Category: Spiritual

Over a decade ago our youth pastor, Thomas, introduced us to the writings of Keller and we’re so very grateful. Back then I had a very limited library, and even fewer reading interests as Loretta both selected and purchased virtually all of my books in the hope, quite simply that I’d mature, and for what its worth, she has not yet quit seeking new reads for me, whereas I am buying all the proven wisdom books we utilize in facilitating relationship healing by the reading & implementation of them. Keller, today being an accomplished author, is widely read and respected. The past four years I’ve revisited this WWGTP&S book numerous times for its insights and two nights ago was led to pull it up on Kindle and read just the Epilogue after which I was prompted to blog it below ASAP.

Loretta and I are continually searching to assist spiritual seekers to prepare for future times of testing, likely to involve pain and suffering. I believe this book may serve as a guide for you to succinctly spiritually prepare for our inevitable future pain and suffering, regardless of it sources and dimensions.

Understand such spiritual strategy preparedness requires dimensions, for example, far beyond merely mounting fire extinguishers throughout your home and have everyone try one outside on a real fire. Also realize, Walking with God through Pain & Suffering reminds me more of Deuteronomy 6:9 by admonishing us to be “writing them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates…” Loving communication is always required. Enjoy your responsibility and opportunity today to prepare.

“If we know the biblical theology of suffering and have our hearts and minds engaged by it, then when grief, pain, and loss come, we will not be surprised, and can respond in the various ways laid out in Scripture. Here they are organized into ten things we should do.

First, we must recognize the varieties of suffering. Some trials are largely brought on by wrong behavior. Some are largely due to betrayals and attacks by others. Then there are the more universal forms of loss that occur to all regardless of how they live, such as the death of a loved one, illnesses, financial reversals, or your own imminent death. A final kind of suffering could be called the horrendous—such as mass shootings in elementary schools. Of course, many actual cases of suffering combine several of these four types.

Each kind of suffering brings somewhat different kinds of feelings—the first brings guilt and shame; the second, anger and resentment; the third, grief and fear; the fourth, confusion and perhaps anger at God. While all these forms of suffering share common themes—and are addressed in common ways—each also requires its own specific responses.

Second, you must recognize distinctions in temperament between yourself and other sufferers. You must be careful not to think that the way God helped some other sufferer through the fire will be exactly the way he will lead you. Simone Weil outlines the experience of affliction as consisting of isolation, self-absorption, condemnation, anger, and “complicity” with pain. A quick look at this list reveals that these factors will be stronger or weaker depending on a person’s emotional temperament and spiritual maturity, and also depending on the causes behind the adversity. Make adjustments.

Third, there is weeping. It is crucial to be brutally honest with yourself and God about your pain and sorrow. Do not deny or try too much to control your feelings in the name of being faithful. Read the Psalms of lament or Job. God is very patient with us when we are desperate. Pour out your soul to him.

Fourth, there is trusting. Despite the invitation to pour out our hearts to God with emotional reality, we are also summoned to trust God’s wisdom (since he is sovereign) and also to trust his love (since he has been through what you’ve been through). Despite your grief, you must eventually come to say, as Jesus did (after first honestly entreating, “Let this cup pass from me”), “Thy will be done.” Wrestle until you can say that.

Fifth, we must be praying. Though Job did a lot of complaining and cursed the day he was born—he did it all in prayer. It was to God he complained; it was before God that he struggled. In suffering, you must read the Bible and pray and attend worship even though it is dry or painful. Simone Weil said, if you can’t love God, you must want to love God, or at least ask him to help you love him.

Sixth, we must be disciplined in our thinking. You must meditate on the truth and gain the perspective that comes from remembering all God has done for you and is going to do. You should also do “self-communion.” This is both listening to your heart and also reasoning and talking to your heart. It means saying, “Why are you cast down, O my soul? Forget not his benefits, his salvation” (Ps 42; Ps 103). This is not forcing yourself to feel in a certain way but rather directing your thoughts until your heart, sooner or later, is engaged. Much of the thinking and self-communing that we must do has to do with Christian hope. Heaven and the resurrection and the future-perfect world are particularly important to meditate on if you are dealing with death—your own or someone else’s. But it is crucial in all suffering.

Seventh, we should be willing to do some self-examining. The biblical image of suffering as a “gymnasium” suggests this. We must exercise care here. This does not mean we should always be looking within ourselves for the cause of our suffering. Job’s friends tried to do that, though Job’s suffering did not occur because God was trying to correct him for something. Nevertheless, Job grew in grace and maturity, and every time of adversity is an opportunity to look at ourselves and ask—how do I need to grow? What weaknesses is this time of trouble revealing?

Eighth, we must be about reordering our loves. Suffering reveals that there are things we love too much, or we love God too little in proportion to them. Our suffering is often aggravated and doubled because we turned good things into ultimate things. Suffering will only make us better (rather than worse) if, during it, we teach ourselves to love God better than before. This happens by recognizing God’s suffering for us in Jesus Christ, and by praying, thinking, and trusting that love into our souls.

Ninth, we should not shirk community. Simone Weil speaks about how isolating suffering can be. But the early Christian communities were famously good places to be a person in suffering. Christians “died well,” the early church authors claimed, not because they were rugged individuals but because the church was a place of unparalleled sympathy and support. Gospel doctrine should make it impossible to grow many “miserable comforters” like Job’s moralistic friends. And the Christian gospel accounts for and assigns meaning to the experience of suffering as secular society cannot. Find a Christian church where sufferers are loved and supported.

Tenth, some forms of suffering—particularly the first two among the four types listed above— 1.) sufferings caused by our failures & 2.) sufferings caused by bad behavior – require skill at receiving grace and forgiveness from God, and giving grace and forgiveness to others. When adversity reveals moral failures or sinful character flaws, it means we will have to learn how to repent and seek reconciliation with God and others. When our suffering is caused by betrayal and injustice, it is crucial to learn forgiveness. We must forgive the wrongdoers from the heart, laying aside vengefulness, if we will ever be able to pursue justice effectively. Doing all these things, as George Herbert writes, will first bring your “joys to weep” but then your “griefs to sing.””

— Walking with God through Pain and Suffering by Timothy Keller

Quotes taken from David McCasland’s “The Quotable Oswald Chambers”

AGONY          AGONY          AGONY

          Agony means severe suffering in which something dies – either the base thing, or the good. No man is the same after an agony; he is either better or worse, and the agony of a man’s experience is nearly always the first thing that opens his mind to understand the need of Redemption worked out by Jesus Christ…. The Shadow of an Agony, 1161 R

            To those who have had no agony Jesus says, “I have nothing for you; stand on your own feet, square your own shoulders. I have come for the man who knows he has a bigger handful than he can cope with, who knows there are forces he cannot touch; I will do everything for him if he will let Me. Only let a man grant he needs me, and I will do it for him.”  The Shadow of Agony, 1166 R

            “Through the shadow of an agony comes Redemption.” The majority of us thus far today have lived our lives untouched by an agony; but in future conquest, war, famine, sword, pestilence or plague, the chances are that all are hit somewhere, and it is through a personal agony that a man is likely to begin to understand what the New Testament reveals.   The Shadow of an Agony, 1174 L

Discipleship          Discipleship          Discipleship

We don’t go in for making disciples  to-day, it takes too long; we are all for passionate evangelism – taken up with adding to the statistics of “saved souls,” adding to denominational membership, taken up with things which show splendid success. Jesus Christ took the long, long trail – “If any man will come after Me, let him deny himself” – “ Take time to make up your mind .” Men were not to be swept into the Kingdom on tidal waves of evangelism, not to have their wits paralyzed by supernatural means; they were to come deliberately, knowing what they were doing. One life straight through to God on the ground of discipleship is more satisfactory in His sight than numbers who are saved but go no further. Conformed to His Image, 346 R

God saves men; we are sent out to present Jesus Christ and His Cross, and to disciple the souls He saves. The reason we do not make disciples is that we are not disciples our ourselves; we are out for our own ends. So Send I You, 1301 L

 

Oswald Chambers wisdom over the past twenty-five years has literally saved my life. He sometimes startled audiences with his vigorous thinking and his vivid expression. Even those who disagreed with what he said found his teachings difficult to dismiss and all but impossible to ignore. Often his dry humor such as the following quote drove home a sensitive point: “Have we got in the way of letting God work, or are we so amazingly important that we really wonder in our hearts and minds what the Almighty does before we get up in the morning!” (Ouch!)

Oswald Chambers was not famous during his lifetime. At the time of his death in 1917 at the age of forty-three, only three booklets bearing his name had been published. Among a relatively small circle of Christians in Britain and the U.S., Chambers was much appreciated as a teacher of rare insight and expression, but he was not widely known.

Chambers was born in Aberdeen, Scotland, in 1874, the youngest son of a Baptist minister. He spent his boyhood years in Perth; then his family moved to London when Oswald was fifteen. Shortly after the move to London, Oswald made his public profession of faith in Christ and became a member of Rye Lane Baptist Church. This marked a period of rapid spiritual growth, along with an intense struggle to find God’s will and way for his life.

A gifted artist and musician, Chambers trained at London’s Royal Academy of Art, sensing God’s direction to be an ambassador for Christ in the world of art and aesthetics. While studying at the University of Edinburgh (1895-96), he decided, after an agonizing internal battle, to study for the ministry. He left the university and entered Dunoon College, near Glasgow, where he remained as a student, then a tutor for nine years.

Having given up art completely, Chambers found total sanctification, holiness, and devotion to God through the nondenominational Holiness Movement, called the Pentecostal League of Prayer. Pentecostalism hadn’t yet been born as an official movement. Lecturing and preaching in small churches nearby, he became increasingly confident and prolific, realizing the power of his own words were not his but the Spirit’s. He’d always been deeply intellectual, consuming astonishing amounts of literature that ran the gamut from theology to modernist philosophy to fantasy fiction, and he’d always striven to incorporate his reading into his sermons. He continued in that vein, but being set free in the Spirit, it was said he never took notes or planned his sermons in advance.   

In 1906 he traveled to the U.S., spending six months teaching at God’s Bible College in Cincinnati, OH. From there he went to Japan, visiting the Tokyo Bible School, founded by Mr. and Mrs. Charles Cowman. This journey around the world in 1906-07 marked his transition to full-time work with the Pentecostal League of Prayer.

In 1908 while on a ship bound for America, he met Gertrude Hibbs, a stenographer from home bound for New York City to look for secretarial work. Falling in love, they were married in 1910, the bride changing her name to Biddy Chambers after the two names Oswald had given her: the last was his own, and also his nickname for her, “B.D.”, (Biddy) for “Beloved Disciple.”  Their daughter Kathleen was born in 1913.

.During the last decade of his life, Chambers served as:

Traveling speaker and representative of the League of Prayer, 1907-10

Principal and main teacher of the Bible Training College, London, 1911-15

YMCA chaplain to British Commonwealth soldiers in Egypt, 1915-1917

He died in Cairo on November 15, 1917, of complications following an emergency appendectomy. The complete story of his life is told in Oswald Chamber: Abandoned to God (1993), available from Discovery House Publishers, Box 3566, Grand Rapids, MI 49501 or at www.dhp.org.

Thus ended the life of Oswald Chambers, an obscure preacher with nothing but some articles and booklets to his name, none of them well known. His afterlife though, would tell a different story; he would become one of the best-selling authors of all times with over 50 books to his name, a credit to a wife’s devotion to her husband. In “My Utmost For His Highest”, which has been in continuous printing since it was first published in 1927, Biddy combined excerpts from hundreds of lectures into these succinct daily readings. This book’s enduring popularity testifies to her intimate knowledge of the material and her editing skill, being the mastermind, creator, and sustenance of the Oswald Chambers publishing industry, which she ran for nearly fifty years, until her death in 1966. That story is told in the book “My Utmost: A Devotional Memoir.”

As presented in the Dec 24 blog, the introduction to it is repeated below. I just minutes ago read all 4200 words of your free gift again, actually now for the third time. I am so impressed with Chapter One of the John Eldredge and Brent Curtis book titled “Sacred Romance,” because I do believe it captures the “real time in this moment the state of the union for too many of today’s nomadic free wheeling Christ Followers (CF’s).”

And since that possible condition is so contrary, dear reader, to the clarion call of the Gospel of Christ, I am inviting you once more, assuming you missed the opportunity prior, to take 15 minutes to potentially begin the journey to restore your soul.

Prior Introduction:

Just Wednesday (12/21) when I came in for lunch I reached for a newly arrived used book, Sacred Romance, by an interesting author, John Eldredge, and before going back out to work, I’d read the first chapter twice and I realized he’d struck a home run for me. My Eldredge book guru responded immediately to my affirming text of the book with “That is a great book. Read ‘Beautiful Outlaw’ next”, to which I responded “I’ve been an outlaw all my life since my loving though, “time driven father,” had taught me to jaywalk before I was even seven, and somehow my renditions of taking short cuts in life for decades did not turn out so beautiful! My image of Eldredge prior to this book was that he communicates well with the “rugged mountain man no non-sense masculine crowd” of today’s CF’S etc, but this book, “Sacred Romance” I believe is effectively targeting the “compliant rank and file card carrying weekly pew dwellers” as well as the live-streamers now scattered across the institutional church landscape.

So, if you’ve been internally restless recently realizing suddenly your dominant posture is unwittingly being a compliant sheep, or perhaps, too often found thinking “There is something missing in all of this” which then, soon leads to we losing our passion for life, after which a despondency or despair may set in, which we again, just can’t seem to shake free from, so in time, we verbally confess “My heart’s just not in it!” and then exit in some too often, most miserable fashion! Definitely not so good when you’re to be a “truth teller ambassador type” in His community!

Actually, Chapter One serves beautifully as both an introduction / prologue. Envision your 2023 with the ends knocked out of all your ruts. Perhaps you need to read a chapter each day from Proverbs every month for a spell to broaden your perspective of biblical wisdom and common sense as the evilness of our culture engulfs us.

So here is your Christmas present from me this year. Go to the Dec 24 blog below directly to where Chapter One begins! And Amazon Prime has used copies shipped for less than $5.00. Enjoy!

The Employees, Businesses, and Relationships

We All Have To Give Up In Order To Move Ahead…

NYR = New Years Resolutions

While endings are a natural part of life and business, we often experience them with a sense of hesitation, sadness, resignation, or regret. But consultant, psychologist, and bestselling author Dr, Henry Cloud sees endings differently. He argues that our personal and professional lives can only improve to the degree that we can see endings as a necessary and strategic step to something better. If we cannot see endings in a positive light and execute them well, he asserts, the “better” will never come about in business growth or rewarding personal lives, and especially so, I Merlin, maintain if we are to develop fruitful spiritual dimensions.  

In this insightful and deeply emphatic book, Dr. Cloud demonstrates that, when executed well, “necessary endings” allow us to proactively correct the bad and broken in our lives. When endings are avoided or handled poorly, as too often is the case, good opportunities may be lost, and misery repeated. Drawing on years as an executive coach and a psychologist, Dr. Cloud offers a mixture of advise and case studies to help readers:

1.) Know when to have realistic hope and when to execute a necessary ending in a business, or with an individual;

2.) Identify which employees, projects, activities, and relationships are worth nurturing and which are not;

3.) Overcome people’s resistance to change and create change that is effective;

4.) Create urgency and an action plan for what’s important;

5.) Stop wasting resources needed for the things that really matter.

Knowing when and how to let go of either something or someone, when it isn’t working out – whether it be in a personal relationship, a job, a ministry, or a business venture – is absolutely essential for short term  vitality and especially for thriving long term in all dimensions. Necessary Endings gives readers the tools they need to say good-bye and move on.

Used copies are expensive and not readily available. Amazon new is $27.29

Never have I done this prior! You just might say that I’ve been doing a lot of  things in this blog lately I’ve never done prior. Just Wednesday when I came in for lunch I reached for a newly arrived used book, Sacred Romance, by an interesting author, Eldredge, and before going back out to work, I’d read the first chapter twice and I realized he’d struck a home run for me. My Eldredge book guru responded immediately to my affirming text of the book with “That is a great book. Read ‘Beautiful Outlaw’ next,” to which I responded “I’ve been an outlaw all my life since my “time driven father” taught me to jaywalk before I was seven, and somehow my renditions of taking short cuts in life for decades did not turn out so beautiful at all!” My image of Eldredge prior to this book was that he communicates well with the discontents, the misfits, the underground, etc,. David, years earlier anointed for kingship, and later escaping Saul, with his band of 400 men (marauders)  comes to mind, but Sacred Romance is effectively designed for targeting the rank and file card carrying weekly pew dwellers, as well as the “seldom seen fringies.”

So if you’ve been internally restless when you realize suddenly your dominant posture is being a compliant sheep, or too often found thinking “There is something missing in all of this” which too soon leads to we losing our passion for life and so when the deadness sets in which we again, just can’t seem to shake, we confess “My heart’s just not in it!” and exit in some too often miserable fashion. Not so good when you’re a “truth teller” in His community!

So here is your Christmas present from me this year. Since this book is without an Introduction or Prologue, I just typed up Chapter One for you to read at your leisure… 4200+ words, but I’m hoping you’ll thank me if you’re honest.

Actually, Chapter One serves beautifully as both an introduction / prologue. Envision your 2023 with the ends knocked out of all your ruts. Perhaps you need to read Proverbs through each month to broaden your scriptural common sense perspective since it is increasingly being culturally destroyed.

Sacred Romance: Drawing Closer to the Heart of God

By Brent Curtis and John Eldredge

Book Review of Sacred Romance: Drawing Closer to the Heart of God

If you’re feeling lost, disconnected, or longing for something more, join John Eldredge and Bent Curtis as they explore the greatest love of our lives. The Sacred Romance invites us to find the peace and purpose we crave by slowing down, asking questions, and deepening our relationship with God. Eldredge and Curtis believe that modern Christians have lost touch with our hearts. We’ve left that essential part of ourselves behind in the pursuit of efficiency, success, and the busyness of our lives. The Sacred Romance will guide you through a journey to getting to know yourself and your creator even better, asking you: What is this restlessness and emptiness I feel, sometimes after years into my Christian journey? What is it that is set so deeply in my heart, that simply will not leave me alone? When did I stop listening to God’s leading? The Sacred Romance is a journey of the heart, full of intimacy, adventure and beauty, that will guide you through your fondest memories, your greatest loves, your noblest achievements, and even your deepest hurts – but the reward is worth the risk!

Page 8 Paragraph 5: “The truth of the gospel is intended to free us to love God and others with our whole heart. When we ignore this heart aspect of our faith and try to live our religion solely as correct doctrine or ethics, our passion is crippled, or perverted, and the divorce of our soul from the heart purposes of God toward us is deepened.”

Enjoy being thirsty! merlin

Chapter One: The Lost Life of the Heart

Thirsty Hearts are those whose longings have been wakened by the touch of God within them. A. W. Tozer

Some years into our spiritual journey, after the waves of anticipation that mark the beginning of any pilgrimage have begun to ebb into life’s middle years of service and busyness, a voice speaks to us in the midst of all we are doing. There is something missing in all of this, it suggests. There is something more.

The voice often comes in the middle of the night or the early hours of the morning, when our hearts are most unedited and vulnerable. At first, we mistake the source of this voice and assume it is just our imagination. We fluff up our pillow, roll over, and go back to sleep. Days, weeks, even months go by and the voice speaks to us again: Aren’t you thirsty? Listen to your heart. There is something missing.

We listen and we are aware of …. A sigh. And under the sigh is something dangerous, something that feels adulterous and disloyal to the religion we are serving. We sense a passion deep within that threatens a total disregard for the program we are living; it feels reckless, wild. Unsettled, we turn and walk away, like a woman who feels more than she wants to when her eyes meet those of a man not her husband.

We tell ourselves this small, passionate voice is simply an intruder who has gained entry because we have not been diligent enough in practicing our religion. Our pastor seems to agree with this assessment and exhorts us from the pulpit to be more faithful. We try to silence the voice with outward activity, redoubling our efforts at Christian service. We join a small group and read a book on establishing a more effective prayer life. We train to be part of a church evangelism team. We tell ourselves that the malaise of spirit we feel even as we step up our religious activity is a sign of spiritual immaturity and we scold our heart for its lack of fervor.

Sometime later, the voice in our heart dares to speak to us again, more insistently this time. Listen to me – there is something missing in all this. You long to be in a love affair, an adventure. You were made for something more. And, you know it.

When the young prophet Samuel heard the voice of God calling to him in the night, he had the counsel from his priestly mentor, Eli, to tell him how to respond. Even so, it took them three times to realize it was God calling. Rather than ignoring the voice, or rebuking it, Samuel finally listened.

In our modern, pragmatic world we often have no such mentor, so we do not understand it is God speaking to us in our heart. Having been so out of touch with our deepest longing, we fail to recognize the voice and the One who is calling to us through it. Frustrated by our heart’s continuing sabotage of a dutiful Christian life, some of us silence the voice by locking it away in the attic, feeding it only bread and water of duty and obligation until it is almost dead, the voice now weak and small. But sometimes in the night when our defenses are down, we still hear it call to us, oh, so faintly – a distant whisper. Come morning though, the new day’s activities scream for our attention, the sound of the cry is gone, and we congratulate ourselves on finally overcoming the flesh.

 Others of us agree to give our heart a life on the side if it will only leave us alone and not rock the boat. So, we try to lose ourselves in our work, or “get a hobby” (either of which soon begin to feel like an addiction); we have an affair, or develop a colorful fantasy life fed by dime-store romances (Hallmark qualify?) or pornography. We learn to enjoy the juicy intrigues and secrets of gossip. We make sure to maintain enough distance between ourselves and others and our own heart, to keep hidden the practical agnosticism we are living now that our inner life has been divorced from our outer life. Having thus appeased our heart, we nonetheless are forced to give up our spiritual journey because our heart will no longer come with us. Our heart is now bound up and trapped in the little indulgences we feed it to keep it at bay.

Losing Heart

The life of the heart is a place of great mystery. Yet we have many expressions to help us express this flame of the human soul. We describe a person without compassion as “heartless,” and we urge him or her to “have a heart.” Our deepest hurts we call “heartaches.” Jilted lovers are “heartbroken.” The truly evil are “blackhearted” and saints have “hearts of gold.” If we need to speak at the most intimate level, we ask for a “heart-to-heart” talk. And when we love someone as truly as we may, we love “with all our heart.” But when we lose our passion for life, when a deadness sets in which we cannot seem to shake, we confess, “My heart’s just not in it.”

In the end, it doesn’t matter how well we have performed or what we have accomplished – a life without heart is not worth living. For out of this wellspring of our soul flows all true caring and all meaningful work, all real worship and all sacrifice. Understand that our faith, hope, and love all issue from this fount, as well. Because it is in our heart that we first hear the voice of God and it is in the heart that we come to know Him and learn to live in His love.

You can see that to lose heart is to lose everything. And a “loss of heart” best describes most men and women in our day. It isn’t just the addictions and affairs and depression and heartaches though, God knows there is enough of these to cause even the best of us to lose heart. But there is the busyness, the drivenness, the fact that most of us are living merely to survive. Beneath it we feel restless, weary and vulnerable.

Indeed, the many forces driving modern life have not only assaulted the life of our heart, they have also dismantled the heart’s habitat – that geography of mystery and transcendence we knew so well as children. As we mature into the intricacies of life, we all at one time or another have experienced with a parent, a teacher, during a church service, or even sexual intimacy, the sense that something important, perhaps at that moment, the only thing important, had been explained away or tarnished and lost to us forever. Sometimes little by little and sometimes in epic chunks, the terrain that life has appropriated to nourish and sustain the more wildly expressive life’s dimensions of the heart, or the heart’s exuberantly creativeness, is simply lost, squelched, thereby forcing such dimensions to retreat as endangered species into smaller, more secluded, and often darker geographies for its survival. As this has happened, we discover sadly, something has been lost, something vital to the integrity of our soul.

For what shall we do when we wake one day to find we have lost touch with our heart and with it the very refuge where God’s presence resides?

When did I stop listening to God’s leading? The Sacred Romance is a journey of the heart, full of intimacy, adventure and beauty, that will guide you to your fondest memories, your greatest loves, your noblest achievements, and even your deepest hurts – but the reward is worth the risk!

Starting very early, life has taught all of us to ignore and distrust the deepest yearnings of our heart. Life, for the most part teaches us to suppress our longing and live only in the external world where performance and efficiency are everything. We have learned from parents, peers, at school, at work, and even from our spiritual mentors that something else is wanted from us other than our heart, which is to say, that which is most deeply and intimately us. Very seldom are we ever invited to live out of our heart. If we are wanted, we are wanted only for what we can offer functionally. If rich, we are honored for our wealth; if beautiful, for our looks; if intelligent, for our brains. So we soon learn to offer only those parts of us that are approved, living out a carefully crafted performance to gain acceptance from those who represent life to us, thereby divorcing ourselves from our heart so that we unconsciously begin to live a double life. Frederick Buechner expresses this  phenomenon in his biographical work, Telling Secrets:

“[Our] original shimmering self gets buried so deep we hardly live out of it all  … rather, we learn to live out of all the other selves which we are constantly putting on and taking off like coats and hats in response to the world’s weather.”

On the outside, there is the external story of our lives. This is the life everyone sees, our life at work and play and church, of family and friends, paying bills, and growing older. Our external story is where we carve out our identity that most others know. It is the place where we have learned to label each other in a way that implies we have reached our final destination. For example, Bob is an accountant, Mary works for the government, Ted is an attorney, etc., so busyness is substituted for meaning, efficiency substituted for creativity, and functional relationships are substituted for love. In the outer life we live from ought, (I ought to do this) rather than from desire (I want to do this) and management substitutes for mystery.

There is a spiritual dimension to this external world in our desire to do good works, but communion with God is eventually replaced by mere activity for God. There is little time in this outer world for deep questions. Given the right plan, everything in life can be managed …. except your heart.

The inner life, the story of our heart, is the life deep within us, our passions, our dreams, our fears and our deepest wounds. It is the unseen life, the mystery within – what Buechner calls our “shimmering self,” such as a mirage of a lake in a desert! It cannot be managed like a corporation. The heart does not respond to principles and programs; it seeks not efficiency, but passion. Art, poetry, beauty, mystery, ecstasy: These are what rouse the heart. It is why Jesus so often taught and related to people by telling stories and asking questions. His desire was not just to engage their intellects but to capture their hearts.                                                                         

Indeed, if we will listen, a Sacred Romance calls to us through our every heart moment of our lives. It whispers to us on the wind, invites us through the laughter of good friends, reaches out to us through the touch of someone we love. We’ve heard it in our favorite music, sensed it at the birth of our first child, the loss of a marriage, the death of a friend. Something calls to us through experiences like these and rouses an inconsolable longing deep within our heart, awakening in us a yearning for intimacy, beauty, and adventure.

This longing is the most powerful part of any personality. It fuels our search for meaning, for wholeness, for a sense of being truly alive. However we may describe this deep desire, it is the most important thing about us, our heart of hearts, the passion of our life. And the voice that calls us to this place is absolutely none other than the voice of God.

We cannot hear this voice if we have lost touch with our heart.

The true story of every person in this world is not the story you see, the external story. The true story of each person is the journey of his or her heart. Jesus himself knew that if people lived only in the outer story, eventually they would lose track of their inner life, the life of their heart that he so much desired to redeem. Indeed, it was to the most religious people of his time that Jesus spoke His strongest warnings about a loss of heart.

It is tragic for any person to lose touch with the life of their heart but especially so for those of us who once heard the call in our heart and recognized it as the voice of Jesus of Nazareth. We may remember Him inviting us to a life of forgiveness and rest, providing us the life of beauty, intimacy, and adventure that we thought was lost. For others of us, when he called, it felt for the first time in our lives as if out heart had finally found a home. We responded in faith, in hope, and in love and began the journey we call the Christian life. Each day seemed a new adventure as we discovered the world with God by our side.

But for many of us, the waves of first love ebbed away in the whirlwind of Christian service and activity, and we began to lose the Romance. Our faith began to feel more like a series of problems that needed to be solved or principles that had to be mastered before we could finally enter into the abundant life promised us by Christ. We had moved our spiritual life into the outer world of treadmill activity, and internally we drifted. We sensed something was wrong and we perhaps tried to fix it – by tinkering with our outer life. We tried the latest spiritual fad, or a different church community, or simple redoubled our commitment to make faith work. Still, we found ourselves weary, jaded, or simply bored. Others of us immersed ourselves in busyness without really asking where all the activity was headed. At one point in my own spiritual journey, I stopped to ask myself this question: What is it that I am supposed to be doing to live the spiritual life in any way that is both truthful and passionately alive?”

What we want to say in these pages is simply this: Our hearts are telling us the truth – there really is something missing!

The Centrality of the Heart

For above all else, the Christian life is a love affair of the heart. It cannot be lived primarily as a set of principles or ethics. It cannot be managed with steps and programs. It cannot be lived exclusively as a moral code leading to righteousness. In response to a religious expert who asked him what he must do to obtain real life, Jesus asked a question in return:

“What is written in the Law? … How do you read it?”

He answered: ‘“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind; and ‘Love your neighbor as yourself,’”

“You have answered correctly,” Jesus replied. “Do this and you will live.” (Luke10: 26-28.”

The truth of the gospel is intended to free us to love God and others with our whole heart. When we ignore this heart aspect of our faith and try to live our’ religion solely as correct doctrine or ethics, our passion is crippled, or perverted, and the divorce of our soul from the heart purposes of God toward us is deepened.

The religious technocrats of Jesus’ day confronted him with what they believed were the standards of a life pleasing to God. The external life, they argued, the life of ought and duty and service, was what mattered. “You’re dead wrong,” Jesus said. “In fact, you’re just plain dead [whitewashed tombs]. What God cares about is the inner life, the life of the heart” (Matt. 23:25-28). Throughout the Old and New Testaments, the life of the heart is clearly God’s central concern. When people of Israel fell into a totally external life of ritual and observance, God lamented, “These people … honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me” (Isa. 29:13).

Our heart is the key to the Christian life.

The apostle Paul informs us that hardness of heart is behind all addictions and evils of the human race (Rom. 1:21-25). Oswald Chambers writes, “It is by the heart that God is perceived [known] and not by reason … so that is what faith is: God perceived by the heart.” This is why God tells in Proverbs 4:23, “Above all else, guard the heart, for it is wellspring of life.” He knows that to lose heart is to lose everything. Sadly, most of us watch the oil level in our car more carefully than we watch over our heart.

In one of the greater invitations ever offered to man, Christ stood up amid the crowds in Jerusalem and said, “If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the scriptures has said, streams of living water will flow  from within him” (John 7:37-38). If we aren’t aware of our soul’s deep thirst, his offer means nothing. But if we will recall, it was from the longing of our hearts that most of us first responded to Jesus. Somehow, years later, do we assume he no longer calls us through the thirst of our heart? Like the Galatians, whom Paul rebuked for forgetting how they came to Christ, do we too need to admit that something or someone has literally seduced us to return to our outer life and performance as the way of salvation. This external religious self we try to maintain doesn’t recognize God’s voice communing with us when He comes to call us more deeply to the romance he has set within us.

Is it possible to recover the lost life of our heart and with it the intimacy, beauty, and adventure of life with God. Surely, but to do so, we must leave what is familiar and uncomfortable – perhaps even parts of the religion in which we have come to trust – and take a journey. To do so, this journey takes on a search for the lost life of our heart, and for the voice that once called us in those secret places when our heart was still with us. This pilgrimage of the heart leads us to remember together what it was that first engaged us in deep ways as children: “…anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it,” said Jesus (Mark 10:15).

Our journey will take us to explore the hidden questions of our heart, born out of the stories of our lives. It is only by leaving home and taking a pilgrimage that we will begin to see how our own stories are interwoven with the Great Romance God has been telling since before the dawn of time. It is on this pilgrimage that we begin to see that each of us has a part in the cosmic love affair that was created specifically with us in mind. Last, this pilgrimage brings us to the destination, set within all of our hearts, which in some way we have known, longed for, and been haunted by since we were children.

This book is born out of the journey that John and I have shared for several years. I have been a Christian counselor for the same length of time that John has been conducting seminars for a major Christian ministry. Both of us at one time worked in a local church. Our lives have given us a unique look into the inner life of modern Christianity, and what we have known from our own stories has been confirmed again and again through hundreds of encounters with other believers: That most Christians have the lost the life of their heart and with it, their romance with God. (OUCH!) As we trace the steps of the journey toward God’s resurrection of the heart, we hope to help you discover your soul’s deepest longing and invite you to embrace it as the most important part of your life.  

It is our aim to help you “guard your heart,” to see more clearly the enemies of your heart and the hearts of all those you love; to enable you to better enter the battle for hearts to which we serve as ambassadors in His Kingdom.

Our journey begins by asking questions, putting words to the movements of the heart. “What is this restlessness and emptiness I feel, sometimes after decades into my Christian journey? What does the spiritual life have to do with the rest of my life? What is it that is set so deeply in my heart, experienced as a longing for adventure and romance, that simply will not leave me alone? Does it have anything to do with God? What is it that He wants from me? Has he been speaking to me through my heart all along? When did I stop listening? When did His voice first call to me?”

When did I stop listening to God’s leading? The Sacred Romance is a journey of the heart, full of intimacy, adventure and beauty, that will guide you to your fondest memories, your greatest loves, your noblest achievements, and even your deepest hurts – but the reward is worth the risk!

Happy New Year!

I plan on having used copies of the book available for $5.

Because a man has altered his life does not necessarily mean that he has repented. A man may have lived an evil life and suddenly stopped being bad, not because he has repented, but because he is like an exhausted volcano. The fact that he has become good is no sign of his having become a Christian. The bedrock of Christianity is repentance. Baffled to Fight Better, 83 L

A man has the power to harden himself against one of God’s greatest gift’s. If in order to dissolve a piece of ice, you take a hammer and smash it up, you simply break it into so many smaller pieces of ice; but put the ice out in the sunshine and it quickly disappears. That is just the difference between man’s handling of wrong and God’s. Man’s handling may cause it to crumble , but it is still only so much crumbled-up wrong, whereas when God handles it, it becomes repentance, and the man turns to God and his life becomes a sacrament of experimental repentance. Baffled to Fight Better, 85 L

Never mistake remorse for repentance; remorse simply puts a man in hell while he is on earth; it carries no remedial quality with it at all, nothing that betters a man.  Conformed to His Image 348 R

Remorse is never repentance; remorse is the rebellion of man’s own pride which will not agree with God’s judgement on sin, but rather, accuses God because he has made His laws too stern and holy.  Our Portrait in Genesis 962 L

The prevailing attitude to-day is the healthy-minded attitude that treats remorse as a disease of the nerves and sin as mere intellectual nuisance – “Do things; don’t give way to absurd self-examination.” Jesus Christ stands for the unhindered facing of God, and such a facing will always bring a man to the evangelical attitude – “Just as I am.” Beware of bracing yourself up to be cheerful when you should be broken up into repentance.  Notes on Jeremiah, 1393 R

Perhaps Examining Definitional Boundaries Today Has Merit Considering ….

The thing that makes us whimper is that we will look for justice. If you look for justice in your Christian work you will soon put yourself in a bandage and give way to self-pity and discouragement. Never look for justice, but rather, never cease to give it; and never allow anyone or anything you meet with to sour your relationship to men through Jesus Christ. Rather, “Love … as I have loved you.” Approved Unto God, 16 R

The teaching of the Sermon on the Mount is never to look for justice but never cease to give it. We waste our time merely looking for justice, when it is our responsibility to see that we always give justice to others. “If you are My disciple,” Jesus says, “people won’t play fair; but never mind that; see that you play fair.” The Highest Good – The Pilgrim’s Song Book, 527 R

One of the great stirring truths of the Bible is that the man who looks for justice from others is a fool … Never waste your time looking for justice; if you do you will soon put yourself in bandages and give way to self-pity. Rather, it is our business to see that no one suffers from OUR injustice. Shade of His Hand, 1205 R