the heart

“I will bring the blind by a way they did not know.” ~Isaiah 42:16

Mily Cyrus is portrayed on the cover of Parade magazine this week as an emerging teen who declares with new found certainty, “I know who I am.” We would only pray that this is as true as it is remarkable. I certainly had no idea of who I was at 17 and still struggle at age 65. Just who am I? I am afraid I have much more in common with the Apostle Paul than I do with Mily Cyrus. Paul, that mighty defender of the faith, openly admitted, “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.”

I have a young friend who is one of those folks who has the appearance of polish and success written all over him. He is an educated professional with a wife and newborn child. Together they radiate the model young Christian family. Well-mannered, well-spoken, prosperous, athletic looks, and knowledgeable in all manner of Scriptural truth, he epitomizes for me any young man’s dream or ambition. He shared with me his story-book upbringing in a Christian home in the hills of West Virginia where he spent every Sunday in church and where he met his wife-to-be as a teenager in the church nursery. He says he was raised in “Mayberry” and was every bit the good son that would conform in such a setting. Yet he looks back and declares that as a young man he was every bit a rank sinner that was fully headed for and deserving of hell. It was his own secret self that was out of control that could also admit with Paul of being the chief of sinners. I sat a bit stunned at hearing this self-deprecating description. The disparity of image and truth jangled my sensibilities.

I am always intrigued by the spiritual journey stories when interviewing new families as they join with us here at school. Many of them indicate they have dull testimonies because of having accepted Christ at a young age in a Christian home. Indeed, a dull testimony is what you desire for your children as well. We would not wish the heartbreak of a prodigal-come-home testimony on anyone. The risk and pain is too great. Yet, I have come to understand that all of us who name the name of Christ, no matter of age or experience, have been fished out of the miry pit of sin by the grace of God. We were all standing in the cesspool of lost-ness, alone and covered in guilt, totally unworthy of any merit or favor. We may have been the elder brother who stayed at home, but we were as equally in need of a savior as any who have traveled to a distant land to waste our substance in riotous living “…for there is no difference: For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God.”

I think it is easy to become confused as to who we actually are. Those of us who have lived the straight life all these years can easily grow comfortable with our middle-class, respectable selves and assume a creeping smugness that belies our actual nature. Jeremiah laments that the human heart is desperately wicked, who can know it? Such a picture of who we actually are is not popular or cheerful. It kind of reminds us of Jonathon Edwards’ sermon, “Sinners in the hands of an angry God,” a picture or message we do not necessarily enjoy. While I would dare suggest that Edwards rename his message, “Sinners in the hands of a just and holy God,” I think he had the rest quite right. We are all quite deserving of eternal damnation. This perspective should do two things for us. It should help us bear a posture of true humility as those who have “nothing in our hands to bring.” Secondly, it should renew within us a sense of profound joy that we, who were lost, have now been found. Though we were blind, we now can see.

It should also make us fully aware that our children, though good and pleasant and obedient on the outside, still need a new heart and a cleansing that only God can give. And when they blow it, we should not be shocked. They are, like we, emerging from the pit and the miry clay of sin into which they were born. That is the real truth of who we are and the most vital truth of all.