Tag Archive - grace

The Weaning Of My Heart

March 17, 2010 in Faith with 6 Comments

For those of you who live in the Brentwood and Franklin areas of Nashville, did you hear all the commotion last night???  Gunshots, helicopters, artillery fire, flashes of light from IEDs, what sounded like a brigade of foot soldiers… it was crazy!  Something straight out of an Oliver Stone epic, I tell you!  It was nearly deafening!  Surely you heard it and were wondering what in the world it was!  I’ll tell you what it was… it was the war in my heart.

When I decided to start blogging again, I purposed in my heart that I wanted to be very honest.  Since much of what I’m writing is very much what I am experiencing present-tense, it helps me weed out a lot of potential pretense and just share what is happening in my life and heart right now.  So, when I write about things like being in “the middle”, it’s because that is very much where I am.  The “middle” is rarely pretty or glamorous, but it is often the tension of “the middle” where the battles are fought, ground is taken and enemies conquered.

In his book Waking The Dead, John Eldredge said:

You won’t understand your life, you won’t see clearly what has happened to you or how to live forward from here, unless you see it as battle. A war against your heart.

As I’m walking out this “middle” season of my life right now, it is very much a constant heart battle between two realities… one that brings faith versus one that brings fear.  What I am learning is that both faith and fear produce worship.  Where my heart focuses, that will it also esteem.  Faith is a focus on the unseen, on God, which produces a heart posture of worship directed toward the object of my focus.  In that same way, fear is also focus and a form of worship as well.

I am not someone who is prone to much anxiety. Quite the contrary, actually.  By nature I’m a very passionate, but also very easy-going, guy.  As I was laying in bed last night trying to sleep, I was overwhelmed by an unrelenting barrage of “what ifs” and imagined outcomes.  I was restless, breathless a few times and consumed with an over-all sense of helplessness, not knowing what “the middle” may hold for me.  Through prayer and some time in my Bible, I regained my focus on God and found great comfort in 2 Corinthians 4 and Hebrews, as I reminded myself who God was and that He is in absolute control of what I’m walking through.

As I was recounting this experience to a friend this morning, I said something that gave me great perspective on what was happening.  “I know what this is,” I said. “It’s the process to wean my heart off dependence on everything and everyone but God.”

Wow.  There’s a visual for you.

I remember once hearing a preacher talk about the Hebrew roots of one of the names we use for God, El Shaddai. “El” points to the power of God Himself, while “Shaddai” is derived from another word meaning “breast”, which implies that “Shaddai” is “the breasted one” who nourishes, supplies and satisfies.  It signifies ultimate sufficiency.

By definition, to “wean” is to:

accustom (someone) to managing without something on which they have become dependent or of which they have become excessively fond

When trouble or struggle comes, our my tendency is to latch onto what may be comfortable or familiar.  These are usually things or people where we I have previously found a degree of solace, but which are ultimately insufficient to the anchoring of our my heart.  These things may pacify, but do not satisfy. I know for myself, when life happens and throws a curve ball, my heart can tend to latch on to anything but Jesus.  Meanwhile God, El Shaddai, the breasted one, stands by patiently desiring to wean my heart off what I can see in exchange for what I can’t see, the ultimate sufficiency that is found only in a heart that trusts and depends exclusively in Him.

So… what is your heart latched on to today?

 

Less Like Scars

March 10, 2010 in Faith with 2 Comments

Perspective is a funny thing.  I remember when I was a child, being so fascinated with those optical illusion puzzles where the static picture seemed to move and take on different shapes right before my eyes.  Or I could look at the picture for hours and see nothing a bunch of multi-colored circles, while someone else would look at it and see a lion, ready to pounce from the canvas onto the unsuspecting onlookers.

It is always intriguing to me when two or more people can discuss or see something and have very different thoughts and views on it.   It’s because of perspective.  The way I am likely to see or perceive a certain thing is largely due to my relationship to or view of that thing.  Perspective is powerful.

In his book The Knowledge Of The Holy, A.W. Tozer says:

“… the most portentous fact about any man is not what he at any given time may say or do, but what he in his deep heart conceives God to be like…  were we able to extract from any man a complete answer to the question, ‘what comes to your mind when you think about God?’ we might predict with certainty the spiritual future of that man.”

Essentially, he is saying that it’s not about the “what” that you do, but about “why” you do it.  It’s not about what you see but why you see it that way.  Perspective projects performance. In other words, how I see something is pretty indicative of how I will respond in my thoughts and behavior.

In his amazing book, “In A Pit With A Lion On A Snowy Day,” author Mark Batterson tags Tozer’s thoughts with the following:

How you think about God will determine who you become.  You aren’t just a byproduct of “nature” and “nurture”.  You are a byproduct of your God-picture.  And that internal picture of God determines how you see everything else.
Most of our problems are not circumstantial.  Most of our problems are perceptual.  Our biggest problems can be traced back to an inadequate understanding of who God is.  Our problems seem really big because our God seems really small. In fact, we reduce God to the size of our biggest problem.

That is powerful stuff right there.  In fact, what both Tozer and Batterson are saying is that the perspective we hold is the true barometer of our heart, which will, in turn, be the thermometer for our life.  A healthy “God-picture” or perspective will produce life, love, justice, grace and mercy because those things are the heartbeat of the Father.   At the same time, a warped “God-picture” will essentially preclude any of those same things from taking root and flourishing, not because of what we say or do, but because of what we, in our heart, believe.

Tozer goes on to say, a “low view of God… is the cause of a hundred lesser evils.” But a person with a high view of God “is relieved of ten thousand temporal problems.”

One of my favorite songs by Sara Groves is “Less Like Scars”, which is all about the power of perspective.  Here are some of the lyrics.

less like tearing, more like building / less like captive, more like willing
less like breakdown, more like surrender / less like haunting, more like remember
less like a prison, more like my room / it’s less like a casket, more like a womb
less like dying, more like transcending / less like fear, less like an ending
and I feel You here, and You’re picking up the pieces, forever faithful
it seemed out of my hands, a bad situation, but You are able
and in Your hands the pain and hurt look less like scars
and more like character

Wow.  It takes quite a “high view of God” to be able to look at what you thought hurt you, and realize that it really came to develop character.  To me it looks like a scar, but in God’s eyes, his character is being revealed in my life.  But that is precisely what a “high view of God” produces… healthy perspective.

Sometimes it takes being on the other side of something to be able to really embrace that kind of perspective.  But after you’ve been through enough of those experiences and had your perspective challenged and changed, you should find yourself grasping a high view of God in the middle of the situation. 2 Corinthians 4:16-19 is a great perspective verse.  It truly takes a “high view of God” for Paul to be able to confidently say, in the present tense:

Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.

I will say that my “God-picture” has changed dramatically, even over the course of the last year and several months specifically.  It’s part of this amazing journey I’m on.  My God-picture was warped for most of my life.  But I can testify first hand that the adjustment of my view of God has indeed changed how I see absolutely everything, and it is rocking my world.

Author Andy Andrews wrote a great book called “The Noticer”, which is all about the power of perspective in your life. In the book, one of the central characters, Jones, weaves in and out of folks’ lives, always challenging them on their perspective and encouraging them to embrace a higher view.  It is an amazing book that really impacted me and I highly recommend it.

There are so many applications for this topic, and I’ll jump back on this a little later, but it’s really been stirring in me lately so I wanted to go ahead and jump into it now.

What perspective governs your life and how have you seen your “God-picture” change over the years?

 
Page 2 of 2«12