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But it is equally true that God has promised to give us a new heart of “flesh”. “Moreover, I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; and I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. I will put My Spirit within you and cause you to walk in My statutes, and you will be careful to observe My ordinances.” (Ezekiel 36:26-27) Is it logical that God wants to give us a new heart but never intends for us to live from it? Do we have two hearts? I believe some of the answer to these issues we struggle with lies in the false gods that lurk in our souls purporting to be our real self's. I also happen to believe that there is a unique “blueprint” or DNA written into us of what God designed us to be in reflection of His image even before we were born or even “converted” that He wants us to become aware of and fulfill as our destiny. That is what I refer to as the “true heart”.
I am beginning to suspect more strongly that the “wicked heart” in us may actually be a “heart facade” erected there by the false gods we accumulate during our life. It is called a heart of stone and is composed of the walls we build around our hearts from our earliest experiences of discomfort to protect our hearts from pain. Because it is built around our real heart to “protect” it, it's shape looks a lot like our heart and we often mistake these walls for the heart itself. These walls are hardened over the years and reinforced by the lying gods that offer themselves to assist us in protecting our hearts from further pain and trauma. They lead us to believe that we must always avoid pain at all costs, that we must mask our true emotions and present false identities and masks to exert control over what people think about us and thereby how they treat us. We amass a very complex structure or maze of masks and appearances to be prepared for any eventuality, but primarily to keep anyone from knowing who we really are on the inside. In doing so we lose sight of our real identity ourselves and come to believe that the masquerade is the real thing.
For instance, as I was growing up I ran into a serious obstacle to many things I felt I really desired to do in my rebellion and anger. It was the deeply rooted, fundamental idea of being honest. It was drilled into me by parents and teachers, church and culture. Honesty and integrity were stressed and illustrated in dramatic stories with wonderful outcomes and strongly encouraged and enforced. I accepted these instructions and became super-conscientious about always being honest. I developed great fear of the dire consequences I might suffer if I was dishonest in any way and went to greater and greater lengths to be meticulously honest. In the process I became very reticent about making promises of any kind. I also developed a very strong reaction of intense anger and shame if anyone questioned my honesty or did not trust me about something. My mother noticed this strong character trait in me and sometimes used it to her advantage to manipulate me into altering my external behavior. My aversion to making promises even troubled me deeply when I realized I would have to make an unequivocal promise when I got married. As hard as I tried I could not find any alternative to making that promise short of not getting married.
Until this morning I have always believed that there was nothing to add to this part of my story. But as the experiences of the past few weeks have chipped away at the ice and stone surrounding my heart in attempts to find my real identity, it has occurred to me that the deep sense of honesty that has been such an intense part of my psyche all of my life was, in fact, only half of honesty. It was just an “intellectual honesty” that I many times found ways to circumvent through rationalization and creative schemes to avoid the pain of exposing what my real heart was feeling. So ironically, while externally maintaining strict honesty factually I was really being trained to be almost wholly dishonest about the condition of my heart and thereby losing touch more and more with my true identity.
The result of this is that I have become a well-groomed and self-deceived hypocrite with deeply embedded habits of thinking and reacting that are very difficult to overcome or to even perceive now. Living from my heart is such a foreign experience to me that I grapple with even understanding where to begin and how to continue. It does help to explain some of my baffling gaps in my character like my lack of natural compassion and my lack of appreciation.
Learning to live from my heart is very difficult to do after years of training for the opposite. It means for me being honest about real emotions and desires in the present tense and getting acquainted with my true heart vs. the false god heart. I am now realizing that I need compassion and pervasive forgiveness to completely replace bitterness and resentment in my spirit so that when I am under pressure and being squeezed, those attributes will be what spills out of me. For whatever is filling me on the inside is what will spill over on others when I am pushed or offended.
The thought came to me this morning that I must be a safe enough person for my opponents to confess their faults to without fear of my censure or shame. That was a shocking thought to me when I began to apply it to all the people that I am prone to criticize and find fault with. I have an awful lot of growing and maturing to do.
When I sat down for my communion time with God this morning I read this in My Utmost for His Highest by Oswald Chambers, a devotional book that I have read every day for at least 5-6 years now. “If there is sin, confess it, not admit it. Are you willing to obey your Lord and Master whatever the humiliation to your right to yourself may be?
“Never discard a conviction. If it is important enough for the Spirit of God to have brought it to your mind, it is that thing He is detecting. You were looking for a great thing to give up. God is telling you of some tiny thing; but at the back of it there lies the central citadel of obstinacy: I will not give up my right to myself—the thing God intends you to give up if ever you are going to be a disciple of Jesus Christ.” (UHH 9-24)
The story came to my mind of Moses striking the rock in anger in his frustration with the blindness and rebelliousness of the people God had asked him to lead to the promised land. The reason God gave to Moses for punishing him over this incident was not a reprimand for not following God's orders nearly so much as for misrepresenting who God is before the world. Moses presented a distorted picture of God’s passion and spirit toward the disobedient, setting the stage for the present terrible misunderstanding about hell and how God relates to those who oppose and reject His love. We are still struggling to overcome the ill-effects of Moses' wrong choice centuries later and still largely believe the lie about God that he acted out.
It is time for new examples and demonstrations of what God is really like. He desires to incarnate Himself in me just as much as He did through Jesus and demonstrate through my spirit and actions how he feels about lost human beings. To do this He has to get me to begin living from my heart the way He designed me live, the same place that He lives, and fulfill the destiny through the identity that He created me to be. I don't know what that looks like, but He does, and He's in charge of growing me into a man that reflects this aspect of Him to bless those around me through encouragement, compassion, unconditional love and honesty of heart, not just of mind. God, you've got a lot of work cut out for you, but you have my permission to do whatever you desire to fulfill your plan in me.
