Heart surgery

I have heard several ministers talk about having a head change or having a heart change. When I think about my life I have probably had a few million head changes but very few heart changes. Sometimes I even wonder if I ever have had a genuine heart change. Often I've come to the place where I realize a change is necessary and decide to do something to make the change stick. Usually I'll get through a couple of weeks, after that I lapse right back into whatever I was doing, feeling, or experiencing previously. A perfect definition of a head change if there ever was one. Head changes are easy. They can be brought on by a fiery sermon, contemplative music, or solid advice from a trusted friend. Heart changes are much more difficult to live out. The difference is head changes can be affected by us and by external stimuli, heart changes can be brought on only by God through the Holy Spirit working in us.

Well then what can we do make it happen? How can we get it done? What can I do to get this change started and working in my heart? Nothing. Nada. Zero. There is nothing we can do to make a true heart change happen for ourselves, it is something we have to completely rely on God to perform. I like to see it as surgery in a sense. God has to constantly remove our hearts and replace it with one that is closer to his own. To do this he must re-open our wounds. This is another major reason why a heart change is so difficult, we try to hold on to the heart we have, with all its faults and deformities, and hide it. But why do we try and hide what God longs to heal? If we try to re-open our wounds on our own it causes more damage to our heart and soul then when the injury first occurred. Our operating theatre resembles those from the Middle Ages: crude surgical instruments, dull blades covered in dried blood, unsterilized so when we make an incision we infect ourselves further. Many times we don't even anesthetize ourselves when we try to operate. No wonder the pain is so intense, no wonder we have hardened hearts and why so few of us survive our own procedure thus ensuring we never heal properly.

God's operating theatre is a stark contrast to ours: The room is spotless and clean, the instruments are new and sterile, the blades sharp, the procedures are all state of the art, and like some procedures there may be some pain after we are groggy after waking up but we do not feel the actual surgery being performed. When we re-open our wounds it is usually to dwell on those wounds and how they were given to us. When God re-opens our wounds it's to heal them. His spirit is the salve that heals our souls. It is the only thing known to cure the ails of our hearts. You may be reading this wondering, "Well great Mike that's wonderful. Only God can, I can't. That still doesn't help me though. when will he do it? How will I know?"

Those are good questions but if you are asking those questions he has probably just performed a procedure on you already. You are just feeling the after pains of surgery. When you are having surgery you are unconscious so you do not feel anything, but when you wake up it hurts. Sure it hurts, but it hurts far less then the actual surgery itself. This is our road to understanding what has just happened in us. I'm not sure what the next step is because I feel like God has already done something in me but I don't know what it exactly is and what it is for, but as I walk and trust him I will begin to understand. Perhaps the second step is hope, but real hope not manufactured presidential hope; a hope that God is faithful, and that he will continue the work he started in us. One of my teachers, Dr. Bekker, once said that sometimes the Holy Spirit has changed us and we haven't yet become aware of it, but we will as we continue our walk and trust in him.

Open books with dirty pages

Introspection is a loaded word. We mock people who are too introspective and want them to be more outgoing. Some aren't introspective enough and we ask them to take some time and think about what they may be doing to their lives. For some that would be like asking Bill Clinton to not cheat on Hillary with trashy women but for others it may be as difficult as figuring out the physics of the unifying theory of everything. Introspection is necessary and I think too few people take time for themselves to think about what they feeling and doing and how it makes them feel and what they could do to feel better if they weren't doing well. Introspection though can also be dangerous. Really? Dangerous? I can hear you asking that question aloud in your mind as you read this blog. Yes dangerous.

The reason introspection is dangerous is because if done too often for too long it can begin to some across as a self-serving ego trip. People who are too introspective pour out their deepest darkest feelings on their blogs, Facebook pages, or journals replete with the complete inner and outer goings on of their lives leaving nothing to the readers imagination. It can become a sort of twisted status symbol: look how broken, hurt, and troubled I am and as you read look at my questions and thoughts and marvel at my ability to put into moving prose the deepest thoughts of my heart and mind. It turns into a focused spotlight, illuminating a self serving cliche that leads people to form opinions about you that you yourself want them to think. It is shaping what you want people's ideas of you to be, and that my friends is pride, and as C.S. Lewis reminded us, pride is the chief of sins because all sin stems from it.

Well what am I doing then sharing what I think about a topic like this? Am I being prideful since I am assuming there are people who are curious about what I have to say on matters pertaining to spirituality and Christian spirituality in particular? Possibly, but I think that intent plays a great deal of weight. If someone is giving their opinion on something whether it be a blog or forum it isn't prideful to share that opinion. When a person is going through a difficult time and posts thing on blogs and Facebook about some struggles is that prideful? No. If someone is open about their shortcomings is that prideful? No. Pride steps in when you intend to elicit certain responses from your peers. Pride rears its ugly head when you intend for others to pity you or to talk about you when you're not around, to try and make yourself the center of attention. Is that pride? Yup. So beware of people who are willing to share everything too quickly and who spare no detail; introspection is good and sharing with others is good and healthy.. but not always. C.S. Lewis (again) said, "The other, and less bad, vices come from the devil working on us through our animal nature. But this (pride) does not come through our animal nature at all. It comes direct from Hell. It is spiritual: consequently it is far more subtle and deadly."

Reformation

In the 1500s the Catholic church was rocked by an event that changed the course of Western civilization: the Reformation. A monk named Martin Luther in response to the practice of selling plenary indulgences, which is paying to have a persons soul removed from purgatory, posted the 95 theses to the doors of the church at Wittenberg. This act sparked a revolution in theology whose aftershocks still reverberate down through the ages to our own time. Luther did not intend for the Catholic church to splinter like it did but when the splintering began he saw no other choice but to continue shedding the light of the doctrine of salvation by grace through faith. The official Catholic position was that good works ensure salvation because good works show faith and paying the church money to free souls was a way to do good works to save a soul. Luther wisely pointed out the error in this and in doing so changed the political and religious landscape of Europe.

Today there are many people who draw on the legacy of the Reformation, usually because it's to lend an aura of legitimacy to a movement they are involved with or are promoting. It's easy to refer to a movement as a continuation of the Reformation or as a new Reformation, but just because they claim such a thing doesn't make it so. I do not believe that a new Reformation is possible due to a wide variety of social and cultural factors and referring to a movement that broke the dominance of Catholicism and using that paradigm to break away from doctrinal Christianity is dubious at best. You cannot call people involved in Emergent,Word of Faith, or any other group that claim to be enacting another Reformation reformers because the Reformation was primarily against a corrupt and oppressive religious institution, medieval Catholicism, that when it hit swept across Europe like an out of control wildfire. At the time everyone was Catholic, you were Catholic because they did not allow other denominations like we have today. You were Catholic or else you'd probably be killed as a heretic. The Reformation changed that. What it won for us wasn't another a system of belief but it caused the church to constantly revise and reevaluate its theology and relationship to culture. We already had a cultural revolution, sure it was in 1500s but it paved the way for us and how we see things today. It took a static institutional dinosaur and changed it into a constantly evolving and shifting church . The Reformation brought back into focus doctrine that had been de-emphasized for so long that it seemed to have been forgotten. We are not at that point now because there is no one institutional church controlling and ruling on all things theological. Scripture ever since the Reformation has been constantly reviewed and interpreted so the primary doctrines of our faith are no longer hidden from view, no longer dependent on specific people to share it because scripture is available to all.

There are many things wrong with the church in America today: Hyper-prosperity, televangelism, ultra-fundamentalists who apply the letter of the law not the spirit of the law, and people who de-emphasize so much of our faith that it becomes nothing more then just a story of Jesus or a dialogue with people about where they are and why Christianity sucks and why it must change drastically. There is a lot of American culture that has become tied into Christianity. There is a lot of cultural garbage that does at time need to be filtered out but don't use the Reformation as a beacon to radically change something that has already been radically changed and tested and strengthened throughout the past 500 years. The Reformation that we should be focusing on is not one of doctrine but the reformation of the heart. David wrote in the Psalms for God to create in him a clean heart; the prophets said that God would take the law and write it not on tablets of stone, but on our hearts. The reformation we need is the one we must try and live out: our ongoing process of sanctification. We need everyday to turn our hearts to God, to hear what he is saying to us through his word and through his children and to let his spirit renew us and keep us focused on the things that matter: doing justice, loving mercy, and walking humbly with our God.

Sola gratia, sola scriptura, solus Christus, sola fide.

Watching From the Fence

While I was working today I came across a book about South Africa. It was about how Nelson Mandela brilliantly used the national rugby team, the Springboks, to help unite the country recently mashed together by the election of the ANC government thus ending years of government sanctioned racism: apartheid. It was an incredible moment and I am glad I was in South Africa to witness it. The memory got me thinking though about something that has been gnawing on my mind for some time. I cant help but compare my life in South Africa with my life in America. Sometimes I feel like I am split in two that one part of me, a vital part of me, is still thousands of miles away separated by the vast Atlantic. I left behind a life that I built on my own. I had friends, surrogate family and a place where I felt like I belonged, and I left it all behind.. but I had to leave it all behind. It doesn't make a lot of sense and I can barely explain it myself, but I know leaving there was the right thing to do. I am convinced of that. Something in my soul was lost while I was there and I feel like I have been unable to find it.

It is a crazy disconnect. I can empathize with Abram, I mean when God tells you to go, you go but it doesn't mean it's easy. Sometimes the decision makes no sense, but deep inside you know it's right. I feel like that a part of me is gone. I don't know what it is or how it happened, I just fell it, and I've felt it for years. Like Baudolino I go from one path to the next, seemingly lying my way from one spot into another, and seeing where the path leads. Sometimes I like the person who I was in South Africa more then the person I am now here in the USA. The Michael in South Africa was cocky, somewhat abrasive, but his naivete about life and the church and spiritual matters are at times a better person then the Michael here in the USA who is less cocky, still somewhat abrasive but tempered with a better understanding of himself. The SA Michael was sure of himself, knew where he stood in his relation to others, grew and matured in the things of God and everyday life, gave himself wholeheartedly to the things he was doing because he believed in them. What a far cry USA Michael is from that person. Always thinking. Always questioning. Always wondering if things will ever turn in a direction that seems more favourable to him. I don't believe in what I do any more. That naivete is gone.

So I stand on the fence looking at the person I was and the person I am, always testing, always comparing, and always wondering what might have been, unable to focus on what is and what should be done. Don't get me wrong I learned some valuable lessons and am grateful but I can't help but wonder what it was all for and what is it worth. I know God has a plan, at least I believe he does. I may not see all of it or even know any of it, but it does not mean it does not exist. I'm just tired of the unknowing and the questions and I want to know the answer to the questions in my mind that spring up from time to time. Maybe I'm being too harsh and to hard on myself, but hey, it's a blog after all and these are the thoughts and feelings I'm having at the moment.