What, in fact, is God’s deep desire for us? What does he long to do for us? Is it not much more than forgiveness? In fact, the Gospel is a message of a restored person. People who are not whole cannot wholly give themselves to something. At the Fall, we lost our selves, because we gave our hearts away.
Heart equals self.
God wants to restore our hearts to us, to give us back our life and our aliveness. As George MacDonald says, the story of humanity’s journey with God is about his longing to give us life, his own: “The whole history is a divine agony to give divine life to creatures. The outcome of that agony … will be radiant life, whereof joy unspeakable is the flower.” And, “All the growth of the Christian is the more and more life he is receiving.”
The invitation is to “radiant life.”
It was God’s original intent, from millennia past to give us a radiant, whole life: “Long before he laid down earth’s foundations, he had us in mind, had settled on us as the focus of his love, to be made whole and holy by his love.” (The Messege, Eph. 1:4) As John Eldredge points out, holiness and wholeness must be taken together. Rather than an austere, painful exercise in super-spirituality, holiness is an invitation to wholeness. We cannot be holy unless we are whole, and cannot be whole until we are holy.
Notice that Christian growth is about receiving more life! Jesus indicated that it was a kind of full-hearted life lived in union with God and all the resources of his Kingdom. Yet, one cannot live full-hearted and substantially restored and still remain under the unkind assumption that one’s heart is still marred, dirty or faithless. Restoration also is not likely to occur when a person believes that God’s primary goal is to get them to behave and act like good little Christians “ought.” That yoke of slavery no longer fits God’s children.
How can we live a new life if we don’t really believe our hearts are treasured and not trampled? Could we even begin to change if we believe God uses shame to change us or pressures us into spiritual conformity? If our convictions about both ourselves and him are wrong, we have little hope of a new life. Is there a better way of thinking about our life in God? About our hearts?
My upcoming book, Recover Your Good Heart, addresses this question by providing a more hopeful way of thinking about our new hearts; so that wholeness and holiness become an already-established power within the believer - a life that he increases in as he walks in his new-hearted identity.