Ep 34: Roxette Was Right

In Episode 34 of the Soil & Roots podcast, Brian Fisher explores the spiritual habit of listening to your own heart.

Many Christians are comfortable learning to hear God or listening to others, but paying attention to our own inner life can feel unfamiliar or even selfish. Yet Scripture repeatedly invites us to watch over our hearts with diligence because the heart is the core of who we are.

TRANSCRIPTION

Heart Listening

Intro: Welcome to the Soil and Roots podcast: digging beneath the surface to uncover the hidden ideas that form us, the church, and the culture. I’m Brian Fisher.

This is Episode 34: Roxette was Right

Just a quick reminder, I’ll be inviting a co-host to join me every other episode coming up here soon in Season 3.  A wonderful friend of mine, Kyle Moody, has been involved with Soil and Roots since the beginning. He and I will be modeling the type of “less monologue, more dialogue” approach we think is so helpful in our spiritual formation. I think you’ll love Kyle, and we hope the updated format will be helpful for you on your spiritual journey.

We’re working our way through the third Primary Problem this season on Soil and Roots, The Formation Gap. The essence of discipleship is to become like our King, and we’ve been exploring which set of elements best helps us in that journey.

The Holy Spirit prompts and directs us, though discipleship is something we participate in.  We cooperate with. We decide whether to be disciples or not.

The Five Key Elements

And we’ve explored several formative environments, including the New Testament community, and discovered that every intentionally formative culture has five things in common:

• Intentional time
• Specifically designed habits
• Purposeful community
• Appropriate intimacy
• Repetitious and increasingly complex instruction

If we deeply desire to become like someone else, we reprioritize our lives, we embrace these five elements, and we set our hearts on a journey of formation.

This is true if we want to become like Michael Jordan or Jordan Peterson, like Gabby Douglas or Frederick Douglass, like Mother Theresa or Brother Andrew.

If we desire to become like someone else, we’ll allocate blocks of time to the journey, we’ll study and apply the habits of the person we admire, we’ll become involved in a community of people who all want to become like that same person, work with each other in transparent, trusted relationships, and submit ourselves to instruction designed to take us into a deeper understanding of the object of our formation.

We’re calling these purposeful, intentional, five element communities “Greenhouses.” You can find all sorts of information about Greenhouses on the website, and we’ll do a few exclusive episodes about them before we end this season.

Now we might sit back and ask, “Is my local church like a Greenhouse?”  Well, I hope it is, but it may not.

If your church’s stated purpose is to make disciples, people who are becoming like Jesus from the inside out, if they exist to help you think like Jesus, relate like Jesus, desire like Jesus, and love like Jesus as He grows His Kingdom

…if your church invites you to spend large blocks of time in various formative disciplines in a community whose purpose is to journey with you in formation…

…if you have deep, confessional, trusted relationships with pastors and leaders there and the teaching curriculum steadily and intelligently guides you into deeper and deeper things of the faith,

…if you can say that you think, act, desire, and love more like Jesus now more than you did two or three years ago because of your local church – you’re probably in a type of Greenhouse! Booyah!

Some churches see their primary role as guiding your spiritual formation, but not all.

A Real-Life Example

For example, the church we used to attend isn’t a five-element community.  But it doesn’t pretend to be.  The senior pastor has said publicly that his view is that the primary purpose of the church is evangelism, and so the local church’s primary mission is to make converts.

I don’t agree with him, but I respect his position and the way he organizes the church around his philosophy.

The church has some Bible studies and support groups for people struggling with addiction or in their marriages, but the church has no expectation of being a place where people are formed from the inside out.  It expects to be a place where people hear the Gospel of Justification, with some percentage of people engaging in a few programs.

I respect the senior leadership’s consistency and transparency.  Their goal is to make converts, and they assume any discipleship is largely self-directed.

I said back in Season 1 that I don’t expect to be discipled at that church, because they don’t have that expectation either.

We spent an hour or two a week there.  There’s no training or intentionality to practicing spiritual disciplines. They don’t train us on prayer or fasting, confession, solitude, or how to hear the voice of God.

There’s no opportunity to build trusted, intimate relationships with the pastoral staff for the purpose of individual formation, and the teaching isn’t designed to grow the congregation into deeper and deeper levels of understanding. As best as I can tell, there’s no long-term, progressively complex method to their preaching schedule.

Does that make the church wrong or bad?  I don’t think so.  My wife doesn’t like this expression, but “it is what it is.”  I view the church as a place to develop the habit of corporate worship, to hear the preaching of the Word, and to serve. Those are all very good things, and they play some minor role in our formation.

Not to beat this metaphor to death, but that church is like a sports group that wants to convince me that Michael Jordan is the best basketball player in history and invites me to accept that fact.

But it isn’t a sports group that’s designed to help me become like Michael Jordan.  It doesn’t encompass the constant hours of practice and team building, the rigorous disciplines like dribbling, shooting, free throws, and passing.  It’s not a community of other Jordan fans who want nothing more than to become like Mike.  It doesn’t have a three-year training curriculum that starts with the basic rules of basketball and gradually moves me toward understanding the deeper nuances and philosophies of the sport.

And so, I live in a Gap.  Maybe you do, too.

Heartview Review

Jesus and His friends modeled a wonderful array of habits to help us become more like Him.

We’ve already touched on two: developing the habit of hearing God, and developing the habit of hearing other’s hearts, what we call “heart listening.”

God has placed us into four relationships (with Him, others, ourselves, and creation), and so we’re looking at habits in that context.

Today we’re going to look at the habit of listening to our own hearts. 

As the Soil and Roots community grows, I’m having more conversations with you about the various themes that you want to explore further. Some of the topics that are hitting home with you include:

• The power and importance of unconscious ideas
• The reality and scope of the Kingdom of God
• Questions and concerns about the role of the modern church
• The concept of “double knowledge” – that our relationship with God is dependent on our relationship with ourselves.

For some of us, intentionally digging into our own hearts is unfamiliar, a little uncomfortable, and maybe feels a little selfish.

Most of us are very comfortable embracing the idea that we should fix our eyes on Jesus as we long to fall more in love with Him.  But looking at ourselves and our own hearts as part of that journey?  Eh, we’re not so sure about that.

Growing to become more like Jesus requires this “double knowledge” – a deepening relationship with Jesus and a deepening relationship with ourselves. This isn’t how discipleship is normally portrayed in our era, which is why there’s a dilemma.

A process by which we come to understand our hearts better is called Heartview.  We may talk about worldview – that’s the set of beliefs that guides how we view the world and reality.

Heartview often sits underneath our beliefs, our worldview.  Heartview is the set of usually unconscious ideas and desires that power and govern us. Sometimes our ideas align with our beliefs and that’s a beautiful thing.  But…sometimes they don’t.

The basic concept behind Heartview is that our hearts reveal their hidden ideas and desires whether we want them to or not.  If we’re paying attention with kindness, we may well learn a thing or two about our inner life.

Our hearts reveal themselves through eight primary indicators:  our thoughts, emotions, behaviors, relationships, speech, our health, and how we treat time and money.

Four Characteristics of the Human Heart

Let’s take a look at a few characteristics of the human heart from a biblical perspective.  There’s a great resource called the Baker Encyclopedia of the Bible, and I dug around for what it says about the heart.

Here are four qualities of the heart according to Baker:

1. “Being so complex, man’s heart is sadly divided, and Scripture often extols a perfect, whole, true (i.e., united) heart (Gn 20:5; Acts 8:37 mg; Ps 86:11).”
2. “For “heart” signifies the total inner self, a person’s hidden core of being (1 Pt 3:4), with which one communes, which one “pours out” in prayer, words, and deeds (Gn 17:17; Ps 62:8; Mt 15:18, 19).

We talked about this back in Season 1.  Our hearts are the core, the deepest part, the center of who we are as humans.  And our heart “speaks.”

3. “It is the genuine self, distinguished from appearance, public position, and physical presence (1 Sm 16:7; 2 Cor 5:12; 1 Thes 2:17).”

This is a fascinating characteristic.  Our hearts are the “real.”  Not who we present to ourselves or others, but who we really, truly are.

4. “And this “heart-self” has its own nature, character, disposition, “of man” or “of beast” (Dn 7:4 kjv; 4:16; cf. Mt 12:33–37).^[1]

In other words, my heart sometimes has a “mind” of its own.

Emily Dickinson famously wrote, “The Heart wants what it wants – or else it does not care.”[2] Woody Allen co-opted the quote, and it’s popped up directly or indirectly in countless movies, books, and pop songs ever since.

Why does our heart sometimes have a “mind” of its own?  Because we’re all somewhat dis-integrated, disconnected people. Jesus is the only perfectly integrated person. His heart, mind and body are always on the same page.  Ours, unfortunately, are not.

Let’s summarize these four biblical qualities of the heart:

1. The heart is complex and divided, yet the Bible encourages us to be whole-hearted
2. The heart is our inner self, our core, and it speaks
3. The heart is our genuine self
4. The heart has its own nature or character

How can we learn our own hearts so that we may grow deeper in our relationship with God?

By “listening” to our hearts.  By paying attention to them, by intentionally discerning them.

The Bible invites us to do just that.

Proverbs 4 says, “My son, give attention to my words; Incline your ear to my sayings.

Do not let them depart from your sight; Keep them in the midst of your heart. For they are life to those who find them and health to all their body. Watch over your heart with all diligence, for from it flow the springs of life.^[3]

Beautiful imagery here.  We are to watch, guard, and pay attention to our hearts with all diligence.  That’s very purposeful, intentional language.

A deep disciple routinely explores their own heart and story in community, and we do that by paying attention to what our heart is saying through our indicators: our thought patterns, emotions, relationships, behaviors, health, words, and how we use time and money.

Chuck DeGroat wrote a book called Toughest People to Love, which explores how leaders may better relate to difficult people, including ourselves.

He writes, “…I’m convinced that leaders are called to examine ourselves very carefully as we attempt to figure out others.”[4]

That isn’t just true for leaders – it’s true for all of us.

Three Challenges to Listening to Our Own Hearts

So why might this be difficult for some of us?  Why might the idea of paying attention to my words or my thoughts, or the relationships I tend to form or how I use money, or exploring my story seem selfish or worldly or like I’m somehow betraying Christ because I’m focusing on me?

Here are three potential reasons:

1. The pendulum always swings too far to the other side.

I’ve spent a lot of time in the past year studying the Christian worldview and apologetics. I’ve been on video calls with some amazing authors, in small groups with Christians around the country, and have participated in some very deep conversations about modern Christianity and culture.

Many of these conversations have explored the “rise of the modern self.”

Back in Episode 24, we quoted some thinkers such as Glenn Sunshine and Carl Trueman.  Trueman, in particular, has correctly noted that we live in an age where the “self” is now the center of the universe.

“You do You.”  In some cases, we’re being forced to recognize someone’s identity based on how or what they feel about themselves.  Disney has been telling us for decades to just “follow our hearts.”  In many ways, our culture now affirms the notion that someone’s heart and feelings dictate reality for everyone.  That’s bad.

However, we’re running the risk of swinging the pendulum too far in the other direction.  What I’m hearing from various Christian corners is that the solution to the “You do You” culture is the subtle rejection of the emotional human heart in favor of solid doctrine, biblical truth, and correct teaching.

Those are all necessary and vital things. But the conclusion is that feelings, desires, and embedded ideas have virtually no place in the Christian life.  That objectivity is key, and that the heart cannot be trusted at all.

We should make a critical distinction here.  There is a profound difference between worshipping ourselves and studying our hearts for the purpose of worshipping Jesus.

I’ll say that again – there is a profound difference between deifying and idolizing the self and exploring the self in order to fall more in love with Jesus and become more like Him.  To assess what we do and why we do it for the purpose of doing more of the things Jesus does.

There seems to be a growing widespread, underlying Christian idea that feelings are “bad.” We can’t trust them; we shouldn’t follow them.  We should reject feelings in favor of correct statements.

Our emotions are gifts from God. Jesus has emotions, the Father expresses emotions.  Like anything else, emotions can be honored and attended to, or abused.  Modern culture is currently idolizing and using emotions to justify all sorts of destructive behaviors.  But is the solution to reject and ignore them entirely in favor of intellectual accuracy?  Or is it to develop a biblical, holistic understanding of emotions and treat them accordingly?

2. Here’s a second reason we may struggle to practice listening to our own hearts.

We’ve accepted the unconscious idea that Christianity is primarily about “doing.” We work, we perform, we’re constantly doing, going, making. Some of us feel guilty if we sit still for five minutes, or if, God forbid, we take a vacation and leave our laptops at home.

If you grew up in certain types of churches, we’ve been instructed thousands of times to serve and evangelize.  We’re to lay down our lives, deny ourselves, get out there and do something.

After a while, we may begin to feel selfish and guilty if we take some time to slow down, think, and explore our inner selves, our hearts, our stories.  We don’t feel like we’re doing enough, because we’ve been taught the Christian life is primarily about doing.

But the Christian life is primarily about being. The “doing” is a natural result of the “being.”

That’s the irony. For the deep disciple, service and evangelism just happen. She serves and talks about Jesus as a matter of course.  She doesn’t even think about it. As our stories become more and more woven into the story of the Kingdom, we’ll naturally serve and love more, and we’ll naturally invite people into the Kingdom in lots of different ways.

The third reason we might struggle to listen to our own hearts:

3. It can be painful. If the bedrock of who we are is our hearts, and our desires and ideas sit down there, asking why we speak, think, relate, stress, feel the way we do can be difficult. It can hurt.

It’s not just about exploring the ways we’ve been wounded – it’s about exploring how and why we’ve wounded others.  That’s why Heartview requires courageous curiosity.

One of the spiritual disciplines that’s been all but lost today is confession. Not just to God but to others.

It’s somewhat ironic that the hallmark of a Christian should be repentance, and yet we seem to avoid confession and repentance with regularity.  I certainly do.

Confession is often a natural outcome of Heartview.  We may discover, in our quest to understand why we’re short with our wives, or why we use money to manipulate, or why we try to control our friends, that our hearts desire things from the kingdom of darkness, and that results in sin.  But Augustine said, “The confession of evil works is the first beginning of good works.”[5]

A five-element community such as a Greenhouse strives to be confessional, in that it strives to be a community of continual repentance in safe and trusted environment.  And that sort of humility comes not only from understanding the wounds that have been inflicted on us, but the wounds we inflict on others.

The alternative to exploring our hearts is darkness. As poet W.H. Auden wrote,

“We would rather be ruined than changed, we would rather die in our dread than climb the cross of the moment and let our illusions die.”[6]

So how about us?  Do we struggle to listen to our own hearts because of one of these reasons?

1. Because we fear we might be selfish, or that focusing on our own hearts automatically means we’re worshipping ourselves and succumbing to a struggling culture?
2. Or because we’ve been taught we need to go, go, go, and if we aren’t doing something, we aren’t being someone?
3. Or because we’re understandably afraid? Afraid of what we might discover if we listen quietly, carefully. Afraid of the dark desires, the dark ideas, the sins that were inflicted on us…the sins we’ve inflicted on others? That exploring our hearts may well mean we become people of repentance, people of confession, people of stark and transparent humility.

A deep disciple is invited to practice hearing God, hearing the hearts of others, and hearing their own hearts.  And we do it together in our safe, trusted, compassionate community.

Ok we have one more episode on Habits and then we’ll move on to the third Key Element of Formation: Community.

You might be thinking, “We covered hearing God, hearing the hearts of others, and hearing our own heart.  Is the next episode about hearing creation and culture?  Is this turning into some New Age mumbo jumbo?”

Well, you’ll just have to wait and find out.

Thanks for listening!

For more information, check out soilandroots.org and email me at fish@soilandroots.org. We’ll see you next time.

^[1] Elwell, W. A., & Beitzel, B. J. (1988). Heart. In Baker encyclopedia of the Bible (Vol. 1, p. 939). Baker Book House.

[2] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/434971-the-heart-wants-what-it-wants—or-else-it

^[3] New American Standard Bible: 1995 update (Pr 4:20–23). (1995). The Lockman Foundation.

[4] DeGroat, C. (2014). Toughest People to Love: How to Understand, Lead, and Love the Difficult People in Your Life – Including Yourself (p. 6). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

[5] Foster, R. (2018). Celebration of Discipline: The Path to Spiritual Growth (p 143). Harper One.

[6] DeGroat, C. (2014). Toughest People to Love (p. 41). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.