In a recent post I described spiritual abuse and its harmful effects. In this post I would like to think about why this type of pressure is seen as a useful tool and to consider what a proper biblical perspective is. The core issue that spiritual abuse is attempting to address is most often, a falling short of a godly ideal. It is an attempt to control another’s actions through fear of God’s anger towards them or fear of losing God’s approval of them. When we use this tactic, we are sending a clear, sometimes unintended, false message. This message tells the receiver that God is not satisfied with them and that they need to perform differently so God can once again be satisfied. Too often Christian teaching presents a version of God that is contrary to what He says about Himself. The message goes something like this. If you do good enough, shape up enough, live holy enough, have the right daily spiritual practices, etc., then God will be happy with you. It is contrary to the message of the scriptures and it is void of the concept of grace through faith.The message of the Gospel of Jesus Christ is a message of reconciliation, not a message of a new performance. According to scripture, any new performance is the fruit of an inner change of heart. When we make the gospel a message of new performance, we deny passages such as James 1:14 that clearly teach us that our performance is affected by the desires of the heart. The biblical narrative calls all believers to acknowledge that the performance of individuals around us, is the result of the fruit of the spiritual root that is growing from deep within. Once we begin to understand our hearts from a biblical perspective, we can begin to point individuals towards an inner heart change that will translate into yielding different spiritual fruit in its season. A most sobering question for us to consider is this. Do we believe less in the heart of man as the source of our fruit than God does?
God’s view of the problem is exponentially clear throughout scripture. Man has a heart problem; he needs a new heart and God is compassionate towards the helplessness of man to change his situation. Jerimiah 24:7 and Ezekiel 36:22-38 reinforce the biblical theme that righteousness only comes by heart change. The prophets of old were given revelations of a God whose heart was bent towards his creation, even when they are unrighteous. A God who desired to bring healing, wholeness, and restoration to a people who are lost. Phrases like, “I will remove your heart of stone and replace it with a heart of flesh”1 typify the actions and motives that God has towards those who have turned away from Him and His design for their lives. God often portrays Himself as doing this great deed for man with joy and excitement. God’s response is not dissimilar to an individual who pours their life’s work into a project, only to have it go horribly wrong. Would we not expect the creator of the project to set out to restore it once again into the grandeur that he once envisioned for it? Would we not expect him to do it with great passion and intentionality and exalting over it with joy once it was completed? In the same way, God will exalt over us in singing once we are again restored in relationship with the Messiah.2 This is contrary to the message that is sent by the displeased God or angry God narrative. At the same time, the biblical narrative does not minimize God’s view of sin and the brokenness of mankind. Neither does it take one away from the other, but rather it holds it in perfect tension. Spiritual abuse disrupts that tension and violates God by placing a greater focus on God’s holiness at the expense of his compassionate mercy and grace. This high focus on the holiness of God fills the human heart with fear and dread.
The human heart was not designed to operate in an environment of fear. Before we go there, we need to recognize that the English language is in a constant state of change. In my forty-five years of life there have been multiple English words that have changed their definitions. One example of a word that has changed is the word stoked. As a child we would have said that we stoked the fire or the furnace. Today that word is used in an adjective form as a modern colloquialism to express excitement or pleasure. In this same way, the word fear has changed over time. In today’s language, fear is synonymous with dread, an emotion that is the result of a belief that I may experience harm. In the archaic past, the word fear meant to stand in awe of, reverence. Interestingly enough, in the Hebrew language alone there are three different words that are all translated into the English word “fear”, all of which have connotations of reverence and awe. Why is this important? Where we often read a sense of dread into the scriptures God was simply asking for reverence and awe. Dread is deeply damaging to the human heart. Freedom from fear brings joy, peace and security to the human heart. The human heart was designed to find security in a loving relationship with its Creator where there is no fear because perfect love throws it out.5 The human heart cannot engage with life when it believes it is in danger of being harmed. It will shut down or pull away for self-protection. When messages of God and about God bring fear to the human heart, it will not be able to engage in a relationship with Him. Instead, it will pull away or shutdown and detach. As a little boy I sat under many hellfire and brimstone messages. Ministers of the gospel pounding the pulpit and spitting out their hatred for sin with red faces and loud angry words. This had a deep effect on me as a child. My heart could not process the angry tones. I was filled with fear and my heart began to shut down during church services. I began having nightmares of being in hell and of Jesus Christ’s returning and leaving me behind. To this day I struggle to keep my mind clear during a church service. I also am unable to remember what takes place in a church service for longer than a few minutes afterwards. The resulting damage and fear kept me from engaging with God on a heart level until I was age 33 and I was only able to come to that place with the help of another person through intercessory prayer.
Throughout the Old Testament God made it clear that He would send a Messiah to restore this lost relationship with His created. The Jewish people were given a law by which to abide. If they honored the law through faith, their faith would be counted as righteousness to them once the Messiah arrived. Note the vast difference in how God presents Himself in the Old Testament and how he presents Himself through His son in the New Testament. Why the difference? Because the law of religion was passing away; no more human high priests to stand between them and God. Each individual will be their own priest; each one will answer directly to Jesus Christ their high priest.3 Jesus and His disciples called this “good news.4 Luke says that everyone must press into it.4 Each one must make a choice to pursue the Kingdom of God. For some it is not good news; they have no desire to press into the kingdom of God. When our experienced reality demonstrates to us a God who despises us or becomes vengeful against us when we don’t measure up, we will have no ability to open up our hearts to Him. Experiences with father figures and religious people of influence in our lives have the greatest effect on our experienced reality of God. When individuals experience anger, shaming, loss of relationship, or disapproval when they do not meet the expectations of those who represent God in our lives, they tend to see God through those same lenses. As I stated earlier, this creates a significant inhibition of the heart towards God. Those who develop this view of God will often attempt to make the best of the situation by believing everything He has said from an intellectual point of view. They will have the correct cognitive knowledge and belief of God but that belief never touches the heart. Often the mind of this individual believes in God but their heart is not able to engage with Him because of the fear filled lens it is looking through. This brings us back to our initial observation in James 1:14 where the heart needs to change for an individual’s desires to change. If we have a heart that is hiding from God out of fear, we have no other course than to develop a religious façade in an attempt to hide the desires of a heart that is disconnected from God. At some point that façade will crack and the truth will be revealed. When it does, we become confused and frustrated at the lack of victory in our life. It is, after all, the only way we know how to connect to this God.
Why then are we focused on God’s anger and hatred for those who do not perform to expected standards? Perhaps it is because we cannot understand this “I Am” kind of God. The kind of God who is capable of being the only source of love, grace, and mercy while at the same time being repulsed by and hating sin. This “I Am” God is so beyond our comprehension that we cannot grasp His ability to hate sin yet not having his love for the sinner diminished in any way. Perhaps it’s just easier to create enough pressure to cause individuals to perform to the expected level so that we do not need to deal with the messiness of growing and maturing hearts. Either way, when we apply pressure in a way that even Jesus did not allow Himself to do, we become like the Jewish leaders of Jesus day. We send a false message about who God is. Jesus did not approve when the Jewish leaders did this and he will not approve of us when we do this to others. We would do well to note in scripture that the hard words of Jesus were not directed towards the lost sheep who knew they had missed the mark, but had a deep desire to know God. Instead those hard words were directed towards those in positions of influence who were “just trying to do the right thing”, who were just trying to hold to the purity of the law that God gave to Moses. Have we given ourselves permission to respond to individuals in our sphere of influence in ways that Jesus did not give Himself permission to?
Behold I stand at the door and knock if anyone hears my voice and opens the door I will come in to him and eat with him.6 In this scripture the Heart Healer stands at the door knocking. Not yelling hellfire and brimstone, not giving wise advice or quoting scripture, but simply knocking. It is the responsibility of the heart inside to choose to open the door; we see no signs of forced entry or coercion. If the door is opened, Jesus will come in and eat with him. Those of us who are in western culture may miss the significance of “eating with”. The original reader would not have missed the significance of this. This is about relationship not performance. The original reader would not have heard coercive pressure in this word picture; nor would they have heard, “You are not good enough for me.” They would have heard, “I am interested in being your friend.” The woman at the well. The woman who was caught during the act of adultery. The tax collectors Zacchaeus and Matthew. The political terrorist, Peter the Zealot. The low-class fishermen. What did they all have in common? They were rejected by the religious yet found a friend in Jesus. Peter denied Jesus three times, yet was forgiven immediately upon repentance and given a special role in His kingdom, in spite of his brash and unrefined ways. Jesus allowed his disciples and apostles to mature and grow on the job, all the while embracing them as his friends. Can we do the same to fellow believers around us? Can we do more or less than Jesus?
Perhaps we have misunderstood the final judgement where Jesus Christ sits in the throne room of heaven and judges each one’s life. Have we turned this final chapter of this world’s story into a human scene of a Jesus who has lost His love for the unrighteous and is now raging against them, throwing them into the pit of hell to burn forever? How does this picture align with an unchanging God who loved the world so much that he sent his son to save the lost while they yet were in sin?7 What if instead of a raging Jesus we have a gentle shepherd of the biblical view that is now a just Judge. A judge who will meet justice without hatred and anger. If Jesus truly was the son of the unchanging God and therefore He Himself is unchanging, what will the judgement seat of Christ look like? The same Christ that did not snuff out a smoldering flax or bruise a bent reed.8 Is it possible that as this Lamb searches in the Book of life for the name of the one in front of Him that His love for him compels Him to do so earnestly? Perhaps as He reaches the end of the list a tear forms in His eye as He shakes His head and says softly, “Depart from me. I do not know you.” Perhaps as that individual leaves the throne room to enter into their eternal punishment the Lamb of Justice looks longingly with a look of disappointment. If only they had chosen differently. While these thoughts are not directly pictured in scripture, they seem to align more closely with the biblical narrative than the angry, vengeful God that is so often portrayed in Christianity.
The question I propose for us to consider is how should we respond when we or someone else falls short of Godly ideas? Will we join with Jesus by patterning our speech and our actions after His example of heart level work? Heart level work calls us to get vulnerable and leave behind our expectations so that we can meet each individual in their specific area of need. Are we willing to do the hard-inglorious work of getting down into the trenches of life with those who are struggling with their heart’s desires? Are we willing to get dirty and worn out for the sake of the good news or will we resort to the easiest way out by using pressure to change actions rather than to work on a heart level? Heart level work is not pretty and there are no gold medals for it. There is a crown though, that is more valuable than gold, and the workers who choose the ways of Jesus will receive it one day. It’s known as the crown of righteousness.
Garrett Martin
1. Ezekiel 36:26
2. Zephaniah 3:17
3. 1 Peter 2:9
4. Luke 16:16
5. 1 John 4:18
6. Revelations 3:20
7. John 3:16
8. Isaiah 61:1
The Brew 