This past week, I heard two prominent pastors,  both of whom have large audiences, declare their wretched, sinful nature over the airwaves.  Nothing particular was revealed, just a general confession of miserable unworthiness.  It’s the “let’s just admit we’re screwed up and be honest about it” thinking.

I’m all for authenticity, but isn’t being authentic admitting who you really are?  Apparently, we don’t know who we really have become in Christ.  One of these church leaders said that his job was to “make Jesus look good and sometimes that means I need to honest about how bad I am.” He followed that claim with the idea that we need to believe that God is sovereign and that we’re “totally depraved.”  (Echoes of Jeremiah 17:9 –”The heart is deceitful above all things…” )  The problem with harkening back to a passage like that in Jeremiah, is that it expresses an Old Covenant reality, not a new one.  Remember, there is a progression in Scripture for how God relates to his people.

We’ve been taught to read the entire Bible, including the Old Covenant, as if it is a current and enduring description of the human personality (including those who have trusted Christ).  In some cases, it is an accurate and timeless description of the human condition.  In some cases, it is no longer.  Jeremiah 17:9  is a good example.  The statement is true…of a heart that has not come under the transforming redemption of Jesus.  Those who reject Christ are still under the ruined nature of a depraved heart.  Those who have said ‘yes’ to Jesus are no longer under ruin.  Their hearts have been restored through supernatural, invasive surgery—the giving of a new and radically pure heart for a corrupted, diseased heart.  This is the promise of Ezekiel: 36:26:  “I will give you a new heart and a new spirit…”

I like these two guys because they’ve dumped much of the religiosity of contemporary churchianity.  It seems, though, that their self-disclosers, while sounding holy, are a gross misrepresentation of their actual identities, their new and renovated hearts.

We need a different version of ‘authenticity’ that both acknowledges our areas of brokenness and sin, while stubbornly rehearsing our new nature.  Our natural inclinations as Christ-followers have now become those of Jesus, whether those inclinations are obscured and buried or not.  Authenticity must now be about confessing a new self and indulging the deep desires of our new identities.

The following is a response from a good friend to a question I posed to him.  The question was:  “What have you been told about your heart–even after becoming a Christian?”  Here’s my friend’s response:
“As I look back at my years as a Christian, I am sorry to say that now I see clearly that I have been actually held back in my Christian walk, because I have been receiving the message that my heart is still bad, still wicked.  As a result, my expectations for the “abundant life” of which Jesus spoke, have been nil! Because of what was said on Sunday mornings, I expected to sin regularly!”
There are many Christians who would agree with you if you told them Jesus has made their hearts new, that they are “new creations.”  Yet, their expectation is that they’ll continue to sin regularly and there’s not much they can do about it, except to rehearse the cycle of failure and shame.  They still believe they are predisposed towards wandering and disobedience, and not towards goodness.  –Inclined towards rebellion and self-will, and not towards the new implanted and surprising Spirit-wrought vitality and holiness that is now within them.  Why?
Because they have been given a distortion of the Gospel for so long that anything that challenges that entrenched distortion is seen as suspect.  Familiarity breeds contempt for fresh insight, even the kind that could lead to the very life they long for in Jesus.
We need to start having expectations that are aligned with our new heart, indulging our new appetites and desires for goodness that we now possess..

Law enforcement and the military have a term for an inappropriate or mistaken response that was mislearned during training, a behavioral script that gets laid down during the officer’s training that would clearly not be helpful in a real situation, or perhaps even yield a deadly result. The term is “training scar.” David Grossman, in his book, On Combat, describes an officer-in-training who learned how to grab a gun out of a would-be criminal’s hand. During practice, the officer would grab a gun from a colleague, then give it back to him in order to rehearse it again. During a real confrontation with an assailant, the officer surprisingly grabbed the gun from the man’s hand, then gave it right back to him. Fortunately, the officer’s partner dispatched his own weapon and shot the attacker. The officer who had learned an inappropriate response during training — giving the gun back — nearly cost someone’s life. That’s a training scar.

The Church today is functioning with numerous training scars, or behavioral scripts that are not serving us well. These scripted beliefs are wreaking havoc on The Body. These rehearsed patterns of thought are perhaps even neurologically wired into our brains in ways that lock the spirit and body (Spirit and Body) into dis-ease. The training scar I’m particularly concerned about is our continuing belief that the human heart remains dark, inwardly bent and sinful even after Christ has given the Christian a new heart, goodness and identity at their conversion. We have remained in the Old Covenant approach to relating, refusing to pass over into the New. Listen to most sermons on any given weekend, and you’ll discover the following ingrained script: “Your heart is still selfish and prone to wander. Kill you heart and call that ‘holiness.’ It’s our job to help you behave more like a Christian so that you can do more, be more committed, and stop being so spiritually inept. You don’t really want to follow God, so we’ll pressure you into becoming like him.” The script of “New creation in Christ, but bad heart, still” is the pervasive training scar of the day. It is not the Gospel. And the result to the unwitting Christian is this wound: “You’re not pleasing to me. Try harder.” ———————————

For more on behavior scripts, see Laurence Gonzales’ books, Deep Survival and Everyday Survival. “Training scar” gun story, from Everyday Survival.

Don’t most of us think that the fruit of the Spirit is something we need to attain to, desire more fervently, and try harder to produce? –Something we don’t have much of at all? Or, we have a bit of this one or that, and scarcely others on the list?

• “God, help me to be more patient with my children.”

• “God, my life feels pretty joy-less. I want more of your joy.”

• “God, help me to be more kind to ___________.”

In each case, the assumption is that we either don’t have the particular fruit or that we have so little of it that we fear we’re disappointing God. But what if this isn’t the case? Since Jesus goes directly after the heart when he rescues the person, we should begin to assume some very different things about ourselves:

• We have new hearts. …and God only gives what is most like himself. Good, pure, radiant, vibrant. - That’s what our heart is like even now, despite the fact that this new goodness may appear obscured.

• Your new heart now wants what Jesus himself wanted. You want to live in his goodness. (It’s a much better alternative to the cycle of addiction and shame.)

• Because you have a new heart, you now possess the character of Christ, already. And this is called the “fruit of the Spirit.”

• This fruit is already within you …substantially, though you may be unaware of it.

• What God wants to do through his Spirit is to nourish and release that fruit in increasing measure.

To discover more about your new heart, read excerpts from Jim’s new book, Recover Your Good Heart. Click here.