10 With My Whole Heart

10

With My Whole Heart

Of what concernment unto the glory of God, and in our living unto him, prayer is, will be owned by all. It is that only single duty wherein every grace is acted, every sin opposed, every good thing obtained, and the whole of our obedience in every instance of it is concerned. What difficulties lie in the way of its due performance, what discouragements rise up against it, how unable we are ourselves in a due manner to discharge it, what aversion there is in a corrupted nature unto it, what distractions and weariness are apt to befall us under it, are generally known also unto them who are any way exercised in these things. Yet doth the blessedness of our present and future condition much depend thereon.

Take my heart; it is thine own;

It shall be thy royal throne.

Almighty God, unto whom all hearts be open,

all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid:

Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of thy Holy Spirit,

that we may perfectly love thee, and worthily magnify thy holy name,

through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Nothing, they say, is now so sure as that which we once doubted, and we affirm nothing so strongly now as that which we once did not believe. J. I. can testify to this with regard to the psalms. As a cradle Anglican, he said and sang them in church from his earliest days. As the converted and convictional Anglican that he became at eighteen, it took him some twenty years to believe in his heart that what everyone had told him about the psalms was true, namely, that they were models of praying. Why this blockage? At the time, he ascribed it to two facts. First, the psalmists, being poets, jumped around logically, presenting their thoughts more like flowers in a bunch than like links in a chain, and since J. I. has a linear, lawyerlike mind, this bothered him. Second, the psalms show a concentrated, uninhibited, almost ferocious intensity in the way that they say—shout, rather—their “Help!” and their “Thanks!” This was something that J. I.’s cool inner restraint could not cope with. Forty years on from the time when the psalms began to open up to him, he now sees the problem he had rather differently. The truth was, so he now thinks, that until that time, despite having gained some competence in explaining things (including prayer!) to other people, he still hardly knew experientially what praying with his whole heart really meant.

What he was missing was something of which the psalms themselves speak clearly and pointedly. Psalm 86:11 reads: “Unite my heart to fear your name”; then the next verse, assuming an answer to this prayer, declares: “I give thanks to you, O Lord my God, with my whole heart” (a sentiment also found in Psalm 9:1; 111:1; 138:1). Psalm 119, the 176-verse colossus of the Psalter, speaks of seeking God (vv. 2, 10), of keeping his law (vv. 34, 69) and crying out to him “with my whole heart” (v. 145). What point exactly, now, was this phrase making? What were the psalmists telling us about themselves when they used it?

In this book we have been exploring the key moods and modes of personal praying, with constant appeal to the Psalter for illustration and confirmation of what we say. We begin this closing chapter by observing that in all these modes and moods praying with our whole heart is what the psalms actually model. Now, therefore, we will focus on questions that arise once we see this—questions, be it said, that neither theological expertise nor knowledge of how others have prayed nor collections of composed prayers nor mastery of any verbalizing technique can answer for us. The questions that spring to mind are: How should we comprehend the reality of praying with our whole heart? How can we tell if we are doing it? And what might be keeping us from wholeness of heart in our praying—that is, from “praying in the Holy Spirit” (Eph 6:18; Jude 20), which phrase evidently expresses, in New Testament theological terms, just the same thought? To answer these questions we must look again at what the Bible says about the heart—in other words, what God himself tells us about our human condition.

THE HUMAN HEART

In the past, writes Os Guinness:

Character was . . . understood as the inner form that makes anyone or anything what it is. . . . Character was the deep selfhood, the essential stuff a person is made of, the core reality in which thoughts, words, decisions, behavior and relationships are rooted. As such, character determined behavior just as behavior demonstrated character. Character was who we are when no one sees us but God.

Guinness’s last sentence moves the viewpoint beyond the world of empirical observation, in which the philosophical-psychological-sociological concept of character was distilled, into the world of spiritual reality and divine revelation. In that world personal character, as described, is diagnosed as the evidence and expression of the indiscernible reality called the heart—“the hidden person of the heart,” as Peter puts it (1 Pet 3:4)—which we may properly define as you and me as we really are in the sight of God, the seer and searcher of our hearts. Bible writers may not have known about the circulation of the blood, but clearly they knew that as the physical heart, with its pumping beat, sustains bodily life so the metaphorical heart, the dynamic inner self, energizes every aspect of our personal, relational life. All our desires, motivations, purposes and plans, good or bad; all our inner urges and powers, our relational attitudes and intentions; all our judgments, doubts, suspicions and certainties; all loves, hates, hopes, fears, rejoicings and sorrowings; all our imaginings and our creativity; all proceed from our soul or spirit or heart (these biblical terms are virtual synonyms). In the biblical sense of the word, my heart, for better or for worse, is the essence of the real living person that is me.

So our thoughts, words and imaginations come out of our hearts. Scripture assumes this throughout. When David prays, “Let the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart / be acceptable in your sight, / O LORD, my rock and my redeemer” (Ps 19:14), his two phrases link up to express a single reality, the voicing of the thoughts that flow out of the heart. The two halves of Psalm 139:23, “Search me, O God, and know my heart! / Try me and know my thoughts!” similarly show that thoughts spring from and so reveal the heart. And when the psalmist declares, “My heart overflows with a pleasing theme; / I address my verses to the king; / my tongue is like the pen of a ready scribe” (Ps 45:1), he is telling us that all his poetic imaginings and celebratory utterances are products of his heart. He is writing his poem, apparently, for a royal wedding, in which the king marries his princess bride; Christians use it to celebrate the glory of the Lord Jesus taking his church into the fullness of his fellowship. All forms of exuberance issue from the heart.

So too motives, purposes and plans are rooted in our hearts. Motive, for instance, appears as God’s focus of attention in Psalm 66:18, where the psalmist comments on his own praying: “If I had cherished iniquity in my heart”—that is formed and clung to a purpose of doing what would displease God—“the Lord would not have listened.” A very different motivation is revealed in Psalm 40:8: “I desire to do your will, O my God; / your law is within my heart.” As for plans and purposes, note Solomon’s words at the dedicating of the temple: “The LORD said to David my father, ‘Whereas it was in your heart to build a house for my name, you did well that it was in your heart’” (2 Chron 6:8); and contrast Peter’s admonition to Simon the sorcerer, who wanted to purchase the power to confer manifestations of the Holy Spirit at will: “Pray to the Lord that, if possible, the intent of your heart may be forgiven you” (Acts 8:22). Note too Jesus’ devastating diagnosis of the source of the vices that foul our lives: “From within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness” (Mk 7:21-22).

As all the blood in our body is pumped out into circulation by our physical heart, so all our hopes, dreams, brilliancies, follies, virtues and vices, all that we are and say and do, flows out of the inner essence of the real me and the real you, which the Bible calls the heart in this transferred, metaphorical sense.

Two things must now be underlined before we go further. First, biblical religion is essentially heart religion; real Christianity, as the Puritan Richard Baxter constantly insisted, is “heart-work.” Observance of what Puritans called “duties”—prescribed behavioral procedures, like the practice of prayer—only please God when done for his honor and glory, done, that is, out of what Jesus called “an honest and good heart” (Lk 8:15), meaning a God-centered motivation, humble, thankful and adoring. Jesus taught that keeping the great commandment starts with the heart—“you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength” (Mk 12:30)—and he designates the supreme blessing of seeing God for the pure in heart (Mt 5:8), while castigating the Pharisees for formal religiosity without a God-attuned heart, and assuring them that “God knows your hearts. . . . [W]hat is exalted among men is an abomination in the sight of God” (Lk 16:15). All is wrong if the heart is not right.

This shows us why theologian John Calvin chose for the emblem on his personal seal the image of a heart held—squeezed, rather—by a giant hand, circled by the Latin words Prompte et Sincere (Quickly and Honestly), which told what quality of obedience to God, from his God-gripped heart, Calvin always aimed at. And it shows us why the heart figures so prominently in Cranmer’s classic sixteenth-century Anglican Prayer Book, and how it is that Cranmer’s prayers can be so powerful a devotional aid today. In the Holy Communion service, the Prayer Book teaches us to pray “cleanse our hearts” and “write . . . thy laws in our hearts,” then to acknowledge ourselves “heartily sorry” for our sins, then to “lift up your hearts” in thanksgiving, and then, as we receive the bread, to “feed on [Christ] in our hearts by faith with thanksgiving,” while the final prayer is that the peace of God may “keep your hearts in the knowledge and love of God, and of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.” The daily service (twice-daily, on Cranmer’s ordering) calls on us to confess our sins “with an humble, lowly, penitent and obedient heart . . . with a pure heart and humble voice,” and asks God to “make clean our hearts within us.” Other Prayer Book prayers ask for “hearts . . . mortified from all worldly and carnal lusts,” for “new and contrite hearts,” that God’s Holy Spirit may “in all things direct and rule our hearts,” and that God will “pour into our hearts such love toward thee, that we, loving thee above all things, may obtain thy promises, which exceed all that we can desire.” These prayers (to look no further) are samples of heart religion as it is surely meant to be.

Second, the unrenewed human heart is fundamentally in bad shape. An oracle from God declares: “The heart is deceitful above all things, / and desperately sick”—the NRSV renders this as “devious above all else; it is perverse”—“who can understand it? / I the LORD search the heart / and test the mind, / to give every man according to his ways” (Jer 17:9-10). Many times in this book the conventional assumption that people are all naturally good (good at heart, as we say) and that only external influences and deprivations of one sort or another ever make anyone bad has been shown to be wrong. The truth is that all human beings are twisted and flawed deep down inside. The human heart is in the grip of a pernicious anti-God allergy, an inner drive toward self-centered self-assertion at all times, a chameleon instinct for practical self-deification that the Bible calls sin and diagnoses as pride. Pride, thus understood, is a passion always to be in control so that all our desires get satisfied and in all relationships we dominate. So pride makes impossible a truly respectful attitude to other people, which sees everyone else as mattering more than oneself (the way Paul says it should be: see Phil 2:3), and it makes impossible a truly reverent attitude to God, which sees his glory as all that matters and ourselves as here to praise and please him in all that we do, starting with our treatment of others. All God-centeredness is categorically ruled out by the “me-ism” of pride. If therefore we practice religion, pride in that religion is at the heart of it, and if we do not practice religion, pride is the seed of our idea that we do not need God in order to live well. Pride within leads us to affirm ourselves, feeling that we are the world’s most important people; pride teaches us to justify ourselves, seeing what we have done and are doing now as essentially good and decent behavior, whatever those around us may think to the contrary; and pride generates satisfaction with ourselves as we are, with consequent unwillingness to change or be changed. Such is the bad news about the human heart.

Pride, operating as described, is the reality that Christians call original sin. “He laughed at original sin” is a biting line from Hilaire Belloc, who knew, as all believers do, that our sinful pride or prideful sin (call it whichever you like) is no laughing matter. Pride as described above is the willing pandemic of the human community. Born in us, it is precisely that sickness of the heart to which Jeremiah points, and it produces radical inward malaise and malfunctioning—deformity, indeed—throughout our entire spiritual system. We speak today of tobacco, drinking and drug habits as addictions, and sin too is an addiction, a habit of the heart that mars and undermines what might have appeared at first as good character. And this sinful heart of ours is in its sickness, as Jeremiah tells us, supremely deceitful—devious, falsifying, fantasizing, self-deceiving, as addicts’ hearts always are: which means that we ourselves by ourselves can never be fully realistic about ourselves, never discern our own inner twistedness, until God begins to reveal to us what is really wrong with us. Only God can show us the root of our addictive denial of reality, namely, our inescapable awareness, deep down, of our Creator and his claims, which our heart so obsessively distorts or denies. Only God, whom we cannot deceive, however much we may wish and try to, can free us from the self-deceptions that our sinful pride has generated. Today’s world is full of bad news, much of it truly horrific, but the bad news about human hearts and the consequences facing those whose hearts are not changed is the worst of all.

THE NEW HEART

The Bible proclaims the healing of the heart as a gift of God through the gospel, an integral aspect of the divine work of saving grace. God through Ezekiel speaks of it in these terms: “I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you and cause you to walk in my statutes” (Ezek 36:26-27). It is natural to suppose that this passage was in Jesus’ mind when he used the two-word parable “born again” (or, perhaps, “born from above”) to describe this change to Nicodemus (Jn 3:3-8) and when he chided “the teacher of Israel”—the supposed expert, therefore, on Scripture—for not knowing what the person he had hailed as “a teacher come from God” was talking about (vv. 10, 12). Certainly this was what John had in mind when he spoke of being “born” of God (see 1 Jn 2:29; 3:9; 4:7; 5:1, 18). Certainly this is what Paul had in mind when he spoke of believers being co-resurrected in Christ with Christ out of prior spiritual death (Eph 2:1-10; Col 2:9-14), and out of death in Christ with Christ, accepted as the deserved end of one’s life to date without God (Rom 6:3-11), and when he spoke of the believer as a new creation in Christ (2 Cor 5:17; Gal 6:15), saved through “the washing [that consists] of regeneration and renewal by the Holy Spirit” (Tit 3:5). Regeneration and new birth, co-resurrection and new creation are four names for the same work of God.

Those who come to living faith in the living Christ as their Savior and Master find themselves radically changed inside, and one mark of the change is that remembering God and looking to him and praying to him as Father (and praying to Jesus also) are now instinctive movements of the soul (see Rom 8:15-16; Gal 4:6). The miracle that we call regeneration has taken place, the heart is new, everything is different and fellowshiping with the Father and the Son through the ongoing ministry of the indwelling Holy Spirit, who maintains our sense of union and communion with and abiding in both of them (see 1 Jn 1:3; 2:20-24; 3:24), become our natural and habitual way of life.

The New Testament shows us three linked qualities that will mark out all those whose hearts have been thus renewed. First, they will be consistently repentant. That means more than being rueful, regretful and remorseful. Understanding repentance as turning back from the dark paths of self-service to face, love, thank and serve God, and as forsaking all former practices of disobeying and departing from them, and acknowledging therewith the guilt of those practices and clinging to Christ for forgiveness through his cross, and as resolutely following him into a life of devoted discipleship, they will repeatedly renew their commitment to holiness, and they will constantly reexamine themselves in God’s presence to make sure that no ungodly ways have crept back in. This thoroughgoing personal repentance is beautifully focused by Francis Ridley Havergal. Though the following verses are placed in most hymnals and song books in sections on commitment to Christian service, repentance is the reality that Havergal is here spelling out.

Take my life, and let it be

consecrated, Lord to thee.

Take my moments and my days;

let them flow in ceaseless praise.

Take my hands, and let them move

at the impulse of thy love.

Take my feet, and let them be

swift and beautiful for thee.

Take my voice, and let me sing,

always, only, for my King.

Take my lips, and let them be

filled with messages from thee.

Take my silver and my gold;

not a mite would I withhold

Take my intellect, and use

ev’ry pow’r as thou shalt choose

Take my will, and make it thine;

it shall be no longer mine.

Take my heart it is thine own;

it shall be thy royal throne.

Take my love; my Lord, I pour

at the feet its treasure store.

Take myself, and I will be

ever, only, all for thee.

Second, those whose hearts have been changed in the way described will be consciously returning to God day by day—traveling home, that is, to their Maker, Defender, Redeemer and Friend, from whom, like the prodigal in Jesus’ parable, they had wandered away. This is the larger frame of understanding within which their repentance and consecration are set. As daily they renew the giving of their lives back to God, so they see themselves coming ever closer to the joy they will know when they are finally home with the Father, the Son and the Spirit in the glory God has prepared, as we are told (1 Cor 2:9), for those who love him. Scottish minister George Matheson expressed some of this when he poeticized his pain at losing the lady who broke her engagement to him because he was blind. What his prayer song voices is not the self-pity we might have expected but the worship and hope of a faithful returner.

O Love that will not let me go,

I rest my weary soul in thee;

I give thee back the life I owe,

that in thine ocean depths its flow

may richer, fuller be.

O Light that follow’st all my way,

I yield my flickering torch to thee;

my heart restores its borrowed ray,

that in thy sunshine’s blaze its day

may brighter, fairer be.

O Joy that seekest me through pain,

I cannot close my heart to thee;

I trace the rainbow through the rain,

and feel the promise is not vain

that morn shall tearless be.

O Cross that liftest up my head,

I dare not ask to fly from thee;

I lay in dust life’s glory dead

and from the ground there blossoms red

life that shall endless be.

The vision of faithful Christian living as returning to God, both as a response to disappointment and pain and as a daily discipline and indeed as a life project, flows from texts like the doxology with which Paul rounds off his doctrinal exposition in Romans: “From [God] and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen” (Rom 11:36). Here, from a mountaintop of theological insight and vision, Paul proclaims that all is from God in the sense that he has created it; all is through him in the sense that he sustains and overrules all existence and all life, including our own; and all is to him in the sense that he is its destination, goal, recipient and inheritor. In other words, all persons, all living things, all created realities, all historical processes and all products of art, science, imagination, ingenuity, and skill are means to his glory, pleasure, and praise; either by reason of the intrinsic quality that is in them through his own giving or by reason of the wisdom, truth, and justice that he has shown and will show in dealing with all forms of sin, all living of lies, all corrupting of beauty into ugliness, and all modes of callousness and cruelty, both human and Satanic. All these evils are due to receive, if they have not already received, the retribution they deserve, and God’s love for the goodness he imparts and for all who by his grace learn to cherish it shines forth ever more gloriously as a result. (What a weight of meaning that little word to, which of itself signifies simply movement toward some link with something or somebody, is carrying in this verse!)

Persons with renewed hearts see the triune God, in all the majesty that Scripture ascribes to him, as filling their horizon—rather, as being their horizon—at every point. They look at everything in the light of God, and everything becomes a path leading their thoughts to God; and that is because the regenerate heart loves and desires God more intensely and insistently than human lovers ever desire their beloveds.

Whom have I in heaven but you?

And there is nothing on earth that I desire besides you.

My flesh and my heart may fail,

but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.

(Ps 73:25-26)

I say to the LORD, “You are my Lord;

I have no good apart from you.”. . .

The LORD is my chosen portion and my cup. . . .

I have set the LORD always before me . . .

in your presence is fullness of joy;

at your right hand are pleasures forevermore. (Ps 16:2, 5, 8, 11)

O God, you are my God; earnestly I seek you;

my soul thirsts for you, . . .

as in a dry and weary land where there is no water. . . .

Because your steadfast love is better than life,

my lips will praise you. (Ps 63:1-3)

Starting from where they are at any moment in their life, regenerate persons constantly feel, deep down, that drawing closer to God through Christ and the Spirit in union and communion, prayer and praise is what they most want to do, and this feeling stays with them. In other words, the regenerate are now programmed for that great life-embracing, lifeenhancing return, within which all specific acts of repenting and coming back to God find their place. This mindset is exemplified by George Matheson’s poignant lyric (see p. 269) and is at least faintly illustrated by the lifting of spirits that all hikers know when they turn and head for home. Homecoming is a joyful affair in ordinary life, and it certainly is so as we travel home to God.

Matheson’s words have become a familiar hymn, and all who stand and sing it in worship should be praying it as they do so; thus, please God, we may come to share with Matheson the renewing of light, joy and peace within that flow from knowing we are loved by God as we face up to Christ’s cross in relation to our personal hurts, disappointments and distresses.

Third, the desire of the renewed heart for God and for the fullness of life in God moves returners to become runners, exerting themselves with a zeal, effort and focus matching that of athletes going flat out to win their race. Racing is in fact a recurring New Testament picture of faithful, purposeful, cutting-edge discipleship (see 1 Cor 9:24, 26; Gal 2:2; Phil 2:16; 2 Tim 4:7; Heb 12:1; cf. Acts 20:24). Paul describes his personal running as follows: “Not that I . . . am already perfect, but I press on to make it [resurrection from the dead] my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. . . . [F]orgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus” (Phil 3:12-14). He spells this out, note, for imitation: “Let those of us who are mature think this way” (v. 15). Similarly Hebrews 12:1-2 urges us to “lay aside every weight, and the sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus.” We will be on the home stretch, with the prize before us; we will be running home.

My (Carolyn) friends Jim and Carol have taken the image of “pilgrim” as a lifelong model. Raised in a missionary family on one continent, schooled in a second, then serving as a missionary in a third continent and finally as assistant director of a large international mission agency, at midlife Carol had trouble thinking of any earthly place as “home.” Eventually she realized that her home did not have any earthly address. She and Jim are pilgrims here, sometimes running, sometimes walking, but their home is in eternity with Jesus. All of what happens here, including Jim’s one-hundred-page passport, is a journey toward heaven. When they recently returned to Ecuador, where Carol grew up, they were assigned identification tags labeled “Temporary Visitor.” They accepted this tag as a badge testifying not only of their trip to Ecuador but of their entire lives—on a journey to eternity. And the smiles on their faces while they continue without fixed abode in this world speak not of the misery of refugees who have left their home behind but of the eager merriment of returners running home, and very much looking forward to arriving there.

THE UNITED HEART

What we have said so far might seem to imply that those who have been inwardly renewed in Christ by the Spirit will always have their hearts united, as Psalm 86:11 puts it, to fear God’s name—that is, to honor, revere, love, praise, thank, obey and thus glorify him—with all their energy and powers of concentration all the time. But though it will certainly be like that in heaven, the reality here on earth is not so simple. Before we came to faith, the God-repelling allergic addiction called sin dominated our hearts, and sin continues its effects on us. Motivationally and behaviorally the effects of sin were twofold: first, to keep the true God at a distance while we played God to ourselves, and, second, to disintegrate our focus on life so that in our desires, dreams, actions and habits we became complicated, compartmentalized and inwardly chaotic to a degree, with self-centered passions driving and pulling us in any number of directions at once. When in the course of his journey to faith C. S. Lewis turned at last to serious practical self-examination, “I found,” he writes, “what appalled me; a zoo of lusts, a bedlam of ambition, a nursery of fears, a hareem [sic] of fondled hatreds. My name was legion.” All unregenerate adults are in fact in the same boat, and though when we come to faith this tangle of self-regarding drives and urges ceases to rule us, many of its components remain with us, marauding inwardly to poison the springs of our new purpose in Christ and to regain as much control of our behavior as they can. This is what Paul refers to when he writes: “the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh, for these are opposed to each other, to keep you from doing the things you want to do” (Gal 5:17). The words “the things you want to do” refer to the range of purposeful desires that now dominates our life—the desires, that is, that are aspects and tributaries of the single overmastering desire, to glorify God with our whole heart.

But the desires that constitute the flesh in Paul’s sense, though now dethroned, are not yet destroyed, and in many cases remain psychologically potent within us. Perfect accomplishment of what we want most heartily to do is still beyond us: at this point our reach exceeds our grasp. To be sure, we fight moral and spiritual battles with what we find inside us and we win victories; we make progress, cleansing ourselves “from every defilement of body and spirit, bringing holiness to completion in the fear of God” (2 Cor 7:1). But here on earth the task is never finished. Everything we do appears in retrospect as something we could and should have done better, and whenever we measure our actual performance by Scripture, shortcomings stand out.

In Romans 7:7-25 Paul offers a personal analysis of this to bring out and ram home his larger gospel theme of deliverance in Christ from law religion to life in the Spirit (see Rom 7:6; 8:2). Paul’s point is that for himself as a sample Christian, just as it had been for him in his pre-Christian days, the law, which spells out God’s standard of righteousness, gives no power against the lapses it forbids, exposes and condemns. Playing with the word law, Paul speaks of a “law” in his human system that wars against the “law” of his mind and takes him captive against his will. His analysis ends with a rhetorical summary: “So then, I myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin” (v. 25). The first half of the statement refers to the voluntary service of the renewed heart, expressed in a thoughtful purpose of law-keeping obedience to God; the second half refers to the involuntary down drag of indwelling sin in its myriad forms, obstructing, distracting, dissembling, deceiving and keeping us from doing, properly and purely, the things that we most want to do. Things our hearts know we should not do—little things, maybe, but grievous—repeatedly fool us into thinking we want to do them just this once or into doing them without thinking at all, and then we wake up to the fact that we have done, not the good we should have done, but things that were poor quality, much less than the best, and often downright bad. This is an ongoing aspect of every Christian’s experience as long as we are in this world.

So Christian living involves a permanent element of conflict and struggle, not only with temptations that come from outside but with impulses, urges, attitudes, moods and mental states that bubble up around the heart and to some extent block and derail our purpose of obeying and honoring God with perfect purity of heart and perfect precision of action. We do not want to be less than perfect in serving God, but in practice we always are. So when Scripture speaks of praying with our whole heart, the focus is on intention rather than accomplishment, and the wholeness of heart referred to is comparative rather than absolute. The desire expressed is that our praying here and now may fully reflect God’s work of uniting our heart (one aspect of ongoing sanctification) as far as it has gone.

To be sure, refreshing moments are given us when our heart feels utterly fixed on God and completely united and absorbed in loving response to him, but these do not last, nor are they ever the whole story. There is always more going on inside us motivationally and temperamentally than we are aware of at any moment, as professional counselors, helping us to look back, are often in retrospect able to show us. Meanwhile, as we persevere in prayer, we can count on God’s work of uniting our heart to progress.

Just how much does it mean then to ask for and receive, on a moment-by-moment basis, both for our praying and for our private and public living, a heart united to fear God? Comparing translations of the Hebrew verb in Psalm 86:11 points us to the answer. Unite is in KJV, RSV, NASB and ESV. The classic Anglican Prayer Book has “knit my heart unto thee.” “Give me an undivided heart” is the NIV, TNIV and NRSV rendering. Among the paraphrases, TEV offers “train me to serve you with complete devotion”; NLT has “grant me purity of heart”; and The Message, freest and perhaps most luminous of the lot, gives us “Put me together, one heart and mind; / then undivided, I’ll worship in joyful fear.” This is then followed in the next verse by “from the bottom of my heart” for the Hebrew “with my whole heart,” which catches the nuance beautifully. “Unite my heart” is thus revealed as a prayer that all Christians frustrated by the Romans 7:14-25 experience would and should naturally make. (Several psalmists evidently knew this experience, even if they had no words for it, and every real Christian knows it.) The prayer is for an increase of inner integration that will show itself in an ever deeper and more intense concentration on God himself, the light and joy of the psalmists’ life and ideally of ours too.

Four tests will tell us how far our own hearts are united Godward in this sense. We note them now before we go further. First, how far are our heads right? All renewed hearts have an instinct for embracing Bible doctrine as God’s truth and for interpreting and assessing all life by it, and for sensing God’s presence and gift in all that is good everywhere. A bleak alternative to this, of course, is the all-too-familiar reality of compartmental living, whereby religion is viewed as a distinct department of our existence, and prayer is one of the due tasks in that department, but this religiosity has no link with the rest of our life, where sick fancies and porn or envy and hate or power-hungry ambition and greed may still be in full control. This, however, is a version of the hypocritical role play that Jesus condemned in the Pharisees and that we should condemn too. It is an evil to be avoided. So, what should we say of our own head—the life of our own mind?

Second, how far are our hands right?—used, that is, with a purpose of pleasing God? “Take my hands, and let them move / at the impulse of thy love,” wrote Frances Havergal. Hands stand for our life activities, all the many things we actually do. The question is, are they engaged to please God or just to please ourselves or those around us? Pleasing others is a trap we must learn to avoid. So, what should we say of our own hands—the actions and enterprises of our own life?

Third, how far are our habits right? What of our routines? Our favorite ways of spending time not otherwise committed? Our cherished ways of thinking and subjects of thought? Our hobby and sports interests, even? Things that are not good or that are overdone can become so routine that our conscience ceases to complain with regard to them, and thus moral sores can become part of our being without our realizing it. That often happens when bad habits get hold of us. So, are our own habits holy? Are we concerned that they should be? Are we trying to make them so? What should we say of our habits, the formed and formative regularities of our own life?

Fourth, how far are our hopes right? Human beings live very much in their personal hopes, and it is of things hoped for that Jesus speaks when he tells us to lay up treasure in heaven, since where our treasure is there our heart will be (Mt 6:20-21). What do we save for, plan for, scheme for, pray for? Is it for the joy of ever-closer fellowship with the Father and the Son, here and hereafter, that we hope most of all? Does the hope of giving our gracious God pleasure unify what we do with our lives? And will it be to God’s honor if the hopes we most ardently cherish at this moment are fulfilled? So, what should we say of our hopes—the focus so largely of our own present life?

From these necessary questions it can be seen that we need to watch like hawks what it is that we take into our hearts, for what we take in will always seek to take over. We are what we are at heart, no more, no less. The heart becomes the inside story of everyone’s life, and we do not understand ourselves, or anyone else for that matter, until we are in touch with what goes on in us and in them at heart level. So we cannot wonder that in the book of Proverbs, where the literary form is a wise man instructing his son, there are constant admonitions to guard our hearts and seek to harness them in obedient trust Godward. “Trust in the LORD with all your heart, / and do not lean to your own understanding” (Prov 3:5). “Let your heart hold fast my words; / keep my commandments and live” (Prov 4:4).

My son, be attentive to my words;

incline your ear to my sayings.

Let them not escape from your sight;

keep them within your heart. . . .

Keep your heart with all vigilance,

for from it flow the springs of life. (Prov 4:20-21, 23)

We are to aim at avoiding what pollutes the springs, says the wise man; that is wisdom and anything else is folly.

PRAYING IN THE SPIRIT WITH THE WHOLE HEART

We have gone into detail about the human heart, in the biblical sense of that phrase, because it is so little understood by Christians today. We referred earlier to J. I.’s longstanding failure to appreciate the whole-heart praying of the psalmists because, as he now sees, his personal piety, such as it was and marked as it was by a good deal of surface-level passion, was still too cerebral, and his heart, deep down, was still too much in a “frozen-chosen” mold, needing to be loosened up and indeed warmed up. We do not think he is the only modern Western Christian who has had a problem here. Our individualistic culture in the West naturally spawns a sense of identity in isolation, and many instinctively guard their sense of distance in all their commerce with people and things outside themselves; and this makes openhearted, uninhibited, self-surrendering Christian transparency, both Godward and manward, difficult and at first unwelcome.

Now please be clear: what we are talking about at this point is not just achieving wholeheartedness in the everyday sense of warm, unhesitating, enthusiastic and robust commitment to something or someone, desirable though that sort of wholeheartedness so often is. The biblical reality that we have in view is the spiritual, supernatural wholeness of heart that springs from realizing two overwhelming truths. Truth one is that without the Father, the Lord Jesus and the Holy Spirit we would be lost in darkness and discontent forever. Truth two is that, through the love of the holy Three who have rescued us from ruin, we are already enjoying a new life of acceptance, fellowship and security with God, the life of joy, peace, praise and happiness in holiness that will be ours in much greater fullness to all eternity. As we realize these realities more deeply, our hearts become freer, lighter, more God-entranced and thus constantly closer to the psalmists’ hearts as expressed in their recorded verbal praying. That is the matter of fact that we aim to unpack now.

The New Testament twice directs us to pray in the Holy Spirit. What, we ask, does that mean? Not, we think, praying in tongues, though some may experience that. Nor is praying in the Holy Spirit praying out of some kind of ecstatic inner experience every time. In our view, praying in the Spirit means conversing responsively with God on the basis of a triple awareness, each element of which flows out of the teachings of Scripture and is imparted to us by the indwelling Holy Spirit of God.

The first awareness is a panoramic understanding of the new-created, new covenantal, Christ-centered order of things that now overlays and augments the ongoing life of this planet and its inhabitants. The focal point of the new order is God’s gift of eternal life to believers, the life of fellowship with God that will go on through eternity and never end. This new life is a present reality for all those who through faith know, trust, love and serve Jesus Christ as their Savior King. The resulting global awareness of God’s salvation purposes, which the Holy Spirit writes in their hearts via Holy Scripture, may be pulled together and schematized in order as follows:

Such, in brief, is the panoramic, comprehensive, big-picture view of the Christian calling that the Holy Spirit communicates to all God’s people. What it involves in detail is something that all of us go on discovering all our days, but the convictional outline remains as above, shaping both our behavior and our prayers.

The second awareness is a progressive, intensifying realization of the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ as our Savior, Master and Friend, our prophet, priest, and king, our Lord and our God. The Spirit leads us to dwell on his wisdom, power and love as the Shepherd whose sheep we are, as the Vine whose branches we are, and as the Redeemer whose ransomed trophies we are: the Redeemer who in love gave himself up to die on the cross in order to rescue each of us personally from hell, and who in love will keep us close to himself forever. It was Jesus’ promise that when the Spirit should come to fulfill what we may properly call his Pentecostal ministry: “He will glorify me, for he will take what is mine and declare it to you” (Jn 16:14). What then is it that the Spirit makes increasingly vivid to us? Jesus’ person and work, his preeminence and power; his identity and dignity as the enthroned Son of God; his past, present and future deeds; his love, faithfulness, promises and gifts to us and care for us—in short, everything about him. Thus the Spirit glorifies Jesus, making him glorious in our eyes, so that he fills the horizon and becomes the central reference point of our existence. And the Spirit has been doing this for all believers ever since that momentous Pentecost morning that Luke in Acts 2 describes.

Our part is to be careful lest by any means we resist, obstruct, grieve and so quench the Holy Spirit so that we miss the full benefit of this ministry (see Acts 7:51; Eph 4:30; 1 Thess 5:19). On the contrary, we should constantly be praying that the Spirit will open the eyes of our minds and hearts wider so that we may see more of what he is showing us—specifically, the Son’s role as the channel to us of every good thing God gives us, starting with our very existence and moving on to every aspect of the grace and mercy that saves and transforms us sinners. (See and study in detail how Paul spells all this out in one brief letter, Col 1:13-22; 2:6-15; 3:1-17.)

Paul, who began as a hater of Jesus’ name and a hammerer of his disciples, became a man for whom Jesus Christ truly was all in all (see Phil 1:20-23), filling the entire horizon of his life as the lover and Lord of his soul (Gal 2:20). The love of Christ, he says, meaning the love Christ has shown to him, was the driving, directing, captivating, controlling, compulsive and propulsive force of his life, animating and energizing all his years of selfless service as a church planter and pastor (2 Cor 5:14; cf. 2 Cor 11:23-33). Certainly Paul was a driven man, but it was his sense of the hugeness of Christ’s love and mercy to him that drove him. He could never get Christ out of his mind, nor did he want to. He never ceased to be thrilled and thunderstruck by the way Jesus had laid hold of him in the midst of his vendetta against the church and turned him right around. Henceforth Christ was his reference point in everything, and no one could ever more truly take on their lips John Newton’s words of address to Jesus: “My Lord, my life, my way, my end.” The apostle was permanently humbled, dazzled, entranced and overjoyed at Christ’s “love beyond degree,” as Isaac Watts phrased it, and it is no surprise to find him writing to his friends at Philippi:

Whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, . . . that I may know him. (Phil 3:7-10)

At the end of this passage of testimony he declares that his own Christ-centeredness is a model for all believers. “Let those of us who are mature think this way” (v. 15). For the Spirit is given us to lead us all along the path.

That is made explicit by Paul’s prayer in Ephesians 3:14-19. Look at the cumulative sequence of petitions for his readers that he spells out.

Samuel Francis catches something of this when he sings:

O the deep, deep love of Jesus!

Vast, unmeasured, boundless, free,

Rolling, as a mighty ocean

In its fullness over me.

Underneath me, all around me,

Is the current of thy love,

Leading onward, leading homeward,

To my glorious rest above.

For Paul himself and for the Ephesians, and for us, a twofold knowledge is involved here. Realization of the insuperable strength, determination and tenacity of Christ’s love for us grows with increasing awareness of the seemingly unfathomable perversity, fertility, futility, nastiness, guilt and shame of our own sinfulness. It has often been observed that Paul’s way of referring to his unworthiness, extravagant-sounding to start with, became yet more extravagant as he went along. In 1 Corinthians 15:9 (53 A.D., perhaps) he is “the least of the apostles, unworthy to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God.” In Ephesians 3:8 (61 A.D., perhaps) he is “the very least of all the saints.” In 1 Timothy 1:15 (63 A.D., perhaps) he refers to “sinners, of whom I am the foremost.” It is natural to see this progression down as direct evidence of the Spirit’s ongoing exaltation of Christ in his heart by making the Savior’s love ever more vivid and precious to him. It is certain that the more clearly the Spirit makes persons appreciate the grandeur of Christ’s self-giving love for them, the more they will depreciate themselves for the perceived defects of their past and present lives. And in every case the love of Christ is the centerpiece of the glory of Christ of which the Spirit works to make each of us increasingly conscious.

The third reality is the beauty, wisdom and power of the Father, the Son and the Spirit as displayed in the order of creation and natural providence. What to unbelievers is just the way things work is for Christians the endlessly fascinating display area of an endlessly resourceful God, endlessly to be adored for the wonders of nature as well as those of redemption. That takes us back to the world of Job 38—41, Proverbs 8 and many of the psalms. This aspect of the Spirit’s ministry is important, more so than is often realized, but this is not the place where we can discuss it in full.

Our present point, the point on which we close, is that praying in the Holy Spirit means opening ourselves continually to the Holy Spirit’s ministry of leading us to contemplate and rejoice in the various facets of the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ, and to respond to them in a way that becomes the frame and foundation for the rest of our praying lifelong. What is affirmed here is that this is what constitutes for Christians the reality of praying with our whole heart: Christians pray with a single commanding and controlling focus on the glory of the Lord. And we are told further to affirm that all who pray clearheadedly in terms of the guidelines that this formula provides will find a new fruitfulness in their praying; for God’s promise, given to very imperfect Israelites long ago, still stands, so we believe, as a word to us Christians: “When you seek me with all your heart, I will be found by you” (Jer 29:13-14).

Such, then, is true praying in the Holy Spirit, who always glorifies Christ; praying as those who truly know God through Christ praying out of a true, whole, united heart; praying according to the revealed will of God; praying in terms of the pattern set by the Psalter and modeled by the many whose prayings are recorded in the biblical narrative. We who write, like you who read, dare not claim to be more than beginners in God’s school of prayer; so—Lord, teach us to pray! Amen.

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