Hardness of Heart
"That's great!" I said over the phone to a friend who had just shared a testimony of how God was working in his life. The discussion continued, but my thoughts were still... aggravated, confused, and stuck on my own disillusionment. "What had God been doing in my life?" I thought to myself as my friend continued sharing his triumphant story of God's faithfulness in his life. Searching, grasping at what felt like sand between my fingers, I could not recall a single thing.
My ugly neighbors - their names: Inadequacy and Inferiority- a bitter couple, came knocking at the door of my heart. Why is it that God seems to be up to something in all the people I minister to, but in my life: empty-chaotic-nothingness? I was ministering to others, desperately needing God to minister to me.
At the time, I had recently become a father of two, worked full-time in a successful career, and volunteered my free time as the Teaching Pastor at the church where I served. Week in and week out, I taught people about the God who seemed to be on holiday in my life. My heart felt empty, like a glass champagne bottle that had been broken in the act of christening God's holy ship, his church, that was setting sail.
Like glass, I was becoming hard and brittle. Easily agitated with my wife, kids, and community, and it was only a matter of time before the cork blew. Something needed to change. I needed a change.
I imagine Timothy felt this way. Paul left him alone in Ephesus of all places - the epicenter of conflict and glory. Timothy was tossed into the deep end of the pool of faith to sink or swim. Each day, Timothy had to learn to lead worship surrounded by dumpster fires. It was the perfect environment for the kind of life that springs up like a sunflower, with its soft yellow petals entranced by the sunlight's life-giving glow. Following it around morning, noon, and waiting patiently at night. Or the alternative... the dark night of the soul. I was the latter, and rock bottom was making me stony in heart.
In 2 Timothy chapter three, Paul writes to Timothy and warns him about becoming hard of heart. In the last days, Paul says people will be hard of heart, and it will reveal itself by way of people becoming lovers of self, money, pride, arrogance, pleasure...the list goes on and on. The important thing to note here is Paul doesn't say people will not have love, but that they will love the wrong things. They will put the onus of their attention on things that feed the mind but starve the soul.
He then says these hard-hearted people will be "always learning and never able to arrive at a knowledge of the truth. Just as Jannes and Jambres opposed Moses, so these men also oppose the truth, men corrupted in mind and disqualified regarding the faith. But they will not get very far, for their folly will be plain to all, as was that of those two men." (2 Tim. 3:7–9 ESV)
These two men, Jannes and Jambres, are none other than the magicians who engaged in the magical duel of Exodus chapter seven, where they used their witchcraft to turn their rods into snakes, only to be eaten up by Moses' rod. And people say the Bible is boring!
Jannes and Jambres were always learning, maybe even teaching what they had learned, and yet never arrived at the knowledge of the truth. And an arrival of knowledge absent of truth is the compression of evil and the extraction of all things good, happening all at once. It is the pressure that turns soft sand into granite. They had convictions, encounters, experience, and yet none of these things actually helped their heart to be soft when the God of Truth was in their midst.
I am embarrassed to say that I have spent months, if not years, of my walk with Christ, learning and never able to arrive at the knowledge of what God is up to in my life. Beautiful granite appearance to those around me, and yet inwardly cold and brittle.
How is it that we can be in God's midst, hear the stories - the rapturous testimonies of God capturing our friends' hearts, and have little truth alluring us towards the shimmering bait of heaven that mesmerizes even the simplest human to bite down on hooks of glory? Why am I so easily bored with glory? Or, put another way, why is it that God can be at work and I hardly notice at all?
Answer: Distractions.
Maybe you've asked these questions. If so, you are not alone.
Distractions dislocate us from truth, like people with their arms and legs tied to four horses, ready to be quartered and torn apart in four different directions. Dismembered and quartered, we have forgotten to remember, to re-see, to re-mind, to re-call what God has done and what He might be up to at this very moment. It might just be that none of us are without testimony of what God has been doing; instead, it seems we have been seeing skies without clouds, oceans without waves, trees without bark. None of us wants to touch grass without the color green. Sure, we see the big faraway oceanic picture of salvation, but do we notice how God has come near to us, like swells that make our toes sink into the knowledge of the Holy?
To the same distracted people, Paul writes in an earlier letter,
"That according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith—that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever. Amen." (Ephesians 3:16-21 ESV)
It seems to me that to know God, to up-close-know what He is up to in my life, it is not so much a matter of new information that is needed as much as recalling the tenderness of God that softens people like me who tend towards the stoniness of heart. We don't need more perspective; we need focus that zooms us in, refusing permission to the distractions that pull us away. We need to pull a chair up to the table, run our hands through the pages of God's present-ness, recall the wonders of his glory, then latch on to the hook - fighting like hell to be reeled into heaven. Like Jacob, refusing to let go until God wounds our hearts and makes us soft once more.
The ancient Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu once wrote,
"Men are born soft and supple; dead they are stiff and hard.
Plants are born tender and pliant; dead, they are brittle and dry.
Thus whoever is stiff and inflexible is a disciple of death.
Whoever is soft and yielding is a disciple of life.
The hard and stiff will be broken.
The soft and supple will prevail."1
Today, I welcome you to choose to be a disciple of life. To remember the soft, tender touch of God who sets you to flight with the delicate strength of feathers, not the clout of stones. God has positioned you to soar!
Let this be an invitation to take notice of God, to write down his splendidness, and re-remind yourself of the inconspicuous miracles that daily follow you around. You might just end up being the friend on the other end of the phone who awakens the person on the other end of the line to a faith that can fly.
