Recently I have been reading a series of Lectures in The Old Testament by someone called Dennis Kinlaw (he is an author I can highly recommend to you - I have put a couple of his books on the website). In a discussion about intercession and atonement I came across this remark that has made me think:
“I have come to the place where I am convinced that any great ministry of God normally rises and falls in a single heart, so that when in that central heart things are right, it is possible for things to happen in the hearts that are around.”
But actually what it made me think about again is how what goes on in our hearts is so incomparably more important than what goes on in our actions. I’m not discounting actions (and as we shall see actions can give us real insight into what is really going on in our hearts - this is the point that James is making in his letter when he says “faith without actions is dead”) but what I want to show you this evening is that God has decided to make what happens in our hearts the gateway to His saving of the world. Big claim (as Donald Trump might tweet). So why don’t we get started.
There are five places in the Old Testament where God says something along the lines of “I looked for a certain kind of person and could not find one. If I could have found just one person of the kind I needed, my (God’s) circumstances would have been different”.
Can it really be that an ordinary person, you or me, can change the Lord of all creation’s circumstances? God wants to save the world, and he is looking for a person. But why? And if one person can change God’s circumstances, what is the kind of person that God is looking for in order to do that?
Why don’t we take a look at some occasions where he does find a person of that kind. There is a particular type of occasion where we see this played out. There is a particular pattern in the Bible that illustrates this, of people coming to such an identification with the will of the Father that they would rather His judgement fell on them than on God’s people. Obviously Jesus is the culmination of that pattern. But it is true of ordinary men too. It is true for instance of Abraham pleading for Lot, Moses pleading for the Israelites, Samuel for Saul, and Paul for the Jews in Romans 9.
These are all examples of what we call intercession. Someone standing in the place of someone else. But what I want you to see is that intercession is not so much an act as an attitude. Intercession is a turning of a person’s heart to God to such an extent that it brings them to the point of willing self sacrifice.
When a person genuinely puts themselves in an intercessory role a third element has been added to the Yahweh/sinner relationship and when that third element is added possibilities become present that were not there before.
What I am not saying is that there is any saving virtue in me or you. All intercession derives its meaning and its effective power from the fact that it is at bottom a reflection of God's will in a human soul, which is why, in the New Testament, prayer of this kind is ascribed to the operation of the Holy Spirit. It is the Holy Spirit that brings someone like you or me to the place where someone else’s well-being is more important than our own. The efficacy of intercession is dependent on an identification of the personhood of the intercessor with the will of God, in a surrender of myself in concern for another. It is not that there is any special virtue in Abraham or Moses, it was simply that they allowed the Holy Spirit to work in their hearts in such a way that they identified with God’s heart, torn between justice and what the Old Testament calls hesed, which means mercy, lovingkindness, faithfulness. Hesed is His steadfast goodwill and goodness towards His people. The atoning efficacy of intercession is wholly a function of the intercessors closeness with God in personal self surrender. Intercession is not something you say, it is not even something you do, it is what happens in the most internal part of your being.
So God looks for someone who he can work with. Someone who will sacrifice their innermost selves for the good of others. Not because they want glory but because the Holy Spirit has worked in them to change their hearts. If we are going to answer God’s call it’s not through works but by becoming those people. Tonight I want to think about how that can happen.
When Adam and Eve were in the garden they had perfect communion with God - they could have subdued the earth. When Jesus walked the earth He also had perfect communion with God. What was the similarity between them and why are we different?
You may say they had perfect communion because they hadn’t sinned and, of course, that’s true. But have you ever thought about the manner in which the devil got Adam and Eve to sin in the first place, and the manner in which the devil tried to get Jesus to sin in the second?
In both cases the devil’s method of trying to gain entry the same way; by getting them to mistrust - to remove their trust from - God the Father. To disbelieve what He had said. With Eve, the devil's opening words are "did God really say...". And he insinuates that God has ulterior motives and is not to be trusted. She has to chose who to believe, who to trust.
Jesus has just come from being baptised by John and hearing the Father say "this is my beloved Son", to Him the devil starts with, "If you are the Son of God" - ie if you’re not quite sure about that, do the following. In both cases he tries to get them to swallow the lie that God can’t be absolutely trusted, because if he can get them to do that, getting them to swallow the fruit is easy.
So we are beginning to see that the ground of communion is what is mostly translated by the word faith.
There are two words used in the Old Testament that are translated believe or trust. One is the word from which we get amen = he’amin and the other is the word batah. he’amin is used occasionally and means “make firm”. While batah, which means “to trust” is find everywhere you turn. It is because trust is the heart of relationship.
Believing, trusting, that the Father’s words (and therefore his whole person) is true. That they and therefore He can be relied on. Our future actions are always the fruit of what we believe in our hearts. In fact the connection is so close that we can often read off from our actions what we believe deep down, more easily than we can from simply repeating our supposed beliefs. This is where Jesus and therapists immediately find common ground.
Jesus is constantly pointing out hypocrisy. Pointing to people who say they believe one thing but then do another. The point of Jesus’s words is not simply to condemn the hypocrite but to illustrate how what matters is what is going on in the heart. What is being believed in the heart - what our heart actually trusts. We also see throughout the Gospels the converse, people who don't appear to believe or say the right things but who, when it comes to the crunch (because they have a sick relative or see a man beaten up in the street) it turns out do believe the right things - that God is good, that He is compassionate and that he can do anything.
This area of inner beliefs is also the territory that is familiar to some degree to the therapist. The client who says he doesn't get angry but yet won't talk to a sibling or a parent. A client who says they don't have anyone they need to forgive but yet constantly talks negatively about someone. And so on... This seems to me to be exactly what James is talking about when he coins the term di-psychos - usually translated double minded but literally two souled.
So we need to go back to the story of Adam and Eve. Simply by convincing them to believe things about God that were not true, he not only gained access to their lives but because they had been given dominion over the earth, the devil inherited that dominion.
Can I digress for a moment as to why the devil attacked Eve first and not Adam? So I have just stepped out of relatively safe territory and into something more complex and mysterious.... but also important I think. There is within God both male and female. "So God created man in his own image.... male and female he created them." Gen 1:27. God always does things for a purpose. He made us different because there was something important about God that we were to learn from this duality. My sense is that it is something about love. That real love must always overflow to something outside itself. That was the purpose of creation, to provide for Jesus a bride.... The flesh of His flesh and bone of His bones. In that context therefore Eve represents all of us - the creation. The most precious thing to the Father and to the Son and also the most vulnerable. It was for this reason that the serpent targeted Eve. And why Mary is the beginning of Jesus’s story. Whereas Adam showed solidarity with Eve but only in the way of self preservation, so Jesus showed solidarity with his bride in the way of self sacrifice. More another time… We need to get back to the main plot.
The story of the promised land is very instructive in understanding why our hearts are so important. God promised Abraham two things; 1/ a land, and 2/ that all the nations of the earth would be blessed through him. The land was as it were both a home for, and a launchpad for, the blessing of the nations.
But when it came time under Moses for the Israelites to inherit the land, it was all a bit more complicated than they had anticipated. There were previous occupants that had to be removed before the land of milk and honey could be enjoyed and the house of prayer for all nations could be established.
The first thing I want to do is to draw your attention to the dual nature of the blessing that the land was. It was a blessing to the Israelites - it was a land flowing with milk and honey - but it was also the place where God’s presence was to be hosted on earth so that the nations could come and be saved - Zechariah 8 puts it like this:
3Thus says the LORD: I have returned to Zion and will dwell in the midst of Jerusalem, and Jerusalem shall be called the faithful city, and the mountain of the LORD of hosts, the holy mountain. 4Thus says the LORD of hosts: Old men and old women shall again sit in the streets of Jerusalem, each with staff in hand because of great age. 5And the streets of the city shall be full of boys and girls playing in its streets…..In those days ten men from the nations of every tongue shall take hold of the robe of a Jew, saying, ‘Let us go with you, for we have heard that God is with you.’”
Do you see the order - the presence of God, the blessing of His people, the coming of the nations. God was and is looking for a nation of priests. A people that will draw so close to God that their heart is to intercede, to stand before God offering themselves, on behalf of the nations.
So how does this link back to our hearts? Like this. The promised land is a picture of our hearts. We have been promised love, joy, peace, goodness, kindness and so on. The fruits of the spirit. These are things that come into our hearts by the Spirit. They make our hearts a land flowing with milk and honey. So when we conquer the land/conquer our hearts it is a place for His presence and a blessing to us. But it also establishes a place of blessing for the nations.
But what we need to see is that the Israelites didn’t get to occupy the promised land without a long campaign of conquest. So let’s look briefly at how we can work with the captain of the Lord of hosts to conquer our hearts to make a place for His presence, a blessing to us AND a blessing to others.
If you haven’t already got it, what I want us to see this evening is that there is a continuity between getting our inner life sorted and receiving blessing for ourselves and being a blessing for others.
This isn’t something that happens once and is done. Our whole Christian life is a process of bringing our inner beliefs, our hearts, to a place of identification and trust in God and His words.
You’ve heard us talk about Salvo and I want to explain briefly how it fits in here. Salvo is not some kind of magic bullet or indeed the only way of bringing our hearts into conformity. But what I would describe it as, is as a tool kit we have developed full of tools that really help. It contains diagnostic tools to help us understand more about our what our inner beliefs actually are. And also a number of different kinds of tools that allow us to get a handle on correcting them.
So let me give you a very quick rundown on how it works.
The first thing is that we all need courage in approaching our inner giants - everyone of us feels nervous about this stuff. Do you remember how Moses sent a group to spy out the land and they all agreed the land was great but most of them said that it was impossible to conquer because there were giants there, Caleb talked about their hearts melting with fear.
Like the Israelites, we can see that it would be good to have all our stuff sorted but we are frightened of the current inhabitants - the giants.
So who are these giants? Shame is probably the big one. Shame is basically a judgement of yourself. That there are things about you that cannot be accepted - cannot even be mentioned or thought about. It's so visceral that it feels horrible. It's a feeling that everybody wants to avoid. But that immediately tells us that behind it lies something really precious about you and about me. Otherwise the devil wouldn't go to such trouble. I allowed shame to stop me dealing with stuff for years. What we need to know is that Jesus is not that interested in our sins (He has forgiven those). He is much more interested in the lies we have been fed that led us to the place of sin. We’ve all sinned in ways we wouldn’t want to talk about. We’re all the same. We are all here to help one another get to freedom.
Another giant is pain. I find it difficult to acknowledge my own pain. Jan once pointed out to me that I smile whenever I talk about a painful experience in my life. I easily believe the lie that my pain doesn’t matter (which is a proxy for I don’t matter). So I try and hide it. We all try and avoid pain. But paying attention to pain is important because only as we follow it upstream can we find its source and do something genuine and permanent about it.
But our inner beliefs are really subtle and we need each other and the Holy Spirit to help us see the lies we are believing.
Jesus said He was sending the Holy Spirit to lead us into all truth. That didn’t just mean to explain doctrine to us. But to explain and cast light on our own hearts which are really hard to understand. As Jeremiah says “the heart is deceitful above all things...who can understand it” but then in the next verse He says that He searches our hearts and our feelings.
If you want to know more sign-up for the Salvo training course starting in 6 weeks on 8th May.
So let me try and recap. God promises us a life and life abundantly. We experience it increasingly as we conquer the land that He has promised us - it’s what the New Testament calls the renewal of the mind. It always take courage to fight the giants of shame, pain, anxiety, fear and so on. We are all in this together. We all have sins and giants but we have a God whose nature is mercy and kindness - and He wants us to be kind and forgiving with other and kind and forgiving to ourselves.
That as we become established in the promised land it is not just so we can be happy but so that we can more fully experience the heart of God whose purpose it is to save the world.
That God is looking for a men and women who will allow the Holy Spirit to work in our hearts so that we will desire the good of others more than we desire our own good. Men and women that will intercede for others not simply in action but in attitude.
When the Lord finds people like that His circumstances are changed and His salvation can come.