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.

“I cannot recommend Jim Robbins’ book Recover Your Good Heart highly enough. With profound insight, compassion, and solid biblical support; he resurrects one of the most forgotten and overlooked truths in our day — We are not the same people coming out of conversion that we were going in! Our sin nature and old heart are not eradicated but they are offset with a glorious, unalterable, supernatural reality. We have new hearts, new inclinations, and a new identity. We are far more than forgiven sinners. We are renovated saints with new hearts, good hearts; which come wholly through the Holy Spirit. Thank you Jim for reminding us that our hope for godliness is not gritting our teeth and trying harder. It is falling back on the resources and power of our good heart, the “heart of flesh”, birthed at conversion and appropriated throughout our lifetime. A great work!”

Dwight Edwards,

advisor to Larry Crabb
www.kindlingforthefire.com

]]> http://www.robbinswritings.com/2008/09/22/recover-your-good-heart-reviewed/feed/ http://www.robbinswritings.com/2008/09/16/training-scars/ http://www.robbinswritings.com/2008/09/16/training-scars/#comments Tue, 16 Sep 2008 16:40:57 +0000 Jim The Heart Relational ministry New book http://www.robbinswritings.com/2008/09/16/training-scars/ 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.

• “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.

Special Guest, Jim Robbins — interviewed on Family Room Media’s weekly podcast. I was interviewed by the guys at Family Room Media about my new book, Recover Your Good Heart.
Topic: The work of Jesus goes far beyond forgiveness. It is a rescue of the heart. This is why the follower of Christ already has a new goodness, new power and new desires.

Thanks to David, Bob, and Loren at Family Room Media.

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To read excerpts of Jim’s new book, Recover Your Good Heart — Living free from religious guilt and the shame of not good-enough, CLICK HERE.

It’s as if we call on him to come pay us a visit, to help us out in this situation or that; and then his nearness dissipates. The God who fades. But what kind of assumption might this discouraging view of Jesus be founded upon?

We say that the Cross and Resurrection is about an exchanged life — his for ours. But don’t we look at this rather forensically — as if the whole deal occurs on paper, like a contract with each side’s lawyers signing off on it? Wouldn’t it be better to assume that something actual was exchanged: that a sin-sick and dead heart was removed, and a new and supernaturally radiant heart was given?

There is no virtual reality here. Not in this Kingdom.
I think our problem is that when we imagine Jesus giving something to us, we think he gives us a substance, something other than himself. For example, we ask for “more grace.” So is grace a solid, liquid, gas? - A powder or something transient and illusive? Of course not. Grace is Jesus saying to us, “Take me. …
I am what you need. I’ll bind myself to you, as you.”

So why do we think he comes for a brief visit to fix a problem or answer a prayer, yet slowly disappears again as a ghost? It’s because we don’t believe that the incarnation — the self-giving of Jesus — still continues within us today. Not just for us, within us.

It’s also why we don’t believe anything supernatural really happened to us at conversion. (Again, it’s that on-paper-only problem). When he rescues, he gives himself. When he performs spiritual surgery, he gives himself. When he gives us a new and supernaturally- purified heart, he gives us his own. That’s why the Christian’s heart is good now, actually good.

“Take mine. I am what you need. I’ll bind myself to you, as you.”
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Source: “As you..” The Rest of the Gospel, Dan Stone & David Gregory.
I

You can now expect holiness from your heart, the  goodness and vitality of Jesus himself within you. And this gives you permission:  to indulge your deepest desires — for they are now untainted and noble. (Didn’t God promise to “give you the desires of your heart?” How did he do that?) He gave you a new heart — with fresh desires, some of which are unique only to your heart.

You can now expect to dream more earnestly.
Delight more relentlessly.
Resist your tempters more confidently.

Your heart is stronger and more noble than you think. Expect that.