Some of my closest friends live by the expository sermon. I’m not a preacher, but I am a disciple of Jesus Christ, and in light of that high calling and experience, I can offer an expository testimony based on Psalm 131—a verse-by-verse account of the hope that is within me.

Verse 1: Lord, my heart is not proud, nor my eyes haughty…nor do I involve myself in great matters, or in things too difficult for me.

Can you imagine standing before your fellow believers (with a straight face) saying, “I am not a proud and arrogant person”? In our contemporary Christian culture, it has been engrained in us that our hearts are essentially depraved. So, a comment such as this would come off as straightforward heresy. Yet here is David, the man after God’s own heart, making this outrageous boast. Or, is it? Let’s explore.

Something about John Eldridge used to bug me. Most people know that name as the Christian who went wild at heart. I was three books into Eldridge before I figured out what had been bothering me: he never talked about our sinful hearts! How could that be! I was deeply suspicious of him since the fact of my fallenness was foundational to the outworking of my salvation. It seems ironic, now, that the thing that was repulsing me at one level about John Eldridge was attracting me on another. Freedom is like that. It offends the elder brothers that the fatted calf is being slaughtered. Yet, oh how we wanted to go to that party!

Offended by his freedom, I thought, “What gives John Eldridge the right to go through life, climbing mountains and fly fishing, while the mission of saving souls is the real business of the great commission?” I railed inwardly, “Come down from your high places, Mr. Eldridge. The harvest, white and ready to gather, is down here, not up on your snow capped peaks.” And in the midst of my protest, I knew longing: “Oh my…those hallowed God haunted, snow capped peaks.” (If I had access to it, I would have ended that sentence with an a teardrop. Is there a broken heart emoticon?)

In that season as Mr. Eldridge was busy reeling me in, one book at a time, a dear friend drove into my driveway and handed me a book. They said that the Lord had encouraged them to give this to me. I knew this person’s heart. I trusted them implicitly. The book was He Loves Me by Wayne Jacobson. I thanked them and promptly read the book. It was a chapter-by-chapter OMG experience, filled with teardrop emoticons. By the time I finished the book, I knew what someone had told me was true: I was full of religion. The truth was, as our pastor had told me, “Rob, you are hard on me and you’re hard on yourself.” But, at that time, I just didn’t get it.

God was bringing the pot to a rapid boil, though. I had laid into a few people recently with an anger I can only describe as volcanic. It was white hot and came unwanted from someplace deep within. It scared me. All was not well with my soul and I knew it. What was wrong with my heart? It didn’t feel wild. Honestly, it did not even feel alive.

A standing prayer of mine for 35 years had been, “Search me, oh Lord, and know my heart, and see if there be any hurtful way in me, and lead me in the everlasting way.” Although I didn’t recognize it immediately, my Father in heaven was busy accomplishing kingdom come and getting his will done in my heart. He was answering my prayers in a way that was exceedingly and abundantly beyond my wildest expectations.

A religious heart is uniquely blind and manic. It sees where others are violating principles while oblivious to its own barrenness. It lives alternately puffed up on the days when things go right and it appears God is loving, and then it goes into despair when things go south, convinced that God is not. Here is a revelation that truly blindsided me: a heart can be born again and yet still be functioning with a legalistic law-principled heart. This is the religious prison in which the elder-brother lives. He’s a son, all right. His heart is just boycotting the party on principle: it’s just not right to receive the father’s affection when no work has been done.

For when Gentiles who do not have the Law do instinctively the things of the Law, these, not having the Law, are a law to themselves, in that they show the work of the Law written in their hearts, their conscience bearing witness and their thoughts alternately accusing or else defending them.  Romans 2:14-15 (NASB)

After spending some focused time with a few people who knew the landscape of the heart and the ways of God in the kingdom-domain, I emerged with something new, but which I always had. I had it in principle, but not in practice. I could have taught a respectable Bible study on our identity in Christ. I could have pointed you to all the right verses, but my heart would have been mostly clueless.

What I always had was a new identity. After all, I was a new creation in Christ, a son of God, with a brand new nature. Yet, with my legalistic and insecure heart (and a ton of help from evangelical preaching), the deepest conviction I held about my life was that I was just a sinner saved by grace. My poor track record of devotion and failure to manage my own sin regularly proved out my assumption—my heart was deceitful above all else and beyond understanding just as Jeremiah 17:9 said. I kid you not—this was one of my life verses.

My heart landscape team helped me repent of all the resentment and bitterness accumulated in my wounded, religious heart, and I was cleansed from those sinful attitudes. A religious stronghold had been torn down. After this heart house-cleaning, my vision was restored to see something about myself that God had known all along—I was a beloved son whose hard kingdom labor (or lack of it) did nothing to alter his high opinion and love for me. It became crystal clear that the deepest truth about me was not my fallen nature. It was my new nature. I had finally opened the gift of my birthright—my identity. If you ask me who I am today, the answer is simple: I am His. And, quite astonishingly, He is mine.

Another verse I’d claimed for my life was from Psalm 131: “I do not involve myself in great matters, or in things too difficult for me.” For good measure, I tacked on I Thessalonians 4:11: “and make it your ambition to lead a quiet life and attend to your own business and work with your hands.” (You would have to know the past two decades of my life to see what a good sense of humor God has and what he thinks about my right to claim verses for my life.)

Verse 2: Surely I have composed and quieted my soul; like a weaned child rests against his mother, my soul is like a weaned child within me.

Ah…rest—that condition of the heart that is secure in the love of God and in Christ. Rest is a state of grace that can only be experienced when one has been weaned from their labors to please God. Seeking God in a religious fever—as if either he or we were lost—is nonsense and will obscure our true identities as sons and friends of God. We already have him if we have truly entrusted ourselves to Christ. He already has us. It’s not a matter of finding him; it’s a matter of composing our hearts in quiet. Living is simple gratitude that he has found and claimed us as his own forevermore.

Verse 3: Israel (or, for us, Church), hope in the Lord from this time forth and forever.

Father, let our boast be that we are yours. If we remain yet in bondage, help us to see the ransom that was paid. Restore the foundations of this temple of yours on earth, which is our hearts. For the balance of our days teach us to live and fight as sons instead of sinners. Let us discover our strength in our rest. Further reveal the mystery to us of Christ in us, the hope of all future glory. Put your enemies to flight and establish your kingdom. We give you permission to do as you wish with our hearts. We will hope in you forevermore. Amen.

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