Find and address the things that lie within before something else does.
Like a lot of pre-teen boys back in the seventies, my brother and I got into lawn mowing to earn our summer candy and comics. It wasn’t long before our gigs felt onerous under a blazing Louisiana sun. We began trying to get done too fast, only giving the yard a cursory scan before starting the mower. That led to running over items hidden in the tall grass while the blades were turning—a stump, a hose head, a brick, a clump of paper that exploded out from under the mower all over the rest of the yard. Each of these yielded spectacularly unpleasant results.
And it all began with a rushed assumption that nothing needed to be picked up.
This is the mistake we Christians make on an almost daily basis. Nothing resistant, it seems, lies concealed within the thick religious ground cover that fills our hearts. And so, skimping on internal development, we devalue the needs of our hidden regions while paying premium attention to behavioral and external issues others can see. The apostle Paul warned that this type of avoidance ends up in Christian shipwreck (c.f. 1 Tim. 1:19) and useless ministry (“vain discussion”—v. 6).
Concern for our inward condition needs to remain central to our walk.
“Certain persons, by swerving from these, have wandered away into vain discussion, desiring to be teachers of the law, without understanding either what they are saying or the things about which they make confident assertions.” (1 Tim. 1:6-7).
According to Paul, some people swerve from the things of verse 5, which mentions a pure heart, a good conscience, and sincere faith (see my last post). In doing so, these folks not only neglect their inner life but deliberately avoid it.
Dealing with internal issues tends to be more abstract than simpler, workbook-style self-improvement. We prefer the pragmatic strategies to Christian living rather than the rich, truth-based, faith-based relational approach. Jesus warned of this habit, indicting the religious folks of the day: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you clean the outside of the cup and the plate, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence” (Mt. 23:26).
The teaching of behavioral legalism is, to some of us, tempting. It offers short-term results, bypassing the slow and steady work of grace. That is why some people choose to try harder rather than to cry out, “wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from the body of this death?” (Rom. 7:24).
Even natural efforts that seem successful are never marked by the divine hand. Truly, a person can attain praiseworthy standing in the religious community by the sweat of his brow. But meanwhile, his heart can remain mixed with many motives, his conscience only as good as his sinful self-justification, and his faith little more than an object for public show. Yet he has kept the “rules,” sometimes above and beyond his peers.
Although there are important practical uses for the principle of law giving and law keeping (we will see them in next week’s post), in the end, the law does not grant the boon its practitioners think it will. It might restrain people from doing certain things through shame and threat of punishment, but it does little to change the human heart. The things that lie hidden, lie hidden still.
Avoidance of inner life issues frequently proves destructive. Then why do we do it? For one thing, it is easier to allow mixture in the heart than to face it. It is easier to bribe our conscience than to exercise ourselves unto having a good one. It is easier to follow rules than to interact with God in authentic ways.
Regardless though, in principle, a situation allowed by God always ends up exposing these concealed things. As King James might say, “Behold, the mower cometh.”
And it can get ugly. Once while mowing a back pasture, we hit a nest of baby rabbits. The bloody mess that resulted traumatized my young mind.
Okay, maybe some of these experiences will happen no matter what. How often are we aware of everything lurking in the tall grass of our hearts? I’ve certainly been caught by surprise many times, shocked at what a momentary crisis seemed to flush out of me. These things were humiliating because I had worked so hard to do and be the opposite. In undetected ways, my moral energy had become my god.
Now, if those things can happen by “accident,” how about the objects we intentionally swerve around? And what blessings might occur if we decided to face them in a non-compromising way, probing hidden regions more carefully? What if we made our heart, conscience, and faith more germane to our consideration of the Christian life?
Now there’s a thought.
But these things take time to cultivate. Maybe years. Maybe all your life. However, the changes that are made will prove genuine. Grace, the redemptive work of God, builds spiritual experiences and truth into a human being, turning a person into what God requires.
This is an updated edition of a post originally published on Bareknuckle Bible
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