gift does not cease to be a gift after we believe; on the contrary.  By believing, we fully attain the gift.  We receive it and call it ours.
   This understanding of grace (that it is always a gift), this view of the blessings of God, does something in us if we receive it.  It supplants our expectation of getting what we believe we are owed.  It replaces our sense of entitlement with a proper fear, or reverence, of God: who He is, what He does, and (perhaps most importantly) peace with the probability that we will not know why He's done anything.  With God we have to be be content with knowing the who and the what, and not knowing the why.  That, perhaps, is a good definition of faith.
   Arguably we may have an idea of why God does things, but any intimation we have of the 'why' is really an interpretation of the 'who'.  God is love, so He loves.  The reason why He loves is because He is love.  But this interpretation of God's actions only goes so far in answering the 'why'.  God is also a healer, but He does not heal every time we ask.  So why does He heal sometimes, but at other times the illness or injury or disability remains?  That is a 'why' that may never be answered, and the health of your relationship with the Lord depends on your willingness to live without an answer.
  What we discover when we run into an unanswerable 'why' in our lives is revelatory of what we believe God owes us.  If during the trial we think God has run out on us, it probably means we felt entitled to His deliverance.  But if we find that God is there just as we knew He would be, and this even though we haven't been delivered from our difficulty, it probably means we understand the most important thing about God.  The most important thing about the Lord for us is not that He will always get us out of a jam, but that

"He will not leave you or forsake you." (Deut. 41:6)

   Entitlement is a precarious foundation for a relationship.  What draws us to God is not a promise of ease, but a promise of freedom.  He does not woo us with a vision of an easy life, but rather He woos us with the image of His son who bled and died to redeem us all.  It is tempting to conflate salvation with physical prosperity, but there is no guaranteed correlation.  Salvation does not equal deliverance from our worldly troubles.  Salvation equals adoption into the Father's heart, and that is more than we could ever have hoped for, worldly troubles or no.  Life is what God offers, and what He delivers, and we are never entitled to it.  But by grace He has given it, and that is good enough for me.  I don't want what I'm entitled to; I want grace.  I want the gift, the one that God doesn't owe me, but which He nevertheless willingly and extravagantly gives.