8th March, 2011

LLOYD HARKNESS

For some people it is one catastrophic event which has knocked their world out of kilter. They disconnect from God in the turmoil they are feeling.

Others do not see the drip, drip, dripping of single actions, values, attitudes, desires or ambitions, not passed through the filter of God’s love, are stalagmite or stalactite in their formation. They encrust the soul and freeze God out.

HEART OF STONE: Lloyd Harkness argues that keeping hardness of heart at bay is an ongoing exercise in every Christian's life. PICTURE: Adrian, Canada (www.sxc.hu) "(The behaviour of the Exodus generation) is a key story cited in the New Testament as an example to all not to harden your heart. The price you can pay is indeed costly. You can miss the ‘promised land’ Jesus offers to all who follow Him."

Hardness of heart. Calcification. It comes in many guises to steal away the love of Christ and replace it with another love. Self love, in some form, is the standard replacement. Choosing ‘another’ rather than God is the definition of a hard heart.

The Exodus generation of Israelites proved to be hard of heart.

It can be easy to forget your history with God when faced with a fresh challenge. The Israelites fell into arguing and quarrelling when faced with no water in the desert. Their situation was hard and their hearts likewise hardened. Despite their previous experiences of God under Moses leadership, especially in terms of God’s provision, which is where they were being tested again, they were angry with God and ready to abandon Him and Moses to follow their own path, like the golden calf incident.

This repeated pattern of behaviour kept this generation out of the Promised Land. Their behaviour is a key story cited in the New Testament as an example to all not to harden your heart. The price you can pay is indeed costly. You can miss the ‘promised land’ Jesus offers to all who follow Him.

In contrast to the Israelites, Job, throughout the time he lost family, finances and health, kept his focus on God. He complained bitterly during these days, somewhat like the lost generation of Israelites, but he never hardened his heart to God nor turned his back on Him.

When the horror patch in Job’s life was over, he comes into a place of greater abundance because the drip, drip dripping of his advisors telling him to curse God and die was filtered through a love of and for God.

Proverbs tells us we are blessed when we live reverently before God but we are walking into trouble when we harden our hearts to Him.

An irony, which historically has often risen its head when people seek to live reverently, is legalism.

Legalism reduces reverence to complete obedience to a series of laws. The first commandment with its heart relationship between God and man is crushed under the weight of our efforts to please Him. This form of calcification sees faith, hope and love squeezed out by a misplaced notion of piety consisting of only rules and regulations, a spiritual canon.

This is why the Bible in the hands of one person can be hardness personified while for another it is love given, received and spread abroad.

Hardness cripples not only the individual. It also disables people from seeing what should happen in a given situation. When Jesus restored a man’s withered hand on the Sabbath there were those who could only see a law to honour God being broken. God’s love was being exercised in this act but they could not see it.

Legalism is a hardness of heart which fails to deliver a life of ‘knowing’ God on so many fronts.

Paul speaks of hardness as something that leads to self seeking, and self seeking in turn will involve a rejection of truth and embracing of evil. The follow Jesus imperative is critical. We have to submit our ideas to God’s revealed way and choose to follow Christ rather than our way. The washing of the water of The Word is fundamental to weighing up life philosophies that permeate a culture.

Hardness of heart is like a calcification of the bones. It limits movement and curtails freedom. It shrinks our and other’s lives to something less than what they could and should be.

Encouragement plays such a crucial role in counteracting hardness. Encouragement sucks the wind out of sin’s self focus, apathy’s apathy, distraction’s distractiveness and a heart’s disheartenment.

We all need to keep a firm hold on our salvation, the place where we started walking with God. Moments of God awareness and Holy Spirit sensitivity can become calloused over with the care and toil and ‘sweat of our brow’ labour which is the result of The Fall.

God’s desire is to shape us into His image and we need to remain receptive to that each day.

This is a delicate, delightful and discipled way of living. It is a life that requires sensitivity to the Spirit. In the midst of a storm Jesus castigated His disciples for their hard heart. In their panic He comes and calms. On the surface of things, this can seem a harsh criticism. The problem was the disciples had just been part of the feeding of 5000 and they still were not connecting the dots as to who Jesus is and that nothing can separate them from the love of God.

The disciples had not taken away from the miracle what Jesus wanted them to. They were still looking at life through lenses that needed to be broken. Their hearts were encrusted and Jesus, the great potter, was making the clay of their lives move pliable.

Being disciples requires attentiveness to the Lord. Attentiveness requires a soft heart, and feet and hands ready to respond.

Both the storms and tidal ebb and flow of life are part of everyone’s experience. The question is what will be the condition of our heart. Hardness of heart can be such an insidious crippling calcification.

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