A Cluttered Heart Equals Cloudy Eyes
Alright, so far we’ve learned our distraction goes beyond our prayer life and the one or two other areas we may have already realized we were distracted. In fact, we have realized that our distraction is far reaching and in some ways debilitating to any growth be it spiritual, professional, or relational.
We’ve also seen that the this distraction, this thinness, comes from a heart that is feeding out of the pantry instead of doing the hard work of preparing and enjoying a feast. That is, we have delighted in the trite, the easy, the convenient, instead of the deep, the meaningful, the abiding pleasures of joy that is found in Christ and all that He has for us.
But before I move onto the next step, I’ve realized I’ve failed to even explain why we need to go on this journey and do this work in the first place.
Have you ever stopped and stared a beautiful painting for more than 5 minutes. Try to literally set yourself inside the scene of that vista? Or have you ever taken a walk in a meadow for no intention of getting any where but to just enjoy the quietness of the walk? Or have you ever simply stared across the dinner table at the one you love as you watch them do some common task and be left to wonder at your love for them?
If you haven’t, you should. If you have, you will know that none of those moments could be what they are without the stilled, undistracted, peace of that moment bound up inside a ball of pleasure that you never want to let go. That’s what we are trying to get to – more moments of profundity, and solemnity and fewer moments of distraction; more of a lifestyle that reaches for quiet walks instead of multi tasking, late night chaos that comes with a hurried life.
A cluttered mind, friend, is a cluttered heart. A cluttered heart has clouded eyes, and clouded eyes have difficulty beholding the glories of Christ.
Why do we want to pursue a disciplined heart and mind of depth? Because we all know that the book is better than the movie, that learning to play Beethoven’s Piano Concerto #5 is better than just listening to it. We all know that standing and beholding a beautiful sunset on a late summer’s day is better than seeing a picture of one.
Christ wants these things for you as well, beloved. you need only slow down long enough to see them and take hold of them for a lifetime.
Nibbling at the Table of the World
That was a hard exercise wasn’t it? I’ve found that my distracted mind is much like my sin, far worse than I thought it was. If you tried those exercises from the previous post, that’s probably what you are realizing. So, enough with the guilt! Lets do something here.
To begin with we have to understand that our minds are connected to our hearts like grass is connected to dirt – the grass only grows if it has good soil. So your distracted mind grows out of a distracted heart. This is the first problem.
We live in a culture that has everything from Sham Wow to Mercedes Benz telling you that you must have their product and then, then you will be happy. And though you have the mind of Christ and it tells you that is a lie, underneath it all you still really believe them. So how do I know? Because I own a Sham Wow (just kidding).
I know because my heart is just like yours – it is so incredibly prone to wander, prone to leave the God I love. Why, why is this? Because, like John Piper says so well, we love to nibble at the table of the world so much that it leaves no room for the great.
We like those “Convenient Pleasures.” We like Little Debbies, 8-minute abs, and porn because their easy, and they provide a quick fix with little investment. I mean, why work at a marriage and learn to love someone deeply when you can just type in sleeze.com and get what you really want with out all the trouble, right? Wrong! That is but crumbs, brother/sister – there is no great in any of that.
The only way we can make any head way in the construction zone minds of ours is by understanding first that the distraction is fed from the pantries of our hearts. And our hearts have learned to nibble away at the pantry instead of learning the joy of a feast that takes time, dedication, and love to prepare. But when we sit down and enjoy it, oh how good it tastes. How much better it is than those crumbs we have been nibbling on for so long?
Jesus said: “What comes out of a person is what defiles him/her.” (Mark 7.20). And our distracted minds come out of our hearts. They must be fixed first before we go anywhere else in restoring these broken down houses.
How do we do that? Repentance. Its going to cause you to be still before the Lord and do the hard work of stopping long enough to repent of specific ways you stand and eat at the pantry when a feast is prepared for you by the Lord Himself. Then look to a bloody cross and an empty tomb and be reminded of what true love is, and where true pleasure is really found. Take some time to do that today and we will talk more tomorrow.
The Longest Minute Ever
Take a moment and try and be quiet for 60 full seconds and just think about one thing during that 60 seconds – it could be baseball, Frito Lays, or Supralapsarianism…okaaayyyy….go! (Waiting patiently…)
How’d you do? Yeah, I know you stunk at it. How long did it take you to think about that assignment you needed to get working on or that appointment you had later today, or that conversation you had last night? 40 seconds? 30? Go ahead and admit it – you didn’t make it 20 seconds before all those thoughts started flooding in your mind.
Try this: turn off your iPod, TV, laptop, cell phone, and any other noise making device in your room and for 5 straight minutes just sit there and put a virtual recorder on your mind. Literally just pay attention to the throngs of things your mind will dart to in that span of 300 seconds. (You may have to try this a couple times as the first time you will just be considering how awkward this exercise is).
Now continue this exercise the rest of the day. When you are reading, talking, watching TV simply pay attention to how your mind is darting around from thing to thing. You cant keep the TV on the same channel during commercials. You read Facebook and your eyes dart to the right to see who’s on line, to the top to see how many messages you have. When you are talking to your friend on the phone, you are also reading an email. When you are sitting in your office and working on a project you check your phone for a text or start wondering what you are going to do tonight.
I’ve been doing this for the last week and have been absolutely amazed at how undisciplined I am. It’s important, though, you do these exercises and pay attention. I know you can resonate with these things as you read them, but it is only when you experience them that you might then feel them.
I’m not trying to get all emotive on you. I just want you to feel the weight of this problem. If I read something and resonate with it, I don’t necessarily feel the weight of the problem. Much like I can read about how sweet honey is, but when I actually go and taste it, oh it is so much better. So you have to do the hard work of recognizing and feeling your actually worse at being a disciplined thinker than you thought.
Ok, so that’s it for today. just give that a go, and tomorrow lets come back and try and advance the conversation.
A Mind Like a Pinball Machine
I stopped long enough the other day to notice something about myself – I have trouble keeping focused in my prayer life for more than a moment on any one subject. I know, I’m the pastor – its part of my job to pray – but I began to recognize my prayers were like a pinball bouncing around the stratosphere of my mind back to the Lord. So I began asking myself why I had this problem.
This then led to my noticing how I had trouble paying attention to hardly anything for more than a fleeting moment. I love to read, but I began to notice how I would read an entire paragraph, get to the bottom of the line and realize I had read an entire paragraph while simultaneously thinking about that other book I was looking forward to reading. Or, I noticed how I would play cars with Judah (making the noises…rrrrrmmm) while also having a conversation with Andi about pre-school, all at the same time.
I walk down the streets of DC listening to the wonderful strings of Yo Yo Ma on my iPhone while holding a book and also typing a text message in between strides and sentences!
My mind is the equivalent of a Jet ball thrown into a closet...and I don’t think I’m alone.
I’ve really tried to pay attention to these patterns and I’ve recently tried to work against them. How you ask? Well, that’s going to be the subject of a few posts here.
I don’t pretend to have the answers, but I do hope to expose you to the same thing I have been exposed to. Not only that we have scattered prayer lives (I already know you are aware of that), but we are scattered in virtually all of our thinking.
After exposing the breadth of our thinness, I want us all to feel the danger and recklessness of such a pattern, and finally I hope to provide some ways to try and work against this pattern.
Feel free to follow along. If you find this helpful, great, if not, that’s fine to. Part of my attempting to overcome this unhealthy pattern is by writing these posts, so in the end, I could be the only one that benefits, and that will be fine. But I do hope you can be helped along the way.
Why Do I Want to Be Forgiven?
From John Piper's God is the Gospel:
Consider an illustration of what I am trying to say. Suppose I get up in the morning and as I am walking to the bathroom I trip over some of my wife’s laundry that she left lying on the hall floor. Instead of simply moving the laundry myself and assuming the best in her, I react in a way that is all out of proportion to the situation and say something very harsh to my wife just as she is waking up. She gets up, puts the laundry away, and walks downstairs ahead of me. I can tell by the silence and from my own conscience that our relationship is in serious trouble.
As I go downstairs my conscience is condemning me. Yes, the laundry should not have been there. Yes, I might have broken my neck. But those thoughts are mainly the self-defending flesh talking. The truth is that my words were way out of line. Not only was the emotional harshness out of proportion to the seriousness of the fault, but the Bible tells me to overlook the fault. “Why not rather suffer wrong? Why not rather be defrauded?” (1 Cor. 6:7).
So as I enter the kitchen there is ice in the air, and her back is blatantly toward me as she works at the kitchen counter. What needs to happen here? The answer is plain: I need to apologize and ask for forgiveness. That would be the right thing to do. But here’s the analogy: Why do I want her forgiveness? So that she will make my favorite breakfast? So that my guilt feelings will go away and I will be able to concentrate at work today? So there will be good sex tonight? So the kids won’t see us at odds? So that she will finally admit the laundry shouldn’t have been there?
It may be that every one of those desires would come true. But they are all defective motives for wanting her forgiveness. What’s missing is this: I want to be forgiven so that I will have the sweet fellowship of my wife back. She is the reason I want to be forgiven. I want the relationship restored. Forgiveness is simply a way of getting obstacles out of the way so that we can look at each other again with joy.
Imagine What You Can Do in 5 Minutes
5 minutes does not sound like a whole lot of time. But used purposefully and intentionally, it can be used in a powerful, eternal way.
As we go through the book of Acts, we see Christians being persecuted for their faith. Well that still happens today. Yes, physical, sometimes deadly persecution for our brothers and sisters around the world. And in 5 minutes you can pray for them.
You can read and pray over the World Watch List of 50 countries where the church is persecuted. (HT: Z)
Trinity. What just came to mind when you read that word?
Too often we think the Trinity as some detached Christian idea that is hard to understand or explain, so we just agree to ‘believe’ it but negate to try to understand it’s importance. Well as Fred Sanders said in The Deep Things of God the Trinity is not a problem to solve, but a solution to our greatest need.
Before trying to work out the cognitive underpinnings of the Trinity, look at it from the view of the gospel. The gospel is Trinitarian from beginning to end. The Father is the architect, the Son is the agent, and the Spirit is the applier. Though distinct in their roles, they are unified in their purpose of bringing glory to God and joy to man through our redemption.
Here are a couple quotes from Trinitarian theologians that provide insight into how the Trinity is gospel:
When God designed the great and glorious work of recovering fallen man, and saving the sinners, to the praise of the glory of his grace, he appointed, in his infinite wisdom, two great means thereof: The one was giving his Son for them, and the other was giving his Spirit to them. And hereby was way made for the manifestation of the glory of the whole blessed Trinity; which is the utmost end of all the works of God. (John Owen)
We know the Holy Trinity co-operates in the work of our salvation: the Father hath given us His Son, and the Son hath sent His Spirit, and the Spirit gives us faith, which unites us to the Son, and through Him to the Father. The Father ordained our redemption, the Son wrought it, and the Spirit reveals and applies it. (Robert Leighton)