How to Protect Your Heart in MOvement
“I the Lord search the heart and test the mind, to give every man according to his ways, according to the fruit of his deeds.” (Jeremiah 17:10)
I remember the early days of walking with Jesus: Happily rising early to meet with Him through His Word. It was always a source of joy. I remember loving the community of Jesus in all its diversity and happily serving anyone in the name of the Lord. My prayers were full of surrender to His will and my heart was hungry for righteousness.
Fast forward to about my eighth year of pursuing movement on the field in Japan. I was rudely defending movement principles to believers who were in different tribes than myself. I had an almost absent sense of value for relationships with others, except for those who had strategic value for my mission. I was mostly distracted when I was at home with my family. The ongoing state of my heart was the opposite of peaceful. I was still spending time in Scripture daily. I was praying. But I was primarily looking for results in ministry.
Let me say here that any ministry has the capability of producing these results in a person’s heart. This is not unique to pursuing movements. I simply believe that the bigger targets we run after, the greater the temptation to lose sight of our walk with the Lord.
The Lord is described as the one who “searches men’s hearts” (Rom. 8:27, 1 Thess. 2:4). We cannot hide from Him. The responsibility for the state of our hearts is in our own hands (Deut. 20:3; 1 Chron. 16:10; Ps. 27:14; Prov. 6:25; Isaiah 7:4; John 14:1, 27; Col. 3:15; Heb. 10:22). Our heart is the place from which we believe and receive salvation. Our heart position determines whether we receive support or opposition from God.
We can only accomplish the job of discipling the nations with the help of God. And God helps those whose hearts are yielded to Him.
Jesus took time to address the heart condition of His disciples in His training (See Matthew 10:19, 26, 31; Luke 10:17-20; John 14:1). There is so much rich content in Jesus’s “training sessions” both with the 12 and with the 72. In his training of the 12, as seen in Matthew 10, He seems to spend more than half of the training on issues of the heart. He zeroes in on this topic as well during the debrief of the 72 in Luke 10 after their first “ministry trip.” They come back with joy, saying, “Lord, even the demons are subject to us in Your name!”
Jesus’s response is interesting. When I first started meditating on this passage in the context of modern training debriefs, it seemed odd that His response was to put a wet blanket on that joy. He appeared to be saying, “That’s great guys. I have seen some pretty neat things too. But that is not where you are supposed to put your joy.” I could not imagine saying that in a debriefing after someone’s first harvest experience. Upon further reading and meditation, I now see that that is not what Jesus was doing. I will comment on that in a moment. For now, the main point is that Jesus saw this moment when the 72 returned as an important teaching opportunity.
Below are some recommendations for keeping a close check on our hearts in the context of movement. These are not taken directly from Jesus’s debrief with the 72 but from a variety of Scriptures that I have been reading and meditating on regarding this topic. And they are taken from some first-hand experiences learned the hard way.
Compare your life to the Word of God and repent where it is not in line.
Years ago, a friend of mine and a very good pastor told me that when he and his wife are having a conflict that is not easy to solve, he goes to 1 Corinthians 13 and reads the classic verses about what love looks like. He said that, invariably, he finds something he did wrong in the conflict. Then, he goes back to his wife and confesses that piece that he can own. And that acknowledgment of his wrong usually leads to a good resolution.
I think we can do the same with the list of the works of the flesh in Galatians 5. Am I experiencing “enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy” (Gal. 5:20-21 ESV)? These are sure signs that I am not walking in the Spirit and that my heart is not in a good position before the Lord.
The good news is that God draws near to those who are contrite in heart. If we let these passages reveal our brokenness and we turn toward God, He will turn toward us. Repentance is a gift.
I think that the more years we have behind us of walking with Jesus, we can get more comfortable in thinking we understand the will of God. Sometimes when I read stories of how the Pharisees got it wrong in the Gospel accounts, I find it more helpful to see if I am guilty of the same things that Jesus says they were guilty of rather than thinking I am always on Jesus’s side or one of the disciples that He was defending. I usually find that I am more in line with the Pharisees in my heart attitude. And if I respond appropriately to this sin, I find myself experiencing closeness with God.
Check your heart in times of victory, and embrace the greater joy of simply being known by God.
In the debriefing of the 72, as they return with joy and share their experience with Him, Jesus begins by affirming how great what they just experienced really was. When He says, “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven” (Luke 10:18 ESV), many commentators believe that, based on the tense used in the Greek, He was referring to the specific period of time in which the 72 were on mission. In a sense He was saying, “I was watching Satan be defeated as you went out.” He did not minimize their experience. However, another very important element of this story is the joy that Jesus experiences at the tail end of this conversation. When Luke writes that He “rejoiced in the Holy Spirit,” this can be described as “the most exultant description of Jesus in all Scripture” (Edwards, James R. The Gospel According to Luke Pillar New Testament Commentary, p. 313 IVP. Kindle Edition). I believe this emotion was connected with the words that had just come out of His mouth: “Rejoice that your names are written in heaven.” As we can see in the following verses, as Jesus explodes in a joy-filled prayer, He was also rejoicing in the fact that He was known exclusively by the Father as well as the fact that He had the privilege of revealing the Father to the disciples (Luke 10:21-24).
He was not squashing their joy. He was pointing them to the greater joy of being known by the Father. It is very important to note that He does this right in the middle of them experiencing the “high” of ministry success. He makes a point to direct their joy to intimacy with the Father. It would be good for us to check our own hearts in the middle of ministry success and make sure they have the correct posture.
Check your heart in times of failure, and saturate your heart with truths about the Kingdom to come.
Isaiah was called to preach to a people who would not listen, yet in his writing, we are given some of the clearest pictures of the coming Kingdom and clues to the identity of this King than we see in most of the biblical texts.
In the letter of 1 Peter, the theme of suffering is clear (1 Peter 1:6-7). He encourages his readers to “set their hope completely on the grace that will brought … at the revelation of Jesus Christ” (1 Peter 1:13).
Regardless of what season we are in, a truly eternal perspective looks to the fulfillment of the coming Kingdom and is not truly at rest with anything in between. It would do all of our hearts well to meditate on the reality of Jesus sitting on a throne on earth where there is no more sickness, crying, or pain, and where God truly dwells with man.
Make sure you are in the right lane and running at the right pace.
Paul tells the Galatians that, since they live by the Spirit, they should make sure they stay in step with Him (Gal. 5:25). Make sure your pace equals the pace of the Spirit. Stay in step with Him. Sometimes He wants you to run. Sometimes He wants you to stroll. At times He wants you to just sit and wait (Ps. 46:10).
Jesus said that He had brought glory to the Father by completing the work that the Father had given to Him (John 17:4). Some have looked at the ministry of Jesus before the cross and come to the conclusion that He was not necessarily that successful. While I thoroughly disagree with that assessment, even if it was accurate humanly speaking, Jesus was able to confidently say that He completed what the Father had given Him to do. It is important to know, to the best of our ability, what our specific piece of the Great Commission may be and to not get beyond what we have been called to do.
This takes an ongoing assessment of what specifically the Lord has called us to do as well as an ongoing assessment of our heart, the condition of our family, and even some of the personal weaknesses the Lord has entrusted to each of us.
Direct your prayers toward the glory of God.
In John 12, Jesus received a cue that the time of His departure was near. He told the disciples that His soul was troubled. He vocalized this inward battle by saying, “And what shall I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour’? But for this purpose, I have come to this hour. Father, glorify Your name.” And then? He received an audible response from heaven. “I will” (John 12:27-28 ESV). The apostle John later tells us that we can have confidence that whatever we ask we will receive from Him if we know that we are asking Him to give us something within His will (1 John 5:14-15). I cannot think of a prayer that is more guaranteed to be directly answered than this one.
We would do well to pay close attention to our hearts as we seek to join the Lord in the work of expanding His Kingdom.
This is not a one-time heart check but an ongoing necessity. We cannot lean on past victories in any area, but this is especially true in areas of the heart. It is entirely possible to start out in the right place and then drift from where we need to be. As you read earlier, I am guilty of this myself.
Let us keep our hearts squarely in the hands of God. They are safe there. And we are guaranteed to experience the powerful support of God when they remain in that place (2 Chron. 16:9).
“…we have been approved by God to be entrusted with the gospel, so we speak, not to please man, but to please God who tests our hearts.” (1 Thess. 2:4)
“So don’t judge anything prematurely, before the Lord comes, who will both bring to light what is hidden in darkness and reveal the intentions of the hearts. And then praise will come to each one from God.” (1 Cor. 4:5)