Foolish Hearts

More than one life is poisoned by the ungrateful heart. Paul describes everybody’s plight: it’s passed along to the children.

For even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks, but they became futile in their speculations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Romans 1:21 (NASB)

Born on this side of eternity, living in a ravaged, spiritual wasteland, we actually live the brutal world of Mad Max — it’s the emotional realm, not a post-nuclear holocaust as in Mad Max. We’re plagued by our own darkened, “foolish heart” that creates a harsh desert of ingratitude. We grow up in it. Everywhere, stretched far into the horizon are thankless, complaining, embittered people—even those near-at-hand.

The desolate world of Mad Max -- in our heart, where only the tough survive!

Yes, our parents were ungrateful too! And so were their parents…

Primoridal Soup

Ingratitude is the building stuff of this realm. It mandates an economy of currency, because people will otherwise take without any thought of payment. Ingratitude fuels insatiable appetites, the wars and conquests of human history.

Biologists speculate that life originated in a dark, toxic realm someone called “Primordial Soup”. The Bible calls it “Ingratitude”, and it’s the dark realm where human life  is spawned every day. Ingratitude is foundational to the human condition, and it is ultimately tied to our problem with God: “after all, He created this mess! And He abandoned me!”

But ingratitude with God guarantees an emotional short-circuit: to be cut-off from God means facing life alone, which means lots of fumbling and stumbling in the dark, which means lots of hurt feelings, which gather in cesspools in dark places in the heart. It’s called a “foolish heart” because it’s filled with the hurt of foolish mistakes. It’s called a “dark heart” because everyone hides their poisonous feelings–but they erupt, sooner or later.

Growing colder and darker, the heart collects our poisonous thoughts. It originates with ingratitude with God, the Bible says (Rom.1:21)

Thus, the daily grind of life is poised with moaning, unhappy people. New management theories try to control it, employees are “empowered”, businesses restructure to increase profits, but the workday still grinds us down. Why? Because the workplace is filled with so many ungrateful people! No matter how many raises or benefits we get, the poison of ingratitude cannot be ignored for long, so it leaks, splashes and explodes.

“Change the social order!” Karl Marx wrote, and so millions died. Communism said the problem was out there, with everyone else, and tried building a world of “Comrades”. But it was a foolish and blood-soaked dream.

Communism was the most costly and bloody experiment in social engineering ever attempted, and the results should never be dismissed or forgotten. Why didn’t Marxism deliver the promised Utopia? The answer is simple: Marx downplayed the glaring monster of ingratitude guaranteed to tear communal living apart. It’s been raging in families since Cain killed Able. If ingratitude so alienates blood relatives, won’t the monster snarl at strangers?

How could Marx miss it? Ungrateful people don’t behave like Comrades: they lash out, like Mad Max!

Silly efforts to survive a nuclear attack -- and many deal with God this way.

This beast snarls when the God-issue arises. People are unwilling to talk about God precisely because their resentments are so complicated and repressed.

To raise the God-issue means hope and a promise for something better. If God is not “good”, then we should consider the Russians’ wisdom from the Cold War: “when one hears the air raid sirens, one should pick up a shovel and quietly proceed to the nearest cemetery, to dig your own grave.” With enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world 20 times over, our “nuclear drills” and duck-and-cover exercises in the 1960s were silly.

To avoid Him is like avoiding life (He created life, after all). Ingratitude can be the only reason to avoid God, if you think about it: shouldn’t God receive more honor and thankfulness than any living creature in the universe? If not, then all of us are in deep, deep trouble.

Wether you agree or not, it doesn’t matter: it’s not a philosophical issue. It’s not a religious issue. It’s an issue deep inside our hearts, wether visible or not, and the Bible makes it a clear issue not to make us feel guilty, but to help us see the things we hide from everyone, including ourselves.

Real and False Gratitude

The word Paul uses for “give thanks” is eucharisteo in Greek, and it goes beyond merely feeling grateful. “Eucharisteo” means to be openly, visibly, demonstrably thankful. “Thanksgiving” is more precise than “thankful”.

A grateful, passing thought is far different from a demonstration of gratitude. Someone may claim to be grateful for their parents, but when was the last time it was expressed? Until expressed, this fleeting thought is not eucharisteo .

Three simple questions can measure your attitude of gratitude:

1. To whom have you given thanks in the past week?
2. What did you do to express gratitude?
3. If asked, would the other person remember your last effort to demonstrate gratitude?

These are hard questions, but reasonable. If I’m grateful, of course it should show at least once a week! (Are we pulling teeth here?) And it shouldn’t be vague, and it should register with people around me.

Awkward Gratitude

The problem is, however, that people feel awkward expressing gratitude, and this is true especially in those old, weary relationships like parents. Why is this? Should gratitude not increase for those long-term relationships, the ones with substance and commitment? But the ungrateful heart is a stern accountant of wrongs perceived, and a spendthrift of grace received!

Men feel especially awkward demonstrating gratitude, with the exception of the workplace where gratitude is the expected reward for a job well-done. Naturally the rules are different at work, so gratitude is economic or perhaps expressed through an awards banquet. But why is it so rare at home?

Before consigning gratitude to the grave of gooey, touchy-feely irrelevance, consider the devastating effects of its antonyms: ingratitude, indifference, resentment and everything that grows in place of thankfulness. Ingratitude is not just a “bad hair day” or simple neglect, but a poison saturating the human condition. It is a terrific furnace for human suffering.

Alienation in a few of its many guises

People so quickly elect the alienation option for relational problems! If there’s any struggle, any pain, any difficulty, then alienation is often the first, most convenient choice. The “Ingratitude” diagram demonstrates the many diverse ways the ungrateful heart creates alienation. Why is this creative energy not spent resolving relationships?

Raw Alienation

This is the primary and most devastating effect of ingratitude: resentment severs relationships and drives us apart. The fountainhead of all alienation is that between the creature and Creator, as we read in Romans 1:21ff, sealed by ingratitude. This alienation turns creation upside-down:

they exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible man and of birds and four-footed animals and crawling creatures. Romans 1:23 (NASB95)

Alienation with God means a perverted relationship with creation as various creatures take turns standing on the throne of Almighty God in the hearts of the unbelieving. As evidence, Paul parades a hideous succession of degenerating gods: man, birds, cows, and finally crawling creatures! Each in turn not only fails to deliver the promises of deity, but each leads to a more debased and dehumanizing slavery.

Yes, dehumanizing slavery precisely describes alienation. What sane person could possibly worship crawling creatures? Is this not the epitome of insanity? Yet entire cultures have worshipped scorpions and snakes! As grotesque as it sounds, is it really any better than worshipping other humans? Disappointment is guaranteed either way, followed by even more ingratitude.

If even the God Almighty does not deserve gratitude, then who does? That is the most reasonable question in the universe. To judge God means entering an insane world of reversed roles:

You turn things upside down, as if the potter were thought to be like the clay! Shall what is formed say to him who formed it, “He did not make me”? Can the pot say of the potter, “He knows nothing”? Isaiah 29:16 (NIV)

Self-reliance

“But I am thankful!” says the ungrateful heart. “I am, after all, thankful for myself! And I’m surprised more people aren’t!”

When alienation grows, it supplants relationships with self-reliance. Some take a different angle, but it’s equally self-reliant: “I’m such a loser…” (and it sounds rather humble at this point), “and I can’t believe that [God / my parents / my friend / everybody else] made me this way!” The conclusion is the same: “I’ll have to depend on myself from now on…”

The angry and alienated philosopher H.D. Thoreau epitomized it: “Know thyself!” He wrote these famous words while living the epitome of ingratitude alone at Walden Pond and wrote a book by that name which became a classic American treatise of ingratitude towards everyone and anyone. It is a call to distrust everyone except oneself.

“Know Thyself!” is actually the prolog for the book, “Resentful Independence from God.” It is an embittered, perverted view of the goodness of God, but Thoreau didn’t invent it:

Why are the nations in an uproar and the peoples devising a vain [empty] thing?
The kings of the earth take their stand and the rulers take counsel together against the LORD and against His Anointed [Messiah], saying,
“Let us tear their fetters apart And cast away their cords from us!” Psalms 2:1-3

The Psalmist is baffled: is God’s leadership and authority little more than chains and fetters? This is news to God! It happens all the time. People say, “Yeah, that religion stuff ain’t fer me right now…nossiree! Meybe when I gets t’be older…” and it’s the same complaint: God means chains and fetters. Really, is God such a cruel taskmaster?

This is what the LORD says: “What fault did your fathers find in me, that they strayed so far from me? They followed worthless idols and became worthless themselves. Jeremiah 2:5 (NIV)

Contra Thoreau, God has a different view of self-reliance:

…they became futile in their speculations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools. Romans 1:21b-22

Irrational Loneliness

The only problem with “Know thyself!” is the undeniable fact that relational beings must relate. Either deny the relational being, or deny self-reliance, but only an Infantile’s make-believe world can demand both relationships and self-reliance, whatever is most convenient. In reality it’s not a convenient choice because a price is paid for one or the other. The leap into self-reliance and out again occurs by the price of scars inflicted on surrounding relationships. Loneliness is the price paid, and it is unreasonable to assume otherwise.

Again it goes back to a gratitude problem.Without gratitude, who can be trusted? Without trust, self-reliance is mandatory. Then comes the loneliness. Read how this progression devours the soul of Job in the Bible when he too struggled with great sufferings that snuffed-out gratitude:

“Therefore I will not restrain my mouth; I will speak in the anguish of my spirit, I will complain in the bitterness of my soul…I waste away; I will not live forever. Leave me alone, for my days are but a breath.” Job 7:11,16

Suffering is one thing, but alienation is quite a different matter. Does alienation resolve suffering? Quite the opposite is true. Alienation is the domain of demons long-accustomed to distrust. The fabric of the universe is ripped apart by rebellion and accusation against the goodness of God, and these self-reliant creatures, once angels, are now called demons. Fueled by self-reliance, they become predators, by necessity:

“Now when the unclean spirit goes out of a man, it passes through waterless places seeking rest, and does not find it.” Matthew 12:43.[1]

“Waterless places” means “empty” or “lonely places” and it’s precisely this kind of emotional dessert self-reliance wanders, “seeking rest.” But of course there is no rest. Until a relational being connects emotionally with another relational being, it “does not find it.” The Waterless Places option is a frequent refuge for the hurt and anger of Infantile rage seeking rest, but ironically it’s a blazing desert devoid of peace, where hurt and anger is fueled still more. Yet Waterless Places is such a widespread malady and growing: it describes the alienated atmospheres hanging thick in family homes everywhere.

Even the great prophet Elijah fell into a snit of self-pity and ingratitude. Much like an Infantile, he ran away into a lonely place to lick his wounds. There he developed an unreal picture of his own lonely world:

He said, “I have been very zealous for the LORD, the God of hosts; for the sons of Israel have forsaken Your covenant, torn down Your altars and killed Your prophets with the sword. And I alone am left; and they seek my life, to take it away.” 1 Kings 19:10

The truth was far different. Elijah’s view that “I alone am left” was so distorted and so self-absorbed, God first had to smack Elijah with an earthquake and a fireball rolling up the valley to get his attention. Elijah felt lonely because he ran away. It was that simple. Once inside the Waterless Places of alienation, “seeking rest” was an impossible quest. Elijah would never find it out there. What did he imagine would happen? Would he continue running and running deeper into the desert until everything changed? It was an irrational course, which of course accompanies loneliness. But once Elijah connected with God his eyes were opened and he learned there were thousands of others standing with him.

In the same way God pursued silly Elijah and endured Elijah’s silly view of the world, He pursues each one of us today with His love. If only we would respond! Everything would look so very different.

To connect with another relational being is the beginning of the end of loneliness, and this is obvious. God’s love is readily available. Why then would anyone opt for Waterless Places? Quite simply, as with Elijah’s experience, loneliness is so deceptive and creates an irrational, distorted world that even God’s love cannot penetrate. Why is this? Since God’s love “rejoices in the truth” (1 Cor. 13:5), and sine loneliness deceives, something has to give way. God won’t. So the irrationality of alienation must be challenged, and few allow this intrusion into their isolated but deceived world. Elijah allowed the intrusion, but it took a fireball to do it.

There is only one relevant question that remains, and the answer determines the depth of the loneliness we suffer: will you allow the rationale behind your loneliness to be tested? If so, just start with a few simple questions:

1. Are you alienated from a relationship that should be close? This could be an authority figure, the parents or siblings, a friend, offspring or a spouse.
2. Is there anything in this relationship worthy of any gratitude? Carefully consider this question.
3. Finally, can you possibly demonstrate thankfulness by going back to pay the price required to end this alienation? It could mean mean setting aside the hurt or anger causing so much separation, but isn’t this a great, substantial demonstration of gratitude?

Next up: the ingratitude of Legalism.

The book of James was probably the first book written in the New Testament, and it’s fascinating to see how the earliest Christian community also struggled to understand God’s Love Ethic. Even more fascinating is the close association between spiritual immaturity and immature love:

If, however, you are fulfilling the royal law according to the Scripture, “YOU SHALL LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR AS YOURSELF,” you are doing well. But if you show partiality, you are committing sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors. – James 2:8–9

The distinction between maturity and immaturity is clear, and it still applies today. “If you show partiality,” you just don’t get it, James said. Partiality is an arbitrary set of rules imposed on the world around. Partiality means conditional love, not sacrificial love.

To “show partiality” is a key factor in immaturity, and it’s why so many relationships fail: disappointment and arguments erupt because someone violated the conditions for love. The immature cannot tolerate failure, nor will they forgive, because partiality governs their world.

Partiality is also called Tribal Love in Love Ethics. When Tribal Love fails, the underlying immaturities are revealed in temper-tantrums and rejection.

Tribal Love is a counterfeit of God’s love manifested in the Tribal Christian home. These homes feel loving, and love seems to be working between the Tribe’s members, but actually it’s a fragile arrangement and highly susceptible to disruption by invaders. Uniformity and conformity rule the home, and it’s a joyless, strict place where people behave well, but they long for freedom. Invaders are welcomed by the more rebellious hearts.

Tribal Christian homes desperately try to keep invaders out, but what a hopeless and useless effort it is! If they succeed, the home grows more Tribal and weak; but their efforts usually fail when the kids get married or go to college, and then all the protection disintegrates. Thus Christian parents are losing their Tribal children in a swarming ocean of diversity out there. These kids never learned how to love the unloving back home. Their apparent maturity is exposed as latent immaturity when they get manipulated and dominated by a world of unloving predators.

God deplores partiality. God’s love is concerned with all people, no matter how dirty they are. Yet He is not naive about their dirty and unloving nature, so His love conquers and wins and dominates in very dark places.

This is spiritual maturity: the ability to love the unloving. Such love rises above partiality and engages, and sacrifices, and confronts, and wins.

Tribal homes need to reach out to the unloving, dirty world. The measure of maturity must shift from good behavior to loving character, which is precisely the message James delivered to that young, Tribal church. This shift from behavior to character is also the focus of New Testament Love Ethics. It means that Tribal group needs to love outsiders, and only then are they growing mature and spiritually strong.

Indifference

But a more foundational problem lay festering beneath the immaturity in that young Christian church, and it was their spiritual immaturity. They were Jewish Christians steeped in harmful religious traditions, and James had to expose their false assumptions before they could understand mature love. Their spiritual background was so dead Jesus called it “Full of dead men’s bones!” He told the teachers of contemporary Judaism, “You neither know the scriptures nor the power of God!”

The smothering rules of Partiality smothers love. This happened with the religion of Jesus’ day, which was growing less compassionate and loving at the same time it was growing obsessed with traditions. The same trend is evident in cultural Christianity today: religious traditions are plentiful, and loving relationships are few, or superficial. A vacancy of love is emptying churches. Religious tradition no longer holds people in their churches today, and since there is little or no personal investment, why stick around?

Immature love springs from immature spirituality because love is rooted in our spirits. Spiritual immaturity is so fatal to relationships! Christians with glaring spiritual immaturities plunge headlong into emotional turmoil, then repeat it. It’s so typically-modern to say, “I want it, so I deserve it!” without considering, “Do I even know what ‘it’ is?” The Postmodern rejection of truth is sowing relational discord in families and marriages, and nobody understands why these relationships are growing more alienated.

If humans were merely biological machines, love would be so much simpler! This is the direction many go to resolve their frustration with love: reduce it to a simple sexual encounter. Thus “sex” is “making love”, some say, as though sex created love.

But love reaches beyond simple biology, and we know it. Human sexuality is the apex of fulfillment only when love is present. Sexuality without love is the pit of depression.

Love paints human life in rich color, and without it life is stark and unlivable. What makes death so tragic is the presence of love, because love brings value to life.

Did you know it’s possible to love without having a body, but it’s impossible to love without a spirit? It’s true: the human spirit is capable of loving another spirit, and being loved, and this occurs first and foremost with God’s Holy Spirit.

Our spirit carries a phenomenal drive to love and be loved, but it’s also a dark and fallen spirit, barely able to love anymore. People give up trying to love because they quickly reach the extent of their damaged ability to love, and still the thirst for love remains unquenched. Resignation or unquenched thirst typify the love lives of most, and the rest are quickly headed there. This alone proves we don’t understand how love works! Where is the sobriety of the naive Christian who flings into the arms of another romance?

Thankfully, God provides a marvelous remedy to heal our broken persons, as Paul describes it:

Christ will make his home in your hearts as you trust in him. Your roots will grow down into God’s love and keep you strong. And may you have the power to understand, as all God’s people should, how wide, how long, how high, and how deep his love is. May you experience the love of Christ, though it is too great to understand fully. Then you will be made complete with all the fullness of life and power that comes from God. – Ephesians 3:17–19

The presence of God awakens a capacity in our broken spirits we always longed for: to know love that wont’ betray and break us further. This is a new experience and it fills us with deep inner strength that echoes throughout our lives. Younger Christians experience it, but older Christians might not. The difference is one of spiritual health. Unhealthy Christians greatly hinder God’s love and delay His healing work inside our damaged spirits.

James was so wise, we must follow his lead. A drowning man has to stop thrashing before a lifeguard can bring him back to safety, and Christians likewise have to quit thrashing in exhausting and useless spiritual activity before God’s Word can break into the busy, driven lifestyle of spiritual immaturity.

Anti-Spiritual Life

Christians struggle with issues far removed from the ”Royal Law” James talks about. Secular concerns and minor spiritual concerns which shouldn’t be concerns, or concerns guaranteed to increase concerns get all the attention. In the end, after years of exhausting activity, Christians degenerate into self-focused, socially withdrawn and alienated worlds. It is possible, in fact, that __Christians can become more loveless than non-Christians__ and then, “They are worse off than before,” as 2 Peter 2:20 says. Is this possible if Christianity is the real deal? “Yes!” Peter says:

“It would be better if they had never known the way to righteousness than to know it and then ”reject the command they were given” to live a holy life.” 2 Peter 2:21

The self-focused Christian by necessity must “reject the command they were given” to “love one another just as I have loved you,” What Christ called “A New Commandment I give unto you” is what Peter calls “the commandment they were given to live a holy life.” Christians who “reject the command they were given” are those who live in isolated, irrelevant worlds. This kind of Christian becomes the scorn of the Kosmos: “Do they not blaspheme the fair name by which you have been called?” (James 2:7) Spiritual rebellion causes the impotency of Christianity today. ”How destructive it is to ignore the Royal Law!”

By far the most pervasive and also the most poisonous lifestyle is Christian materialism with its many worries. Those first century Christian Jews struggled with similar misguided concerns. Their culture’s religion was hopelessly entangled in material wealth, and their traditions taught riches were God’s reward for righteous living. Unlike America, however, few were wealthy, but the religious elite certainly were, and this doctrine fortified their power and prestige.

Jesus collided with the health-and-wealth doctrine of His day:

Jesus said to His disciples, “Truly I say to you, it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven!” When the disciples heard this, they were very astonished and said, “Then who can be saved?” – Matthew 19:23,25

This mistaken allegiance to wealth is precisely what James raised with his audience:

“If a man comes into your assembly with a gold ring and dressed in fine clothes, and there also comes in a poor man in dirty clothes, and you pay special attention to the one who is wearing the fine clothes, and say, “You sit here in a good place,” and you say to the poor man, “You stand over there, or sit down by my footstool,” have you not made distinctions among yourselves, and become judges with evil motives?” – James 2:2–4

They extolled material success and praised the wealthy, but James renounced their traditions:

Listen, my beloved brethren: did not God choose the poor of this world to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom which He promised to those who love Him? – James 2:5

Just in case they didn’t get the picture, he later says:

Come now, you rich, weep and howl for your miseries which are coming upon you. Your riches have rotted and your garments have become moth-eaten. – James 5:1–2

James was no diplomat! Yet he is so right to shout like this: materialism triggers a whirlwind of activity that keeps its victims distracted long enough to ignore the realities of life.

Here’s the point: to be engrossed in the American Dream and its phenomenal allure is to get trapped in a world far removed from spiritual maturity. The American Christian landscape is overgrown with the weeds and thorns of prosperity:

“The one on whom seed was sown among the thorns, this is the man who hears the word, and the worry of the world and the deceitfulness of wealth choke the word, and it becomes unfruitful.” – Matthew 13:22

“It becomes unfruitful” is true indeed. The life choked by the “worry of the world” is especially unfruitful relationally, as we’ll see next.

meet the work substitute love defect

The weeds of American prosperity not only stunt spiritual growth, they also breed a defective, immature approach to love.

Here’s the fruit of the American Dream: the preoccupation with career, work, money and everything it buys exerts phenomenal pressures that sap our strength and emotional reserves, leaving little for relationships and spiritual life. It’s a dirty bargain to exchange our love and spiritual life for cheap manufactured goods, or even worse, for reward from sterile institutions like American business and finance. Commerce and trade and economic development fuel the wars and barbaric plunder of weaker peoples throughout history, and the American economy still pillages individuals and families in American culture. The lifestyle of affluence is actually a lifestyle of broken and decaying relationships, from God’s viewpoint.

Nobody can walk away from the pursuit of the American Dream all day long and naturally snap into a fresh capacity to relate with others. Men are especially vulnerable, and they develop a syndrome we call the Work Substitute Love Defect which is an extremely immature and mean-spirited way of loving their wives and kids. It’s immature because the Work Sub offers little emotional warmth or concern, but he demands emotional love from those who owe it whenever he gets emotionally starved himself. Quite often it’s the sex he demands from his wife, and he feels little obligation to provide any emotional love for it. He’s already given enough, now it’s her turn. His calculations are based on the raw manpower he’s already exerted providing for the family. In effect, emotional giving is unnecessary, because, “I already gave at the office!”

People in the Work Sub’s life feel unloved and mistreated, because the so-called love he gives is so cold and functional, and it never touches anyone deeply. It’s an inexpensive love he dispenses, because truthfully he enjoys his job and is absorbed with his accomplishments even though they deplete his emotional energy. Running on empty fumes, he can only offer his family the fruit of his labors, which is usually money. Even while he justifies it, he also knows money can never substitute for real human warmth, and he craves it from everyone else, so he steals it through teasing or just plain meanness. Any emotional reaction is better than no reaction, and angry reactions are better than the emotional emptiness that pervades his life.

Homer Simpson is the prototypic Work Sub. This functional, work-oriented love is a shallow interaction with real humans, and as Work Subs become more functional and less emotionally sacrificial, part of their humanity slowly erodes from sheer neglect. It’s a dehumanizing way to live by restricting our love to simple, functional deeds.

Advancing

The American Dream is rife with the defective love of Work Subs. We will return to this subject later, but realize this much: there is a symbiotic relationship between our spiritual and emotional immaturities. Clearly when someone rejects spiritual truth, there’s no basis to understand the spiritual realm, and since our ability to love is spiritually-rooted, the ignorance results in confused love relationships. But the converse is true: a Christian can be convinced about God’s truths, but unless he starts to exercise mature love, he remains spiritually weak because he’s not living the Royal Law.

Here’s the $1,000,000 question: what should a Work Sub do? How do you help someone like this?

The next installment is all ready to go, and we return to the earlier issue of what it looks like to live as a Christian without a Love Ethic.