“It’s like spitting into the wind.” “It’s an uphill climb.” “I feel like I’m swimming against the stream.”
Ever felt like that? Ever felt like that about trying to live as a Christian? How can we live as Christians when everything around us seems to be pushing us in the opposite direction?
There are those old habits that we’ve built up over the years. We know that God isn’t happy with them, but we still keep falling back into them.
Then there are our old friends. We still love them dearly, at least some of them, but our paths have gone different directions. The things you used to do together, you don’t want to do any more.
Sometimes it’s our family. I know one guy
who signed himself into a rehab programme in
And that’s not even counting our own, personal weaknesses; weaknesses that make us vulnerable in various areas, whether it be physical, emotional, or mental.
No wonder it’s hard!
But a lot of our pain, and our failure to live the way we know we should, is actually because we live our lives backwards. We live them from the outside, in. We allow the pressures of the world around us to shape us and define us, to push us in directions that we don’t want to go.
This week we begin a new series that hopefully will help us to see a different way of living. I’ve called it “Living From the Inside Out.” This week we’ll talk about our hearts, the very core of our being, the place where we meet with God, and we’ll be talking about holiness – “Living with God.”
Next week we’ll talk about the next layer out, “Living with Yourself,” and we’ll see how that is made easier by what the bible calls humility. Then we’ll talk about “Living with your Neighbour,” and we’ll discuss integrity. In week four we’ll talk about living with society at large, “Living with Others,” and we’ll look at what the Bible means by justice.
Finally, at the end of September we’ll wrap up the series by talking about “Living with Creation” and we’ll see what the Bible has to say about our place in the big picture of God’s creation.
But this week we begin by talking about our hearts.
In the passage that was read for us, Peter
was writing to Christians who lived in what is now
So Peter reaches back into the Old
Testament to find something to encourage them with. He reaches back to a time
when the little country of
What he’s saying is that, when things get tough, the way to deal with the pressures of the outside world is first to make sure your inside world is pointed in the right direction.
[I used to work as a cook in a youth hostel. I wasn’t a very creative cook, but I could follow a basic recipe. During that year as a cook I came to have a new respect for onions. Almost everything we ate at the hostel had onions in it somewhere, so I learned how to peel and chop onions really well. I learned that if you peel them under running water you cry less, which is important when you’re peeling onions for 150 people. And I learned quickly that you can peel onions down to nothing. There’s always one more layer that can come off, until you end up with this tiny little excuse for a vegetable and have to start all over again with a new one.]
Our lives are a lot like onions. There are layers upon layers upon layers. Most of the people around us only ever see the outside of our lives, and that’s appropriate. There are appropriate boundaries that we have to keep. You can’t spill your guts to every person that crosses your path. Then there’s a smaller group of people who know more about you. As you work down through the layers of your life, there are fewer and fewer people who know you that well; friends, family, your spouse, until you get right down into the core, the very centre of your being, the place that defines you, the place that only you and God know about.
That place is what the Bible calls your “heart.”
[I know that if you go online and search for songs with “heart” in the title you’ll get a great long list from “Your Cheatin’ Heart” to “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart” to “Beat Of My Heart.” They all have one thing in common. They’re all talking about emotions, mainly love. But the Bible never uses the word “heart” that way. In a couple of places our modern English translations do use “heart” that way, mainly because Greek and Hebrew talk about our emotions as being located a little further down, in your bowels, and that’s a bit icky. Imagine trying to sell a song with a title like, “Your Cheatin’ Bowels.” Doesn’t really work, does it?]
Sometimes when the Bible talks about a
person’s “heart” it’s talking about the organ that pumps blood around your
body. But usually, when the Bible talks about your heart, it means the centre
of your being, what you value, what you choose. Prov 4:23 says, “Above
all else, guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life.” In other words, if you get your heart right then everything else
will flow in the right direction from that. If you get your heart wrong, then
you can’t really get the rest of you life right either. Jesus agrees. He says,
“For out of the heart come evil thoughts,
murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander. These
are what make a person ‘unclean’” (Matt 15:19,20).
If our heart is what is at our very core, the very centre of our being, then the important question is, “What, or who, lives there?”
There are all kinds of answers to that question, some more socially acceptable than others. It’s perfectly acceptable, socially, for someone to say that they value success, or their career, or their reputation, or their family above everything else. If you’re talking with someone and they say that their family is the most important thing in their life, most people would probably approve of that. If they told you that they lived for success or for their career you might be a little less positive, but you would still be more approving than if they told you that they lived for money, or sex, or power.
So, what lives in your heart? What is at the core of your being? Have you ever even asked yourself that?
[One of our favourite movies is “Sabrina.” In it Harrison Ford plays Linus Larabee, a mega successful businessman. In the course of the movie he slowly comes to know himself. At one point he says, “I do what my dad did. He did what his dad did. The path gets deeper and more familiar. I NEVER CHOSE!”]
Perhaps for the first time in his life he saw his own heart, and he didn’t like what he saw. What do you see when you look into your own heart? What lives at the core of your being? Why do you do what you do?
In Ezekiel 14 a group of Israelite leaders
come to ask Ezekiel for advice. But God speaks to Ezekiel and says, “Son of man, these men have set up idols in their
hearts and put wicked stumbling blocks before their faces. Should I let
them inquire of me at all?” (Ezekiel 14:3)
When Ezekiel talked about idols he didn’t mean people like Brian Melo. Neither was he talking about little stone figurines of some god that you would set up in a little household shrine, although that’s what the word means.
Clearly, you can have idols in your heart as well as in a temple. When we put anything, other than God, first in our lives it becomes an idol. It may be a good a thing in itself, it usually is, like our job or our family, but if it takes over God’s place at the centre of our lives, it becomes an idol.
So there we have our choice of what to do with our hearts. We can either set up idols in our hearts, by making something other than God the most important thing in our lives, or we can “Honour the Lord Christ as holy in our hearts.” We can’t do both.
[Some people try. They’re like the guy who went to a party and was invited to have a drink with Joe afterwards. He said “Sure.” Then Mike invited him to come see his new apartment. He said “Sure” to him too. So at the end of the party he went out into the parking lot, put one foot in Mike’s car, one foot in Joe’s car, and said, “Let’s go!”]
Only God is worthy of being the most important thing or person in our lives. Other things, good things, like family, friends, career, etc. all have their place. So do other people. But there is a God shaped space at the centre of our lives and we are incomplete until he fills it. We may try and fill it with other things, even good things, but in the end they’ll tear us apart.
The solution to not being torn apart by our idols, or at least pulled this way and that by them, is something the Bible calls holiness. By that I don’t mean keeping some long list of do’s and don’ts. That’s legalism, not holiness.
There is one thing that we are called to do. It’s what Peter wrote to his friends. “Honour the Lord Christ as holy in your hearts.”
[I remember when we were in
That’s the picture that Peter is painting here. Only, instead of honouring a statue in a shrine somewhere, he calls us to honour Christ in our hearts. Just one God; the creator and sustainer of the universe. Just one shrine for each of us; our own hearts. And as Proverbs says, whatever is in your heart directs your life. If you have Christ, the holy one, living in your heart, then he will direct your life into holiness, because holiness is catching. You catch it from Jesus.
In the Old Testament book of Leviticus God says again and again, “be holy because I am holy.” There’s even a section, chapters 17 to 27, that’s called the holiness code, and the whole idea is that God’s people will reflect God’s character because he lives in their midst. His holiness kind of rubs off on his people.
People become like what they worship and value. If what lives in your heart as your thing of ultimate value is money, or success or even some other person, then that will shape who you are. If God lives in your heart, then he will shape who you are. That’s what holiness is, the living God shaping your life because he lives in your heart.
So how do we go about honouring Jesus as holy in our hearts?
1. Ask the Lord to show you your own heart. Ps 139.21-22 is a good prayer to pray, “Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.” You don’t need to go digging. If you ask him he will show you what’s there.
2. If God shows you that something else, other than him, is there, deal it. If it’s something wrong, than agree with God that it’s wrong (that’s called confession) and turn away from it (that’s called repentance) and ask God for his grace to do that.
God might show you that you have made something good into an idol that has taken God’s place in your heart. It might be a particular person, or your job, or your family. If that’s the case then you need to rearrange the furniture in your heart so that Jesus is first, then everything else will fall into place.
3. Ask the Lord to keep you aware of your own heart. The best way to do that is to give him some time every day to speak to you. That may be in the morning, or in the evening, but set aside some time to talk to God about your life, and to listen to him, to read the Bible. And over time he will change your life as it becomes centred on him.
[One Sunday morning, a man woke up around 5 a.m., his wife and children still asleep. Glad to have time to himself, he went downstairs, brewed some coffee, and began to read the morning paper. Three sentences into an article, he saw his five-year-old daughter coming down the stairs.
He said, "Honey, go back to bed."
"But I'm not sleepy," she insisted.
Determined to read his paper, he tried again to get her to go back to bed. Not a hope.
Looking down at the newspaper, he came up with a plan. In the paper was a picture of the world. So he cut it into several pieces, handed his daughter some Scotch tape, and told her, "Go sit in the living room, and see if you can put the world back together."
His daughter went off to the living room, and he went back to the kitchen to finish his coffee and read the paper. After only a few sips of his coffee, though, his daughter came bounding into the kitchen. "Here, Daddy, I'm finished!" she said, showing him the picture of the world put back together.
Amazed, he asked, "Sweetie, how did you do that so fast?"
She replied, "It was easy, Daddy. On the back side of the page was a picture of a man. When you make the man right, you make the world right."]
We’re going to be spending this month talking about living as Christians in the world around us. The starting point is not to try and change the world. The starting point is in our own hearts. If we put Jesus at the centre of our lives, if we honour him as holy in our hearts, then he starts putting us back together, and the world begins to make more sense. But it has to start from the inside out.