A New Heart

Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson here with Greg Uttinger and Bryan Broome, and we’re talking about the human heart. Not the anatomical nature of it, but the spiritual nature of it.

But first we have some stuff to talk about from last time. We had talked about an exchange between Ken Gentry and Gary DeMar. A listener wrote us and very graciously asked for receipts.

Which we commend him for. That was the right thing to do.

Yeah, thank you. If I were doing show notes you wouldn’t have had to do that, so apologies, but thank you for writing in and asking. I’m going to hand it off to you guys because I have not really followed the topic of discussion.

Bryan, could you tell us what you passed on to us, so that we know what information we’re working with. It’s not a lot, but it’s something real.

Yes. First there was Ken Gentry asking questions of Gary on his Facebook profile on different posts, just basic questions of the Christian faith. “Is there a future bodily return of Christ? Is there a future physical resurrection of believers at the end of history?” And there was a third thing that I don’t remember offhand.

Unfortunately, Gary was a little bit cagey in responding to it. Even if he’s innocent of it, it comes across very dismissive and unbrotherly. He was like, “Well, just look at everything I’ve written.”

There was also a podcast that he was a guest on. It’s called Burros of Berea, which I have not listened to before, and towards the end they were just doing a Q&A session. In the course of the questions they were talking about beliefs about the return of Christ, and one of the anecdotes he was talking about was, “You know, sometimes it is very difficult to go to church with people who hold different views than you when it comes to preterism and when it comes to AD 70.”

One of the anecdotes that he shared was, “My daughter would come home from Sunday School and say, ‘Dad, Dad! They believe that Christ hasn’t already come,” and he goes, “I know, but you’ve got to be patient with them and work it out with them,” which is more than a little bit of a red flag when it comes to this kind of thing.

His response in this other screenshot – the questions were, “Do you believe in the future bodily return of Christ? Do you believe in a future physical resurrection? And do you believe in a future final judgment that brings an end to temporal history so that sin will be judged and wholly removed from the universe?” Those were what Ken Gentry posted to him.

His response was, “I’m not going to answer questions that aren’t supported by scripture. They’re not related to specific Bible passages. I’m not going to answer questions that aren’t supported by scripture. You might be misapplying a passage to one of the questions. Maybe a verse you believe applies to the second coming actually applies to some other coming. For example, the Larger Catechism uses Matthew 24:30 as a second coming passage, but is it? Ken Gentry doesn’t believe it does, but G.K. Beale does and believes it’s parallel with 1 Thessalonians 4:17, which is used as a second coming passage. Do you understand what I’m getting at?”

So there’s confusion and apparent…

Obfuscation, side-stepping…

That’s exactly the word I was going to use, obfuscation, which means that if this is true – and we were talking about this before we started recording – all of this is if this is what he believes.

We certainly don’t want to speak for anyone besides ourselves.

Yes, but that position that he appears to be implicitly supporting is at odds with scripture, and it is at odds with the confession of the Church for the past 2,000 years. And IF he is in favor of that view, it is dangerous to follow him down that path, and that’s why we brought it up and why I brought it up the last time I was on and why we are talking about it again, because it’s important. This is akin to denying the bodily resurrection of Christ as far as its centrality to the faith.

Paul actually equates the two. If there is no resurrection, then Christ has not risen from the dead.

The thing that may come back on us – we’re nobody, just friends, Bible teachers, talking about the Bible in the context of high tradition and pop culture, and having fun and hoping people profit – so why are we even going there? Well, it came up. We could have cut it from what we posted. We didn’t. There are a couple reasons:

The school I teach at has supported Gary DeMar from the beginning. We used his book God and Government in a number of our classes for years and years and years. We stopped a few years ago, not because of theological problems but because I’d written something I thought worked better for us.

Gary DeMar has spoken at a conference for our school. At my church, his book has been on our book table over and over again for years.

If, if, if he’s taking a left turn toward hyperpreterism, I have a duty to say, “You better check this out before you follow him any further, because this is serious.”

“But this is theology. Why are you arguing about theology?”

Hello! That’s what we do here. We talk about theology and its implications. Now, we have not done a section on the bodily resurrection yet, but as Bryan has said, it’s basic to the creeds and confessions. “Oh, are you putting those over scripture?” No, the creeds and confessions are the voice of God’s people for 2,000 years explaining what they see in scripture. This is the doctrine of the priesthood of believers and the perspicuity of scripture.

If scripture is that plain, and for 2,000 years people have been seeing exactly the same thing in it, for someone to come along now in more or less the last 100 years since books along these lines were being written, that’s not good. Many of us are under authority, that if we were to go that direction we would be called to account as heretics.

So this is us saying we’ve supported this man in the past. We don’t know all the facts, but what you just heard from Bryan is worth investigating.

It’s also worth again reiterating that we are nobody, except for Greg in his congregation. We don’t have ecclesiastical authority in our podcast here. We’re not in possession of the keys. We’re not making any claim. We’re not saying he’s out of the Church or anything like that. We’re saying his belief – if it’s his belief – is a warrant for being placed outside of the Church, but that’s about the length we’re willing to make any claims.

And we will do the same thing with others when it impinges upon the current life of the Church. We’ve criticized people not so much by name before. We’ve made reference to the American Gospel films that very much criticize people by name, so we’ve supported those films. We’ve criticized Charles Finney a lot.

And he’s not even here to defend himself.

But his works are online and very public. You go public, you risk the possibility of public confrontation and examination. I don’t know what happened to Charles Finney when he died. I would hope he went to be with the Lord, because somewhere along the line he realized that things he was saying weren’t biblical. I do not know and I’m certainly not God.

And that act of calling out false teaching, especially by name, is not something we should delight in. I don’t think it’s something that we do delight in, but it is something that Paul did in his epistles. If bad stuff is being taught in a public forum – a nice passive construction there – it bears being called out in a public forum.

Because what’s at stake are the souls of men. This is not just an intellectual game. This is not did the Vikings really reach America before Columbus, or was Lincoln really assassinated by a conspiracy, or JFK for that matter.

New documents have just been declassified on that topic.

I hear. I’ll wait to see them, but that’s not what this is. We’re talking about the truth that saves the human soul, and the resurrection is at the center of it. Paul spends all of 1 Corinthians 15 arguing that. So all we’re saying again is this is disturbing. Check it out.

If you’re going to listen people who are famous, then you need to sometimes ask for their credentials. “What do you believe? What are you teaching? Is it what my church believes? Is it what the confessions say? Is it what Christians have said for 2,000 years, or are you on some strange rocking horse?”

Speaking of hearts of men, that’s a good pivot and segue to what we’re talking about. I have a quote from Anne Frank, the diary of the young girl who was caught up in the Holocaust during World War 2. She writes this – “In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.” What were you on?

Romanticism, which has at least some of its roots in Rousseau, has taught us a couple things:

It’s taught us not to judge the heart, because that’s none of our business, which largely comes down to, “Don’t judge anybody or anything about anything, because you might be judging their hearts.”

It’s taught us the heart is fundamentally good. It’s society, the environment, civilization that corrupts people. So don’t ask, “What’s wrong with this child?” Ask, “What’s wrong with his environment?” or as one rendition of Clarence Darrow would have it, “Don’t indict them. Indict the system.”

So we need to talk a little bit about what the heart is, as far as the Bible is concerned, and then what the Bible thinks of man’s heart apart from the work of the Holy Spirit, and then what God thinks of man’s heart factoring in the work of the Holy Spirit.

Just something I thought of, I remember seeing a phrase a while back and it was like, “Racism isn’t learned, it’s taught,” or something like that.

That sounds like a distinction without a distinction.

You’re right, because the question is, well, then where did it come from? If it’s not something you learn from reality and it’s something that you’re taught, then where did the first racist get their idea about these kinds of things? It’s a chain of logic failure.

I’m taking a wild stab in the dark here and thinking that it’s probably someone on the political left who said this.

Wow, that was brilliant.

I’m a really good guesser. It’s just so interesting because the vast majority of teachers, both in secondary education and higher education, lean left, so I just wonder who that’s supposed to be an indictment of.

Parents.

But it’s the teachers who are teaching, right? Parents have no business teaching children.

That’s the point of that line of thought. You have to be careful with parents because they teach horrible things – by example, by word, without intending to – so we need professionals to do the job. And not old-line professionals, because they partake too much of that Kool-Aid. We need new people who think in new trendy ways and who can see the good in everyone, and never criticize and blah blah blah. This is romanticism reborn yet again.

We’ve talked before in a different context about the whole “don’t spank your child” thing. We see this every generation or half-generation, and it’s more romanticism. “The child is basically good.” No, the child is not basically good, but we’ll get there in a minute. We’re making pronouncements about the human heart.

My favorite lines are from one of my favorite movies, The Emperor’s New Groove. It’s a fantastic movie, except the only gospel is “I knew there was some good in you.”

“No, there isn’t.”

“Yes, there is!”

“Uh-uh.”

“Yes! There is!”

This after Kuzco has been a pain in the neck, to put it lightly – selfish and egotistical.

He has a lot of neck to be pained!

Bad llama.

One of the first scenes, of course, shows a flashback to his babyhood. When his toy breaks he cries, and suddenly half a dozen hands reach out to hand him a new toy. There’s no explanation or anything. We’re just supposed to understand, “Oh, he was spoiled from his childhood by others, by the system he was caught up in. It’s not really his fault that he’s spoiled. People spoiled him, but somewhere underneath there there is some good, and given the right circumstances that can be drawn out of him and brought to the fore, he will do the good thing that we need when it’s time, although you might have to counterbalance past externals with new rather harsh life-threatening externals, and a good friend.”

Waterfall with rocks at the bottom.

Bring it on. Yeah, pop culture.

We’re on the cutting edge of popular culture, quoting a 20-year-old movie.

I was just writing our Christmas letter and I just compared us to the old computer game, You Don’t Know Jack. Do you remember that at all?

Oh, goodness – only as a misty item out of the swamps of the distant past.

Out of the ether of distant time. History became legend. Legend became myth.

So the heart, as Emily said, is in scripture rarely if ever the organ that pumps blood. Yes, God’s people knew about that. The whole ancient world knew about that. So when the Bible speaks of man’s heart it’s generally not speaking biologically or physiologically. It’s talking spiritually.

It’s talking about the center of man’s religious being, the depths of his soul, the place where our deepest values and affections and priorities lie, the voice that says I, the most inner self. “From the heart are the issues of life,” Proverbs 4:23. In our heart, scripture says we perceive, we consider, we discern, we think, we ponder.

Romanticism tends to look at the heart as the seat of emotion. Something done from the heart is done with deep emotion, feeling, and conviction.

This is the emotion as distinct and opposed to the intellect.

Yes. “Don’t use your mind. Reach out with your heart.” That’s not a biblical distinction.

“With the power of friendship we can defeat the enemy.”

“Search your feelings. You know it to be true.”

“Reach out with your feelings, Luke.”

I would hope everybody has the idea by now. Just turn your minds back over all the movies that you’ve seen in the last – oh, I don’t know, 80 years.

Every movie ever made.

Pretty much, including some that were done in the name of Christ. That’s not how the Bible views the heart. The heart is not something over against reason. It is in our hearts that we reason or, to put it differently, the heart is the root and foundation and the source of our thinking and our feeling and our choosing. It’s also from where sin arises. Out of the heart come wicked imaginations, fornications, and adulteries. Jesus goes on and on with the list.

And that’s Jesus who said that, the most compassionate person who ever lived.

Yes. Ecclesiastes 1:17 says our hearts may be full of wisdom and understanding, or they may be given to folly. We may speak truth in our hearts or utter lies – Psalm 15:2.

Yes, we do feel in our hearts, and we may surrender our hearts to grief and sorrow. The Bible uses phrases like wounded, sick, broken, or filled with joy and gladness, and so on. It’s in our hearts we purpose and choose. A man’s heart deviseth his way – Proverbs 16:9. To take something to heart means to take it seriously and act upon it.

I’m talking about me. When I speak of your hearts, I’m talking about you. Down deep, down where there’s nothing further back, down where you are you, that’s what the Bible is talking about. It’s there that romanticism would find goodness, and anything that clutters its access to activity, to the body, to the thinking process – those are things that need to be removed.

Those things should be excised from our natures, from our complex of beliefs and habits, from our outward culture, so that what’s underneath, that basic goodness of heart, can bubble forth and do good things at the last moment and save the movie from a horrible ending.

Again, that’s not how the Bible looks at it. “The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked,” God says through Jeremiah, “who can know it?” God asserts that only he can drive a heart with the reins. So when God calls us to repentance, he calls us to come with all our hearts.

This is from Joel 2:12-13 –

Therefore also now, saith the LORD, turn ye even to me with all your heart, and with fasting, and with weeping, and with mourning, and rend your heart and not your garments, and turn unto the LORD your God…

That’s what God wants from us, to hate sin as we find it in our hearts, with our hearts. There’s a problem there, because that which he would have criticize our heart is itself the heart, which is deceitful and wicked and unknowable even to itself.

So when your heart tries your own heart, it’s sort of like the scene in Casablanca. “I am shocked, absolutely shocked to find out that gambling is happening here!”

“Your winnings, sir.”

“Thank you. Where was I?”

Exactly, that kind of thing.

It does give itself to the circular introspection of despair, where if we catch a glimpse, perhaps against our will, of goodness, God’s nature revealed in the things that he’s made, for example, and we try to figure out how we measure up, there’s just an endless, “No, I don’t measure up, but I have to measure up because goodness and I’m the best and I’m going to deceive myself into thinking that I can be the best,” and it just feeds itself. That was not a very eloquent description of the process, but it’s not a fun process.

No, it’s not, and we do this for other people as well. We see a life that’s reprobate, that’s full of the most horrible sins, and then that person does one really good thing, measured by externals, and we say, “See? There’s good in you after all. I knew it. We will now make you our leader.”

What’s also so interesting about that sort of redemption focused on externals is we have that happen so often in badly written TV shows, where the villain has a change of heart and joins the good guys and then betrays someone…

And they trust him immediately.

Yeah, they trust him immediately and then sometimes it can flip-flop as many as three times in a show. I will namedrop exactly who I’m thinking of and that is Once Upon a Time. It happened like four times before Season 2 ended and I was like, “Can we just please execute the murderess?”

I have lots of thoughts about Once Upon a Time. We could do a whole podcast on that, but we shouldn’t.

I gave up on it for that very reason.

But the thing too is that a cultural idea even has its limits. They would never say, “Well, at the end there was the guy who killed Hitler. He’s a pretty good guy. He was pretty bad before that.” I’m talking about Hitler himself, because he committed suicide. That’s the joke. They still have a threshold of what’s morally unacceptable to forgive.

He could have done something really good like, “I’ll give all the wealth I made as a Third Reich person to the poor,” and then he kills himself and they’d be like, “Oh, he did one nice thing at the end. Maybe he was okay.” No one’s going to do that.

I mentioned romanticism, but let’s now bring in existentialism. For existentialism, as for Finney, man has no fixed nature and you make yourself by your choices, one choice at a time, so who you were yesterday and what choices you were making yesterday are largely irrelevant. What are you choosing now?

If yesterday you chose bad things, whatever in the world that means in a world without standards, and today you choose a good thing, that is something we all applaud for whatever reasons, probably sentimental, then yes, you were bad (hear the air quotes) and now you’re good. And as long as you keep choosing good, then we can all be friends, and yes, we can even make you the leader of our team.

Do either of you remember the TV show Alias or was that before your time?

I can remember seeing the logo. I can picture the logo in my head right now.

I never watched it. I can see the actress, nothing else.

Jennifer Garner. The flip-flop was very similar. The main character is deceived into working for an organization that pretends to be the CIA. She finds out it’s not and she goes to the CIA and they make her a double-agent and she goes back to this horrible front and manages to destroy it, and yet in the process finds out that a lot of those people didn’t know what they were doing either, so they’re actually good people.

The one person who did know, he was a really bad guy, but now we need his services and he’s really sorry for all the harm he brought, because he has some kind of connection to our lead. So, “Oh, yeah, he knows what’s going on. We’re going to make him the leader of this real CIA cell now,” and it just kept going back and forth, exactly like Once Upon a Time.

It sounds like The Blacklist. How The Blacklist starts is basically the same thing. “I was a bad guy, con man, murderer person, but now I’m going to help you.”

And Liz in the show is just absolutely horrible. First of all, she’s a bad actress…

The real crime.

…but her character is not someone you want to invite over for tea. She’s not a good person, and she does horrible things and keeps on doing horrible things, and her friends keep defending her for reasons that no one can understand, because she’s not a nice person.

With Raymond Reddington we know he’s a crook. He’s not ashamed to admit it. We hope that there’s some higher purpose in all this, and that maybe he’s not quite as bad, but you know, he’s pretty bad. And she’s worse, and she can’t act so that doesn’t help. I think they’ve written her out of the series. I haven’t watched it in a long time.

As a side note, I’ve always found it interesting that I can never tell what details in a show are supposed to be important, because I don’t know how good the writer for that episode is at writing. This goes for every show ever.

There are times I’ll be like, “That thing doesn’t work. Maybe that is a thing that they’re going to draw on later,” like this guy is lying about doing XYZ because it shows us doing it wrong in the show. But then they get to the end and they’ve never drawn on it, and it ended up being somebody else who did the murder or whatever, so it’s like, “Oh okay, they weren’t good at writing and they didn’t know how this thing worked.”

That’s kind of exciting. I think Monk was really consistent, and Foyle’s War was really consistent. A detail would come up and I’d be like, “Oh, that’s going to be important,” which kind of spoils it a little bit for you, so maybe it’s good to keep you on your toes.

I guess. At the very least it’s a good thinking exercise. If I’m sitting down to a show, I want to sit down to a mystery show or a crime-solving show like an Agatha Christie mystery, and be like, “Okay, everything here is placed with purpose.” Sometimes it just turns out that they handed the setting of the show and the characters to a list of producers whose job it is to find writers to fill out a 22-episode series, and be like, “Alright, go ahead, just fill this up.”

I love Agatha Christie because the thing is everybody’s a criminal, just not this particular crime. That brings us back to total depravity, doesn’t it.

We’re all criminals, and that’s our next step. We call this doctrine total depravity. That does not mean that everyone is as bad as they could be. That would be something like absolute depravity, I suppose.

Utter depravity.

But the biblical doctrine is that since sin is innate in man’s heart since the fall, it touches everything. It touches how we feel, how we think, our rationality. It touches our choices and therefore touches our entertainments, our family relationships, our romance, our literature, whatever. Everything is tainted. None of it as bad as it could be, most of the time, but there’s always going to be something of rebellion against God in what we do, until Jesus himself intervenes.

I’ve heard an illustration of a cake pan that is dented, so every cake that comes out of that cake pan is going to have a dent in it. As we go about our business, everything we do has this grime on top of it of the sin.

Stretching the metaphor of that further, you don’t fix the dent in the cake pan by trying a different cake mix.

Yeah, you need a new pan, is what happens here. Dr. Van Til uses the analogy of running lumber through a buzzsaw, but the saw is tilted at an angle. It doesn’t matter how careful you are, how skilled you are, every piece of wood that goes through is going to come out cut at the wrong angle. There’s nothing you can do about it except replace the saw. This is the kind that we’re dealing with.

It shows up very early in scripture. In Genesis 6:5 we’re told –

And GOD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.

In Romans 8 we’re told –

The carnal mind is enmity against God, for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be. So then they that are in the flesh cannot please God.

We’re told that the plowing of the wicked is sin, that whatsoever is not of faith is sin, without faith it is impossible to please him, and many, many other things like this.

This is a line from the Puritan writer Thomas Boston –

“The mind is defiled; the thoughts of the heart are evil; the will and affections are defiled: the imagination of the thoughts of the heart, that is whatsoever the heart frames within itself by thinking, such as judgment, choice, purposes, devices, desires, every inward motion…is evil.”

The wise man, Solomon, the Preacher says –

Yea, also the heart of the sons of men is full of evil, and madness is in their heart while they live…

Madness, insanity. Sin is insane. Saying, “I can ignore the God who made me, the God who holds my heartbeat and my breath in his hand, the God who knows the end from the beginning – I can ignore that and get around that, because I’m all that and a bag of chips.” Talk about being out of touch with reality. It is insane. It is mad.

For some reason this seems to come up in my family a lot. “This person is insane!”

“Yeah, but how does it manifest? Is he a serial killer or does he just talk to himself while he’s sweeping?”

There are lots of different forms of insanity, and again not all sin-induced insanity is equally dangerous, but the potential is there and some of it is really that bad. To think that you’re going to cure a serial killer by showing him love, compassion, and understanding is itself a form of insanity.

Of course, the Bible recognizes such a thing as brain damage and that kind of mental illness, but most of what gets labeled mental illness today is simply the insanity of sin being worked out to its logical consequences. When you don’t believe there’s a God, you don’t believe you’re accountable and you’re the center of the universe and you want what you want and you’re going to get it on your terms, of course you’re going to act weird.

The kind of weirdness kind of depends upon your upbringing, your potentials, your gifts, what you can and cannot do, and how much money you have.

How consistently are you eating and sleeping? That, too.

Things like that, which in turn may be affected by your habits of sin. If you’re staying up all night watching pornography, then you’re not going to be worth much in the morning for work. If you’re blowing your mind on drugs, you may not be able to hold a job.

There’s an interplay between soul and body, absolutely. We’re not denying that, but to try to reduce it merely to the chemical activities of the body is materialism. It may sound hopeful. “Well, they’re not that bad. It’s just that some things are chemically imbalanced.” What you’re saying is that this man is nothing more than a batch of chemicals who can be arranged at our will, at our pleasure. That’s not happy. That’s not good news. That’s frightening news because then it becomes incumbent upon us to fix people.

The flip side, the solely spiritualization of this sort of thing also denies the interconnection of the soul and body. Of course, if you’re struggling in your walk with God there will be physical consequences to that.

David describes them in the Psalms.

I can speak personally. In college I had some pretty severe depression, and I can tell you it was because of my perfectionism, staying up too late, procrastinating, not eating and not sleeping. There was definitely the spiritual component to that, and it had physical effects, and the answer was not to read more scripture and pray more.

Well, you probably needed a little bit of that. It just needed to be pointed and you needed to act on it. Sometimes we don’t need to be told scripture over and over and over again. Sometimes we just need to take it to heart. Sometimes it’s scripture like, “Elijah, go sleep. You’re tired. Here’s some food. Eat it. Now go sleep some more. You’re tired.”

Jesus does say that those who are sick need a physician, so we want to be open to that. We don’t want to think that everything is a matter of simply reading scripture, but the scripture has to be applied and then it has to be acted upon.

There are people who go back for counseling week after week for years, and nothing happens. There’s a couple possibilities. First, there may be an underlying physiological component. Second, they simply may be unrepentant and are hiding in the full light of biblical counseling.

“I’m here for another dose, pastor. Help me out. Give me my fix of counseling so I can be a better person. You know how much this means to me and how much I want to serve Jesus.”

“Have you gotten rid of all your pornography?”

“Well, I’m working on it.”

What I was going to bring up earlier is that when you look at it in purely materialistic terms, it completely removes any personal responsibility. Yes, there are things that are outside of your control. There’s a sense in which everything is outside of our control because God is sovereign, but we still have personal responsibility. Then it just becomes a matter of, “Oh, I have to cede control of myself over to somebody else who Knows Better.”

It turns into what Lewis talks about, of a tyranny exercised for the good of its subjects; whereas on the other side, the pure spiritualization of it turns mental health into a good work essentially where, “Oh, I do everything right. God loves me so much and that’s why he gives me good mental health, because I’m doing these things and it’s a direct result of me doing these things the right way,” etc. So you have complete ceding of your personal control and a deluded sense of your own self-mastery.

Basic to a lot of modern thought, both inside the church and outside the church, is the perfectionism that Emily mentioned earlier. We don’t want to admit there’s something wrong, and we don’t want to admit that, “You know what, it’s wrong and I’m probably going to be dealing with this for a long time because this is my besetting sin.”

That’s not excusing it, it’s just acknowledgement that, “The next time I lose my temper, please don’t let me get away with it. The next time I’m sitting around like a couch potato, kick me off the couch and tell me to go do my chores.” This is part of living in a complex of people – family, church, community – where we hold one another accountable and we don’t expect perfection of people.

And that’s love. That’s real friendship and community. This is not the sort of thing you can work through on your own and that’s why God gave you the church.

We used to call that kind of attitude “the home beautiful” mentality, because you had to have your perfect children in your perfect house that looks like it’s never ever been lived in. And if you fail, then somehow you’re an utter failure. Of course you haven’t failed, you would not fail, you’ve never failed, and therefore if something goes wrong it is obviously somebody else’s fault or someone is telling lies.

Your children could not possibly be doing drugs. They could not possibly be sneaking out of the house at night, because that doesn’t happen here. That happens to other people but not us, because we’ve got it together.

I’ve actually seen that claim exactly made by some friends of ours, to the extent of saying, “Oh well, X Y and Z medical thing isn’t going to be a thing for our children, because they’re going to be living God’s way, and therefore they won’t need this protection because they won’t sin in this particular way.”

I thought, “Have you been around yourself as a teenager?” I’m not saying this particular sin was necessarily something even I would do, but the naivete of it all.

It’s a refusal to hear the gospel, because the gospel comes with this self-diagnostic kit called the law of God. It says, “Look into the mirror. This is what God demands. This is the holiness of God. This is the love of God. This is the wisdom of God. You have not lived up to any of this and you are in danger of hell. Now, let us tell you the other half. Let us tell you the good news.”

But if you refuse to hear the bad news, then you don’t really need Jesus very much – maybe as a role model, maybe to again be part of the community that calls itself Christian, but talking about forgiveness and sanctification and the blood of Christ – that makes people uncomfortable. They just want to talk about the pretty and the nice things.

Yeah, bring up Jesus too often among Christians and sometimes you get in trouble.

Fancy that. It’s a weird thing when you can bring up the name of Jesus over and over amongst the same people and all you get are smiles – knowing or otherwise – and amens and “Brother, ain’t that the truth,” you know you’re among people it’s safe to be with because they’re honest about themselves.

They have enough trouble dealing with themselves. They’re not going to go after you unless they really think you need help and they really think that maybe they can help somehow, because they’ve been there and done that.

I don’t want to leave the mental health discussion too far in the distant past without just sort of repeating something that I needed to hear in those days, which is if you know that you need the gospel, and you listen to the gospel and it seems out of reach on an emotional level, even when you know that is what you need and you know that your peace is in Christ and you know that your rest is in Christ and you know that your hope is in Christ – if you can’t reach it, there might be something chemically off that can be addressed.

There might be. Yes, go see a doctor, absolutely. Run the blood panels and find out what’s going on. But also – and here I would turn to Lewis’ Screwtape Letters, the chapter on nothingness – are you familiar with it?

I don’t recall. You’ll have to refresh my memory.

It’s the time when little by little the tempter has gotten you to the point of no huge sins, just little things. You’re neglecting your prayers a little bit, neglecting scripture reading, missing church now and then, and maybe some other little sinful habits. It’s not a huge deal, but you become more uncomfortable and you don’t exactly skip prayers, but you don’t throw yourself into them. You just want them over with. You want your Bible reading over with. Nothing seems light or bright or joyful.

At the end, not doing great sins but not doing great holiness, you end up doing nothing. You stay up late hours staring at a dying fire or listening to a tune you hate or channel surfing over late-night commercial programs.

Netflix autoplaying.

Yeah, things like that. Screwtape says, “The enemy [that is God] describes himself as the one without whom nothing is strong. Nothing is very strong, strong enough to steal away man’s life, his hours,” and he ends, and this is where this touches.

Screwtape says to Wormwood, “Don’t be deceived here. Our cause [that is the cause of hell] is never in greater danger than when a believer looks around the whole universe, can find no trace of God, no trace of support, no joy, no happiness, and does not want to obey, but does anyway.”

So yes, faith should be delight. Jesus should be our joy, and sometimes there could be something biochemical, and sometimes it really is a spiritual battle deeper than we understand it. Sometimes trusting God does mean holding on in the dark.

We’re not analyzing anyone’s particular position or conditions right now. This is why God gave us community, pastors, doctors, and older people who’ve been there and done that.

Another thing we don’t do is diagnose spiritual illness at a distance. Don’t blame us for that one. However, the Bible does offer hope. We looked at Jeremiah 31 not too long ago. God says through Jeremiah –

But this shall be the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel; After those days, saith the LORD, I will put my law in their inward parts and write it in their hearts, and will be their God and they shall be my people.

In Ezekiel, which is what this podcast is supposed to be about –

Then will I sprinkle clean water upon you, and ye shall be clean. From all your filthiness and from all your idols, will I cleanse you. A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you, and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh and I will give you a heart of flesh.

The Bible is talking about heart transplants, about a radical alteration of who we are at the center of our being.

There used to be a slogan – “Come to Jesus. He doesn’t want to change you.” Yes, he does. That’s kind of the point. Not only does he want to change our legal standing with the Father, he wants to change who we are.

Now, definitions and qualifications. “I was an artist. Will I not be an artist anymore after I come to Christ?”

Who knows, honestly, but probably. If that was a gift he gave you it will probably be intact, although you may or may not use it differently afterward.

”I was always a fun bubbly person. Is that going to change?”

Probably not so much, but you know, there’s no promises here. There’s no promises that you get to keep what you think is so special about you. Whatever is on the other end will be good and will be better and it will be what God intends. There is much in you that he will take and sanctify and transform, but there are some things that may not stay the same anymore and that’s got to be okay.

I’m reminded on that note of another Lewis book, The Great Divorce, where there’s the man with a little lizard that’s just hooked onto him, causing him great distress. Then an angel approaches him and says, “I can get rid of that thing for you,” and he goes, “No, no, it’s fine. It’s just a little thing. It’s barely any notice at all.” He goes through successive levels of trying to wriggle his way out of the angel getting rid of this thing that’s annoying him.

At the end the angel does kill it at the person’s behest, and it actually doesn’t end up killing it, it transforms it back into – what was it, a great steed?

A great horse, although actually he does say, “It died first.” It dies and it’s resurrected.

The whole thing with his metaphor – and I believe he explains it in that scene – is that the lizard is basically deformed and sinful sexual attraction. Then the sinful part of it at least is slain. It is destroyed, and it is resurrected into the beauty and fullness of what sexual desire and sexual being and existence is. It’s better for you. You think this little thing, “Oh, it’s fine, it’s just a little thing,” but it’s slowly sucking the life out of you.

Right, whereas the stallion becomes something he can jump on and ride off into the mountains, deeper into deep heaven. I suspect that that particular twist gave a lot of people a lot of trouble. In fact, Lewis in the context says, “People are not going to understand this,” and George MacDonald answers, “You’re right, but get them to understand.”

If this vice, this sin dies and can be transformed, what about something that seems like mother love, which can become an idol. What if that dies and is born again? What great thing will it be? There’s potential in what God made us to be, but we’ve corrupted it, and until we die to our sins, to would-be autonomy, to self, then that’s not possible. But once it happens, things can happen. Things can change a good deal. We’re going to have to be ready for that.

I think too often people think in terms of, “I’ll have to give up. I’ll lose too much. I won’t be me anymore.” Well, yes and no, but for anything you have to give up he will give you something better. You’re not going to have to become a monk or a nun, okay?

There’s a lot of ways to serve Jesus that are exciting and joyful, fun and dangerous, that will stretch you beyond measure and that will satisfy the deepest longings of your soul. That’s what we have to say. He knows. He made you. He knows what’s best for you. Come to Jesus.

Another quote from Thomas Boston on generation and the new birth –

By regenerating grace, the will is brought into a conformity to the will of God. It is conformed to his preceptive will [that is the precepts of scripture], being endowed with holy inclinations, agreeable to every one of his commands. The whole law is impressed on the gracious soul: every part of it is written on the renewed heart.

The whole law. My generation and the one or two before tended to look upon God’s law as some sort of bondage, something that was dispensationally inferior, that was brutal and cruel, barbaric, a relic of the previous age when God hadn’t grown up and really become a Christian yet. And yet as you read the Bible, Old and New Testament, you never see that. And although the new covenant promises many new things – a better covenant, better promises, and so on – it never promises a better law, because the law is simply a transcript of who God is.

So can come to the Psalms and find out how the psalmist delights in God’s law. In fact, in Psalm 119 the whole thing is about God’s law, not simply as a list of rules but as God’s revelation of himself and how he would have us live. The word torah means a path or a direction to take, so here are some things out of Psalm 119 –

With my whole heart have I sought thee: O let me not wander from thy commandments.

Give me understanding, and I shall keep thy law; yea, I shall observe it with my whole heart.

The proud have forged a lie against me, but I will keep thy precepts with my whole heart.

Notice the heart in each of these.

Let my heart be sound in thy statutes, that I be not ashamed.

O how love I thy law! it is my meditation all the day.

I cried with my whole heart; hear me, O LORD. I will keep thy statutes.

Emily, you wanted to make a remark about this as we were passing through.

I thought this would be a bunny trail that we could go down, but for the sake of time I’ll just abbreviate my thoughts and throw them out here.

We sometimes read this and think how can I read this, because I have this sinful heart that has been changed but is not perfect yet. How can I sing to God about how much I love his law, because honestly sometimes I still feel its burden and its crushing weight. How can I sing this? But I remember a discussion of what Jesus sang when he walked on earth. He sang the Psalms.

He sang the Psalms perfectly with a sincere heart, in full integrity and truthfulness, and he did that in our place. So when we sing the Psalms we sing them in his place. We can sing, “Oh Lord, how I love your law. I meditate on it all the day,” and we want that to be more and more true as we become more and more like Jesus, but we have that righteousness already because of God’s gift to us of Christ’s righteousness.

And this of course is not a bunny trail because anytime you want to talk about sanctification there’s always the possibility of going over the top of the hill and losing sight of justification, so it’s important that you brought that up here.

Yes, here are many things where the psalmist does say, “I love thy law out of my heart,” and Paul says much the same thing, while at the same time acknowledging that he doesn’t live up to it. If in my heart I’m acknowledging that it’s no more I but sin that dwells in me – in other words, what God has wrought in my heart is something deeper than even my sins, and yet my sins are here – how does that work? Well, Jesus died for me. Jesus covers my imperfections.

And he lived and he sang for you.

Yes, he sang these things for me and I can sing them in him, and it is becoming true. It will not do to say that nothing I do is pleasing to God. It’s pleasing in Christ. We have to have that qualification. By itself, yes, all of our works are still corrupt and tainted by sin. Does total depravity apply to Christians? Yes, but with this caveat that so does justification by faith, and that all of our good works are still tainted by sin and yet God receives them as good works and he wants more. He wants more fruit and he will prune us.

That’s all in the light of what Jesus has already accomplished for us. This doesn’t become a “I will be good today.” This becomes, “Thank you God for your law and your gospel and for revealing yourself, because you didn’t have to do any of this for me. Thank you for being my Savior.” And so we come full circle.

Yes, we talk about God’s law, but we talk about it with a thankfulness for what God has done and as something that is still imperfect and impure and has to be sanctified by the blood and Spirit of Christ.

That is our hearts, not the law.

Yes, our hearts need that, and so do our lives, which come out of our hearts.

Alright. Because we are around Christmas, rather than making all-sweeping recommendations, today we are going to recommend something to bring to a white elephant exchange, and I nominate Bryan to go first.

A good white elephant gift, in my mind anyway, is something that’s a knick-knack of sorts but that has just enough practical or cool value to it that people will want to steal it from each other.

For maximal entertainment value.

Maximal entertainment value. We went to a white elephant gift exchange last weekend, actually, as part of a larger Christmas party, and it was like the last box that got opened and it was me opening it. It was a Christmas ornament mug with a straw, like you would screw the top on and it looked like the top of a glass ornament. Both my wife and I were like, “We don’t want this,” but we were last so no one got to steal it, which was the funniest part.

Thankfully we found someone with an item that we wanted, who did not want the item they had, and they wanted the thing that I got for some reason, and we were able to procure a trade, but that one was a really fun one.

Emily, how about you?

I really love the ones that are like a composite gift, where you can kill multiple birds with the same gift bag – mixed metaphor. For instance, a bag of Starbucks coffee beans will never go amiss. That will guarantee that the gift will get stolen. However, you can pair that with something really boring, or things that perplex you with their very existence, like the Christmas ornament mug – why did someone make that? – or something that is just kind of like, “I don’t want to own this. I don’t want it in my house.”

I’m pairing both of those things in an upcoming exchange that will have occurred by the time this podcast airs, I hope, with something that I genuinely have had in my house for a long time and really want to get rid of, and that is a large basket that I don’t have a use for. It’s a picnic basket. I love picnics, but every single time I go on a picnic I take a cooler. I don’t take a picnic basket.

At first I thought of filling the picnic basket with ping-pong balls or something. I thought that would be fun – just obnoxious enough – but I think I’m going to put it all together so I have the picnic basket containing coffee beans and Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra. I’m excited about this. I’ll let you know how it goes, but I think it’s a pretty good gift.

I have nothing on the top of my head, but maybe something will come. I know when I was in elementary school there was one thing that none of us ever, ever, ever wanted. That was those little book-like collections of Lifesaver candies.

Oh, I loved those!

Someone always brought one and we all did our best to pass it on to someone else. It’s been so long that I don’t remember our exact thought processes. Maybe we just didn’t like Lifesavers, I don’t know, but I remember if someone got that for you that was just, “Really? Thank you.”

Man, those were a staple of our Christmas stockings.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen those.

They would have a little story. It was super cute!

Other things from the past at our school – there was a fruitcake, and at every staff Christmas party it would be passed on, because no one eats – I don’t know, in my world no one eats fruitcakes. Maybe in your universe it’s different. But it would be passed from person to person, and every year it would be camouflaged more so that people wouldn’t know what it was, then hidden in different ways, then come back again out of nowhere, until finally – apparently, according to Kate – one teacher got it. She was new that year and her husband, not knowing any better, ate it – after about 12 years.

I was about to say that when you want a good gift the people are going to want, pick some food items. But you know what? Maybe you don’t. Chocolate chip cookies, if you know how to make them, are probably something people will love you for.

I used to get Yard-O-Beef, actually.

Yard of beef? What is that?

It’s a yard long sausage.

On the topic of fruitcake, there’s a Christmas song that I found recently from Ireland. I don’t remember exactly when it was made because it’s on my Spotify, but it’s called “Miss Fogarty’s Christmas Cake,” and they’re describing a fruitcake and it’s inedible.

He goes over to tea at the Fogarty’s place, and the first thing they give him is a slice of Miss Fogarty’s cake.

There were plums and prunes and cherries
There were citrons and raisins and cinnamon, too
There was nuts, and cloves and berries
And a crust that was nailed on with glue
There were caraway seeds in abundance
Such that work up a fine stomach ache
That could kill a man twice after eating a slice
Of Miss Fogarty's Christmas cake

There comes a point where one of them in the group is like, “I want to try it.”

Miss Mulligan wanted to try it
But really it wasn't no use
For we worked in it over an hour
But a piece of it wouldn't come loose
Till Kelly came in with a hatchet
And Murphy came in with a saw
But Miss Fogerty's cake had the power
For to paralyze any man's jaws

It's just the densest possible cake you could possibly imagine.

Were you part of Cornerstone choir when they did Fruitcake?

I was not.

“Fruitcake, cinnamon, cinnamon, don’t forget the cinnamon.”

I left some cinnamon at somebody’s house the other day and she texted me, “Hey, cinnamon, cinnamon, you forgot the cinnamon.”

That’s a formal choir piece describing how to make a fruitcake, and certain bodily motions are involved. I mention this only because if any of our friends from school are listening, they would expect it of us, so there you go.

And it will now be stuck in your head for the next week and a half. You’re welcome. We love you.

Thank you all so much for this conversation. It’s been a delight. Thanks also to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband. Thank you to you, our listeners. We appreciate you tuning in.

Please get in touch with us if you have anything to say. You can send us an email at [email protected].

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Thanks again for listening. Hope to see you next time.