Purity of Heart and the Knowledge of God

Apart from Jesus Himself, King David was a man who understood authority perhaps as well as any man ever has. He ruled the nation of Israel during its ascent to the pinnacle of power among earthly kingdoms, and he gave much energy to contemplating authority and what is required of those who will exercise it. In Psalm 24 David gives us insight into the authority structure of heaven, and the requisites for receiving that heavenly authority here on the earth. Consider these words:

The earth is the LORD’S, and all its fullness,

The world and those who dwell therein. 

For He has founded it upon the seas,

And established it upon the waters. 

Who may ascend into the hill of the LORD?

Or who may stand in His holy place? 

He who has clean hands and a pure heart,

Who has not lifted up his soul to an idol,

Nor sworn deceitfully. 

He shall receive blessing from the LORD,

And righteousness from the God of his salvation.

(Psalm 24:1-5, NKJV)

David’s first acknowledgement here is that all the fullness of the earth belongs to the Lord God. He is the supreme authority by right of creation and redemption, and all who dwell on the earth belong to Him. But then the Psalm gets focused on who will be qualified to share in the Lord’s authority. “Who may ascend into the hill of the Lord, or who may stand in His holy place?” In other words, who is the one who can stand before the Lord in confidence to share in His authority?

The answer is concise and pointed: “He who has clean hands and a pure heart, who has not lifted up his soul to an idol, nor sworn deceitfully.” David takes the issue of qualification right past the question of behavior to the deeper matter – the condition of the heart. The one who may confidently stand in God’s presence is the one with a pure heart, who has no falseness or deceit in the foundations of their personality. Because the heart of God is absolutely pure, with no hint of improper motives or deceitful agendas, He is able to exercise His authority in such a way that brings maximum grace and fulfillment to all who come to Him. He doesn’t use people for His own glory at their expense. Rather, He shares His identity and authority with them that they may be exalted and glorified, thereby bringing even greater honor to Himself.

Therefore, those who will share His authority must be those who are conformed to His character. They will be the same on the inside as they are on the outside, those who know that God desires us to have “truth in the inward parts.”  But the greater reward that comes to those with pure hearts is that they will see God. As we grow in conformity to His character, there is a greater and greater revelation that comes to us. God allows us to see Himself. We can hardly imagine the depth of this reward. King David, in the context of his own magnificent earthly kingdom, said that his greatest desire was to be in the House of the Lord, gazing upon the beauty of God, and inquiring in His temple.  David knew that God’s self-revelation was the ultimate prize, worthy of the total focus of his own heart.

Becoming People of Mercy

As we begin to be conformed to the image of Jesus in our search for power, we also begin to realize how He exercised the authority that was given to Him. We begin to see things as He sees them, and to respond to people and situations with the mercy and compassion that characterizes the heart of God in His dealings with us. In another section of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus instructs us that as we give mercy to those around us, particularly those who are undeserving of it, we begin to demonstrate our intimate relationship with God as our Father, who is merciful and kind to those who are wicked and ungrateful.

Being merciful to evil and unthankful people does not seem like the way to greatness, at least to those who are accustomed to living in the me-first, cut-throat world of contemporary culture. But we must be reminded that mercy is the way of God, and He is the one who defines all things. It is He who gives power to those who wait upon Him and are conformed to His ways. His promise to those who become merciful is that they will receive mercy, both for their own situations, and as a resource to give away to those who need it.

The reason that mercy is such an essential dynamic in God’s Kingdom is that it provides a context in which people can truly be transparent about the condition of their hearts and lives. In the New Testament letter to the Hebrews, the writer provides a profound understanding for the context of mercy established by God on our behalf.  Citing the temptations that Jesus faced as a man on the earth, we are told that these pressures made Jesus to be compassionate and merciful toward the rest of us when we face such things. Because Jesus is sympathetic due to His own experience of testing, we can come into the presence of God in the confidence of full self-disclosure knowing that the first thing that awaits us is mercy, not condemnation. Therefore, as we experience mercy as the first result of encountering God, we become those who give mercy to those we encounter, thereby opening a way for them to be transparent about the things that concern them. The freedom to be real and transparent in a non-defensive way is integral to spiritual growth and lasting change, and the extending of mercy as the first response sets the context for that growth.

When God finds people who are becoming merciful, He extends even greater mercy to them. One of the great dynamics of the Kingdom of God is that whatever one gives away is returned to them in greater measure. In Luke 6:38, just a few lines after Jesus instructs us about mercy, He further teaches that what we give will be returned to us, compressed and increased in proportion to how we gave it. Though we have mostly applied that principle to the giving of finances, He is talking primarily there about mercy and forgiveness. As we become conformed to the character of His Kingdom, we become recipients of the graces of His Kingdom. We give mercy to those who need it, setting in motion the release of additional mercies to us, both in our areas of need and as a resource to share with others.

Gary Wiens

Hunger and Thirst for God’s Perfect Design

Our hope is that the reader is beginning to grasp the natural and necessary flow of the Beatitudes. Awareness of our poverty leads us to mourn our condition. As we grieve over what has been lost and over the impact our brokenness has on God’s heart and ours, He comes to comfort us. Part of that comfort is the further revelation of who we really are in His heart, and of His commitment to bring us to that fullness if we will trust Him and embrace His ways.

The more we see of what God has for us, the more we begin to desire it. The more we are frustrated in our own attempts to produce by strength what He would give us by grace, the more we cast ourselves on Him in utter dependence. As He speaks to our hearts concerning His plans for our lives, the deeper our hunger grows to have these things established in our lives. The more we consider the person of Jesus and open our hearts to fall in love with Him, the more He touches us with His own desires for our fullness. He tenderly comforts us in our pain by awakening our hearts to deeply desire what He deeply desires. In other words, He answers our longings by giving us greater longings, taking us to the place where we are famished and parched for want of His reality.

You see, that is what righteousness is. It is the fullness of God’s design being realized in practical reality, all things being conformed to His desire and design. We have mistakenly thought that righteousness is merely the patterns of our external behavior, when in fact righteousness refers to conformity to God’s nature and design. Righteousness is first of all an internal conformity to God’s character that gets expressed in behavior that arises out of the internal reality. Righteousness is everything operating as it was designed to, in line at every level with God’s pattern and purpose.

When Jesus declares that He is looking for those who hunger and thirst for the reality of righteousness, He is telling us that He desires people whose greatest longing is to think, feel and act like He does. His promise to that group is that they will be satisfied, satiated with righteousness to a degree greater than they can fathom.

This matter of hungering and thirsting for righteousness is central to the purposes of God being realized on the earth. We believe that this fourth Beatitude is the pivot point in the list of character traits that Jesus outlines in Matthew 5. The first three Beatitudes lead up to it, and the final four proceed from it. From this point on, they begin to move into the positive expressions of Christ’s character, and so as the satisfaction of this hunger and thirst begins to come, other qualities begin to emerge as a natural result of that desire.

Gary Wiens

Standing In Meekness

Meekness is a fascinating term, perhaps one of the most misunderstood concepts in our vocabulary. Originally, it is defined as “gentle,” in the sense that describes a wild and powerful horse that has been trained to respond to its master, and therefore has become useful. Meekness is strength under discipline, and has several key components that must be understood.

To stand in meekness implies that we recognize that the lordship of our lives belongs to someone other than oneself. There is One who created me for His own pleasure, and who redeemed me from the clutches of Satan, and so by the dual right of creation and redemption my life belongs to Him. Since God is the one who “thought me up” in the first place, it is only He who can define me. Only He can tell me who I truly am, and only He can impart the grace to me to become that which He sees.

Meekness is the quality of steadiness, peace, and patience that emerges out of accepting what God says about me, and standing in that definition regardless of the situations and contrary reports that we encounter. The constant effort of Satan is to convince us that we cannot trust God to give us what He has promised, and what we desire. The enemy does not care if we come to despair over this issue and simply give up in hopelessness and shame, or if we take the other extreme and set our wills to achieve our destiny by the strength of our own resources. Either extreme keeps us from the grace of God that produces in us what He requires. Satan’s greatest fear is that there will be a group of people whose hearts embrace what God has declared concerning them, who will receive God’s definition of their lives, and by grace through faith appropriate His power to step into that definition in the reality of daily existence.

The promise of God to those who are meek is that they will inherit the earth. Once again, the things we crave at the deepest levels are promised to those who will acknowledge their need for God and live life by His power according to His definitions and parameters. The inheritance that comes from God is not given to those who seize the day by dint of will and force of personality, who strategize the best or are the most creative in marketing.  Though they may seem to have the edge for a season, the fact is that the meek will inherit the earth, and the wisdom of their choices will be vindicated and demonstrated when the Kingdom of God is established here on this planet.

Gary Wiens

Power Through The Grace Of Mourning

When we hit the wall of our own poverty, our inability to produce what we long for, we find ourselves facing an even more difficult step of humility – that of mourning over the condition in which we find ourselves. We’ll say this again in subsequent postings, but mourning over our brokenness is really a lost art in our culture. Because we want to have positive feelings about ourselves, we tend to avoid the deep self-examination that faces us with our own poverty, our inability to move forward on our own. We would rather try again by making a career change or altering our marital status. We’d rather read a new self-help book (maybe someone has discovered the magic formula!), try a new church, or perhaps medicate ourselves in some deeper and more damaging way.

But Jesus has given us the way forward, and it requires a significant choice for humility on our part. We must come to the place of mourning, grieving over our condition. This mourning requires a season of reflection, considering the things we have missed out on, the relationships we have lost, the opportunities that have passed us by. We must face the reality of our own choices that have irreparably damaged us and those around us. Most significantly, we must face the anguish that we have brought to God, who created us for His own great pleasure, but to whom we have brought nothing but pain.

Though this is a difficult posture to take, the reward is proportional to the cost. Those who mourn will be comforted. In other words, the pain that we all feel when we consider the broken condition of our lives will be assuaged, and we will know the comfort of the one who has the authority to give it at the deepest possible levels.

Power Through Spiritual Poverty

Every human being knows – unless that knowledge has been blunted by circumstances – that he or she ought to be someone important, that others ought to take notice, and that their life should mean something beyond the mundane realities of daily existence. Greatness is in our design, having been built into us by the Designer Himself, our Father God.

The surprising thing is that the path to greatness is opposite of what is intuitive to our fallen human nature. We think greatness comes by effort, by good planning, and by being willing to do whatever it takes to overcome the obstacles in our way. In God’s Kingdom economy, however, there is a different path. It begins with poverty of spirit.

In Matthew 5, Jesus lays out the Kingdom way to greatness, and begins with this phrase: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.” Spoken at the very beginning of His earthly ministry, Jesus then proceeds to live out this principle all through His time on the earth by living in complete dependence upon His Father in Heaven through the power of the Holy Spirit.

He takes the posture of a servant (see Mark 9:35; Philippians 2:7), does nothing without seeing and hearing what the Father is doing (see John 5:19-20; 8:28), and lays down His life for His friends in love (see John 15:13). In other words, Jesus comes to greatness by being fully dependent on the Father’s will and direction by the Holy Spirit.

The basic issue for us is that we find it hard to believe that the Father wants greatness for us, and that He will bring us to greatness if we will follow His lead by the Spirit. Instead, we tend to take over our own situations because we think we know best, and find ourselves grasping in futility for the very thing He promises to give by grace.

Here’s my prayer today: Father, I want to live a powerful life today, but I can do nothing without Your presence and power in my life. Lead me by Your Spirit into the situations You have prepared for me, give me Your words of wisdom, Your strategies for serving, and grant me the courage to trust Your ways, just as Jesus did.

Amen.

Reaching Your Power Potential, Part One: Your Drive to Power

Deep within the heart of every human being is the longing for significance, to have a meaningful destiny. It is the yearning to be taken seriously, to make some sort of difference, to have a life that matters somehow. The aching desire in the soul to be recognized, to be deemed important is a dominant factor for most of us. This is often expressed in a strong desire to exercise power in our life situation. We have an intense motivation to control the environment around us, to influence our circumstances for the better, at least “better” as far as we are concerned. Termed by some students of human nature as “the drive to power,” this desire can be found anywhere from the nursery school to the boardroom, from the playground to the professional sports arena. It’s a desire that pays no attention to gender or age, and gives little heed to personality styles or economic standing. The simple, easily observable fact is that from the time we are toddlers we want to have things our way, to control the situations around us for our benefit, and be able to tell somebody – anybody! – what to do.

As obvious as this “drive to power” is in the human soul, it is just as apparent that most people live with this desire frustrated and squelched, at least to some degree. Hemmed in by life situations completely beyond our control, we do the best we can “under the circumstances.” We fight for recognition, striving to be seen as valuable. We hope that someone will notice that we have important things to say and that we too have a destiny that deserves to be realized. Many of us have experienced such devastating blows to our identity that any hope of feeling significant or powerful is simply unrealistic. Any hope of significance seems like a wispy dream in the violent storm of real life. Some respond to these cataclysmic blows by setting their body, soul, mind and strength to the pursuit of power, determined to never be hurt again. Others simply roll over and die, with any potential for significance stripped from them and crushed in the trampling of other people’s lusts.

At the same time that we feel this longing to have power and influence, we feel a certain ambivalence about it, a double-mindedness that tells us that such things as “power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” It’s as though the human race has this negative condition that is common to everyone, a condition that we cannot deny or live without, yet one that is so toxic that corruption is the inevitable end to the pursuit of power. Therefore, we try to build all sorts of checks and balances into our systems of control. We strive to protect ourselves against the corruption of the drive to power, only to find ourselves manipulating and evading the very systems we set in place so that we might gain more influence or have more control over our situations. In other words, we cheat if we think it will help us.

We could cite thousands of examples of dishonest and abusive behavior taken from every strata of human life. It’s not only the politically or economically powerful person who grasps for more power. It’s the pastor who abuses his spiritual authority to raise money. It’s the guy who cheats at golf, or the woman who crosses the line in using her sexuality to gain an advantage over the competition. It’s the road-rage nut who guns the engine to pass everyone he can, and it’s the teen-age girl with an eating disorder resolutely controlling her food intake, even though her strategy for power may eventually kill her. The drive to power is immense within us, and is a reality that must be examined and understood from God’s perspective if we are to deal with it successfully.

Over the next weeks, I will explore the only appropriate way to pursue power and fulfillment, the way given to us through Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon on the Mount, found in Matthew 5. I hope you’ll follow along!