Seeing with New Eyes |
|
X-ray questions - 13 August 2009
One of the most perceptive chapters in David Powlison’s Seeing With New Eyes, appropriately entitled ‘X-ray Questions’, contains a series of questions designed to expose what’s really going on in our hearts. The idea is to mull over each question (honestly) for a while, and then look up the Bible references that follow. As you’d expect, there’s plenty of food for thought.
It’s tempting to think that exercises like this are really only for ‘desperate cases’ – Christians suffering under really serious trials, or stuck in patterns of really destructive ungodliness. But this is a mistake. It would do none of us any harm to chew over questions like these from time to time.
Here’s an example.
1. What do you love? Hate? (p. 130)
So, what’s the first thing that pops into your head? Honest, now. Love – proper cappuccino with an extra shot; hate – cheap instant with powdered UHT. Or maybe (this’d probably be better): love – talking to people who really understand me? Playing with the kids at church? Or maybe better still: love – a good solid sermon; the book of Ephesians. All good things. Great things. Really great Christian things.
And then you look up the Bible references.
And he said to him, ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbour as yourself.’ (Matthew 22:37-39)
It’s not that we don’t believe it. It’s not that we don’t really love God. It’s just, well, we just didn’t think of it. Mention ‘love’, we don’t immediately think ‘the Lord our God’. We think ‘creation’; the Bible says ‘Creator’. We think ‘provisions’; the Bible says ‘Provider’. We think ‘good Christian stuff to enjoy and do and be blessed by’; the Bible says ‘The One who gives to all people life and breath and everything else’.
And then the ‘love your neighbour as yourself’ bit. Here ‘love’ means something subtly different from ‘love’ when we say ‘I love coffee’ or ‘I love Ephesians’. When I ‘love’ Ephesians, I love what I receive from/through/in it. Not bad, obviously – that’s what it’s there for. But when I love my neighbour, I’m giving what (s)he needs from me. In the one case, I love to get; in the other, I love to love.
Seeing through new eyes - 13 August 2009
David Powlison understands a good deal about what makes Christians tick. More to the point, he understands how to help us tick better. He understands how to help us grow in maturity and Christlikeness, whether through particular trials, specific crises of ungodliness, or just the normal ups and downs of the Christian life.
Powlison’s book Seeing with New Eyes is unsettlingly insightful. It’s basically about bringing the Bible to bear on our all-too-human messed-up-ness.
He’s brutally honest in the way he refuses to ignore the issue of human sin, even when addressing the trials of the Christian life. This sets apart genuinely Christian counselling from every secular alternative. Here he is quoting Dietrich Bonhoeffer:
The most experienced psychologist or observer of human nature knows infinitely less of the human heart than the simplest Christian who lives beneath the cross of Jesus. The greatest psychological insight, ability and experience cannot grasp this one thing: what sin is. Worldly wisdom knows what distress and weakness and failure are, but it does not know the godlessness of man. And so it also does not know that man is destroyed only by his sin and can be healed only by forgiveness. (Powlison, Seeing, p. 12)
Painful. But ultimately liberating. Once we face our hidden ungodliness head-on, we’ll be able to start thinking clearly about living as disciples of Jesus in what is, after all, a fallen world.
It’s not that there’s some simplistic connection between sin, on the one hand, and trials, unhappiness, or whatever on the other (You’re having a hard time, so you must have done something really bad). Nope (Luke 13:2-5; John 9:2-3).
Rather, the point is that Jesus Christ is always trying to re-shape us more in his image. Our heavenly Father loves us so much, and loves us so wisely, that he values our sanctification infinitely more than our comfort. He ‘disciplines the one he loves’ (Hebrews 12:6), and occasionally discipline hurts a bit. But if we’re alert to what God is doing, then we’ll be best placed to take advantage of even the most painful situations to grow more like Jesus, which wouldn’t be a bad thing (James 1:3-4).