God's Invitation to Voyage to the Deep (part 2)

We invite you to take your scriptures out, your Bible out, and turn to our scripture reading for this morning, which is found in Mark chapter ten, verses seventeen through twenty-three.

Through twenty-two, rather.

Mark ten seventeen through twenty-two.

If you're using a Pew Bible, you'll find that on page eight forty-six.

And Jesus said to him, Why do you call me good?

No one is good except God alone.

You know the commandments: do not murder, do not commit adultery, do not steal, do not bear false witness, do not defraud.

Honor your father and mother.

And he said to Jesus, Teacher, all these I have kept from my youth.

And Jesus, looking at him, loved him and said to him, You lack one thing.

Go, sell all that you have and give to the poor.

And you will have treasure in heaven.

And come follow me.

Disheartened by the saying, he went away sorrowful, for he had great possessions.

Here ends up with the reading of Scripture.

Well, this morning, we're going to do something a little unusual, a little different here.

We're in a two-week mini-series which we began last week that I've entitled God's Invitation to Voyage to the Deep.

And it's based off of this passage in Mark chapter 10.

Mark 10 · chapter mention

And in this passage, one of the things that we see is we see Jesus inviting a man.

Inviting him to enter a voyage to the deep places of his heart.

And to see what really was there.

To really know who he was and to see the great need that he had for Jesus.

And as we saw last week, it's not just this man that Jesus invites.

Scripture still speaks to us today.

And this passage has a lot to say to us who are believers, to us who are Christians.

The Lord is inviting us still to take a voyage into our hearts, into the very deep places, the core of the of who we really are.

And to see what's there.

And to bring that before him, and to traffic in that before him.

And this voyage is not an easy voyage.

More than a mile deeper than the height of Mount Everest, so to a depth of seven miles, and he built this special craft.

And in order to go that far down, there was all kinds of preparations he had to do.

It was a long process.

It required a lot of perseverance, a lot of resolve.

He had to endure a lot of costs.

And he had to face a lot of unnerving fear.

It wouldn't be a one-time build the craft, go out, make the dive, receive the fame kind of thing.

This was something that he would do in stages.

He would begin shallow.

He would go deeper.

He would go deeper.

And it was something that I'm sure every time as he took the craft out and he stood on the deck of the scientific vessel that held his craft, I'm sure there was something in him that wanted to stay on the deck when it came to that really deep dive.

And as we talked about last week, there's something in us, even us as believers, that want to stay on the deck in the shallow places of our lives, and to not enter into that journey where God calls us into our hearts.

So what I'd like to do this morning, and what's going to be very different here, is we're going to have more of an interview than we are going to have a sermon.

And I'm going to invite up Stefan C.A, who's the director of Northland Christian Counseling Center.

And I've invited Stefan because Stefan deals with the human heart.

And he has for decades.

That's his vocation, that's his ministry.

And this morning we want to just sit down and talk about some practical, practical things surrounding this whole journey of the human heart.

Why it's so hard, what it will cost us, what are some practical things we can do?

What's the goal of it?

And what is the great reward of it?

So I hope this will be something that will be uh a great blessing to all of us.

So would you give a warm welcome to Stefan?

I want to begin, I think, by talking a little bit about the dullness of our hearts, the human heart in general, but no less the Christian heart.

Even as we have a new heart, we still have the flesh with us.

But in the Bible, one of the things that's remarkably clear is that God is interested in the depth of who we are.

He's interested in the heart.

That's a biblical category.

One of the passages that I love is in Proverbs 4.23 mind your heart.

Give all diligence to your heart, for out of it flow the issues of life.

But we have a real problem of being aware of what's going on in our heart.

So can you talk a little bit about why are we as Christians so dull to our own hearts?

Can you hear me?

Okay.

One of the things that um is clear after um years and years of been in the counseling field for a number of years, probably 25, pretty close to 25, um was a missionary with crew for a number of years prior to that, actually about 18 years.

There was a little overlap.

But um there's something about the human heart that tends to be blind, blind to realities that go on way down inside, and really the motivations that go on way down inside.

And I think one of the things that has struck me from my own story, way, way back, late 70s, early 80s, was how um uh I was so unaware of the depth of the fallenness that existed inside of me.

So uh I was blind to it.

Um just a quick story.

I um came to to Christ in my um late teens, early twenties, and um there was a period of time where there was just a honeymoon period, and um it during that whole time I eventually went on staff with crew and then um on into a ministry that took me to Southern California, and it felt like my life fell apart.

Actually, every category that I could think of was a disappointment within the first two years.

I was in the prayer ministry.

Now I don't know how wise it is to put a kid in a prayer ministry because I felt enormous spiritual uh fighting going on, I guess I'd put it like that.

And um but during that time I was so aware that the disappointments that went on with my roommates, with my job, with just about everything, and I became increasingly angry, and um I didn't realize how convinced I was that if a person came to Christ, that it should be just like a rocket going like this, just an upward escalation year in and year out.

And um I was totally unaware how disappointed and angry um it would make me if there was a different plan than the one that I thought he should do, which was just propel me straight into the stratosphere.

And um what that time uncovered, fascinating to me, that what it really uncovered, here I thought I was there for something other than really what I was learning.

And what I really learned was, Stefan, I'm gonna show you there's a depth to the fallenness inside of you that you just have no comprehension of.

I can remember, I'm not happy about this at all.

I still probably a bit of shame in this, but I can remember standing in a little apartment in the middle of God forsaken San Bernardino, California, and uh shaking my fist at heaven saying, You've destroyed my life, um, I'm done.

That was very, very early on, probably 81, 82, right back in that era.

And um it was probably a period of years before any of that made sense, and um, but I was totally unaware, that's the the dullness you're talking about, I was totally unaware that there was a depth of depravity there that that existed even after becoming a believer existed inside of me.

And so you could say, you could say it like this, that the penalty of being unaware is that we walk in a blindness.

I'll often tell clients that um it it's there's something about counseling that's to help people see again.

And um if if a person in the physical sense is turned out on South Washington here and told to walk to the other end of town completely blind, what are the chances they're gonna get hit by a car?

Pretty high.

Um in the spiritual sense, if there isn't sight, there's a pretty good chance there'll be disaster that's awaiting that person as well.

So I guess I would put it like that.

One of the questions that I asked you last week in kind of a uh uh informal survey was I said, what would you just just give me a rough estimate?

What would you estimate estimate is the percentage of spiritual, marital, and family problems caused by relating in ways that ignore or are oblivious to what's going on in our heart or in the hearts of others?

And your response to that was was really shocking.

100%.

Can you comment on how does this unawareness, this dullness of our heart impact our relationships um both with with God and with others in our in our life?

How have you seen that?

Well, uh uh Christianity is different than all other religion in that it's a quality of relationship that Jesus says is at the core.

We are to love, love Him with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength, love our neighbor as ourself.

On these two commandments rests the whole law and the prophets.

So when there's a failure to love, there's going to be problems.

And so the kind of the huge thing in my mind is how are people doing learning to love?

And if they're failing, then any other foundation that they build in that relationship is going to have a problem.

So there's this level, I guess, as I as I think about it, as I've watched it over the years, if I'm unaware of how I'm relating to another person, and I and the quality of love is not actually taking place the way it ought, then there's damage that's going to be done over periods of time and it's going to be destructive in that relationship.

So what we can expect is that if we're not moving in the direction of the Great Commandment over long periods of time, that's going to be destructive in relationships.

So I'm hearing you say that there's a there's a high correlation between love and our own awareness of our heart.

And because love comes, the love we're called to do, the love we're called to walk in toward one another is not uh a surface level kind of thing.

It's something that comes from the very depths of our being.

Yeah, very much.

Um there's there's a um there's there's simply probably just a simple point is that um I'm to be growing in love whether not whether my spouse or others deserve that love, I'm to be growing in that love.

So um if it's contingent on somebody doing something, um, you know, there's gonna be problems.

So worrying about myself is one of the keys.

Worrying about where my heart is in relation to that command is one of the keys that's so incredibly important.

Yeah.

So we're gonna we're gonna build on this point, worrying about where my heart is.

I'd like to say a little more about what that looks like.

So we have a video here.

I saw Dr.

John Coe from Talbot Seminary and University.

Um, would you would you go ahead and show that video?

It's about a four-minute clip, and we're gonna pick up on some of what he's talking about, spiritual formation, true spiritual formation that scripture calls us to handle it.

With God in heart, scripture in hand, all of us are asking the spiritual theological question, and that is, how does this really work in my life of growth?

And nobody can escape that question.

Our vocation that God has called us to is wherever we are, that He wants to use that to transform us.

It is you hear the scriptures on Sunday morning, and you hear this very high calling, this very high ideal to walk in the spirit.

So now your task is, okay, I'm at work.

Now what would it be to walk in the spirit at work?

How does this actually work in my life?

Let's take, you know, you're you're doing something as mundane as doing budgets at work.

For me, I have to work on budgets in the job I have as an administrator.

Well, that became a major issue, John.

Do you want to do budgets in the flesh?

Do you want to just go on autopilot and do it?

Or do you want to ask the question, how can I sit here and spend the next four hours working out this budget and just be open to you, Lord?

I want to walk with you, I want to be with you.

This is this is my calling.

My calling, your calling, if you're doing budgets at work, it's not to it's not when you go into church on Sunday, oh no, that's the higher calling.

No, or going on a mission trip.

No, your calling is how to transform doing your budgets at work, but doing it open to the spirit, at first needs to there needs to be an intentionality.

And the intentionality is, God, today as I'm going to work, I really want to be open to you.

I want you to teach me.

I want you as I bump up against things, like I'm bumping up against my budget, and I get really bugged.

That's cool.

In four seconds, I'm gonna say, God, I'm really bugged about this budget.

But I want to do this in you.

Or I'm at work and I'm interacting with a whether with a client or a person, and that person, you know, they bump something in my heart, and I'm just kind of a little angry at them, I'm a little bugged, I'm a little fearful.

Well, somewhere in the privacy of my own soul, I want to then say, whether it's just right there, or maybe you know an hour later, okay, God, this is good.

This is good because, Lord, you're using this person uh to transform me.

They really bug me.

And so anything at work is an opportunity where when people bump our soul, they're only being used in the sovereignty of God by to raise certain issues.

Well, now I have a real conversation.

And so, you don't want to make the mistake to think that going on a mission trip, uh, that's where the spiritual growth is.

You know, all that stuff at work where our souls are getting bumped, that's the Lord kind of purging it, bringing it up and saying, God, I really am angry at that person.

I'm really bugged at that person and what's going on.

Now you're in the middle of formation.

Now you're you're doing spiritual theology, you're doing what God called us to do.

And you know what the tell-off of this is?

The goal of all of this is not so that um even later on say, ah, I I see that I'm I'm growing.

I've become a better person.

You know, but you know what I think the goal is?

Is we're moving more towards a becoming a more dependent person.

You know, the process of growing, that's a long process.

In fact, someone has said that spiritual formation is the slowest motion on earth.

You may not see that growth, but here's what you will begin to see you will begin to see that your soul is taking the word God, I need you.

You begin to see a little bit of humility so that now you realize, you know, I used to get really bugged.

I kind of in my soul storm out of the office and be bugged all day.

But I just, I now I'm able to hold this process with you more and say, yeah, you know, I know that's going on, but God, it's okay.

What you're doing is you're gaining more access to your soul of how to experience God in the stuff of your life, and how to even experience others in that stuff as well.

You know, last week we talked about, and you can see it in this passage that we read in Mark chapter 10, that the Lord has a lot of different kinds of mirrors, mirrors that he holds up for us to see deep inside what's really in our heart.

Mark 10 · chapter mention

And uh I love how John uh Dr.

Koe talked in this about some of the mirrors that God uses in life.

Um he talked about the mirror of uh conflict, the mirror work of people who bug us, and how this begives us access to our soul.

And that's the real work of spiritual formation right there, that we begin to look at what's going on in our heart and engage it.

Can you can you just talk a little bit more about that?

Yeah, I really am totally agreement with what he's talking about there.

So, a story, a couple stories actually.

Um, after this period of time that was so difficult in the beginnings of my missionary journey back in the early, early 80s, um, I was aware that I carried residual anger from that for a period of time.

And I felt justified in my anger.

I'm gonna just say it like this that during those formative stages, spiritual formation years in the 80s, um, I became aware of a deep pattern that I brought into my Christian life from my post-prior Christian, or from my prior life before I was a Christian, that I liked the glory of man.

I wanted the glory given by man rather than God.

And of course, prior to Christianity, it was a survival technique for me.

I was an emotional orphan growing up, and the way I got something was to perform.

I brought that same pattern into my Christian life, didn't know it.

I thought it was supposed to disappear when you became a Christian.

Lo and behold, it didn't.

Performing for love doesn't work in Christianity.

In fact, God frustrates plans like that, wasn't even aware that I performed for love, but I did.

So as I moved through the 80s, people used that.

Now there was something very good about that inside of me, but there was something not so good about performing.

People used that, and I became jaded and resentful at people for doing that.

Then my reaction to that is I was angry about being used, even though that's how I got something back.

It wasn't until the early 90s, and there was a period of time when it was just like this, I was at a program where, and people helped me with this, they they helped me, but also there was a prayer that I had prayed, God put me in touch with the depth of what this thing is inside of me that constantly makes me want to just walk in fleshly ways.

It was a prayer somewhat like that.

And I'll tell you, and here's where it's hard to put words to this because it, but it was just like this.

There was probably months in which the curtain was sort of thrown back, and I saw kind of a depth of what was inside of me that just was mind-blowing.

Every time I would interact with a person or with God, I saw this root inside of me that wanted to make it about me, that wanted to perform, wanted to do something, and so this twistedness in the deepest parts of me was made clear, at least to the depth that I could understand.

It's gotten even deeper since then, because Christianity is a fixed point, it is true, that that's all true, but the depth and the richness in which you see something like the word sin just gradually deepens over the decades.

So we need long periods of time to kind of grow into understanding some of the richness.

And then even if you think you know some of the richness, there's a richness that's even deeper than that.

It would be arrogant to think you've arrived.

And I have at times thought, oh gosh, they can't get any better, or I can't see.

So at that point, there was kind of a depth that I became aware of.

Um and uh I don't know if you've heard a phrase similar to this, but uh, we're worse than we think, but grace is better than we imagine.

I think that took on a whole new meaning for me.

So the reason I tell that story is that it's got kind of a little something even this morning.

So I'm sitting over there and I was listening to some of the hymns, and there was a sense in which, when Pat was leading us in those hymns, there was something in me that said, I think I could cry right now, because I believe what's on that board or on the screen, that there's kind of a richness to grace that that just moves my heart deeply because of the depth of the fallenness that I'm aware of.

And I thought I could use those tears to do something to the audience.

Now, how about that for depravity?

But that's what depravity looks like, and that's what Cole is talking about, is that you give me half a chance, and I'm gonna turn something into something for my benefit.

And it's at those moments, just those little periods of time when you're sitting there by yourself in your heart of hearts, and all of a sudden you're aware that your heart is doing this thing called the the fallen dance, and you're trying to use something that was meant for good, that isn't good, that you're using it for evil.

It's the Romans 7 dilemma, oh wretched man that I am.

So just in saying what I just said, that's what he's talking about when he's talking about bumping up against things.

There's wonderful opportunity to see more of who you really are at those moments if you don't lie to yourself.

At those moments, just who you really are.

And that's what he was kind of getting at, and that's just a personal example from both my past but even this present moment, it would look like that.

Can I take that one step further?

No, yes.

In the passage in Mark, how when you read that, how there's something in me that wants to say, could this guy not have just said, what would it have been for him to have said, Lord, what are you talking about?

Just shown a sliver of curiosity before the Lord.

So you're talking about something that happened in you that happens all the time in you.

So the step further is how what do you do with that with the Lord?

Is this just something you're just just growing awareness of?

Is this something you bring to the Lord?

What does that look like?

How does that shape your communion with God?

Yeah, well, I mean, just going back to the initial thoughts that we had about dullness.

Now, if I don't take that opportunity and I decide to ignore that or not say anything about it, what happens to my ability to be able to see what just happened?

I become more dull.

I become more disconnected and blind to the realities that are going on.

So if I take the opportunity, what it kind of looks like in my mind to move in a good direction is to see, own, and confess just what happened.

So I owe nothing to my pride.

I can get up here and say, yep, I'm made of that kind of stuff.

And guess what?

We all are.

That's the little secret inside and outside these doors, is we're made of that same stuff.

And so if if I take that opportunity and I get to see it and say it to both God and man, there's something in me that begins to see better in that whole thing, too.

Well, we're gonna have to wrap up here.

Um I I I think I'll just say this that the Lord is inviting us.

He's inviting us through his word, he's inviting us through his people to take, to enter in, to just start this journey of beginning to reflect on what's going on in our heart and to bring that before him, to open up ourselves to ask the Holy Spirit to begin to show.

What do you want to teach me?

What's going on inside of me?

Um, but there's something in all of us, no matter how long you've been at this, is gonna want to stay on the deck.

So if this is new to you, really new to you, uh, even if it's not, we want to invite you.

One thing that today we only have a 30 minutes here is all we had.

But for the whole summer, for June, July, and August, in um two different adult Sunday school classes.

So you have two opportunities starting next week at 9 o'clock to 9.50 uh each week.

We're gonna be dealing, uh Stefan will be leading a group downstairs, and uh, I have a group upstairs where um I'm gonna be going through a book that, or at least the ideas in it, called called Minding the Heart.

Uh it's very interesting thing, and I'll kind of close with this.

Um, this is written by Dr.

Robert Salcy, and uh you may not recognize that name, but he was a seminary professor at uh Biola Talbot for 54 years.

He he's the Howard Hendricks uh of Talbot, one of the most highly respected guys.

And this book grew out of a journey of his own where he said, I taught courses on sanctification, but I didn't really know my own heart.

It took years to begin to discover the prominence of that and realize that in Christianity, in a lot of what we read and study here, we're just not touching on the heart.

And so he sought out to create a book that would try to deal with that.

So I hope we whet your appetite a little bit and uh for that in the in the weeks to come.

Uh let me close us in prayer here.

Our Father, you've called us to love you with all of our heart.

And Lord, you the more we pursue what's really in our heart, the more we ask you to unearth the works of our flesh, the idolatries of our heart, the murder, the thievery, the adultery, the passions that just run wild, the self-centeredness.

The more you unearth that, Father, the more glorious we see that you are, and the more we long for that day when you will complete the process at the resurrection.

Oh Father, that is a precious, precious hope that I pray, we pray that you would stir and cultivate and grow that hope in each one of us today.

We ask it in Christ's name.

Amen.