Episode Transcript
[00:00:05] Speaker A: The following is a legacy recording from the archives of the C.S. lewis Institute. While the audio quality of these recordings may vary, the content remains vital to the mission of the Institute to develop disciples who can articulate, defend, and live faith in Christ through personal and public life.
[00:00:24] Speaker B: What I would like us to do is to turn to First Book of Kings, chapter 8, where Solomon is praying to the Lord at the dedication of the Temple.
And it says in verse 54 that when Solomon had finished all these prayers and supplications to the Lord, he rose from before the altar of the Lord where he'd be kneeling with his hands spread out towards heaven.
And as he stood and blessed the whole assembly of Israel, in a loud voice he said, praise be to the Lord and who has given rest to his people Israel, just as he promised, not one word has failed of all his good promises that he gave through his servant Moses.
May the Lord our God be with us as he was with our fathers. May he never leave us nor forsake us.
May he turn our hearts to him to walk in all his ways and to keep the commands, decrees and regulations that he gave our fathers.
And may these words of mine which I have prayed before the Lord be near to the Lord our God day and night, that he may uphold the cause of his servant, the cause of his people Israel, according to each day's need, so that all the peoples of the earth may know that the Lord is God and that there is no other.
And this is the verse that I want us to really get the thrust off.
But your heart must be fully committed to the Lord our God, to live by his decrees and to obey his commands as at this time.
And so as we think of what it means for our hearts to be fully committed to the Lord our God, there are four aspects of this that I want us just to briefly touch on.
The imagery that we've had frequently through this weekend is the image of the tree of life is the image of the man who in Psalm 1 is like a tree that's planted by rivers of living water, and who bears his fruit in due season.
And four of the fruits that we can see which are reflective of this first of all the fruit of listening, and the second is the fruit of gentleness, and the third is the fruit of assurance, and the fourth is the fruit of contemplation.
I want to look at these four different aspects, but they are fruits in the heart.
And so we start with the awareness that wisdom is not simply something in the mind.
Wisdom is in the heart.
The Eastern fathers In the early church used to have a posture that they believed was central to their lives.
That is, bringing the thoughts of the mind into the heart before God and standing continually in the presence of God. Just think of that. Bringing the thoughts of the mind. That's to say, the things that we memorize, the things that we've understood, bringing them into the heart so that we digest them and redigest them. Chuda cud. They used to talk about in lectio divina, this rumination, the word of God, and doing so in the presence of God, and standing obediently, docilely, always in the presence of God.
Now, the scripture that is so full of references to the heart is obviously referring to the whole person.
It's the sphere of our emotions and our. Our feelings, our desires and our passions.
But the heart is also that psychic focus, that center.
And indeed, in Scripture, it's the heart that's the seat of wisdom as well as the locus of the will.
It's that source that is the spring from which all our moral actions flow.
And ultimately it's the heart that is the sphere where God dwells within us.
And so we're reminded in Deuteronomy 6:5, that you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart.
And in Jeremiah 31, we have the first reference to a heart transplant, where he says, deep within them, I will plant my law writing it upon their hearts.
Then he reminds us of the need for a new heart to be given to us.
And so in Deuteronomy 4:29, we read that if you seek the Lord with all your heart and with all your soul, you shall find him.
So that really the Christian life is a life that is rooted and based upon the heart.
And it's in the heart that God will recreate us as we long to be conformed to the image and likeness of Christ.
The recreation takes place in our heart.
In Deuteronomy 36, we read, Yahweh, your God will circumcise your heart until you love him with all your heart.
So that this painful process that we've been probed by, and perhaps lanced by, and perhaps realize that a surgical operation is required is all because the ultimate purpose is a transformation of character, a change of life.
And so In Ezekiel chapter 36, verse 26, we read, I shall remove your heart of stone, and I will give you a heart of flesh instead.
That hardness will be taken away, and that sensitivity to the Word of God will take its place.
And so the psalmist could pray, create in me a cleansed heart.
Remove that hardness of heart, that dirt of filth of heart, and renew aright or a steadfast spirit within me.
And so it's no wonder, then, that we realize that the probing of the Christian life is an examining of the heart.
In Deuteronomy 8:2, we read, Remember how Yahweh, your God, led you for 40 years in the wilderness to test your heart and to know your inmost being.
So that we cannot assume that our lives as Christians will have any progress unless we're prepared for the inmost probing, for the inmost searching of our being.
All the acts and pretenses and masks that we wear have to be all stripped if we are to know the ways of God.
So that to know God is to know a God who examines the heart.
And we will always be on the run from God unless we prepare to expose our hearts.
And it's very frightening, and for many of us it's very threatening.
So the nature of God is. Is that he's a God who knows our hearts intimately.
And so in Psalm 21:2, we read, a man's conduct may give him the appearance of being upright, but Yahweh knows the heart.
And consequently none of these outward appearances are of any consequence in the light of that reality.
And so in the prayer that we read of Solomon in chapter 8 of First Kings 8:61. This, then, is the prayer of our hearts at the end of this conference. May your hearts be entirely given to the Lord your God.
Now, for our hearts to be entirely given to the Lord our God means that we are therefore prepared for an intimacy and for a vulnerability and an exposure that we've never dared have before.
And so we go from this conference asking God to examine our hearts and to disclose insights that perhaps we've run away from all our life.
It's a frightful prayer. It's a very revolutionary thing that we're asking God to do this morning.
And then we can ask, as Psalm 86:11 puts it, teach me your way, O Lord, and I will walk in your truth. Give me an undivided heart that I may fear your name.
So that all those passions, all those emotions are all integrated and they're focused on one concern, and that is that I might fear the character of God, that I may fear his name.
So if we're seeking really to know God as obviously we should be, then we know that that divine encounter must be in the heart, nowhere else.
So the reason why we're frustrated in knowing God is because we're not prepared to open our hearts to God.
And of course, one of the great fantasies of Christian life today in our Western culture is that we deceive ourselves by our activism and our professionalism and our scholasticism and all these other masks that conceal the heart of man before God.
So that's the focus. It's in the heart now, the reluctance that we have to open our hearts, and therefore the reluctance to receive God's word.
And why some of us may be secretly saying, you know, obviously a lot of people around me have been blessed this weekend, but I haven't received anything.
Could well be because our hearts have been blocked.
And we don't know why they've been blocked.
And we don't know how to reach those blocked and hardened hearts.
Many times we will experience the reality that in the lower zone of our consciousness, of our hearts, it's as if it's permafrost that the sun's rays have never reached and melted.
And we don't know how to reach down to those feelings.
We don't know how to really be attuned to that subconscious life of ours, because there is interior conflict and blockage that we've never really been able to reach.
So one of the first fruits of wisdom is cultivating a listening heart.
If, as we have heard from our brother Dr. Wolke, in this wonderful series of studies on proverbs of the power of the Word and the seriousness with which we should take Scripture, then nothing is more imperative than.
Than to responsively act on the Word by having a listening heart.
And as I think about it, there are many insights that we need in order to have a listening heart.
Perhaps one of the first prerequisites for a listening heart is to have a freedom spirit.
You see, well, meaning friends may buttonhole us and say, I know what's wrong with you now listen to me.
Of course, we'll never listen.
That kind of aggressive action immediately clams us up.
That's why we know that to speak the truth, we have to speak it in love. Because there's no other way in which truth can be communicated without being devastating to us.
Light will burn if light is not love.
And so we realize that we have to have the moral sense of responsibility to choose and to be free to choose.
And so we need the freedom to listen.
Many of us perhaps, have complained that there's no one that is a spiritual guide, no one who is really wise around us to help us and guide us.
I believe that most of the reasons why we don't find a spiritual Director is because we don't choose to find one.
Because we want one on our terms.
We want one who will tickle our ego. Because he's so much smarter than I am. And it's nice to be associated with him.
But the fact is that there are many more people around us who give us wisdom.
If we had a listening ear.
And we don't have a listening ear because we're not free from our own emotional life.
So that's the first prerequisite that we have freedom to listen.
And the second condition for listening is that we are prepared to have self intimacy.
I'm not talking simply about the intimacy with other people.
Talking about the need to have intimacy with ourselves.
Now, many of us have never dared have intimacy with ourselves. That's why we dare not be alone.
That's why nuzak and Muzak fills the air from morning till night.
Because we're afraid of being alone with ourselves.
Now, if you're afraid of being alone with yourself, then you're obviously afraid of self intimacy.
And of course, one of the problems about life is that there are many, many distractions.
Which will avoid and enable us to evade self intimacy.
For some people, it's workaholism that keeps them from self intimacy.
And people who work phonetically are obviously indicating that they're not prepared to take time to reflect upon their inner lives.
They're afraid of self intimacy.
Sometimes scholarship is a very strong addiction to self intimacy.
And even being sociable and always around other people can be another addiction.
So all these isms, scholasticism, relationalism, workaholism, all the isms are the idols that tyrannize our lives.
And really keep us and block us from such a course of action.
But then I think if we have the courage to enter, as Higgins has pointed out to us. Into this dynamic of seeking to know God. And therefore to know ourselves. And therefore not to be afraid of self intimacy. Because we're not afraid of intimacy with God.
Then one of the consequences of self intimacy is self acceptance.
That, yes, as Paul says, I'm a gynecological monstrosity. I'm a freak of nature.
But by the grace of God, I am what I am.
Then we begin to find that the chatter and the noise and the distraction of our emotional life begins to get quietened.
And we become at home with ourselves.
That was a wonderful verse that Bruce gave us this morning.
Let me just repeat it to you.
Proverbs 15:31. He who listens to a life giving rebuke.
Will be at home among the Wise, but more perhaps that we see in that too, is that he'll be at home with himself.
Many of us are not at home.
We're spaced out because we're not in place.
And to be in place is to be at home.
And to be at home is in a place of security. When we know we've been accepted in the beloved.
And you can see how that the contrary to this, being at home with ourselves and his acceptance, and in the wisdom of the Lord, is therefore to avoid all self alienation.
If we're not prepared for self intimacy, we're not prepared to listen to our own inner being before God, then the consequence is that we're floundering, we're really lost, we're confused about all these pressures of our inner life.
And so overwork and addictions and accident proneness are all indicative of a confused life.
And they're all indicative of the fact of self ignorance and self alienation.
And therefore when we have those problems, we cannot listen to other people.
Too many noises in our own heads and hearts for us to be able to listen to the pains of others.
And so a lot of the blindness that we have about other people and the lack of discernment that we have in our relationships are simply because we're not able to be listeners to ourselves before God.
And of course, when we think of the word of God and its power and its vitality, there is therefore nothing more tragic than for a Christian to be deaf to the word of God.
And our deafness is because of these other processes that we've just been describing.
So it's a Christian who writes in Romans 7, as many of our abler commentators have told us this in Romans 7, verses 15 to 19, I do not understand what I do, for what I want to do, I do not do. But what I hate, I do.
What kind of person is describing the situation?
Someone who is self alienated, someone who is confused about his own inner life, Someone who is not able to listen to himself, to his own needs.
And so therefore how important it is for us to realize the consequences.
Really, what Paul is describing in his own frustration is you could sum it up by saying, I'm incapable of listening to God and listening to myself in the presence of God.
That's why I have no wisdom about coping with my own life.
But then, as we think of it, listening is also the basis of all personal interactions.
No communication between any two people can take place without listening.
And that's why for many people, like the two tramps and waiting for gardeau they're doing a lot of talking, but they're not communicating.
And there are many people who are frustrated in their prayer life because they spend all their time chit chatting with each other without any real listening and consequence. They chit chat with God and there's no real listening to God either.
And so how vital it is then to realize that true speech is only vitalized through true listening.
And we will not listen to the speech of the Scriptures unless we are listening persons.
And being a listening person is not just simply turning a switch on.
It's a person that's nurtured in certain qualities of personal life.
And so, you know, we're reminded by John that if we don't love our brother, how in the world can we protest that we love God?
We can say that if we don't listen to each other personally, how can we listen to the word of God?
And so the relational matrix in which we live is obviously reflective and determinant upon the divine matrix with which we should be living.
And consequently, this is a very awesome thing for us to ask God to give us listening ears, listening hearts really, because behind the ear is all the shaping of the heart to listen.
The ear is simply the vehicle that is determined by the shape of the heart and by the nature of that heart before God.
What then does it mean when the three disciples were busily wanting to make three tabernacles, and the voice from heaven at the transfiguration said, this is my beloved Son, listen to him.
Stop all this fussiness, all, all this busyness, all this activism, all this entrepreneurialship in your ministry.
We can be sometimes most disobedient to God and not listen to God by the activities that we're engaged in his service.
So the fruit then of wisdom is the cultivation of a listening heart. And as I've been loving gardening this spring, the thing that amazes me is how the flowers and the fruitage of the summer provide us with the seeds for the next germination.
And so a listening heart is both a fruit of wisdom, but it's also a seed of wisdom.
It provides a further abundant crop for the following harvest.
Then, secondly, I suggest one of the great needs of our lives too is to have a gentle heart.
Jesus invites us in Matthew 11:29. Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden. I will give you rest, take my yoke upon you, and learn of me, for I am gentle and humble in heart.
And we're exhorted by Paul in Ephesians 4. Two, be completely gentle, he says, be completely humble and gentle.
So that gentleness and humility that we were hearing about last night, they're very closely bound together.
So when I listen, I will also develop a gentle heart. A listening heart cultivates a gentle heart.
Again, we realize that a gentle heart is therefore a heart that is free from addictions.
It's not violent, it's not refusing to listen.
It's the reverse that if I am gentle, then I have time to listen.
And if I listen, I will cultivate gentleness.
And so Paul told the Thessalonians, he says, we were gentle among you as a weaning mother is with its.
When we have the spirit of Christ, we are so inspired by Christ that we discover that we don't need the substitute of perspiration.
Gentleness is a profound expression of moral discipline and the moral life and the wealth of the moral life.
And one of the important elements, of course, of gentleness is that it's the antithesis of willfulness.
So that a gentle spirit is a spirit that is abandoned to God's will.
It's not self willed, it's a spirit that is wholly submissive and surrendered to the will of God.
And gentleness is very much akin to intimacy because I can approach someone in gentleness and doors will be open to hearts in gentleness so that it is in fact the doorway to intimacy.
And I will find that it's in gentleness that in a sense we cultivate a yet special way of listening that we listen to others in our gentleness.
This is of course so antithetical to our culture which is so aggressive, so brash, so extrovert, so exhibitionism.
Gentleness is concealing and gentleness is inviting.
And gentleness is patience and long suffering.
And gentleness is reflective and gentleness is guided by the Holy Spirit.
You see, if we know the power of the Redeemer and the ultimate consequences that God has all things in his hands, then we can afford gentleness because there's a quiet confidence in the gentle spirit.
Gentleness is really hopeful.
It lives in the realities of faith, hope and love.
And of course, gentleness is very much akin to poverty of spiritual and poverty of spirit is recognizing that we live in God alone and for God alone in our lives.
So that the more we are aware of God in our lives, the gentler our lives will become.
Because we have far more dependence upon God than. And therefore we don't need all this energy and all this effort.
As I've said, we don't need all this perspiration.
Well, there's a great many other things that we can learn about gentleness, but I don't want to monopolize too much time.
So let's now turn to the third fruit, a listening heart, a gentle heart, an assured heart.
Recently I've been doing a word study of a word in the New Testament, parrhesia. It's spelt P, A, double R, H E, S I A.
And that this word, parrhesia is the word for assurance, for inner boldness, inner confidence.
And it's the word that in a sense was the secret of the genius of Athenian democracy, that it was discovered that in the city state there could be freedom of speech to vote for your leader.
You could have a public vote and declare openly encourage who you wanted to lead you.
And this word that was used in the 6th century BC was taken up by the Apostle Luke in the Acts of the Apostles.
And Luke tells us that the genius now of the Christian life is that we have assurance to preach the gospel boldly.
So there's Peter, who has no assurance. Huffing and puffing before a maidservant in the high priest's court and denying his Lord and being anything but rocky, in fact, very rocky.
And now he stands up with boldness.
Do you know one of the things that's going to happen to us as we go from this conference is that God has given us assured hearts, yes, chastened hearts, rebuked hearts, but he's also sending us forth with assured hearts.
And then we find that the same word is used by the Apostle Paul in Ephesians as he prays.
And he gives us the assurance to be what we suggested the other day, like small boats that have left the inner harbor of, of our own orthodox conventionality, our own traditional way of life. And he's launching us into the deep and we don't know where we're going. And the life of faith is totally unknown because it is self abandonment to the ways of God.
But Paul prays that you may be strengthened with all might in the inner being, so strengthened, so assured in your inner being that now you can explore the length and the breadth and the depth and the height and know the love of God that passeth all understanding.
We can be intrepid mariners, we can be infinite explorers, we can scale the highest summits of God's universe and have this inner assurance to be intrepid spiritual explorers.
And then finally we find that in writing to the Hebrews, the writer prays that his converts will have boldness, the boldness of access into the holiest of all to worship God in a way that the Jews never could worship. Once a year the high priest went in, but it was only once a year, not without blood.
But now we have access all the time to go in with this inner parrhesia, this inner assurance into the presence of God.
Remember how art at the beginning emphasized that the very basis for a good conscience is assurance.
Likewise, an assured heart gives us an assurance that we can now be men and women of prayer as we've never been in our lives before.
And so this is my last point, that the fruit of wisdom is also the fruit of a contemplative heart.
When Thomas Aquinas was wrestling, as many other philosophers had wrestled before him, as to what was really the source of happiness, what was the secret of the blessed life, he came to the conclusion that the source of happiness is the contemplation of God.
If you're wanting to have a new vision for your life, a new prospect for who you are before God, and you want that to be a heavenly vision that will encapsulate you and dominate you and infinitely encourage you, what more can you ask for than the contemplation of God?
And so make it a desire of your heart that the life of prayer is really the lifestyle that you now will live.
In our first session, I gave you that diagram of those different quadrants of different activities of prayer, different forms of prayer.
Look at that again.
And if, until now, your prayer life has been a very sort of spotty, fragmentary kind of verbalizing in prayer, and it's extraordinary how Aquinas himself, before he, had a remarkable mystical experience that changed, changed his whole life just two years before he died.
Do you know what he says?
He says prayer is nothing but saying words to God verbally.
He basically says that. And therefore he says, as you can't say very adequate words to God, let your prayers be brief.
So he contradicts himself in a sense, by saying that contemplation is really the way of happiness, because he knew very little about contemplation.
And it was Aquinas that influenced the reformers and both Calvin and Luther, great men as they are, they put us in that tradition that we've got stuck in as evangelicals, that prayer is saying our prayers.
And when we're at a loss for words, we start praying.
And many of us have been brought up in that tradition that cannot believe that prayer can be anything else than verbalizing words before God.
Now, if you're stuck in that tradition, as many of us have been.
It's time you moved on, isn't it?
Because that isn't what the Book of Proverbs is telling us about meditating on his word day and night. Or the psalmist is saying meditating on his word day and night. Psalm 19 and Psalm 119.
And so we realize that this whole quadrant of a meditative life, of a prayerful life before God, means that we're now prepared not only to say our prayers, but that we're prepared to be a prayerful person, which is a very different thing.
And when we enter into that meditative life that is now our whole lifestyle is now our whole way of living. And if people ask you, who are you? You're no longer Homo sapiens, you're becoming Homo orans.
Not simply man, the inquisitive Noah, but man who is the worshipful prayer.
Do you want a lifestyle? Do you want a personality in God?
Then let it be a prayerful personality. Let it be a contemplative way of life.
Then we'll discover that from meditation, then flows this greater, deeper, richer awareness of the contemplative life before God.
What's the fruit of a contemplative heart?
It's a joyful heart.
It's an ecstatic way of living.
And so when you think of it, it's like a spiral from the cognitive and the verbalizing.
It increasingly becomes more meditative in the heart. It's more contemplative of the celebration of the presence of God. That's indescribable, that is, therefore, so ecstatic.
And on it goes like an onward. What is called a perichiosis. It's an upward spiral.
And the upward spiral, through faith, hope and love. Leads us into the realities of a life that is filled with joy and with his peace and with his gentleness.
And that is, in fact, in communion with Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
May God help us then, as we think of these things.
And to realize, you see, that that kind of contemplative adventure is inconceivable without an assured heart.
We can't scale and climb high heights without being confident about our climbing ability.
And we cannot scale the heights of God's presence in contemplation without assurance in our heart.
And we cannot have assurance in our hearts without having a gentle spirit.
If you try and be a spiritual man or woman in terms of the aggressiveness of Washington, you'll be defeated before you start.
And so we cannot enter into the kingdom aggressively.
We can only enter into the kingdom gently.
And we can only enter gently into that way of life with a listening heart. So you see how they're all bound together.
And we can only have a listening heart when we believe in the word of God.
Thank you.
Perhaps we could, as we think about it, just meditate. In conclusion, I was going to quote it of Charles Wesley's hymn, oh for a heart to praise my God, A heart from sin set free with conscience sprinkled by the blood so freely shed for me. And then Charles Wesley goes on to say, a heart resigned, submissive, meek, My dear Redeemer's throne, where only Christ is heard to speak, Where Jesus reigns alone. A humble, lowly, contrite heart believing true and clean, which neither death nor life can part from him that dwells within.
A heart in every thought renewed and filled with love divine, perfect and right and pure and good.
A copy. Lord of Thine thy nature Gracious Lord impartial, Come quickly from above Write thy new name upon my heart, Thy new best name of love.
[00:42:20] Speaker A: The proceeding was a presentation of the C.S. lewis Institute. In the legacy of C.S. lewis, the institute endeavors to develop disciples who can articulate, defend and live faith in Christ through personal and public life.
For more information, please visit our website at www.cslewisinstitute.org. thank.
[00:42:48] Speaker B: You.
