Heart-led living is not the mission, but the means to it.
Whole civilizations rose and fell under the fundamental assumptions of heart-led living and paid little heed to our Creator. Rather, heart-led living is a basic necessity of living itself. Our civilization is hardly alive for the simple reason it is founded on ignoring the heart. We become highly anomalous when we embrace the dominance of the heart’s mind; we have left Western Civilization behind. We have moved into a far higher world.
But the new level is not the answer by itself. It is simply the place to find the answer. You cannot possibly find it in the world you left behind. In terms of Western logic, heart-led living is the necessary condition, not a sufficient condition, for redemption.
We still have to exploit the condition of living a heart-led life. This is critical to understanding the mission: We exploit the context for God’s glory. And it is typically necessary to remind ourselves that “His glory” cannot be used as some rarefied sacred term, so filled with presumed meaning that it has no actual meaning. The Bible uses “His glory” as shorthand, a symbol for anything that demonstrates and reinforces His claim as Creator and Sovereign.
There is a vast realm of content between us and His glory, and it’s what we should think of as the mission. Any introduction of the term (or concept) of “objective” destroys the whole thing. There is no object, as if we could somehow achieve it and be done. Stay away from that image, because it will cripple your moral discernment. The mission is a living thing and it ends for you when you depart this realm. You participate until you leave it, but the mission ends only when this realm of existence ends.
On our end of things, the mission is first and foremost a commitment of the heart to our Creator’s claim on us. I can point to the Law Covenants in the Bible as fairly concrete representation of His claim on humanity, but until you move into the territory of the heart implied by the words and provisions of the Laws, you really aren’t obeying the Laws. The moral realm of the heart is implicit in the total image painted by the Law Covenants, if not in the detailed brush strokes. Without the national social context that enforces the literal provisions of those Laws, you could hardly justify by mere logic any embrace of them. By the heart you discover the utter necessity of the Laws as the implications of your commitment to the God who issued them.
Pure human logic leaves the doors wide open to almost any moral conclusion. Ever heard of Dr. Peter Singer? His positions are quite logical and self-consistent, and clearly reflect the need for something better than mere reason. Human logic by itself has no compelling reason to embrace any moral values at all.
But when reason is bound under the authority of the heart, you get an entirely different philosophy of ethics and morality. But you still have to “reason” in your heart which of the various moral claims best answer the fundamental demand every awakened heart seeks. Awakening the “mind” in your heart creates a vast awareness of moral necessity that must be filled. There must be something to which the heart commits to provide the structure of the heart’s moral considerations. You cannot possibly be a genuine atheist if your heart is awakened. That’s why the heart works like it does; it never questions whether there is a higher realm with at least one deity. The heart knows.
We who have given our hearts to the God of the Bible participate as primary agents for promoting His claim on all human hearts. Our hearts embrace His claims and our minds organize our lives accordingly. While we should hope our witness of His claim should strike the hearts of others, we know that our lives will impact first on their minds. It’s not merely because our world silences the heart, but this is human nature. This is the natural context of what we can expect, even when hearts are awakened. The doorway is the perception fed into the mind first.
So our conduct, both in the details and in the wider context, must so emphasize the dominance of the heart that their minds are forced to re-examine basic assumptions. It should be apparent that we are not entirely rational, yet not irrational, either. Our conduct should signal something bigger and stronger than human faculties, something that sets us apart from all the lesser commitments (as systems) that they experience.
We don’t control the context. We don’t control the results of our witness. Instead, the mission is to exploit whatever the context may be, by living from the heart with as much consistency as our human capabilities can manage. But those capabilities should obviously be enhanced by God’s provision in Creation, as Creation responds directly to our heart-led commitment to reality as God reveals it. Anyone paying attention should be able to see a transcendent element in what we can do, and wonder where we got that extra power.
We exploit Creation because God designed it that way, and we do so within any context that comes upon us. We don’t seek control over the context. God does what He does, and we are not in the business of allowing our human reason to challenge His decisions. Yet, within any given context, we use His guidance to challenge a broken reality to reclaim what He designed it to be. Creation will be so very glad when you restore divine justice, in any measure, to any context.
That’s the heart-led mission.
