Park Cities Presbyterian Church (PCA)

The heart's imagination

by Skip Ryan

June 19, 1994

Ephesians 5:24–30

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Listen to the audio of The heart's imagination

Ephesians 5:24-30: Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything. Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave Himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the Word, and to present her to Himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. After all, no one ever hated his own body, but he feeds and cares for it, just as Christ does the church—for we are members of His body.

In Florida there are the phenomena of sinkholes. Underground streams which exist several hundred or several thousand feet under the surface of the ground all the time, and which actually support the ground everywhere, sometimes run dry. So, instead of streams of water which support the surface of the earth, there are great gaping caverns under the earth. Sometimes those caverns give way and huge holes just emerge in the middle of the earth somewhere in Florida, pulling into their midst everything that happens to be in their way: houses, cars, people, whatever is there.

I think I see in that something of a parable of our Christian lives. Despite everything looking good on the surface, as most Floridians try to make things look good on the surface, often there is an enormous danger that just under the surface there are huge caverns about to give way. Sometimes, in fact, those caverns do give way, and there emerges into our lives great gaping holes where there’s a lack of reality—where all that we have said that we say we believe as Christians seems to be just on the surface, but under the surface there is a marked lack of reality. And under the surface there is no genuine, real support for the outwardness of our Christian living.

So often our Christian lives, therefore, become exercises in pretense. We feel obliged and constrained to put on a good show for those around us, to say the right words, to exhibit the right kind of behavior, to act morally. But all the while our faith and our spirituality, our religion you might say, is simply a matter of outward show, and underneath there’s no depth of reality and there’s no depth of power.

I want to read you part of a letter I received the week following the message “How Jesus Transforms the Church”:

Dear Skip,

I write to thank you for the message you delivered in your sermon today that God’s love transforms us, and that the same power of salvation continues to work in changing us even today... You must continue this thought and answer the question “How does this happen?” How can this transforming love change my fears, disappointments, and ingrained habits and attitudes? Having been a Christian for 25 years and aware of the transforming power of grace, but living like it is rules and conventions that matter, the force of your words on Sunday sticks with me as I try to figure out how to deal with the limitations and brokenness of my own life. I would very much like to know how we, as a church, and how I, individually, can participate and apprehend the power of the love of Christ. In short, it would be great to hear more about the how-tos, the life of grace, if you can fit this in to your preaching schedule.

Here’s our problem. There’s no reality and there’s no power. There’s an outward profession, but there’s a lack of inward confession. There’s a lot of pretense. There’s a lot of moralism. There’s a lot of outward living of our Christian lives, slapping on the back, saying the right things, smiling the right smiles, but inwardly we’re starving. And when we’re starving we eat junk food. The problem every Sunday morning for many of us is that we eat sweet rolls all morning and are not ready to eat the roast beef and the turkey at the banquet that is laid before us in worship. We’re filled with the wrong things!

We know something is wrong. We believe in the gospel, but we don’t live by the gospel. We sense there’s not much contagious about us. We have glimpses of the spiritual life, but it’s in a fog and, like trying to find our way through the fog, we sometimes have to feel our way and catch glimpses of the sun as it breaks through. But most of the time there is anxiety, discouragement, and stagnation.

The ancients gave us the concept called sloth. Now by sloth they did not mean laziness. It’s not couch potato sloth. It’s rather spiritual dejection. That’s what sloth classically means—a kind of inward, deep laziness of the soul where the things of God don’t grip us. What grips us are the things of the world. But not God! And so we’re lazy in our hearts.

And then we see that there’s not only no reality, there’s also no power in our Christian living. There’s often no power in our closest relationships. In our family relationships, we lack a spark. There’s no love. There’s no self-denial there. In fact, the family becomes an arena in which we display our selfishness more than anything else. There’s no power in sharing our faith with others, and there is no power over temptation. There is not much victory over good old-fashioned sin, if we’re honest.

I think the question before us is, “What do we do about sinkhole living?” I want to propose to you that we need to see two things: the reason for it, and then, by God’s grace, the biblical and spiritual remedy for it.

Why the sloth?

The reason for our sinkhole living is that we have allowed the wrong things to capture the imagination of our hearts. I don’t want to be simplistic, but I want to give you something concrete. The imagination of our hearts has been captured by the world. The Bible puts it quite plainly in 1 John:

Do not love the world or the things of the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world—[and then he lists three things,] the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the boastful pride of life—is not from the Father but is from the world. (1 John 2:15–16)

This is actually a very old problem. It goes all the way back to the Garden, where Eve saw that the fruit was good for food—the lust of the flesh. She saw that it was a delight to the eyes—the lust of the eyes. And she saw that it was desirable to make her wise—the boastful pride of life. Those three massive categories of imagination-capturing realities are there for us every day of our living in one form or another. I want to be specific enough that you can grab hold of something here that makes sense for you. So if I embarrass you a little in some of the things I’m about to say, live with it!

The lust of the flesh. Four varieties are common. Comfort—we worship it! We want it. We make an idol of it. Painlessness. We believe we have an absolutely inalienable right to not feel pain! Medicines, alcohol, or other things abound to help us in what we perceive to be an absolute right. Sensuality usually takes the form of food and drink. Do not be deceived. Many of us live for those things. And fourth, and I suppose what you thought of first when I said the lust of the flesh: sexuality. We needn’t say much about that, since it’s so obvious that our society and our culture is utterly saturated with it.

The lust of the eyes. I would simply propose to you that what the scriptures mean by that is an overweening concern about our possessions, in two forms: either resting too much security in what we have, or in coveting what we don’t have. Both forms abound. It’s hard to resist the spirit of the age, which says that the fella who wins is the fella who has the most marbles at the end of the day!

The boastful pride of life. This operates in the arena of the power and influence that we exercise over others. All three of these: the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the boastful pride of life, in all of their manifold expressions, are what Paul calls in Romans 8 “the deeds of the body” or “the deeds of the flesh.” The flesh, which is the condition of our sin, still attaches itself to our physical nature even though we are new men and new women in Christ. The guilt of sin is broken by Christ at the cross, and any of us who are Christians believe that.

But the problem with that mere belief is that it can turn too quickly to cheap grace. The idea is that I simply believe that Jesus died for me on the cross and I’m going to heaven; I’ve got my ticket to ride; now I can basically live any way I want to and I never pay attention to the ongoing power of sin in my life! That’s what we’re really talking about here.

The particular pattern of sins which may be unique to you or me—whole predispositions about the way we act, temperamental weaknesses—have gone unchecked. They’re there perhaps because of our upbringing, because of our home situation, because of the conditioning we’ve received along the way, because of a certain genetic predisposition—for whatever reason, that’s who we are. “That’s just the way I am!” “She’s moody.” “He’s impulsive.” Just the way we are! Things that lurk under the surface aren’t polite, and we try to hide them, especially in the company of our Christian friends. But they’re there!

Why did all of us just hang on our TVs and our radios during the O. J. Simpson trial? Why? Think about it. I want to propose to you that on one hand we were shocked that a public hero, a person who had been held in high regard, could possibly be guilty of such a terrible thing. But on the other hand, I also want to propose to you that we weren’t so shocked, and that the reason was a kind of morbid fascination about this matter. Every one of us recognizes that there’s a bit of O. J. in us all. We recognize that there are things in our lives that are just under the surface that could erupt! Could we perhaps ever be guilty of the sort of thing he was charged with? We want to say no, of course, but there are dispositions; there are tones; there are angers; there are cesspools of fleshiness in our lives that, if we are honest, always are in danger of overtaking us.

So whether it’s a specific pleasure, or a specific possession, or a disposition, or a way of approaching life—these things become idolatrous. They become the center of our thinking or living. They become false gods. They become the focal point of who we truly are. And as false gods, these things replace the true God in our hearts. So instead of saying life has meaning and we have worth because we are loved by God, are children of God, we say life has meaning, we have worth, if we have enough marbles or power! Our lives will have meaning if we can just get that new car. Then we’ll be okay and really feel good. If we get that new house or that new dress or that new suit or that new job or that something that somehow in our imagination­ we are idolizing, we’ll be all right.

These things appear solid and vivid to us. They control us in spite of our spiritual words. They grip our hearts, but the truth of the gospel does not grip our hearts. The glory of God is an abstraction! You know what an abstraction is. It’s something that’s not real. It’s not concrete. It’s not vivid. What’s vivid? What’s real? Well, the real stuff of this life, the real stuff we idolize, the stuff that when we’re honest we admit we really build our lives around. That’s vivid. But the cross of Christ, the glory of God, the truth about Christ, these things are vague. They’re true. Oh, yes, they’re true. Our eyes glaze over. We nod. We say the right words. But they don’t grip our beings.

This is a cheap shot, I admit it before we begin­—but test yourself: are you perhaps more excited about looking through catalogues than you are about looking through the Bible? Are you perhaps more excited about planning your next vacation than you are thinking about planning a retreat with some Sunday school friends? Now there’s nothing wrong with catalogues and vacations. There’s nothing wrong with new cars and new houses.

There’s nothing wrong with the things that preoccupy us except that they preoccupy us. That’s what’s wrong with them! Anything, however good it is, that becomes the center of our lives is an idol. Temptations and sins are never abstract. Our imagination makes them very, very real. And if we’re honest, we live by these false gods, these idols. That means we act in their reality and their power. We treat them as if they are more real than God’s truth and God’s power. They capture our imagination. We daydream about them. The question must be, “How is the grip of these idols on our hearts loosened?” How am I really transformed? We’re getting there.

False remedies for idol worship

Christians are quick and prone to move toward false remedies when they understand the problem even a little bit. The first inadequate remedy is what I call the Nike approach to Christian living—just do it! The idea is—you know the right thing to do; just do it! It’s your duty, so do it! There is something flawed, deeply flawed, about that approach.

What is right about it? All real change will issue in changed behavior, so if there’s going to be a real change in our hearts then it will affect our outward behavior. But what’s wrong about that approach? It comes from a dangerous view of ourselves, a view summarized by the title of a children’s book, I Can Do It Myself. It shows a little kid dressing herself and says, “I can change by myself.” That’s the message that we get out of our world today even as Christians. I can change! Tell me the right thing to do and I’ll go do it! That is a flawed view of ourselves. We cannot do it.

All the discipline in the world will simply become the arena in which you fail, if that’s your view of how you change. It’s a view that comes out of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. In the last 200 years sin became defined as that which is rational; sin is conscious, voluntary actions; it is a transgression of known laws. But biblically, sin is much more than that. It is a complex of motivations, ambitions, and drives that make us the way we are. It is what we have called the flesh. The problem with the Nike approach to Christian living is it simply doesn’t work. Turn over a new leaf for a while and you find that the leaf is just as dirty on the other side. A new pattern of behavior may work for a while, but it doesn’t really bring change. Right?

The second false remedy that we sometimes try to use is the “let go and let God” approach. I recognize I can’t do it. I recognize that the Nike approach doesn’t work, so I say, “I can’t do it, but Jesus can.” The object of my spiritual life becomes to let Jesus live through me. I just turn my life over to Jesus, and He works through me. I deeply distrust the impulses of my body and mind and allow them to be bypassed so that my spirit can be released to live a godly life!

If the key to the Nike approach is do, then the key word to the “let go and let God” approach is yield. What’s right about that approach? We certainly need the indwelling power of God and the Holy Spirit in order to change.

What’s wrong with that approach? It doesn’t work. And the reason it doesn’t work is that Jesus does not intend to take you over. Jesus doesn’t want you to be a spiritual automaton through whom He lives His life, as if you were a puppet on strings He pulls.

What does our Lord want? He wants your heart! He wants you! He wants you to give Him the worship and devotion of your heart freely, joyfully, and with great gladness. He doesn’t want to pull the strings of your heart and make you do something because He lives through you! He wants to capture you! He wants the devotion of your heart so that you live to His praise.

The remedy, dear friends, is this. If the problem is that the wrong things have captured the imagination of our hearts, then the remedy is that the right things must capture the imagination of our hearts. We must turn our imagination into an ally by using it to make Jesus Christ more beautiful than any idol. We must withdraw the life-giving power out of all of our idols! And we must do so largely by the use of our imagination.

Now the minute your hear the word imagination, some of you are thinking what happened in another Presbyterian denomination at a “re-imagining conference,” and about all kinds of New Age things. Please dismiss all that and think with me like a 17th-century Puritan who didn’t know about re-imagining conferences but knew about the power of the mind to change our lives.

The gods of this age, the idols of our hearts, must have the reality and power taken out of them. The vivid appeal they hold over us must begin to pale in our eyes. The control they sway over our temperaments, our habits, our mouth, our eyes, our feet, which we accept as “just the way we are,” must be challenged! These idols must be fought! They must be slain! And it can happen! You can change! Not in a false way, not in a temporary way, but there can be deep and lasting change in your hearts. But don’t expect it all at once, for the slaying of the idols and the imagining of the right things and the giving our hearts to God again and again, day after day, takes time and growth. How do you do it?

The remedy for idol worship

First, we must understand the landscape of our own heart’s imagination. We must understand the way we are put together. What sort of things appeal to us? Possessions—what kind? Be specific. What color? What do they look like? Why are we attracted to certain things? Pleasure—in what form? Power—exactly how do we like it? We need to know ourselves. As the old Puritan John Owen put it, we need to “recognize sin’s first actings.” How does sin begin to first act in my heart? We assume it’s the same for everybody. It is not!

Second, we must do what the Puritans called “unmasking our sins before the cross.” That was their way of saying we must be honest about who we are. What kind of masks do we wear? Well, try this one—pretending. It’s not really a sin that God cares about—that’s what we tell ourselves. Or how about this mask—rationalizing? It’s not so bad compared to the big, blatant stuff that some people do. Or how about the sin of blame-shifting? “I’m entitled to a little relief because of the terrible way I’m treated by my job, wife, the world, my children, etc., etc.,”—fill in the blank. “I’m entitled to a little relief.” Those are the masks our sin wears. We need to take away all of our pretending, our rationalizing, and our blame-shifting.

Our hearts’ idols are not just the things that we can change at will. We are tempted at this point to revert to the “just do it” approach, to behave correctly by grit. When we begin to see what’s going on in our hearts, we’re tempted to say, “Uh-oh, this has got to stop right now!” So we set up some new rules. The problem with the rules is that they will aggravate the real problem underneath and not deal with the reality of what’s going on in our hearts. We begin to act moralistically and legalistically, but this actually increases sin’s power.

Third, and most importantly, we must also see our sin from the point of view of the love and grace of Christ. Consider the consequences of your sin for Christ. Consider that it grieves the Holy Spirit. It wounds the Spirit of Christ within. It offends the holiness of Jesus. Consider that your heart’s idols are not just contrary to God’s law, though they are, but they are contrary to the Spirit and to the cross.

Conviction grows as we see how great the love of God is—how much the cross cost Him—how our sin is a spurning of the blood of Christ—how great God’s grace is! Take your sinful heart and hold it up to the Lord at the cross and remind yourself that it is for this sin that Jesus died! It is for this idol that Jesus poured out His life blood! Let the love and the blood of Christ run warm over your sin so that you begin to hate your sin, so that you begin to weep over your sin and begin to hate what the world has done to your values.

This is the way John Owen put it, old-fashioned words, but they need to be heard today, “Bring thy lust to the gospel not for relief yet, but for the further conviction of sin.”

Don’t just rush to the cross and say, “Oh Lord, thank you. You forgive me. Okay, now let me get on with my life.” No, hang in there before the cross. Owen says,

Say to thy soul, “What have I done? What love, what mercy, what blood, what grace have I despised and trampled on? Is this the return I make to the Father for His love? To the Son for His blood? To the Holy Ghost for His grace? Have I defiled the heart that Christ died to wash? That the blessed Spirit has chosen to dwell in? Do I account communion with Him of so little value that for this vile lust’s sake I have scarce left Him any room in my heart?”

To see our sin from God’s point of view, from the point of view of love and grace, helps us to begin to hate it rather than to love it. It begins to lose its attractiveness and therefore its power, and it begins to lose its grip over our imagination. You will not change until your imagination begins to focus on the wonder and beauty of what God has done on the cross, on the magnificence of God’s plan of salvation: that men and women who are sinful and bound for hell and deserve it all are redeemed by the precious blood of God’s own Son.

This takes work and time. Our repentance is often too quick, too intellectual. It doesn’t really deal with the reality. It deals with the fear of consequences, the fear of being known, the fear of being seen by others, but not the fear of being seen by God. We need real conviction about our sin. Not only does our sin offend God’s holiness but it also offends His love. Only this kind of conviction, a conviction born of love not of guilt, can begin to weaken the death hold of sin on our hearts, especially the grip of repeated sins. We must direct faith to the death, cross, and blood of Christ. Again, John Owen:

Set faith at work on Christ. His blood is the great, sovereign remedy. Live in this. Live in this and thou wilt die a conqueror. Yeah, thou wilt, through the good providence of God, live to see thy lust dead at thy feet. Act faith peculiarly upon the death, blood and cross of Christ; that is, on Christ as crucified and slain.

Now for the practical application: confess your idols to God. Confession means saying to God what they are, not pretending, rationalizing, not blame-shifting, just saying them. Don’t even ask for forgiveness. Confession is just saying what they are in God’s presence and telling God you want to give them up. If you can’t pray that honestly, then tell God you want to want to give them up. He’ll answer that prayer. There’s a good old-fashioned word for that exercise: repentance.

Then ask God to make Jesus shine in your heart. Ask God to make Jesus, quite simply, the most important thing in your life. Ask God to help you look to Jesus, to direct faith at Christ and His cross and the efficacy of His blood-work for you. Ask God to work in your heart to give you faith. Repentance and faith, brothers and sisters, those are not things you do once! Repentance and faith are the elements of the Christian lifestyle, to be repeated again and again and again—“Oh, God, I’m sorry for my idols. Oh God, I confess to you that I idolize... Oh God, make Jesus shine in my heart.”

Meditate on the cross, not just for forgiveness, but for strength, confidence, and the assurance of Christ’s victory. The root of transformed lives is that we become able to warm ourselves at the fire of the love of Christ rather than having to steal love and acceptance from idols.

C. S. Lewis said:

We are half-hearted creatures, you and I, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in the gutter because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea.

Our idols look awfully good, but compared with the real thing they are nothing. Ask God to focus your vision on that which truly counts.

Eighth-century words say this:

Be Thou my vision, O Lord of my heart.
Naught be all else to me, save that Thou art—
Thou my best thought by day or by night,
Waking or sleeping, Thy presence [Thy truth, Thy hope, Thy cross, Thy blood, Thy reality] my light.

Idols are dumb. They don’t speak. They don’t give life. They will be cast into the outer darkness, as the cross blazes for eternity in the hearts of those who love God!